Epilogue: Retribution and Desire

Their clothing and appearance gave them away as Deltan, though they came into town from the west. MeerShiva procured a room for the night at a small inn on the outskirts of a trading post northeast of Mole Downs. Ra, in an archaic kaftan and braids, was slight and shapeless from months of deprivation, and despite her Deltan height surpassing that of the average falender, Shiva towered over her, and they took her for a boy.

Ra was sedate in the stupor of Shiva’s blood, for once at peace with the absence of memory’s weight. There was nothing important beyond MeerShiva’s winter hue, pale as rice paper laid upon a soft network of tiny rivers, tributaries intersecting and dividing into the delta of precious veins. Upon each tributary, an hour’s meditation might have passed, and Ra had found herself in one moment on the restored stone bridge of Munt Zelfaal, in the next crossing the highlands, then, as swiftly, in the scattered pine forest beyond the mound-riddled moor. At length, the moon limned Shiva’s path, and Ra had been content to follow as though Shiva were the moon’s avatar, slowly gliding over an earthly reflection of night’s ocean.

In the morning, they dined in the tavern at the inn, deserted but for the two of them at the early hour. The tavern keeper, roused with ill grace to serve them at MeerShiva’s cool insistence, set cold fowl before them and hard bread. He had flat eyes Ra didn’t like, his gaze passing over them as it might pass over a chair, seen but accorded no significance. It was an unusual lack in perception that could disregard the eminence of MeerShiva.

For Ra, such was unthinkable. Her head was full of nothing but the whispered vetma of shivashivashiva as she picked at the bird’s flesh and nibbled at the bread. Beyond the corona of Shiva’s presence, Ra watched the blue-gray profile of Munt Zelfaal in the distance through the tavern windows. Painted letters divided the pane, visible through the glass: N R E V A T S L O K. Ra followed the peeling white letters from one side to the other, noting where they fell on Zelfaal’s crags without shadow, ghost clouds of insignificant shapes.

“You should tell your boy to eat up.” The tavern keeper stood watching Ra, flat eyes keen. He set an earthenware jug before Shiva without looking at her. “A tall lad,” he appraised Ra. “But skinny.”

He put his hand on Ra’s arm as though to feel the muscle, and Ra jerked from his grip with a gasp, her skin tingling with feral apprehension. There was something chilling and unclean in his touch. If the Meer were divine, here was the opposite of reverence. Ra could not place the feeling of unease, though its cold presence was familiar, like something forgotten in a dream. Behind him, N R E V A T S L O K danced over the pane.

“The wine, fool,” said MeerShiva, her eyes dark with impatience.

The proprietor made a stifled noise of disrespect in his throat and tipped the wine jug into Shiva’s cup.

She raised it to her mouth and took a sip, scowling and setting it down with force. “You call this wine?”

He gave MeerShiva a look that bordered on contempt. “It’s good enough for the kind that come to my tavern.”

His calculating gaze returned to Ra, and the feeling of disquiet grew stronger. Beads of sweat had begun to dance on her forehead, and what little she’d eaten was threatening mutiny in her shrunken stomach. Ra leapt to her feet, fists at her sides, trying to still the wave of unrelenting nausea. MeerShiva watched her over the earthenware cup.

“Your privy chamber?” she managed, and found she couldn’t meet the proprietor’s eyes.

He jerked his thumb toward a door in the back of the tavern, and Ra excused herself, flushing hot and cold as she weaved toward it. By the time she reached the door that led onto a dark, foul little out-room jutting into the alley, her limbs were shaking uncontrollably. She huddled before the crude hole cut in a plank seat—no Haethfalt miracle of running water here—and trembled, arms hugging her chest. But there was nothing to retch. Shaking again, Ra unlaced the sash of her kaftan and drew the fabric up over her legs. Her womb was seized with an agonizing ache, and she folded into a crouch over the seat, gasping and dizzy.

He had hurt her, here in the privy, invading her dispassionately as though her body were the dead flesh of an animal.

Ra’s stomach tightened into a ball of agony. Beneath her, the pot had filled with dark, viscous blood as if she’d expelled a full menses with a violent convulsion, or the beginnings of some misbegotten child.

She stumbled back and sank into the dark corner, the kaftan still bundled in white fists. Would he come in here? Would he find her? Please don’t let him come in. “No. No, please,” she whimpered, trying in vain to keep the memory at bay. Without realizing it, she’d begun to rock, her head lightly thumping against the privy wall with each unbidden thought.

The door was thrown open on the stale backroom of the tavern, and Shiva regarded her with a look like menace in her storm-green eyes.

“Don’t let him come in!” cried Ra, her voice catching like moths’ wings in her throat.

Shiva reached down and yanked Ra forward by the collar of the kaftan, slapping her hard enough to make her head ring. “You are not this child,” Shiva hissed against her cheek. She stroked Ra’s arms then in an oddly tender gesture, and spoke in a placid voice. “You are MeerRa of Rhyman, ShivaRa of my blood.” Her lip curled upward, and her eyes and voice hardened. “It is time to return the poison to its master.”

