Idol of Blood (21 page)

“Understood!”

Jak waited while the silence stretched. It was a long moment before the length of rope came whistling out of the grayness, bearing a small, heavy pouch. Jak reached for it, but it came just shy of the cliff side and disappeared.

“Lost it,” Jak called. “Try again—harder.”

The rope returned more quickly this time, but once again was short of its destination. Jak lunged for it and caught it anyway, balancing at the edge and nearly plunging into the ravine.

“Got it!” Jak called after stumbling backward. “Hang on!” The trees were sparse here, but there was one small aspen a few feet up the old road. Jak ran for it—and was pulled up short.

“Shit!”

“What's wrong?” Ahr's voice was weary.

Jak looked around, trying to think of something else to anchor the rope to. There was nothing. “You've got to come closer, Ahr. A few yards closer.”

The rope began to slacken as Ahr crawled along the rail, and Jak moved with it, inching toward the tree. It seemed forever before the length Jak held was at last enough to wrap around the aspen trunk, and Jak was sweating with fear, despite the damp.

“Are you secure?” Jak called out, stretching the rope around the tree's far side. Ahr made a sound as though to answer, but it turned into a startled shout. The rope jerked in Jak's hands, nearly torn away. “Ahr!” Jak hung on with difficulty. Ahr's entire weight was clearly pulling back, and Jak was stumbling, jerked forward by the force of gravity. “Damn it!” Jak dug both feet into the roots of the tree. The soaked ground was useless for purchase. Looking out over the ravine, Jak could see nothing. The bridge support had simply disappeared.

“Ahr!” Jak screamed, losing the battle against his weight. With a sob of frustration, Jak pulled with all the strength of the moundbuilder. The skin was tearing from the determined palms despite their calluses, but Jak bore against it, cajoling the rope around the trunk's circumference. The bark smelled of friction. Jak braced both legs around the tree and heaved to gain enough to tie the rope in place. Sweat and blood were mingling with the mist, but Jak at last managed a knot that would hold. There was no time to pause and rest. Ahr was waiting.

At the edge of the gorge, Jak was able to see him. He dangled several feet down, head and arms hanging limp over the makeshift harness. Blood marked the side of his face.

“
Meerrá
, Ahr.”

A portion of the old road could be used for leverage, and Jak took hold of the rope and dug one foot into the stone. Ahr's unconscious weight was almost impossible to move. Jak swore and strained against the rope, knowing each jerk must be dragging Ahr against the rocks. He would be battered and shredded if he ever reached the top.

“Jak.” The weak sound came from below, and Jak let out a sob of relief.

“Ahr! I need your help! Can you grab on to the rock?” The answer came in a lessening of the tension in the rope. Jak mopped at sweat with one arm and gained a firmer grip. “I'll pull,” called Jak. “You climb.”

Ahr's progress was slow, but at last the sodden sable hair appeared at the place where the bridge had once stood, and Jak heaved him over until he sprawled prone on the ground.

“Sooth, Ahr!” Jak ran to him with relief.

Ahr lifted his head with a wince, inky blue eyes squinting with pain. “I guess we won't be going back that way.”

“I guess we won't,” Jak agreed, dropping to the ground and touching the gash at the side of his head.

Ahr gasped, but he wasn't paying attention to the cut. He looked beyond Jak to the magnificent metropolis. “
Ai
, Ra.” The words nearly slid from his mouth as it dropped open in astonishment. He climbed to his feet with Jak's help.

Jak followed his gaze. “Do you think it's hers?”

“My gods, Jak, what else could it be? This shouldn't be here, should it?” Ahr was nearly trembling.

“No.” Jak's head shook. “No, it's been gone for centuries.”

Ahr, unsteady, moved closer to the great wall that loomed before them, over which the city preened. “My gods,” he said again. “My goddess. She is. I didn't know.”

Twenty-Five: Surrender

Pearl had become unresponsive. Whatever he'd seen when he'd drawn
Soth
AhlZel had terrified him. He'd spoken those two words, shocking Ume with their perfect delivery, though his voice was like the whisper of a soft rain, and then ceased to respond to her at all.

He stopped showing her his private pictures, hiding them away in the drawer of the vanity, though he continued to do his duty to the
soth
, drawing the
vetmas
for the petitioners Pike selected, which brought the essence of each
vetma
into existence on the paper itself.

Ume supposed Pearl had no choice if he was bound to obey Pike. He'd written the words
“I must obey the master”
, and a Meer's word was inviolate. Which meant the only way Ume could free him was to induce Pike to let him go. And she had no earthly idea how she was going to accomplish that. It was too bad Pike wasn't of the persuasion to appreciate her particular skills.

