Jak was beginning to believe this had been a terrible idea.
With the memory of Ahr’s body slumped in the sidecar as he’d bled to death on the descent from Mount Winter, the thought of riding Geffn’s machine again had been too painful. Jak had decided to leave it behind and make the journey on foot.
But the snow was already heavy on the high desert, mingling strangely with the ochre dust of the straggling desert floor. A few intrepid succulents still grew here before the perennial tree line began, demarcating highland from low, and these were draped in white. After ten days, Jak had barely conquered the steep incline toward the bluff.
Keeping to the EldRud, which Jak had traveled twice by motorbike, had seemed the logical choice, but on foot, in winter, it turned out to be a perilous proposition. The road was no longer visible, and there were no recognizable markers to be sure of one’s direction. And worse, if Jak became disoriented and the journey compounded into weeks instead of days, there was no water source except the snow.
The hint of stars was visible through the gauze of branches overhead as Jak lay gazing up, arms serving as a makeshift pillow. Jak had made camp for the night within a copse of cedar that had so far been protected from the snow. The trees in Jak’s line of vision moved and mourned in the wind, obscuring and revealing the starry dome that was a flattering copy of the one at Temple Ra.
Jak considered going back and meeting up with the Filial. It would cost days, and there was no telling how the weather would turn. No, it would be better to persevere and use the sun for direction. It would only be a few days’ journey keeping to this route—at the most, a week. Jak could ration the water, and the increasing snow could be gathered when the water was gone. It was better to keep on toward home.
But it was less than a day before Jak discovered the gravity of this mistake. The sky grew overcast and snow began to fall again before noon, and the optimistic gauge of the blithe winter sun overhead was obscured by a dense gray covering of cloud. Jak tried to use the breaks in the trees to keep to the road, but the trees themselves were increasingly fewer as the day wore on, and Jak knew by frequent stumbling over rises in the snow that it wasn’t the smooth worn stone of EldRud that ran beneath, but the rocky ground of the surrounding bluff. In the urgency of an emotional need for home, Jak was making all the mistakes of a Deltan who’d never seen true winter.
By nightfall, Jak’s predicament was worse. The unpleasant discovery of a hollow beneath the snow had yielded a twisted ankle, and it was swelling badly. Furious at the stupidity, but resigned, Jak found a suitable projection of rock to huddle under and call it a day. Beneath its protection, Jak erected a small makeshift tent and climbed inside within a cocoon of two blankets and the clothes from home. The ankle would be sore but should be usable by morning, and Jak would have to go slow.
Morning, however, brought no relief to the sprain, and instead delivered an ice storm some hours before dawn. The tent was useless, weighted down by ice and battered by the wind. Jak pulled it overhead as a kind of hood, wrapped in the canvas and crouching against the rocks, and cursed into the wet chrysalis. This was idiotic from start to finish. Jak should have returned to Haethfalt as soon as the urn was delivered, or no later than the arrival of Ra, whom Jak should have avoided at all costs. Jak should have brought heavier clothes, and should have taken the motorbike, or followed the river on foot. Jak should have navigated more carefully.
It was a useless litany of self-reproach, but it was something to focus on. It was better than thinking of the truth: that Jak wasn’t going to make it home.
The storm’s duration was impossible to gauge. After some time, Jak slept, huddled against the stones. It was over when Jak roused, perhaps prompted by the silence, but the canvas and blankets were frozen, and there was a portentous lack of pain in the still-swollen ankle. Both feet, in boots not made for snow, were beyond feeling. Jak broke off an icicle from the edge of the tent canvas and sucked on it, too tired for self-castigation. Death by freezing was a mild way to go, or so they said. Warmth would come before the end. That would be pleasant.
Jak wondered drowsily what waited in the in-between. Perhaps there would be some kind of communion with Ahr’s soul. Jak longed for that. It was a mystery, often debated among the philosophers of Mound RemPeta, what happened with one’s consciousness once consigned to the elements. Some claimed to recall vague dreams at the edge of reawakening, intense desires and aspirations that propelled their matter into a kind of chemical reaction, and propelled the spirit into its next incarnation to continue the journey.
Perhaps the median held only emptiness, and the stored memory of one’s collected lives was nothing but a myth. Or perhaps some accident of chemistry set off the spark of the soul.
It occurred to Jak that this would be a crushing blow to Ra. The thought was neither satisfying nor distressing. Ra had manipulated every element of her Meer-charmed life, companions as well as events, even plotting from the grave to have things her way despite the tide of life. Somehow, without a formal cremation, Ra had contained her integral self and brought it forth again from the netherworld. She was a cheat.