Shiva drew Ra to her feet and retied her sash, smoothing the rough silk of the kaftan, before turning Ra toward the dimly lit tavern with its only windows in shadow—shadows that spelled out N R E V A T S L O K. In the mirror over the bar, the name of the establishment was clearly legible, the backwards view turned forward again: KOL’S TAVERN.

The tavern keeper looked up from his stool at the bar. He had eyes like an owl.

MeerShiva murmured intimately at Ra’s ear. “Madness, my dear, may be focused to a purpose.” She drew the back of one nail lightly over Ra’s throat. “I found him in the Meeric flow, not dead after all, as was his lot. Are you pleased?”

“He’s not dead,” whispered Ra. “He’s here.”

“He’s here.” The Meer began to wind her wine-dark hair in her fist, knotting it high behind her head so that its length hung down behind her back and out of her way. She crossed to the door that led onto the street, gliding elegantly across the dank little room, and threw the bolt.

The tavern keeper stood. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Kol,” hissed Ra. The word was like grit between her teeth. She tasted in it all the terror that had been Jak’s childhood. Jak, whom she had forgotten for a day in the sweet nepenthe of Shiva’s blood. Jak, whom this abomination had violated in body, mind and soul. Jak, whom Ra had violated with words. The violent contraction of her womb seized her once more, and she cried out.

Kol stared at Ra in growing alarm. “Madam,” he stammered, as Shiva stepped closer to him. “What is wrong with your son?”

“My son,” laughed Shiva, “had his skull split open by a band of rabble. This is not my son. She bleeds.”

“Fyn’s husband,” said Ra, and the empty holes of Kol’s eyes turned on her. Ra saw the past in those hollows: the girl, Fyn, filled with a sense of futility, whom he’d reduced to a pale projection of the woman she might otherwise have become; the rages to which her early attempts at autonomy had driven him before he’d broken her; the sense of entitlement he felt from the world; and his nearly transcendent pleasure at the power he’d wielded, only hardened to arousal by the pain and fear of a small child at his mercy.

She saw the fall from the ridge at Munt Zelfaal that ought to have killed him, rock crumbling away at his feet into the gorge while an older, hardened Fyn stepped back from his reach with grim dispassion, while half a continent away, the Meer were falling to the Expurgation. She saw Kol’s hike through the gorge on a shattered leg, his collarbone broken, his own pain as meaningless to him as the feelings of others, the sense of entitlement driving him on.

Ra saw another pale child with the closed look of Jak to her, pressed against a privy door at the mercy of Kol’s excavation, enduring, enduring, enduring, beyond what any child, or even hardened warrior, ought to endure. He’d grown bold in his undiscovered years at the trading post, and the thrill had increased with the drawing of blood.

Ra clutched the bar top as another sharp twist of pain went through her, her nails gouging deep troughs in the wood. “Fyn’s husband!” she hissed again.

The blood drained from Kol’s face. “Who are you?”

“Ahlman,” said Shiva, moving slowly toward him. “And Zelman. The beginning and the end. Your end.”

Kol backed away from her. “You’re insane!” He stumbled over the stool, scrabbling against the bar for purchase.

Shiva grasped him by the throat as he fell, and threw him with a heavy crack onto the stained wood of the bar. “Indeed. What is your excuse?”

Kol tried to scramble away, but Shiva held him fast, and he was helpless before her. “What do you want with me?”

“I?” Shiva gave him a dark smile. “Nothing at all. It’s my ‘son’ you ought to worry about. MeerRa of Rhyman has a score to settle with you.”

Kol’s face went pale as Ra moved toward him, drawing her nails through the furrows in the wood, steady and deliberate. Darkness curled around her like a heavy cloak, seeping into her bones like midnight fog. She’d felt its embrace on Munt Zelfaal, but had turned it on herself and those she loved. Here was the rightful object of it.

“I’ve done nothing to you!” cried Kol.

“You touched mene Jak.” Ra plunged the nails of her fore and middle fingers through the flesh of his throat and into the wood of the bar beneath him, cutting off his strangled yelp in a gurgling puddle.

Shiva leaned close to Kol’s petrified face, her lips almost brushing his ear. “You should have died when you had the chance.” She drew Ra away, placing a kiss on her forehead. “Let me,” she murmured. “You will be too quick.”

Pressing a nail into the center of the pool of blood at Kol’s throat as he squirmed against the bar top, Shiva struck his scrabbling arms away with a force strong enough to crack bone. “So curious. Always curious. How much will this hurt?” She drew her finger downward, painting a zipper of red along his shirt over the length of his chest and abdomen. “Always eager to see what pain does to other creatures.” She paused at his belt and drew it off him like a lover, then opened his pants and pressed her nail into his skin once more where she’d left off, finishing the razor slit in his flesh until she stopped at the base of his flaccid cock. Shiva clucked her tongue. “Hardly any point to this anymore, is there?”

