Babylon Steel (23 page)

I was moving with the others, towards the inner doorway. I wanted to back away, to run, to scream, but I couldn’t. My feet kept moving forward. I looked down to see I was holding a cup carved of some deep green stone veined with glimmers of gold. I knew that if I got through the inner doorway and they noticed the cup, it would be smashed, but I couldn’t make my feet stop moving forward.

I realised Glinchen was next to me in the procession, holding an infant Barraklé, wrapped up in white gauze, in hir arms.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“They’ve promised to help me,” Glinchen said. Ze held out the infant. “This one’s going to be the next
dinan-bathai
.”

A fold of cloth fell from the infant’s face, revealing a twisted, furious gargoyle. It began to cry in great whooping wails, and soon they would hear us, and take the cup.

“Make it be quiet!” I pleaded.

“I can’t,” Glinchen said. “It’s too late for that.”

People were turning towards the noise. Any minute now they would see me.

I woke with my heart crashing against my ribcage and sat straight up in the chair, panting, looking frantically all around me. I was in my familiar, beloved room in the Red Lantern, with its wide bed and deep rose curtains. It was dark, the moonlight flooding in on my face.

They say you shouldn’t sleep in the moonlight, especially not on Twomoon. They say the dreams can drive you mad.

The wailing I’d heard was a fading drunken song from somewhere down the road. My neck hurt from sleeping in the chair. I got up and stumbled back towards the bed, my mind spinning like a child’s painted top, a blur of colours.

Then like a top, as it began to slow, something, a pattern, started to emerge. Kittack. The Barraklé and their
dinan-bathai,
the warrior beasts created in times of need.The little statue in the wall-niche in Kittack’s room, with the yellow chips for eyes. The One who is Both, the one who was the best of the Kay-ebakat; the original, single race, before Ikinchli and Gudain. Enthemmerlee, and her golden eyes.

I looked down at my hands, which had held the green and gold cup in my dream. In Kittack’s legend, the last of the Kay-ebakat had been buried with a cup.

Cups turn up often in legends across the planes. Sometimes they represent the female part, or the womb. A cup that must be filled, or stay empty.

Among the Barraklé, the
dinan-bathai
could only be created from a virgin.

Enthemmerlee’s people were damn determined to have her wedded, bedded, and safe. She was that unique thing, a yellow-eyed Gudain. Were the Kay-ebakat more than a legend? Was
that
what Enthemmerlee’s people feared; that, left virgin, she would change with the moons, that she would become living, physical proof that the Gudain and the Ikinchli were once one people?

I was flailing in the dark, I knew absolutely nothing for certain, but it certainly sounded like the Gudain believed it. Kittack, practical creature that he was, might not, but maybe his political friends among the Ikinchli believed it too.

Was Fain right, had she been kidnapped by Ikinchli? To keep her virgin until the change happened, so she could be paraded as proof? Used as a symbol?

I knew about that. It seldom ended well.

Why the Gudain hadn’t just had the poor child bedded themselves, with or without her consent, I didn’t know; the upper classes weren’t usually too fussy about what their daughters thought. Possibly I had got the whole thing arse-uppards and was making a great big fancy from nothing but a runaway girl who didn’t fancy the man her parents had chosen. Which still meant she needed help.

But how the hells was I going to find her? Fain had asked me because I could talk to the people who wouldn’t talk to the militia. But if she hadn’t disappeared among the street-girls, who did that leave me to ask, except the Ikinchli? The only one I knew was Kittack, and he knew nothing and had no desire to get involved. And who was I to blame him for that?

I had to go back to Fain. But if I was going to talk to the man again, I needed a little protection.

I went to find Laney.

“I
DON’T LIKE
these kind of things,” Laney said, frowning, while she chopped herbs with eye-watering speed and shook drops from bottles with a snap of her wrist.

“Nor do I. I’m not planning on using it unless it’s an emergency.”

“You’re expecting one?”

“Maybe.”

