The Hidden Icon (14 page)

“The god could not have wished for a finer end to his scheme. Herat fell to her knees, her muffled cries mere husks of the pleasured sounds they had made together in the dark. He felt nothing as he slipped from his mortal form, but Herat felt horror enough for many pairs of thwarted lovers. In his cold and lifeless face she saw the death masks of her parents, knew that she had lost what once she had taken. Instead of fleeing the prison she descended within and closed the door upon her cell, locking it from within before tossing the key out of reach down the dim, earthen corridor.

“The body Adah had inhabited disappeared, but Herat saw it before her everytime she closed her eyes and often when they were open, too. She lived for many years with no companion but her grief and her regret, while Theba and Adah both found new schemes to amuse them.”

The last of my words dissipated like smoke or starlight, the telling hanging like a curtain over the camp. Without speaking, those who had remained seated for the length of it tucked into their blankets, if they had them, and turned their faces away from me. The quiet that descended was not resentful, but each man and woman that settled around the fire that night bedded their own demons as willingly as Herat had bedded hers.

I didn’t go to sleep, however, but rose and stepped around the already slumbering body of Triss, passed the fire which a lone guard stood awake to stoke and tend to those helpless in dreams. She didn’t look at me as I passed her and out of the fire’s light, but I could feel her attention as keen as the blade of her sheathed sword. I’d earned a moment’s privacy, or perhaps she, too, was afraid of me now.

Gannet waited for me at the perimeter of the camp, sharing with me briefly his sense of the scout that had just begun another circuit around. If we left now, we would both be assumed asleep around the fire. Gannet took my hand, and we did.

Though we carried no light, my surprise at Gannet’s touch was trumped by the dim outlines of the path ahead of us, the trees that had been growing increasingly thick as we had wended away from Cascar. This must be another of his gifts. In this strange semi-sight the trees seemed like straight backed women in line at the well, their baskets and pots balanced upon their heads in the shapes of the stiff foliage.

“Why that story, Eiren?”

I sniffed and dropped his hand, though I knew the darkness couldn’t disguise me from him. He seemed to drop my address in these moments, when I was most likely to be taken by surprise.

“Perhaps you should ask Imke why she challenges me to reveal what I fear. I suspect she knows already.”

Gannet didn’t reply. Herat’s story crowded my heart. Her story made me sorrier now than it ever had before, that she had lived out her days in such grief, whether I believed it earned or not. Her life was more than just a lesson, now. She had suffered and caused suffering, and so had I. But I couldn’t hope to simply be put in chains and left to have out my days.

But Gannet wasn’t thinking about Herat. Not now.

“What you saw was an illusion,” he said at last, and it was as though no time had passed between our exchange over Circa’s saddle.

“But you saw it, too.” I reminded him of the dream we’d shared on our flight from Cascar, the feathery brush of webbed fingers across my cheeks and so his, too.

“What I saw was what you believed you saw. It wasn’t real.”

“I don’t know why you’re afraid, but I’m sure that you have more to fear from insisting that I am a liar,” I hissed. But I couldn’t be sure that Gannet
was
afraid, it just seemed like a reasonable assumption. Why else would he allow gods to walk among us, but not other equally unbelievable things?

“You’re not a liar,
Han’dra
Eiren, but you’re not always in control of what you see... or do.” Gannet’s tone had not exactly softened, but had approached something more like patience as he revisited his usual lecturing ground. I was Theba and Theba me, and in the case of my survival, no doubt, what had really happened would be outside the scope of my understanding.

“I don’t need you to believe me. I saw what I saw.” The words struggled from my lips, and I was uncomfortably aware of my rising ire. I wondered if it belonged to Theba, or to me. Gannet touched a hand lightly to my shoulder, illuminating his face and the stand of trees we occupied in the same instant.

“Just keep it to yourself. The
kr’oumae
belong in stories, only in stories,” he answered, using a word that I did not recognize. “The others will never understand.”

And he was among them. Wishing to keep what little comfort I had in remembering the siren’s scaled, alien face, I pressed the memory into a fold of my mind, a pocket even Gannet’s deft hand might not reach. It didn’t matter that he didn’t believe me, or why. Gannet didn’t own every mystery in the world.

“What is this?” I asked, retreating to a safe subject as I gestured around us at what moments ago had been only deepest shadow, but had been illuminated for me at Gannet’s touch. The moment stirred his fingers slightly, and as though in accommodation, he pressed his hand more firmly against my shoulder. In the desert his proximity had been unnaturally cool, but here, where the night was chill, he seemed heated from within. As a stranger I had wanted nothing to do with him, but now I wasn’t sure if I was more interested in what Gannet could tell me about me, or what he might reveal about himself.

“Something practical.” Gannet answered, the fuzzy outline of his mouth an indeterminate smile as he quoted my earlier request. “I can show you, but I’ll have to let it get dark again, first. Are you ready?”

That he posed the question before plunging me into sightlessness was generous. I nodded my agreement. When he released hold of me this time, I was prepared.

“Light is generated by all living things even in the night; you must simply learn to recognize and magnify that light. Close your eyes,” he instructed, though I couldn’t see the logic in what he asked. I could see no more with them open as I could when closed. Despite my reservations, I complied.

“Don’t think about what you can’t see,” Gannet continued, though it was not a criticism. “You don’t need to know the shapes of things to know that they are there: the outlines of the trees, your hands, the slope of the path. Even the smallest stone has friction and energy at its core; it is lit from within.”