A distant sound played at the edges of Jak’s consciousness, the melody of the median. It was like a forest strung with chimes between the trees—dangling bits of glass, or thin metal bells, enchantingly dissonant. Jak listened to it idly, mind numb like the frostbitten feet. It began to draw Jak away from the lure of oblivion and toward the cold and discomfort of the body, the way pain knocked clarity into the mind. Jak’s eyes opened. It wasn’t music at all, but the breaking of ice under boots. A figure was approaching through the webs of the frozen trees. For a moment, Jak thought it must be Ra, but it was the more alarming Meer who’d spawned her.
Leather-gloved hands perched on her hips, Shiva shook her head with a sigh. “If you’re going to be stubborn, you ought to at least do so with a bit of common sense. You’re quite ridiculous.”
Jak was at MeerShiva’s mercy. Exhausted, frozen and numb, Jak had been easy to hoist over the deceptively narrow shoulders. It was a terrifying prospect to be held aloft by a mad Meer, especially this one. Jak protested pointlessly and was soon silenced by the steady motion of Shiva’s nimble footsteps through the snow, or by Meeric deceit, or both. Jak slept and woke and slept again, silently gliding with the terrifying goddess over the boundless white grace.
Light came once more, a morning, or perhaps just consciousness, and Jak lay prone in an unlikely cave, the source of light its narrow opening to the ground above. Beneath Jak lay a thick animal pelt, and another covered Jak’s bare flesh. The unnerving Meer was seated, legs curled beneath her, before a pleasant fire.
“Fair Jak.” Her expression was unreadable. “You’re with us after all.”
“Us?” Jak attempted to sit up, stunned into thinking better of it by a throbbing skull.
“Us. Me. The greater world. You’re a resident of it yet, and not a collective drop of elements in—what was it you called it? The median?”
Jak’s head rose, crossed arms forming a weak prop to see MeerShiva better. “What I called it? What do you call it?”
“I?” Shiva laughed. “I call it nothing. I have had but one life. I know nothing of reincarnation, except that it apparently happens, as those I’ve thought lost keep reappearing from the dead in the most unnerving way. It’s quite extraordinary, really.” She glanced at her nails as though biding time with a dull guest at a party.
One life? Jak was amazed at this claim. The ancient City of Always had been established by Shiva herself, and had been nothing but ruins—until Ra had resurrected it—for almost half a millennium. Could Shiva be so old without regeneration?
“Old.” Shiva plucked the thought from Jak’s head. “Do I look old to you?” She tossed her hair in a haughty gesture, and her inhuman eyes narrowed. “I wonder what Ra sees in you, Jak na Fyn.”
Jak curled away from her, uneasy at the turn this was taking. There was no telling what this woman—no, this feral Meer might do. Jak stopped the thought too late, realizing Shiva would still be listening. She was worse than Ra in this intrusive skill.
Shiva laughed, a sound both beautiful and unsettling, chilling Jak to the bone as even the ice storm had not. “But you’re so loud.” Her words echoed what Ra had once said. “Keep your thoughts to yourself if you don’t wish to be overheard.” Shiva held up her hands, palm out, in a gesture of truce at Jak’s look of mistrust. “I have no intention of molesting you, Jak na Fyn.” When Jak flinched at this word and its baser connotations, Shiva sighed. “Now what have I said? You’re a very bristly person, Jak na Fyn. Like an offensive desert plant.”
Jak eyed her around the selvage of the animal skin, wishing this unpleasant contact with her would end.
“Do you think you own the word? One would think you were the only person in the world to have been misused.” Her voice was a low, sensual growl like a warning from a great cat, and Jak’s heart began to beat in a rhythm of fear. “Such terrible scars you have.” She unbuttoned her jacket and held it open, baring skin that was paler than Ra’s. “Don’t you see mine?”
At the mention of scars, Jak’s fingertips went automatically to the cheek Ra had striped. There were no scars on Shiva’s skin. But the Meer obviously expected a response.
Jak shrugged. “No, I don’t. Your skin is perfect.”
“You do not look, FynNa.” Shiva rose and came close, crouching before the skin rug. “Look, you ordinary little fool. Is it perfect?”
A web of terrible white lines bisected the marbling of her veins, mementos of deep gashes, blows and lacerations that hadn’t been visible before. Jak’s breath drew in sharply.
