Babylon Steel (34 page)

A litter glowed at the foot of the steps, crusted with gold paint, and jewels, and more gold, and a few more jewels, not to mention bronze bells polished to a glare and hanging from every available projection.

That had to be Hap-Canae’s choice. Shakanti, at least, had some taste.

Yellow-robed acolytes and general attendants swarmed like ants, bowing their backs to help the Avatars into the glittering monstrosity of a litter. Seeing them supported on those straining shoulders helped dampen the dual effects of fear and charisma and get some good healthy anger burning in my gut.

And guilt, of course. Those people with their narrow-nosed, slim faces and long eyes; I knew them. The deep bronze skin, black hair bound with beads and glowing with the occasional flash of hennaed red. The lithe, graceful bodies, some already twisting under the weight of their work.

My people, once.

The litter finally moved off, with the trumpet-blowers going ahead, blaring the presence of godhead through the streets.

A few of the fame-hungry still clustering around the steps waved and cheered, but (bless the Scalentines for their short attention-span) these demigods were already old news, and there were nothing like the crowds there must have been when they arrived.

Their departure took them past the front of the alley, and I pressed myself and Antheranis back into the shadows, but they never paused.

Dark flowers bloomed in front of my eyes and I gulped air. The boy shifted his shoulder under my hand and I realised I’d been gripping too hard. I managed to let go. “Sorry, my lord.”

Antheranis rubbed his shoulder, peering out of the alley in the wake of the procession. “Who are they?”

“Do you have gods?”

“Of course! But... they were
gods?
”

“Demigods. Avatars.”

“Our gods do not
walk about
,” he said, sounding offended.

I thought of those sweating backs, bent to the weight of the litter. “Nor do they, it seems. Forgive me, my lord, but I need to get you back to your father.”

He scowled. “Madam Steel? Why do you hide from them?”

“That’s nothing you need to know.”

“Really, they would...” he drew a hand across his throat.

“Yes.”

“My father, perhaps, can help,” he said, looking up at me.

“I appreciate the thought, but he’s best out of it.” And besides, though I enjoyed Antheran’s company, when all was done he was only a client. He had no reason to get involved.

Besides, I liked the man. I didn’t want him drawing their attention.

I looked at the boy. “How about a bargain? I won’t tell your father what sort of dive I found you in, and you won’t mention what just happened.”

He pondered for a moment. “What you will tell him?”

“That you came to visit Essie and I decided to escort you back.”

He blushed, all the way to the top of his bald head, bless him. “Madam Steel? If I ask Father, he would pay, would you take me, to see the things that are not pretty? The real?”

Ouch. I hadn’t bargained for that. “Just now, my lord...”

“Please to call me Antheranis.”

“As you wish. But just now, having me as an escort... well, let’s just say it might not make you as safe as your father would wish. Why not ask Essie?”

“I could not take her to such places!”

I grinned. Essie was born in King of Stone, a rat’s scuttle from Ropemakers Row. A
brave
rat. She could use her knee like a fist and her fist like a siege-weapon, and if there was anything that could make her blush I’d yet to hear of it. But let him cherish his illusions a bit longer. “Perhaps we can get one of the others to do it. In the meantime, my lor... Antheranis, if you please...” I gestured him towards the Moons in Splendour, where his father was staying.

He pouted, but obeyed.

TIRESANA

I
WENT TO
the ceremonies, and to Hap-Canae’s bed when I couldn’t avoid it. When I rose from it I smelled like him, of cardamom and myrrh; I bathed for hours, trying to scrub it from me.

I seduced my way into the locked sections of the libraries, pretending I thought them a good place for assignations. Leaving my conquest exhausted and comatose, I stuffed ancient scrolls up my sleeves, shuffling things about so it wouldn’t be noticed that anything was missing.

