Babylon Steel (38 page)

“How did you... you speak their language?”

“No. They had some Lithan; badly pronounced.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I have to go.”

I walked out, still clutching half a carrot.

Things of the dead. I didn’t like that phrase, not one bit.

G
LIMMERING
L
ANE IS
another place where the rich go to spend their spare money. There isn’t a single shop where you could buy anything
useful.
Chairs too fragile to sit on; glass too thin to use, and jewellery so expensive that you wouldn’t dare wear it out, for fear every robber in Scalentine would be drawn to it like flies to a corpse.

I edged into the first shop, clutching my scabbard against my leg so it wouldn’t sweep something off a shelf and cost me a month’s profit.

“Can I help you, Madam?” A young man oiled up to me.

“I’d like to ask you about some people who may have been in here.”

By the time I’d been through four or five of them, being treated like a customer when I walked in and a vagrant when they discovered I wanted information rather than insolvency, I was in a rare temper and ready to go home.

I almost passed by the next place: it looked shut. The windows were dim, the few artefacts in them – a battered cauldron, a tray of dusty rings, a dented goblet – didn’t look like the sort of thing that would appeal to the Avatars. But I caught a glimpse of a figure moving about in the gloom, and went in.

The place was yellowy dim, and smelled of dry age. The proprietor was a frail, but very upright old woman, with thick gold-rimmed glasses balanced heavily on a fragile nose and grey hair in a bun from which little wisps and trails escaped to float around her head. She was peering at the spine of a book so old the title would have been unreadable even in decent light. “With you in a moment,” she said, and a flare of witchlight suddenly bloomed over her left shoulder, sparking twinkles and glows in the depths of the shop. “Hmmph. No, really, I don’t think so. A third-generation copy, at best.” She put the book down on the counter, and looked at me with eyes bright as swordpoints.

“I’m sorry to bother you. I wanted to know if some people had been here, looking for something, but...”

“You’re Babylon Steel.”

“Um... yes?”

“A friend of Mokraine’s.”

“Yes.”

“Sad. Very sad,” she said. “He was a great man, you know. Not a good one, but a great one. Now...” She shook her head. “Who, and looking for what?”

“Sorry? Oh. Demigods, from Tiresana. Seeking something,” I said.

“Oh, yes. They were rude, even for demigods. I gathered they were looking for something they believed to be a deifact. Not unusual. Well, deifacts are, of necessity, unusual, but entities seeking them out are sadly common. You’re Tiresan yourself.”

“I...”

“You’d rather it wasn’t known? Of course.”

“Thank you. What’s a deifact?”

“Something that turns a being into a god.”

There was a soft explosion of light in my head, and I leaned on the counter. The woman asked if I was all right. I shook my head, and looked at my ring. In the low light, the stone glowed deep red, like a heart.

And with her sword she cuts the way to power. True godhead comes only with blade and flower.

How many years was it, since I’d read those words? Was this really it, the thing they had been seeking for so long?

Ranay, holding up the scroll, smiling.
“You’ll never guess.”

Was that what he’d meant to tell me? That the jewel of godhead was my own ring?

Wouldn’t that be a fine joke, if this ring, gathering dust in the temple treasury, tossed to a silly girl like a rag doll to a wailing child, had been all along the talisman they longed for? Hap-Canae had had the secret in his hand, not once, but twice. The ring he had given away, the manuscript he had burned.

I laughed, a strange barking laugh in the dusty shop. The woman simply folded her hands and stood, waiting.

If I was right, then they thought they had found it. How delighted they must have been; to have found what they sought so easily, with so little trouble to themselves. It must have seemed to them proof that they deserved it. Only one little murder. After so many, what did it matter?

And how blisteringly furious they would be when they discovered they had a copy, and not the real thing at all.

“A deifact.”

“Yes.”

My mind buzzed and whirled.

If it was true, I could try and rid myself of the thing. Have it melted down, have the stone shattered. Then if they did come back looking for it, once they discovered they’d been duped, it would do them no good.