As he spoke my eyes probed the membranous depths behind my eyelids, that strange focus that comes when one is forbidden to open their eyes but is not truly resigned to the restfulness that closing them requires. I could imagine the spiny leaves of the trees, their tapered points ending each in a flare of light that issued from somewhere within their papery trunks. It was harder to imagine the stones and forested litter beneath our feet as charged and alive, but I pictured such things stirred by wind or water, and it was not so great a stretch to grant them a little energy, still as they were now.

“Good, Eiren,” Gannet murmured. I allowed him the full scope of my musings, more than the little gleaning he could take for himself. He and I were grains tumbling to pebbles grown to boulders as we hastened down a mountainside, our insides fired before inevitably shattering at the mountain’s base. But we had not hit bottom, not yet. I was drawn to imagine again where we now stood, our eyes populous as the knots on the trees, as curious as the heads of mushrooms that poked between their roots. I prized from the stars the points of each of his fingers, the prints of which I could feel still on my shoulder.

My breath caught as my eyes opened in surprise, my face and skin burning with a light I hoped he couldn’t see. But I could, and with a clarity Gannet’s touch had not granted. The night was not in the full color of day, but I could easily have navigated back to the camp, and even ahead into territory we had not yet covered.

As it was, I had plenty to question in the man who blocked the path before me. My marvels and my terrors had their start in him. His lips were parted slightly as though he intended to speak, but a tense moment fell between us that seemed to defy speech. Our eyes locked and a chill passed through me that no amount of heavy clothing would have been able to remedy.

“We should return to the camp.”

I had expected something else, but foolishly. I didn’t know why it made me suddenly so angry to have him behave just as he always did. I shut him out completely before the last syllable even wetted his lips. Embarrassment didn’t settle well with me, and not with the pitch and groan in my belly and heart I thought to be Theba, either.

If I slept tonight, it would be the hard sleep of swallowed secrets.

Chapter 12

Over the next several days I didn’t speak to Gannet as we rode, made easier by the fact that I was behind him this time and didn’t have to contend with his heavy gaze over my shoulder. Besides, I had plenty to occupy me in the changes to the landscape, the mountain ridge rising pale as Gannet’s knuckles on the reins. The trees and undergrowth grew first thick and then thicker, green and hardy, with soil that Circa’s hooves kicked up wet and rich. The cold was like a sentient thing, tight in every breath, stinging my fingers and toes and creeping to settle in my core. The cold weather supplies we had intended to purchase in Cascar remained there still, and I thought I would never be warm again. Pressed as close as I dared to Gannet’s back under the pretense of keeping my balance, I shivered under my borrowed cloak.

My fatigue after that first flight out of Cascar was nothing compared to the soreness of my muscles after two and then three days of near constant travel, and when we made camp I was eager for nothing but to lie prone on my back and hope to sleep. Antares had promised that we would only be a few days traveling this way, and on our third morning out when the path allowed a little while for us to ride several abreast, he brought his horse into step with the tireless Circa.

“How are you faring?” It was not Gannet he addressed, but me. Antares’ sympathy belied his military dress, and the question was merely a courtesy. My answer was plain as the hood I pulled continuously around my face, that I kept only one hand around Gannet’s waist when I could and warmed the other inside my cloak.

“Death by knifepoint is increasingly preferable compared to this,” I said, gesturing weakly around us, not wanting to throw my arm too wide and dissipate what little heat I’d collected under my cloak. Antares’ brow furrowed at my weary joke, but a smile shaved ten years from his features. He seemed about to say more, but the path had begun to narrow and someone signaled for him from the head of the column.

“We’ll be there soon. By nightfall,” he promised over his shoulder. I sighed. Though my proximity to Gannet betrayed his keen interest in our exchange, he didn’t seem eager to take up in talking where Antares had left off. There was nothing to do instead, sadly, but brood on lesser things, and though I would no doubt be colder for it, I decided to retrieve the book from the satchel that hung on Circa’s left side. Every night I had hoped to study the book that Gannet had recovered from the barge, but there had been little light for it. I’d made hardly any progress. Balancing the tome on my thigh with one hand, I secured the other around Gannet’s waist but was careful not to brush my brow against his back as I turned to read. The temptation to rest my head against his shoulder was surprisingly strong.

“You’re going to read?” he observed, voice quiet but pointedly lacking in intimacy. Gannet’s eyes remained locked upon the back of the rider in front of us.

“Do you object?” For all I posed a question, my tone welcomed no judgment on his part. I wasn’t angry with him; I wasn’t sure what I was.

“Not in the slightest.”

Theba had nothing to do with my reasons for ignoring him when I began to read.

The book was unlike anything I’d read before, in such an archaic form of the language we shared that I could hardly decipher it. What was legible, anyway. Much of the book was layers of text accompanied by drawings, one inked on top of the next, on top of the next, on top of the next. It made no sense to me, but I bit my lip against asking Gannet for clarification. The layers grew more numerous and more complex the deeper within the book one read, though I couldn’t call it reading. I turned to a page that had no less than six separate passages of writing scribbled over each other, and a series of symbols that I could not even be sure were paired with the text, or had singular meanings themselves. On sight alone it seemed to me that in some places I was reading a later version of the text, for the characters changed slightly the way a language will in time, though I could not read enough yet to know if the meanings changed, too. In places the variety was so wild it seemed almost accidental, as though someone had attempted to rewrite history, if this were a history.

On that same page I recognized much altered versions of Aleynian characters – so much altered, if not even archaic, that I did not notice them at first – that spelled out Theba’s name. What little text flowered out from her mention made little sense in translation:

And her breath is greed, and from her hands the sky pours, a god mouth bruised.

I could not even be sure that I read it correctly, but I lingered on this passage for the little window it gave me into the book as a whole. For it
was
my book, as Gannet had said it was now. I was in it, after all.

“It will make sense, in time.”