That didn’t last. Neglected as the libraries appeared to me, it was soon apparent that the librarians kept a careful check on the scrolls, even those they weren’t allowed to read themselves. They didn’t question me, of course; I was an Avatar. But their anxiety was obvious. I dared not take a scroll out for more than a few hours.

I knew there was a danger that the Avatars might notice, but I hoped they would not. After all, I was not looking for the same thing they were. I was looking for a way to become
less
, not more. The minute Ranay could bear to let go of the scrolls I took them back and thrust them in among the others.

I met Ranay in unused corners, in empty temples thick with incense-scented dust, in windowless rooms buried at the heart of the temple where the faded wall-paintings looked down on us with flat gilded eyes. The more he found, the more fascinated he became; the more eager for knowledge.

The legend said that the gods had created the Avatars before they left this plane, to do their will and stand for them before the people. And yet it seemed, from the older texts, that perhaps this was not quite how things had happened. That the gods had gone, and then, some uncertain time later, there were the Avatars.

Ranay said that what he had found suggested that the gods had not wanted or desired such creatures. That perhaps the Avatars had been only High Priests and Priestesses who had, somehow, found a way to gain power that maybe the gods had never meant them to have.

It made sense to me. What sane gods would have given so much power to creatures like them?

Of course, that assumed the gods were sane to start with.

One day he pulled out a scroll and held it up to the window. “There were others before you, you said. Other Avatars of Babaska?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Look.”

The ink was old and faded, the words almost gone. A lot of stuff about loosening chains, and cutting bonds, ‘and the jewel of the gods shall open the gate.’ Ranay tapped the scroll. Scratched next to the words were two faint marks. A sort of crossbar, and a thing like a fat bird’s claw.

“Turn it the other way up,” Ranay said.

And there they were: a lotus, and a sword.

Babaska’s mark, made by a human hand. What did it mean?

I ran the tip of my finger over it. I wasn’t sure if I could feel the faint roughness, or if it was just my imagination. It woke a memory in me, but I couldn’t grasp it. “You think one of them, one of the other Babaskas, did this?”

“Yes. I’ve seen others, I didn’t know what they meant. But look.”

He tilted the page, and at the bottom were more marks. Hastily scrawled with the tip of a knife, in a rounded childish hand, barely visible, were words. “Power lies here, the force divine. If Babaska find this, heed my sign.”

“‘The jewel of the gods will open the gate’?” I said. “Do you think that means that the jewel, whatever it is, will give them what they want?”

“True godhead. Unlimited power.”

“Yes.”

We looked at each other, and I could see the horror in his eyes, knew it was reflected in my own.

I banished the fear the only way I knew, and he did no more work that night.

Later, as I lay awake, listening to him breathing – even the sound of his breath was precious to me – I wondered. Why would the last Avatar of Babaska have left such a message? I understood why she didn’t destroy the scroll, it might have been noticed. But surely, marking the passage like that would only draw attention to it? What if it had not been Ranay, but one of the Avatars, who found it?

And what if the Avatars were watching us already, wondering what I was looking for?

I could never sleep for long, those nights. Yet frightened as I was, impatient as I was to be free and human again, seeing Ranay bent over the scrolls by lamplight, working until he was so weary he could barely stay awake for a kiss, I knew a strange, fragile happiness.

“T
HERE IS TO
be a battle,” Lohiria said, her long gold hair rippling and whispering like seas of corn; not that we had seen any such harvest, not for a long time.

“A battle?” Fighting, at least, I knew how to do. Life and death was simple in comparison to what was going on in my head. “Are we under attack? Who is it?”

“Mihiria.”

“What?”

“We want to have a battle. And since you are in charge of the soldiers, you must be there.”

“But I don’t understand... you’re fighting each other?”

She sighed. “Really, how you ended up as Babaska’s Avatar... still, I suppose fighting and fornication don’t take that much sense.
We
pick a place.
We
each pick one of two villages or two towns or two families.
We
tell them they must defend our honour, and off they go. As the Avatar of Soldiers, you have to be there.
Now
do you understand?”