She gave me one of those looks, like being jabbed with emerald spears. “You know, Babylon, if you don’t tell me what’s going on soon, I’m going to get
annoyed.
”

“Laney, you know what’s going on. Fain’s asked me to look for this girl. I need to be able to talk to him without losing my head.”

“And that’s
all
you’re worried about?”

I sighed. “No. I’m worried about the girl who was killed. I’m worried about the Vessels. I’m worried that I’m no closer to finding Enthemmerlee, and if I
don’t,
it could mean bad trouble for a lot of people, not just her.”

Laney sniffed, and thrust a small glass stopper with unnecessary force into the neck of a bottle no bigger than the top joint of my thumb. “There,” she said. “A preventative against lust. And by the way, I know how to make a truth potion, too. Or I could make you swear a Fey oath to tell me what’s going on. I know you know one. I taught it to you.”

“Laney...”

Fey oaths are a damn sight scarier than truth potions. Once you’ve sworn one, it will get itself fulfilled, one way or another, unless the swearer’s dead, and sometimes even then. They work here on Scalentine, too.

Laney had indeed taught me one, in case I ever needed it, but she’d never threatened to make me swear it myself, in all the time we’d known each other – she must be seriously worried. I would have to tell the crew
something,
and soon.

Part of me still hoped that whatever had brought the thrice-damned Avatars here would take them away again, without effort on my part. But that sort of attitude hadn’t got my taxes paid.

“Babylon!” Essie called. “Visitor!”

I really wasn’t sure I wanted another one. The only person I really wanted to see right now was the Chief, and I didn’t think that was going to happen.

TIRESANA

I
DIDN’T SLEEP
much, the next few nights. I told myself it was the heat. Looking out of my window, I saw Renavir standing with Shakanti in the empty precinct; Shakanti was stroking Renavir’s hair, and Renavir leaned against her like a dog. There was something wrong, something horribly wrong, and I didn’t know what.

I saw Renavir in the corridor the next day; she looked straight through me, at some terrible ecstatic vision. Her arms were scored with cuts, although we hadn’t had fight-training for days. I tried to say her name, but my throat closed.

Two nights later the tide rose, out of season, drowning people and crops, and the moon seemed to shudder in the burning air, and every dog for miles around howled and wailed the night through. I heard dreadful sounds, a voice I was sure was Shakanti, shrieking with fury.

The next morning Meisheté came to my door; she brought food, and told me, looking me up and down in a measuring way, that Renavir was gone. The shadows around her eyes were sharply defined, as though brushed in with paint. “Eat up,” she said, brisk and forceful. I had a million questions, but I was locked in silence, afraid to ask them, afraid of the answers.

I picked at the food and thought about Renavir, with her little pale face and endlessly restless bony hands; I tried to imagine her running a temple, dealing with supplicants and corn-merchants and acolytes, and the image wouldn’t coalesce in my head.

I waited in my room, looking out at the inner precinct where a few cranes bobbed and pecked. Faintly, I could hear the sounds of life in the Outer Precinct, voices carried on the hot still air. Why was the inner precinct empty?

For hours, no-one came to fetch me. There were no lessons anymore.

I would have killed to see a friendly face. Radan, Sesh, Kyrl. Suddenly I longed to be going out with the caravans, where the biggest mystery was how a sandmule managed to get its own harness in such a tangle you had to cut the leather to get it out, and the biggest problem was how to avoid being bitten while you were at it.

I fell asleep, having nothing else to do, and woke with a gasp from ugly, heat-thick dreams of wandering through tunnels of sand, to see Hap-Canae standing in the doorway of my room.

“Wake up, child,” he said. “This is your day.”

Behind him was the Avatar Meisheté in her aspect as a crone, her little black eyes like chips of obsidian in their wrinkled beds, the butterfly mask still clearly marked but riven with deep lines; the marker of pregnancy somehow obscene on such an aged face.

“Go with Meisheté,” Hap-Canae said. “You need to be prepared.”

“What? What’s happening?”

“All will be explained soon. Go, go.”

Meisheté started to walk away down the corridor, without waiting for me to get to my feet. I dragged a robe around me and ran after her.

“Prepared for what? Am I to be a priestess? Is that where we’re going?”