“I was captured in the days when my kind were devoured as part of petition. We were insignificant charms. They took me by surprise and cut out my tongue that I couldn’t curse them. They were fools, for it meant I also couldn’t bless them. To punish me for robbing him of his vetma, the master of these men had me stripped and beaten with the lash until I couldn’t stand. He made me his slave, a laughingstock among his court: his captive savage, rendered powerless, for their amusement. Knowing I still possessed the Meeric strength to withstand such beatings, he allowed his courtiers to administer them repeatedly, for sport—for years. Though I wished for death, I could not die.”
Shiva stared past Jak into the fire, her eyes a virulent green, but when she spoke again, it was in an offhand manner, as though the story she related was trivial. “My tongue grew back eventually. The Meer have that ability. When it was whole, I called up each man’s demon, the thing he feared most. My master I repaid with the same he’d given me. He lived to suffer much longer than Fyn’s husband did.”
Jak had begun to weep without realizing it.
Shiva clutched Jak’s jaw between her fingers and raised Jak’s head sharply from the skin rug. “Do you think I told you this to make you cry? I could have spared myself that recollection and toyed with you more cruelly than Ra had I merely wanted your tears. Look at me.” She held Jak’s eyes with hers, and something shifted deep within them, and Jak saw into her. It was like staring into the cataclysmic abyss of a volcano, and Jak was stunned into silence.
“You and I are sisters,” said Shiva fiercely. “Birthed of the inhumanness of others. I was called Shiva the Terrible after I had my retribution. I was no victim. You must cease to be. The rabbit is no more.” She let go of Jak and threw off the skin covering, and Jak saw the rugs were made from the coats of rabbits sewn together. “Now, Jak na Fyn. What will you be?”
Gasping at the unexpected feel of fire-warmed air against bare skin, Jak was tongue-tied, bewildered by the question.
Shiva’s hand traced down Jak’s spine as though assessing the muscles within. “Will you be a man, as I made Ahr? Or shall I give you that which would validate your identity: the characteristics of neither sex?”
Lulled by the steady stroke of Shiva’s hand, Jak felt almost weightless, eyes fluttering closed against the flickering firelight. “No, thank you,” Jak murmured. “I wish to keep my body. It’s only my gender that is…in the median.”
The rolling ship of fever marked the rest of Jak’s journey home, carried once more by Shiva the Terrible after stumbling without progress through the thickening snow. Briefly aware they’d reached the mounds, Jak, in Shiva’s arms, was as vague and empty-headed as Ra had been after her renaissance by the time they arrived at Mound RemPeta, dimly aware of the voices of concern surrounding them.
“What’s happened?”
“Jak’s brought another of them.”
“By the ancestors. What have you done?”
Jak woke rested and damp from the defeated fever, but weighted down with burning lungs. Above was a ceiling of ordinary, iron-gray stones. This was Jak’s bed. This was home. When Jak was seized by a painful cough reminiscent of Merit’s, Geffn’s face appeared overhead in concern, his mop of russet brown untidy with worry as he raked his fingers through it before taking Jak’s hand.
“Sooth, Jak, I thought you were dead.”
“Me too.”
Geffn propped Jak up against another coughing fit. “What were you thinking, heading out alone in the heart of winter without even proper boots?”
Jak smiled at the concern in the soft brown of Geffn’s eyes. It was good to be home with him. Here was an ordinary man, unfettered by the webs of past incarnations. He was, or had been, Jak’s handfasted. He loved Jak. This was where Jak belonged.
“I don’t know.” Jak leaned against Geffn as he sat on the edge of the bed. “Ra was there. She’s well now—apparently—but I just wanted to go home.”
“And you found another Meer.” Geffn shuddered. “That Shiva. Gods. You’re a Meer magnet.”
Jak laughed, and coughed, held by Geffn until the fit subsided. Geffn’s arms were home. “I’m done with all that.” Jak snuggled up to him with a sigh. “I’ve come to my senses. I belong here, with you.”
Geffn drew back from the embrace when Jak tried to kiss him, looking at Jak as though he thought the fever must be talking. “We dissolved our union. We released one another.”
“Because of my foolishness. I’ve been an idiot.” Jak wove their fingers together, trying to pull him close once more. “We can forget that.”
Geffn held Jak away, frowning. “No, we can’t. Jak, I’ve been courting Sevine.” When Jak stared, dumbfounded, Geffn elaborated. “From Mound DarSevineMara—”
“I know where she’s from.” Jak folded up into a pyramid of arms and legs, head ducked between them, and spoke into the blanket. “Oh gods. Oh my gods, I’m such an ass. Shit.”