Of course I did. I wondered how I could ever have been so stupid.

There was no enemy. Where would an enemy have come from? Hardly anyone came to Tiresana.

The soldiers were only pieces in a game, not
people
, not to the Avatars. And I’d been as bad as the rest, failing to see, as they died at my feet, that they were dying for nothing; believing I was doing something that had meaning, defending something, when all I was defending was some other Avatar’s pride. They didn’t interfere with each other, but they played games.

What would I do, among the soldiers? Urge them on to waste their lives, to show an honour and courage that the Avatars had long forgotten, if ever they knew such things?

Anything I could give them, courage or strength, in such little portions as I could, would mean someone else’s death. I was steeped in death, in deception, in ugliness.

I had to do something. I went looking for a place to meet Ranay, desperate to talk to him, frantic to hear that he had found a way to destroy this sick power inside me.

If I’d had any sense I’d have met him openly. To bed priests was part of my role, and would have been perfectly acceptable. As it was, I grew increasingly nervous. I was afraid Lohiria would recognise him and become suspicious; though the woman had the brains of a fish, she had, like all of them, a vicious streak. I was certain I was watched, and kept seeking out new places to meet him. One night, I discovered a part of the temple that was plain and unpainted: a newer part, but almost as dusty as the corridors around the altar-stone and equally unguarded.

I went looking for a room that would lock (not that it would make the slightest difference, if the Avatars came). I pushed open a door and found I was surrounded by the dead.

The room was full of stone sarcophagi, beached boats on a dry shore. There were no names, no engraved steles, no mention at all of who lay within them.

Lifting the lantern, I saw something lying on one of them. It looked like a rag, as though someone had been dusting the tombs.

I picked it up. It was a piece of silver gossamer; or had been, before it was torn and bloodied and washed and mended and stitched until it was just a web of broken threads held together with tiny, obsessive stitches.

Renavir’s scarf.

Still clutching it, I stepped back.

My foot hit something that clinked and rolled away, shining.

A ring. Not left on a tomb, this, but simply discarded, or lost. I knew even before I looked closer that it would be the ring Aka-Tete had given to Jonat. The soft metal was dented. I didn’t know if I had done that, or if it had fallen from Jonat’s limp hand, when they put her in her coffin. She had got thinner, those last days.

I looked at my own ring, and imagined Hap-Canae placing it on my coffin, with a regretful sigh.

The truth sank into me, colder than well water.

All the girls I had trained with were dead, disposed of like dogs that wouldn’t breed true. The bodies had not been dumped in the desert, or the Rohin, but disposed of almost... decently. It was as though the Avatars had wanted to hide, even from themselves, what they had done; to cover murder with a slab of decency.

Why didn’t you run, Jonat? You knew something was very wrong. Why didn’t you run?

I heard her voice as though she was standing there.

“Because I still loved him. Because I hoped I was wrong. Because I tried to make you understand, and perhaps we could have run together, but you wouldn’t see it; you were stupid, and a coward.”

I realised that those who had trained us must also be dead; Livaia, with her grace and humour, all those pretty young men and women, and all the fight trainers. Farren, perhaps, might have survived. But apart from that...

They weren’t here; had they been given to the sands? Was it only because the girls had been potential Avatars that they had been granted the cold grace of a proper tomb?

There were two or three older sarcophagi, too. There had, of course, been at least one other Avatar of Babaska. She had ��proved unworthy of the role,’ Shakanti had said. How many more had there been? Running my hands over the chilly stone, I wondered how they had done it. It’s hard to kill an Avatar.

I remembered, finally, that I was supposed to meet Ranay. I had just enough sense to mess the dust about to hide the marks I’d left, and drop Renavir’s scarf back on her coffin.

There was a lock of silver-white hair lying there too. It seemed that Shakanti, in her own strange, twisted way, might have mourned her protégé.