In the absence of a plan to win Pearl's freedom, Ume stayed close to her charge. The Caretaker had sent her here for a reason, and Ume had to believe she was meant to reach Pearl in whatever darkness was trying to pull him under, to keep him from succumbing to it.

Before concealing the drawings he sometimes left out, making sure they were never to come to Pike's attention, Ume studied the disturbing images. The elements in Pearl's drawings often moved of their own accord, like the one in her room at
Ludtaht
Ra that had led her here. The central figure of these seemed to wander in and out of the frame, turning her back on the viewer almost deliberately, only to appear in some other place in the drawing, or even in another drawing altogether, with a bold, unnerving stare.

Ume couldn't look at the black holes of those eyes for very long. They were like the hollowed-out sockets of a grinning skull, and they seemed to mesmerize with their intensity. It was no wonder Pearl was withdrawing further into himself with such a face staring back at him whenever he channeled the source that fed him these images. Ume wanted to burn them, but she knew that for Pearl the images weren't only in the pigments and the surfaces on which he depicted them. Every picture he constructed externally was already inside him.

All Ume could do was try to be an anchor for Pearl in the tangible world, a safe harbor in the midst of whatever turmoil lurked within his mental landscape trying to claim him for itself.

After the encounter with the Caretaker, Cree had sunk into a deep depression. She hadn't gone back to Stórströnd, continuing stubbornly on her original path toward the Delta, but she was no longer sure why she was going. What she'd feared all along was true. Pearl would hate her for abandoning him, for being so completely absorbed in herself that she'd failed to feel the life that ought to have been bound to her by an invisible thread. She had let him be caged and tortured by that piece of shit Nesre, running away to forget what had happened to her. And running away again when she'd learned at last that he lived.

But what could she do but go forward? There was nothing for her in Stórströnd Township without Ume. Nothing for her anywhere without Ume.

Midway between lake country and the Delta, Cree indulged in an overnight stay at a farmhouse advertising rooms to let on a sign near the road. The house was hidden from view at the end of a long drive lined with overgrown trees. Cree feared the sign must be an old one that had been abandoned along with the place long ago, but she was greeted by an elderly couple, émigrés from her own hometown of
Soth
In'La, who welcomed her like family.

They lingered at the table after dinner, talking late into the evening about the old days in In'La and how it had changed, and Cree felt a bit homesick, even though In'La was the last place she ever wanted to set foot in again. Mariel and Eman had the same soft accent and dark skin as Ume's people, making Cree feel almost among family, though the thought sobered her later lying in bed as she wondered, not for the first time, what Ume's family must have been like.

Ume's father had thrown her out to make her living on the streets at the tender age of twelve after catching her wearing her sister's veil. He refused to accept that his son was not a son after all. Notoriously reticent about her life before becoming Ume, she'd once admitted to Cree in a rare moment of confidence that her father had beaten her savagely before turning her out. It made Cree want to find the man and give him a savage beating herself.

She fell asleep, missing Ume in her arms, and woke sometime later during the wee hours, uncertain what had roused her. In the moonlight, the room looked odd, as though everything in it were slightly translucent and void of color.

Cree sat up and drew up her knees under the covers, wrapping her arms around them. Someone was in the room.

“Hello? Who's there?”

“Cree Silva.” The Caretaker's form seemed to solidify out of the shadows, and the room behind her was no longer the humble farmhouse attic guestroom, but the high ceiling and wooden beams of the hall under the hill.

Cree's temper flared. “If you think you can stop me from going to Ume by bringing me here, you'd best be prepared to keep me here for a long while, and you'd best be prepared for a fight.”

“We have no desire to keep you under the hill. You are only here in the dreaming realm. We wish to speak to you.” Behind the Caretaker stood two other figures, Hidden Folk she'd met before. The Host and the Recordkeeper, they'd called themselves. Cree found it enormously pretentious. Why they hell couldn't they just have names like normal people?

“We wish to show you something,” said the Recordkeeper. “Will you permit it?”

“Permit it?” Cree shrugged. “Show me what you want.”

While she was still wondering why he'd bother to ask, the room swiftly changed again. She was alone in a palatial hall, the center of a rotunda bordered by five columns of polished white marble. The seat she occupied, raised on a velvet-covered platform, seemed to be a throne.

Ume entered the room through the central pair of columns, draped in a plain but flattering gold taffeta, her hair covered in a blue chiffon scarf decorated in gold beads that had the look of an Ume Sky original.