But objects of power are not always easy to dispose of. Or safe. Ranay had said as much. And it had clung to me all these years, that ring; I’d never been able to sell it.

It had never turned me into a god, though. I’m fairly sure I’d have noticed.

“Would you like some water?” the woman said.

I nodded. She poured it into a battered pewter tumbler. It was cool and sweet and I drank gratefully.

“How would you tell if something was a deifact?” I said. “How does such a thing work?”

“Oh, a variety of ways, when and if they exist at all. I don’t carry such items. Too much trouble, even if the genuine article can be got, which, mostly, it can’t.”

“I shouldn’t imagine so. We’d be up to our knees in gods.”

“Oh, it would be very unlikely to work on Scalentine. There are certain safeguards, you know.”

I hadn’t been on Scalentine all this time, though. I’d passed through a dozen planes or more.

“I told them,” she said, “that anything proclaimed to be a deifact is more likely to be the province of fraudsters. They left. Why people think such a thing is worth having I will never understand,” she said.

“Er... no?”

“I seek to understand how the universe works,” she said. “Attaining godhead, by comparison, lacks ambition.” She smiled, at herself, or at others’ folly, I couldn’t really tell.

“I wonder,” I said. “Would you look at something for me?”

“Certainly.”

I took off my ring, and handed it to her. She stared at it, lit up the witchlight again, and stared some more. Then she sighed.

“An object of power, no doubt, but not my field. You might find it worth talking to Mokraine.”

I walked out of the shop feeling as though my head were full of wool, and wrapped up in the middle of it were a lot of people, all shouting.

TIRESANA

O
NE EVENING,
I had had more of a chance to heal than usual, because it was the dark of the moon, and Shakanti’s powers were weak. She retired to her rooms, and didn’t have the energy for torture. Perhaps, too, she was simply losing interest.

I struggled to the surface of a dream of swimming in river water, cool and sweet; reluctant, as always by then, to wake at all. I saw Kyrl, heavier than I remembered. Sesh. Lanky Sesh, who’d punched any man who looked at me funny.

I thought they were hallucinations – I was having them quite a lot by then. I babbled at them, saying that if they were real, I’d ask them to kill me. Because Shakanti would be back, eventually. “They say you can’t kill an Avatar,” I said, “but you just need to find out how. It’s in the scrolls, somewhere. Ranay could have found it. It was easy to kill Ranay, he wasn’t an Avatar. Hap-Canae said he loved me but he burned my love all away.”

“Shh, please, hush,” Kyrl said. She was red with shock and anger.

Sesh was crying. Somehow the sight of that brought me more to myself. I’d never seen him cry, not ever.

“Sesh.”

“It’s me, honey cake.”

“Sesh, are you really here?”

“Hush, Ebi. It
is
you? It really is our Ebi?”

“Please kill me.”

They looked at each other. Then Sesh got a vial from his pouch, and tilted it to my lips. “Hush, Ebi. Sssh. It’s all over now.”

Then there was blissful, painless nothing.

I
WOKE IN
darkness, and realised that I was cold, but not in pain. I could feel rough cloth against my skin, binding my arms to my sides. I pulled free – my strength had come back – and felt about with my hands, realised I was not chained, but trapped; walls of stone enclosed me, no more than four inches from me in any direction.

It took me a few minutes to realise I was in a sarcophagus. I pushed against the lid, but I’d used up my strength ripping my way out of the bandages, and couldn’t shift it.

And trapped in here, I was only going to get weaker.

Was this the final punishment they had decided to visit on me? To bury me alive? I knew Avatars were hard to kill, but without water, without food, surely even an Avatar would die eventually. Just very, very slowly.

I thought of Sesh and Kyrl, and realised they must have been a dream.

Perhaps I should have been panicking, screaming, clawing at the stone, but I wasn’t. Partly it was just being out of pain; the wonderful, blissful blankness of it. What numbing pleasure it was to have only the small discomfort of chilly stone beneath me, instead of unremitting agony that paused only to be renewed.