Geffn rubbed Jak’s back as Jak began to cough again. “You’re not an ass. I love you. You know it. But I’ve moved on.” He gave Jak’s shoulder a comforting squeeze, and Jak peered up miserably between the crook of an elbow. “It was a lovely thought. I’m sorry.”
Jak gave him a sheepish smile. “I guess this means we won’t be having sex again.”
In the cool afternoon shadows, Ra spun the empty urn on the tiles like a child. She was lonely, not even ashes to comfort her, and she had no one to blame but herself. There was Merit, of course; she wasn’t entirely alone, and she had missed him. But he still slept, and the temple was silent. Though it wasn’t his doing, it felt like a punishment of sorts, a refusal to speak to her. She suspected Shiva had done it just for that purpose, and had left her to feel the solitude once more. But why punish Merit, whom Shiva barely knew?
Merit was unwell. Ra had listened at his chest and heard the susurration in his lungs. The old illness, contracted so long ago during the summer of Ahr, had damaged him, and mortal age was now taking its toll.
Temple Ra hadn’t been so desolate, nor Ra’s fate so out of her control since the long years before Ahr. If life was to be only fleeting bliss between expanses of silence wider than the sea, why return? Ra had never had answers to her own solicitations. Even the Meer couldn’t divine themselves. With a wistful sigh, she went to sleep in Jak’s bed, taking comfort in the lingering scent that reminded her of clove and peat, and dreamt of Haethfalt.
Shiva had left Jak with the anxious family and departed, graciously avoiding mention of their rudeness at not inviting her to stay despite the harsh weather. She had business at Soth AhlZel.
Ra had recreated Shiva’s temple in painstaking detail. It was more a restoration than creation. Shiva touched the celadon columns lovingly, entranced by Ra’s homage to her. She spent several hours seated on her dais, looking out at a scattering of centuries.
She had come here, Shiva the Terrible, and demanded the mountain tribes worship her. It was the logical relationship between Meer and the ordinary. Why should she hide in terror from their hunting parties when all she’d ever had to do was fling them away like irritating flies? Perhaps she hadn’t always been this strong, or hadn’t understood what she was, but after taking her revenge, she knew her power. She’d torn bodies apart like cotton pillows. She’d tormented her assailants without even needing to be near them. She remembered this, and not the time preceding it, and regarded herself as an invincible demon with no need of conscience.
That had been the beginning of madness. She’d been harsh with herself for that weakness, but she had every cause to go mad. She would question one who endured what she had and didn’t go mad. Madness was her right.
By her nature, despite her rage, she’d given from the beginning. It was a fair trade, she thought, to grant blessings by consent in exchange for the regard of deity. Those who pleased her received first, and most, and news of the city on the mountain with its own perpetual Meer spread over the land. Soth AhlZel and MeerShiva became the envy of the world, and the hunting of Meer became a quest for the sacred. Men imagined themselves holy in their devotion. Temples rose. The religion was born.
Shiva sighed with the sun as its pale highland winter gold faded into the gray below the arches. Hraethe’s coming had frightened her as nothing else in her experience. She had called him from across the sea and sent him repeatedly away because she’d felt his blood within the Meeric flow. The inexplicable pull of desire had both driven and terrified her.
She’d resisted him through the insult he’d unknowingly delivered to her virgin flesh, and through the soothing fire of passion that had followed, the unmatchable ecstasy that was Meer on Meer. She’d resisted him because she feared his knowing her. It was a nakedness worse than being stripped and derided by a horde of strangers. She’d feared his laughter—the first sound she heard on baring herself to him. And worse, she’d feared needing him.
Resisting her own desire and sending him away once more had felt like an act of power—proving the walls she’d built could not be breached. But Ra’s renaissance had begun to break down that resistance, leaving Shiva vulnerable once more. She hadn’t realized quite how vulnerable until she’d seen Hraethe returned in his mentally vagrant state. She couldn’t be what either of them needed. They would devour her like the Meer of old.
What she could do, however, was what was in her nature to do: to give. She’d offered Jak a vetma. It was the first time anyone—human or Meer—had ever refused. But what she’d come to AhlZel to do—a vetma that would give both Ra and Hraethe what they most needed—would be her gift to Jak as well.
There was one thing each of them longed for.
Shiva took the silver phial from around her neck that contained the last of Ahr. She’d scattered the smaller ashes in the desert beyond the Delta. Within were the larger fragments of his remains, the part that kept Ahr under, the part of his last life not yet relinquished.
