Babylon Steel (39 page)

There was a horrible, tearing feeling inside me, as though something that had been fastened to me with a thousand threads of my own flesh and soul were being ripped away. My hands slipped from the stone and I collapsed back onto the floor.

I hurt. But I could feel all through me that I was, once again, human.

They hauled me up and we ran, me still in my bloodied burial robe, on my bruised human feet. We made it out of the temple. How many people they’d bribed to look the other way, I dread to think; it must have cost them a year’s wages and a lifetime of favours. Luckily the post of temple guard was little more than a sinecure; it meant a great deal of standing about, and polishing one’s kit, and a good pension, but no-one had attacked the temples in a hundred years. Who would dare?

We travelled through the night, under the bright, distant stars; Babaska wielding her sword against nothing; the crouched Leopard, the turning Wheel. They told me that they’d had help – from ex-priestesses of Babaska, who’d gone into hiding. From soldiers, and from whores. All of them terrified, all of them worshipping in secret, all of them risking death to save a symbol – who couldn’t save a single one of them.

I asked after Radan, and they told me he’d died, in his sleep, one night on the road. “He was worried about you, too,” Sesh said. “We told him we’d check up on you, see that all was well, and that seemed to make him happy, and next morning...”

I wanted to cry, but I didn’t seem to have any tears left in me.

We stopped at an abandoned inn on the road out of town. Sesh had stored some supplies there: food, clothes, sandmules, and a sword. It felt good to have one again, but it wasn’t enough, not nearly enough.

“I’m going to Mantek,” I said. “The portal.”

They looked at each other.

“If you stay,” Sesh said, “we can tell people. Maybe we can change things.”

“I can’t. Sesh...”

“Sesh, shut up. You saw how it was. How can you ask her?” Kyrl said. “It isn’t fair.”

“No.” Sesh smiled at me, but there was regret in it. “I’m sorry, Ebi. I am.”

“You can’t fight them, Sesh. They... I tried.”

“But what will you do?” Kyrl said. “How will you survive?”

“I’m a good fighter, now. Even without being... what I was, I’m good. I can earn with that. I...” I didn’t say I could earn my living whoring, too. Sesh was always oddly prissy about such things, especially where I was concerned. “You’d be safer if you came with me.”

“Through the portal.” Kyrl frowned and fiddled with her knife. “I’ll –” she swallowed. “I’ll come with you, if you want.”

She’d risked the wrath of the Avatars for me, but the thought of leaving horrified her. A true Tiresan, Kyrl. Tiresans don’t leave.

“No,” I said. “No. Better this way; then, if they do come after me, they won’t find you. I wish I could give you something.” All the jewels and weapons and fine robes that had been hung on me, and here I was, with nothing to my name but a second-hand sword and an old ring. I kept thinking I should take the ring off, in case someone recognised it, but somehow I always forgot.

“You did give us something,” Sesh said. “We know how the Avatars were made. And we know they can be unmade.”

I gripped his hands. “Sesh. You saw what was done to me. You think they’d hesitate a moment to do the same to you if they even suspect that you know? You know what they did to Ranay. I loved him. Do you want to know how many times I cursed his name? How much I envied him his quick death? Let it go. They can’t be fought.”

Gently, he unclasped my hands. My nails had left red crescents in his flesh. “Anything can be fought.”

“You can
fight
a tidal wave, but it doesn’t mean you can win.
Kyrl, tell him. Please.”

“He knows, lass. So do I. You get yourself away and keep safe. We’ll look after ourselves.”

We hugged, and then they rode away, and I headed to Mantek alone, feeling as hollow as a dried gourd.

CHAPTER THIRTY

I
FINALLY RAN
down Mokraine outside the Blue Griffon theatre, just around the corner from Gallock’s, waiting for the actors to come out. There’s nothing like a failed audition for generating emotion.

“Mokraine.”

“Babylon, my enchantress...” His eyes were veined and wandering, his hands shaking. The familiar leaned against his leg, watching me with its three blood-drop eyes.

“Meet me in Gallock’s when you’re done here?” I said. “I’ll buy you lunch.”