She moved the dangle of flesh out of the way with a look of distaste. “What will happen if I do this?” Her nails pierced his scrotum, and his body jerked violently, his mouth working, but emitting only a harsh gurgling sound. Blood and urine spilled onto the polished wood. “Shameful,” she chided, shaking a blood-tipped finger at him. “Have you nothing to say? Ah, yes. That’s right. It’s what you demand of them, when by rights they should scream and rail. You take even their tongues from them. All that prodding, and stabbing, and thrusting. You expect a child to take the violation of her most sacred place in silence. Does it really make you feel powerful?”

While Shiva took a knife from beneath the bar, Kol shrank into a shuddering ball. The Meer trimmed her nails, her face placid and still as glass, then tossed the knife to Ra. “Do what you like. He bores me.”

Ra stood once more within young Jak’s skin, watching the white light of the owl as Kol made nothing of Jak, as though even the soul were being sundered. A scream of rage howled upward from the pit of Ra’s being, and she found the knife in her hand driving into Kol’s gut. “Taísch naiahn.” Ra twisted her hand, drawing the blade sideways as the knife went deep into the body convulsing beneath her. Fluids glistened on his exposed viscera. “You are nothing,” she said again—the words she’d said to Ahr as she’d taken his life. Blood filled the cavity like a bath of vermillion. “You are dead.”

Once more, Shiva stepped in, and the knife dropped from Ra’s hand as she gazed into the knowing green eyes. “You mustn’t become lost, my dear.” While blood bubbled impotently from Kol’s mouth, Shiva moved Ra aside and thrust her fist into the hole Ra had opened. “How much will it hurt, little vermin? Won’t it be fascinating to find out?” The Meer yanked out her fist, entrails clutched within it, and Kol stared in shock, his body locked in paroxysm.

Shiva stroked Ra’s cheek with the back of a bloodied hand, intestines dangling from the other. “You took the worst from your Jak. I have it now. Remember, I keep the poison in my heart.” She turned to Kol. “And now it is his.”

Lowering her head toward Kol’s, Shiva pried his mouth open, displaying her pearl teeth in a gruesome parody of a smile. From between her brilliant canines sprayed a black-green jet of venom as from the fangs of a serpent. She held her hand against his mouth, pressing down fiercely until Kol swallowed with his shredded throat, his face twisted in horror.

“How much will this hurt? Now you know.” Shiva let his entrails puddle onto the floor as his face went slack. There was nothing viable of him left.

Ra dropped to her knees before MeerShiva, her legs suddenly weak and unable to hold her. Red streamed down her cheeks onto the still pristine, sandaled feet as Shiva regarded her.

“MeerRa. Are you sorry for him?”

Ra raised her eyes to Shiva’s unreadable glass-green stare. “Sorry? Nai. Meershivá. Not for him. I am only grateful.” Ra kissed the bloodstained feet. “Vetta, MeerShiva,” she whispered. “Bless you.”

Shiva lifted Ra’s chin and gave her a stern look. “You are my equal. Rise as Meer.” Ra stood, overcome by the meaning of this pronouncement, as Shiva observed the remains on the tavern bar.

Hugging her arms, Ra shuddered at the offensive stench of him. “He must not be allowed to return.”

MeerShiva nodded and took hold of Kol’s hair, dragging him like a meaningless bag of trash through the back room of the tavern, where a door beside the privy opened onto a service alley in the rear.

Ra followed as Shiva dragged the corpse out to the new wetlands from the flooded moor to the south and tossed it down. She took Ra aside to wait, sitting in the boggy marsh, unaffected by the damp as she drew Ra within the protective circle of her limbs. They waited until the carrion eaters of the moorland appeared, vultures and wild dogs fighting one another for the raw flesh, and watched until there was nothing left that could be conjured again to life.

MeerShiva stroked Ra’s hair under the glittering sun as they listened to the sounds of the marsh, and Ra remembered that Shiva had lived wild in the swamps in the days before the Age of Meer. The bright sun and Shiva’s touch were lulling Ra once more into the quiet realm where Meeric wisdom flowed. The mud of the marsh and the murmuring of frogs and insects were one with the shared beating of blood through her veins. The moisture of the bog was no different from the water that coursed through her body or dashed against distant shores, ushered by the Anamnesis into the vast sea.

In the Meeric well, there were all things and none, sorrow and joy, ecstasy and loss, time and motionlessness in a single drop of blood—or mortal tear—on the tip of an eyelash. Ra had dipped into the well and reemerged countless times over a quartet of centuries, each time reborn in more subtle ways than renaissance, reformed of Meeric desire. Jak and Ahr waited there within the fluid fabric of memory.

MeerShiva rose without speaking, and Ra followed, no words necessary. They stepped out onto the drying hillocks dotted with clover and heather, leaving the trailing outskirts of highland society behind. The highlands, like the Delta, were no place for gods.

Scattered herds of shaggy cattle and qirhu observed them with mild curiosity, unconcerned with the cake of mud and red matter that spattered them as they walked in the clear morning light. They were part of the qirhu, and the cattle, and the circling condors, part of the dappling light that rolled out across the heath. Beneath papery white clouds and autumn’s fragile robin’s-egg sky, falend stretched before them, the rain-swollen Filial winding through it across the heath toward its Anamnesis.

Beyond lay only undiscovered country.