She crouched before the silent sheet of glass-blue water that Ra hadn’t understood, her reflection staring back at her. In the Pool of Souls, the living turned to ice, but the dead burned. Poor Ra, so painfully mad that she’d gone against her own self, had severed bits of her soul in creating her “citizens” of AhlZel. Every person she’d imagined she’d created and tormented had only been a projection of herself. The soul was large and, like the tongues of Meer, could be regenerated. Ra had been in no danger, only tremendous pain. Shiva had seen blood seeping from a host of tiny holes in Ra’s soul when she’d last come here. Ra had been like a skin of wine thrust through again and again with a rapier until the wine trickled out like a crimson fountain.
Shiva opened the phial and poured the fragments of bone into her hand. So little, yet so much. “I must disturb you so soon,” she apologized. “But your going under was a mistake.”
Closing her fist over the remains, she thrust it into the water as though punching into the center of a human body. Her palm and fingers, at first shocked with cold, began to burn from what they held, a terrible heat—acid consuming flesh—and she shouted her agony into the empty temple, but wouldn’t remove the hand. Through her fingers, the burning substance flowed and curled red-stained into the water. Her own blood was melting through her flesh like the center of a candle through the twists and flourishes of a gold mesh cage. She cried out Ahr’s name in a long howl, a sound that could be the simple utterance of pain itself, with no meaning; a sound that was the opposite of Ra. Her hand opened, translucent with the glow of red in the water, fingers splayed.
“Return,” she whispered, and drew her hand out. Laying her head on the cold tile, she held the hand before her, a dangling obscenity of ruined flesh. Her eyes drifted shut. She needed sleep.
Sanguine and cobalt mixed on Pearl’s palette, like the curling spread of his own blood in the bath at Szofl. He’d been painting in oils on canvas, filling the mirrored hall with Meeric tragedies and atrocities. These had all been histories, but now he was bombarded by visions from MeerShiva in her new temple at AhlZel.
She’d kept him out until now, which meant something terrible had happened to weaken her magic. The strokes of Pearl’s brush revealed what had befallen her. Beside the glistening sapphire pool, the red became a violent, molten flow against the tile: the remains of Shiva’s hand as she drew it from the water. He felt the pain himself in the hand that held the brush, an agonizing spasm that wouldn’t relent, making his stomach heave and his head swim.
Pearl’s painting became abstract hues repeating the pattern of reds and blues in a swirling, boiling spiral. He couldn’t stop, gripped by the magic Shiva had begun. Paint flung against the canvas from his brush in splotches and splatters, doing what it would, the reflective pool alive with its own magic separate from the Meer, conjuring what it shouldn’t, what it must, until Pearl convulsed and fell from his stool, collapsing with a helpless moan into the scattered oils.
Something was horribly wrong. Ra sat up, ripped from sleep as when the Expurgation had come, believing for a terrible moment she was once more Meer of Rhyman and RaNa was being dragged from her bed and dashed against the steps. But that was long ago.
She climbed trembling from the bed and wrapped the heavy blanket around herself, her skin like ice, and her breath coming in short gasps, as when she’d first come to this life. The cold was the same and her sense of confusion equal. Ra crouched and touched the floor to assure herself of this reality. This was not a rolling plain of brilliant white, but a darkened room at Ludtaht Ra, flat and dry, and far from Haethfalt.
Ra looked into the dim light in the mirror as she steadied herself against the bureau. Where she’d once been wan and pallid, her skin now had a healthy glow, and she was round where sharp angles had once protruded. I have become like her, she thought with a shock. I look like Ahr.
The disorientation struck her once more, and she closed her eyes to listen. The Meeric flow was calling to her. It whispered of blood: the blood she’d taken that had made her whole. It whispered of AhlZel. She opened her eyes. Shiva.
Ra pondered whether to wait until Merit woke, but there was no telling how long the sleep would last. Perhaps Shiva had left him slumbering to keep Ra distracted and unable to prevent her from carrying out whatever dangerous magic she’d undertaken that had resulted in this chaos in Ra’s blood. Whatever the reason, Ra had to go. The sense of wrongness from Shiva’s blood was only increasing, until it felt as though she herself had taken poison, and her veins itched with contaminated plasma.
Despite his sleep and the illness in his lungs, Merit seemed well enough, and Ra recalled his servants to the temple with instructions to keep watch on him.
She moved with the speed of the Meer’s will, and kept to the EldRud, which took a straighter path to Munt Zelfaal and bypassed the mounds altogether. In only a matter of days, she’d begun her ascent.