I stopped pushing at the lid. I realised I didn’t even want to escape. I just wanted to be left there, to die in peace.

But it wasn’t to be. I heard a scraping noise, and there was a flickering line of yellow light that stung my eyes.

“Ebi. Ebi!”

“Sesh?”

“You’re alive... Praise be, you’re alive. We weren’t sure; we had to believe...”

He and Kyrl helped me out of the sarcophagus. I recognised the room.

“You’re real,” I said.

“Yes, Ebi.” Kyrl said. “We saw... oh, if I ever get the chance! What was done to you, they should die. They should all die for it.”

“You’re better,” Sesh said.

“Yes. Apart from this.” I touched the scar on my face. “That never goes. Everything else... heals. What did you do?” I said.

“A potion. It mimics death. We didn’t even know if it would work, you being... you know. An Avatar. Before we knew what they’d turned you into, we were going to use it to get you away, if we needed to. The state you were in, we were half afraid it really would kill you, but...”

“Death I’d still have thanked you for,” I said.

Sesh was looking at me with a strange, almost greedy wonder, as though I was some rare thing that might disappear any moment. “It’s true, then.”

“What is?”

“The Avatars are human. All of them, not just you?”

“Yes. And knowing it got Ranay killed. We have to get away.”

“I know.” He nodded to Kyrl, who heaved into the coffin a cloth-wrapped form.

I stared at it.

“Just in case,” Kyrl said. “I don’t know why they should ever look, but if they do, they’ll find a body here. Summer fever, poor child, and no-one to bury her. Come.”

“No,” I said. “If I leave and I’m still an Avatar, they’ll find me. We need to get to the altar-stone.”

I wasn’t sure it would work. But I knew that if they found me, we were all dead, or worse.

And almost more than escape, I wanted to rid myself of this sick, stolen power.

We crept through the corridors, keeping to the back ways, but still, we had to pass Hap-Canae’s rooms.

As it was night, we were probably safe, but nonetheless I was paralysed for precious moments, unable to go past the door, in case he should realise, somehow, even in his sleep, that I was there.

In the end they lifted me off my feet, and scurried past with me. I wondered if he had someone else in there, some other young girl, wrapped in silk, stunned with love.

She wouldn’t end up as Babaska’s Avatar, at least.

We made it to the ancient corridor. And here the obsessive secrecy of the Avatars worked for us; there were, still, no guards.

The dust rose up around us like a convocation of ghosts. I thought I could see in it the faces of all the other girls: of Velance and Jonat and Renavir, of Adissi, pleading in stone. All the soldiers who’d died for nothing. And the poor girl in the tent, whose name I couldn’t even remember.

But the words, yes, the words I could remember. I whispered them.

Insiteth

Abea

Iatenteth

Hai ena

The floor hummed against my bare feet, but for a long, dreadful moment, nothing happened. It was long enough for me to think it had all been for nothing, to think we would still be standing there when they found us. Then, the doors swung open.

The altar sat within, looking like nothing but an ancient chunk of rock.

“Give me a knife,” I said.

They looked at each other. “What do you think I’m going to do?” I said. “I need to spill some blood – my blood – on the altar-stone, to give the power back. Give me a knife, or cut me yourself, I don’t care, just hurry!”

Sesh gave me his knife and I cut my left hand, then, holding the knife awkwardly, my right. After everything the pain hardly registered. I was shaking, though, and cut a little deeper than I meant. Quickly, before the wounds could heal, I slapped my bleeding hands into the cupped dents.

It hurt so much I couldn’t even scream. My back bent like a bow, but my hands stayed on the stone as if welded there. The ring I still wore burned against my finger until I thought it would scorch the bone itself. I thought I was, finally, dying.

I felt that gaze inside my head for the last time, assessing.
Go away,
I thought at it.
You didn’t help me. You didn’t save Ranay. You let all your worshippers suffer and you did nothing, so leave me alone!

Was it even Babaska at all, had it ever been anything but my own bewildered mind? I had no way to know, and hurt too much to care.