He didn’t ask why, just nodded, his eyes already back on the doorway, where the sound of voices was growing louder.

I didn’t want to watch him feed. I went into Gallock’s and sat nursing a cup of thick dark coffee until he showed up, flushed and glassy. Gallock glared at the familiar, but said nothing, just banged crockery about in a pointed way.

Mokraine ate little of a good meal, his mind on other flavours. When I thought he had come down enough to pay attention, I said, “Can you tell me anything about this?” I held out my ring.

“Your ring? What do you plan to give me next? A shoe, perhaps? A feather?”

“Mokraine. It’s important. Please. I need to know what it is.”

With a shrug, he took it.

“Oh,” he said softly. “Now
this...
this is interesting.” Without taking his eyes off the ring, he started to poke about in his pockets with his free hand.

“What do you need?” I said.

“I used to have an eyeglass... never mind. May I put it on?”

I hesitated. It had never done anything to me that I knew of, but...

Mokraine saw the look on my face and his own, just for a moment, changed. I caught a glimpse of the man he’d been; not a good one, but a great one, with all the arrogance of someone who was the best at what he did.

He looked away. “No matter. I think the wearing of it is only part of what it is intended for.”

“Is it a... deifact?”

He gave a small cough of laughter. “A deifact! No. Almost the reverse.”

“What do you mean?”

“I wish I had my books,” he said.

“We can go to your place,” I said.

“Oh, no. I don’t have them anymore.”

“What happened to them?”

He stared into the distance. “I sold them, I think. Probably, yes. But even without them, I can tell you, this... is an object of power, but it does not
contain
power; it has no magic within it. It is more like a portal.”

“I’ve been wearing a
portal?
”

“Not precisely,” he said. “But it links to something. And whatever it links to is stronger now, or I might have noticed it before. The alignment.”

“The what?”

“The alignment. The syzygy. Here, it manifests as Twomoon. On other planes, in different ways. It is a time when things move into place, when places and powers not otherwise conjoined link like a necklace on the breast of the All. But this one, this is a Greater Syzygy. More aligns, now. More doorways open. This happens once in seven years, Babylon. It was a Greater Syzygy when I made my experiment.”

“Oh.”

“Where did it come from, this ring?” Mokraine said.

I told him what I thought he needed to know, as briefly and sharply as I could. He nodded, now and then, his gaze wandering from the ring, to my face, to somewhere far. “I don’t know why I kept it,” I said. “I didn’t wear it for a long time. I thought about selling it, sometimes, but somehow I always managed to get some food, or money, or a job, and I’d forget.”

And then, when I settled in Scalentine, I actually started using it as my seal. I suppose it had been a kind of defiance. A statement, that I was safe, and wasn’t going to run anymore.

Hah.

“Perhaps it did not want to be sold,” Mokraine said.

“How can it
want
anything?”

“It was created to do a certain job. It is trying to make sure that job is done.”

I was somewhat disturbed by the idea that this thing, this lump of metal and stone, had been having a hand in its own destiny. And mine, come to that.

“What is its job?”

“I believe that as a glass focuses sunlight, turning it intense and powerful, to blacken and burn, so this diffuses, radiates.”

“Diffuses
what?”

“Whatever power is passed through it, of course. It is meant to take a concentrated power, and flow it out, into...” he stared at the wall. “Earth. Earth and sky.”

“Not people?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“But you’re not sure?”

“Not entirely.”

I tried to think, sipping the cooling coffee.

The ring diffused power. The power stored in the altar? Diffused it to where, and to what purpose?

But the scrolls said that the jewel created godhead. And yet, at least one of those paragraphs had been written in a different hand. And marked. The marks left behind, the marks left by, perhaps, previous Avatars of Babaska. Warning marks.

Upside down.

I looked at Mokraine. He was awake, this time, at least. In the Break of Dawn he’d been comatose. I remembered the cloaked figures at the next table, long, pale fingers tapping a card.

The High King, reversed.

The tarot. The tarot turns up everywhere.