She turned then and looked at me, with a sort of weary patience. “If you are going to fulfil the role for which you have been Chosen, you must learn to comport yourself with dignity, and with strength, and not chatter like a silly girl.”

We reached a room I’d never been in before, full of heavy wooden chests and robe-stands and pots of kohl and eye paint. Meisheté yanked a comb through my hair and dressed me, briskly, in a white gauze undergown and a robe of crimson silk so heavily embroidered with gold and jewels that it weighed like chain mail. She pinned up my hair with jewelled combs, and strapped gilded sandals on my feet.

I kept quiet, and let her pull me about like a small child being dressed for a festival day.

I was thinking as fast as I could. Was this how it had been for all the other girls? Perhaps the Avatar of Babaska herself would be here at last, to take me to my new posting. Could I beg her to let me stay here, to work in this temple? I could say that having been here for so many months I had learned about the temple and its district and would be a perfect High Priestess for it; it was rubbish, of course, what did I know, outside my own little world? I had never spoken with the current High Priestess, and knew almost nothing of the duties she performed.

Not that it mattered, in the end.

I entered the room where all the Avatars were waiting, and it was like seeing Hap-Canae for the first time all over again, only more so. Meeting one Avatar, you can feel the power in them; it’s a little like standing in front of an open oven. A room full of them was like standing in the desert sun.

I searched for Hap-Canae, and he smiled at me. He seemed happy, and my heart calmed a little.

I glimpsed Shakanti’s face and looked away in a hurry, because it was a glaring, screaming skull.

Hap-Canae came forward and took me by the hand, just like that first time. “Child,” he said, “a great destiny is to be yours. You are to become the next Avatar of the Goddess Babaska.”

I simply didn’t understand. I couldn’t speak, I was so confused.

So Hap-Canae spelled it out, or as much of it as they decided I should know.

Avatars weren’t divine beings, god-like, created from the stuff of gods, as we had been told and taught, and had believed without question all our lives.

They were created from the stuff of men. Every single one of them had once been entirely human.

And the Avatar of Babaska was missing. Gone. That was why we had been Chosen, that was why we had had to learn and to be tested in the arenas of fighting and seduction, to see which of us was best suited to take her place. “The others were suited only to be her priestesses. You are the one who has been chosen to be her Avatar.”

“But what happened to the last one?” I said. “Where did she go?”

“She proved unworthy of the role,” Shakanti said. “Let us hope you are more suitable.”

“It was a great sorrow to us,” Hap-Canae said.

I looked around me. Meisheté, the crone. Rohikanta with his running-water hair and beard and his webbed feet and the ugly great Messehwhy
always at his side. Aka-Tete, who even in his human form had the claws of a vulture, and the smell of death he wore like a cloak.

“Will I change?” I said. “Will I be...”

“You’ve seen the paintings of her,” Hap-Canae said. “In her aspect of desire, or her aspect of war, Babaska is always a woman. She has a scar, of course. She flung herself in front of a spear to protect one of her lovers.” He stroked my cheek. “You will become even more beautiful. And as to the scar – if you were flawless, how could mere men look on you and not go mad?”

I told myself I believed him. I wanted to, after all.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A
S
I
HEADED
for the hall I stopped, wondering, for a horrible, paralysing moment if my visitor was Hap-Canae. Or Shakanti, which might be worse.
Stupid,
I told myself fiercely. If they were looking for me, they wouldn’t just
knock.

But it was Kittack. He was pacing the hall, his tail twitching

“Kittack? What’s happened? Are you all right?”

“Yes, yes, fine, not to worry,” he said, waving a hand at me. “We go talk, okay?”

“Yes, right, come up.” He didn’t bound up the stairs like he normally did, eager to get to business, but plodded after me, his tail flicking at the banisters. “What is it?” I said, pulling the door of my room shut. “You don’t look like you’re here for bouncy.”

“After much excellent bouncy already today? Ask younger lizard, hey?” But the grin fell off his face almost as soon as it appeared. “Is damfool politics. Is big stupidness and I probably get head kicked in.”