Overjoyed to see her, Cree tried to call out Ume's name. Her voice seemed strangled in her throat, unable to put enough breath into the word, as often happened in dreaming.
Was
she dreaming? It seemed a reasonable assumption. The Hidden Folk had been the beginning of the dream, and now it had morphed as dreams did. With her hands gripping the arms of the chair, Cree attempted to stand, but her body didn't seem to be her own, and it wouldn't obey her.

Ume approached and gave her a deferential bow on one knee before the altar, raising her head with a smile of recognition, though it didn't seem to be for Cree herself. It belonged to whomever Cree's consciousness was occupying in this dream, someone Ume cared for, yet not Cree.

While she waited to see what role she was playing here, her pulse began to spike and her blood felt hot and sickly within her veins. Nausea gripped her, and Cree watched with horror as her own hand extended toward Ume, one long, pointed nail seeming to grow from the tip of her finger like the blade of a knife to pierce the hollow of Ume's throat. Cree's hand drew back, and a dark well of blood spilled out onto the honeyed canvas of Ume's skin. Ume clutched her throat in shock, eyes on Cree's in silent disbelief as she shuddered, chest heaving in her futile struggle to take in oxygen. She was drowning. Blood spilled out of her mouth, and Ume dropped to the pristine marble floor, staring sightlessly at the ceiling.

The scene shifted, and Cree was walking through the white marble halls of a temple. Fair-haired foreigners in serving garb averted their eyes and scuttled out of her path as she passed them. With her hand open, she stretched her arm wide, and the cowering servants were flung against the columns, dropping to the ground in crumpled shapes—necks broken, spines twisted, eyes bleeding out of crushed skulls. The sight of blood made her want more. She crouched over one of the broken bodies, lifting the head, and bit into the throat with razor-sharp teeth. The bones cracked like the exoskeleton of a crab, and blood spilled into her mouth, warm and thick. Cree nearly vomited.

She found her voice at last in a horrified scream, surging upward from her bed, no longer in the dreamscape. But the Hidden Folk still stood in the doorway of her room, the high-ceilinged hall that was not the farmhouse at all still behind them.

Cree stumbled to her feet beside the bed. “What was that? What the hell is going on?”

The Recordkeeper regarded her dispassionately. “We have shown you what is in Pearl's blood.”

“Pearl's blood? What are you talking about?”

“We have begun to hear him once again,” said the Host. “Something has entered his bloodstream, a darkness that is not his own but of which he cannot rid himself because of his nature. The Meeric well is poisoned, and Pearl drinks from it as others take in oxygen from the air.”

“I don't understand. Where's Ume? Has he hurt her?”

“These are his visions,” said the Caretaker. “They have not come to pass, but his blood is full of them. We had thought Ume Sky would be able to reach Pearl in a way that others could not, to prevent such an occurrence, to teach him how to shut out what is not his.”

“But we see now,” said the Recordkeeper, “that this is not possible. Ume Sky is in danger, and with her, the rest of your kind.”

“Pearl is a malignancy,” said the Host. “He must be destroyed.”

Cree paced away from them, clutching her hair, and then whirled once more to face them. “Is this some kind of sick joke? Do you enjoy tormenting us ‘lesser' folk? Is it some kind of twisted entertainment for you?”

“We do not joke,” said the Caretaker.

Cree let out a bitter laugh. “I'll just bet you don't.” Tears were pouring down her cheeks, and she hated crying in front of anyone. Even more than she hated crying itself. “Why the hell couldn't you have left us alone?” She wished she could go back to the time before and stay far away from Mole Downs, and far away from the Delta. If she and Ume had never encountered the Hidden Folk, she would never have known about Pearl at all.

She tried to ignore the stabbing recrimination that this was effectively wishing her own child had continued suffering in his private hell without her knowledge. But what was the point? What was the point of any of this, if it had all driven him mad in the end, and he had to die?

They were staring at her, infuriatingly expressionless, waiting for her—to do what? Cree wanted to punch their smug, marble-veined porcelain faces.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked quietly. She would do what she had to. She would always do what she had to, to keep Ume safe. “What can I possibly do?”

The Caretaker nodded, as if acknowledging that Cree had surrendered to their will. “Alya's child and Ume Sky have crossed the Southern Sea, where the child has been established as the Meer of
Soth
Szofl.” They were trying to distance Cree from her connection to him, after all their manipulative bullshit about it before. Now he was “Alya's child”. “He receives offerings from the people of Szofl daily in exchange for his blessings. We can hide your intent from the boy. We can give you something to offer him that will stop his heart.”

She should have told them all to go to hell. But the feel of Ume's blood beneath her sharpened nail lingered after the vision, the image of Ume dying at Pearl's hand. Cree had accepted the box—the gift that held the poison she was to give her own son.