“If you find this, heed my
sign!
”I said.“That’s what it said. Not my words, my
sign.
And the symbols were reversed!”

Mokraine looked bemused, but I felt suddenly clear. The sword and lotus, upside down.
This means the reverse of what it says.

The scrolls indicated that the jewel would bring the Avatars power. The last Avatar of Babaska had meant for the Avatars to find those messages in the scrolls, to use the ring, to rob themselves of power. But she hadn’t been certain it would happen; perhaps the ring was already lost, by then. So she’d left a message, for the next Avatar of Babaska.
Find the ring. Use it. End this. End them.

Perhaps she had already known that she didn’t have long.

“Mokraine? Who do you think made the ring?”

He shrugged. Of course, he could hardly be expected to know. Who
had
made it? Someone who thought it might be needed. A priest, a priestess, an Avatar... maybe even a goddess.

“You said it’s stronger now? What does that mean?”

“It means that it is ready to do its job; the alignment is probably a necessary part of the ceremony.”

Which meant I had to do this while the planes were still in alignment,
and
assuming the Avatars didn’t complete the ceremony and discover they’d been sold a dud before I could get there.

“How long does alignment last? I mean, is it anything like a normal full moon?”

“That is a matter for some discussion. Alignment is generally considered to last four days. Its apex will be in two days time,
here.
At about three o’clock. On other planes, of course, they measure time differently. In some, time
is
different.”

Two days.

“Is there anything else I need to know?”

“You are planning to use it?” He looked at me with a surprising level of interest. “Well, the rite it is most likely to succeed if performed at the height of the alignment.”

“I’m not an astronomer, Mokraine. How do I tell?”

“This ring is made to be used like a seal, to be placed somewhere to close the connection. There should be a specific home for it.” A specific home... I pushed my mind back. The altar. I remembered the last time I’d had my hands on it. As well as the handholds, there was a circular depression in the centre of the altar, about the size of a copper coin.

Or the size of my seal.

“If I am right,” Mokraine said, “that place is likely to change its appearance as the correct time approaches.”

“Yeah, that’s... not exactly specific, is it? How do you tell? Can you just put the ring there, and wait?”

“Oh, no!” He looked at me, shocked. “This is, almost certainly, a transference operation of one of the Late Entheranic systems.”

“You what?”

“There are a number of systems of magical operation, Babylon. The Late Entheranic required, as a rule, very precise timing; they used a high degree of ceremony, too, but the ceremony was generally mere embellishment. In most of the Falnaway systems, on the other hand, the ceremony is the very bones of the thing. Without it...”

“Mokraine? Matter in hand?”

“My apologies. But I believe the ring must be placed within a few very specific moments. Too early, or too late, and the consequences could be unfortunate.”

I wasn’t fooled by the casual way he said ‘unfortunate’ – this was a man who had messed around with viciously dangerous magicks on a daily basis for years. And ended up addicted and ruined, of course.

“Right. Thanks.”

“And, of course, it will have to be worn, to operate. That’s why it’s made in the shape of a ring. The Entheranic systems always leave such clues.”

“Worn.”

“Yes. May I?”

I gave it back to him.

He looked at it for a long time, running his thumb over the carving. “There may be more,” he said. “But I would need to do further research.”

“I don’t think there’s time.” I realised he looked exhausted. He handed me the ring. I put it on. “Thanks, Mokraine. And I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For troubling you.”

“Hmm.” He was staring over my shoulder again, and I thought he was already drifting off, his mind turning towards his next feed. “No, I think perhaps... Babylon?”

“Yes?”

He touched my hand, and I tried not to flinch; I owed him that much. “Thank you,” he said.

“What for?”

He gave an odd, twisted smile, raised my hand to his lips, and kissed it. He didn’t feed, just kissed it. His lips were dry. “Try to stay alive,” he said.

TIRESANA

M
ANTEK SEEMED BUSY
to me, with goods coming and going – later I would realise that healthy trade looked a damn sight busier, but then I was still an ignorant girl who thought all the worlds could not be bigger than the deserts of Tiresana.