Garden of Madness (39 page)
An elevated platform, usually reserved for the statues of Ishtar and Marduk, raised them above the heads of the men. Shadir stood beside them, as though they were a united presence, and they waited for quieted attention.
When silence filtered through the men and their upturned faces focused their hostility, Shadir spoke.
“We have long awaited this night, colleagues. The stars have told us that change must come. Until tonight, we have spoken only in whispers of this change, of our plan for the one who would replace madness with clear thinking—the clear thinking of the magi!”
His little speech was met with a cheer. If there had been any doubt as to the loyalty of the gathered group, that doubt was banished.
And with their cheers they had called for their own deaths.
From behind the group, a shout at the Akitu House door raised the hair on Tia’s arms. It was the shout of warriors. Of men who faced their enemy with a rage and a passion.
Nabonidus had performed his task.
Soldiers loyal to him, loyal to her father, poured through the entrance, an invading swarm that chewed through all in its path.
The traitorous magi were largely trapped, save one narrow exit at the back of the Akitu House, which was soon sealed by soldiers.
Tia and her mother huddled at the back wall, alternately watching and hiding from the mass execution.
The magi were unarmed and untrained. Man after man was cut down before the swords of soldiers like hewn grass. Screams of fear, of hysteria, crashed off the stone walls, then ended in throaty gurgles of slit throats and punctured chests.
Her mother’s body shook in Tia’s arms, and Tia feared she would retch. Though unhurt, her mouth tasted the bitter blood of her enemies and her limbs trembled with fatigue as though she herself wielded a sword.
The carnage mounted, a heap of dead and dying. She could not watch but could not draw her gaze away.
How much learning, how much knowledge, is being extinguished here tonight?
Surely a light had gone out in Babylon that would never be relit.
It seemed like hours, but perhaps was only minutes, before the captain of the guard found them clutching each other in the darkness and saluted her mother.
“We have taken the Akitu House, my queen.”
As though it were the enemy’s stronghold
. As it was.
Mother disengaged from her but still gripped her arm. She tried to speak, but the words sounded strangled in her throat. “You will be commended by the king for your good work.”
The captain dipped his head, and a contriteness passed over his features. “I am afraid that we were not able to take the mage Shadir, my queen, nor the other—Amel-Marduk.”
Shadir escaped? And Amel with him?
Tia’s heart pounded against her chest, an angry, relentless beat that would not calm until she had seen them both apprehended.
They had been too quick. Had seen the guards enter and from their place at the back of the Akitu House, they must have slipped through the exit before it had been sealed.
Amytis eyed her, her expression asking her silently what this news meant to the plan.
Could the master mage and his young protégé take the kingdom alone, with all support dead at their feet?
Tia did not know. She knew only that she would not be at rest with them free.
She and Shadir had unfinished business. It was time for the true beast and the product of his depravity to face each other.
“Proceed as planned,” Tia whispered to her mother. “I will return.”
She nodded to the captain. “Give me two of your best. I must get to the palace.”
Tia knew where to find him.
She could not say how she knew, nor what she would do when they faced each other.
She only followed what every part of herself—the thrill seeker she had been and the woman of purpose she was becoming— shouted that she must do.
The two soldiers assigned to her ran alongside, cutting a path through the city streets, with townspeople diving from their path in fear.
She raced up the outer palace stairs, through the arched entrance, and did not slow through the courtyards except to dismiss the soldiers. She would do this alone.
Tia ran along the palace corridor toward her destination, and her skin tingled from scalp to toe with the spark one could sometimes taste when summer lightning streaked across the desert plains. Tia did not run to escape, nor for pleasure, as she had run so many times. Tonight she ran toward the battlefront, and her only weapon was the One God whom Pedaiah insisted was both her shield and her strength.
And we shall see
.
She had thought she would never step foot in the Hall of Magi again. Would she succumb to the evil presence?
But she had learned something through all the revelations of the past weeks—evil cannot always be avoided. Sometimes it must be confronted.
She paused under the heavy-columned entrance of that great Hall. It was empty save one lone figure, a purple-robed mage hastily thrusting instruments and charts into a leather pouch. The tar-black walls and mosaic floor were lit by only a few braziers. Barely enough light to make out the interior of the chamber. But Shadir knew his lair and did not hesitate in his flight.
He must have sensed her there at the head of the stairs. His gaze shot upward, toward the place where she hovered, and Tia saw fear.
The expression surprised her, emboldened her. A fiery flame of righteous anger flashed through her veins, ignited her blood.
“You will not leave Babylon alive, Shadir.”
He yanked the pouch’s strap over his head and one shoulder. “You trifle with power far beyond you, little princess.” He made no move to approach and neither did she leave her perch.
“Your deeds are known. To my mother. To myself. To the king.”
“Ha! The king has known nothing but dirt and grass these seven years.”
She smiled, slow and sure as she had seen him smile so many times, and that flicker of fear crossed his features again. “No longer. Even now he prepares to speak to his people. To assure them of his strong leadership. To inform them of the treachery among his wise men that has been so utterly defeated.”
His lips worked, pursing and relaxing, as though they would speak but he could find no words.
So she supplied the words herself.
“It was you who told me I was not the daughter of the king. Did you think I would not learn the name of my true father?”
He lifted his chin and shrugged one shoulder. “It is a day long past.”
Since Tia had learned the truth of her parentage, one thought had plagued her: If she should face Shadir, would she feel an undeniable sympathy? With his blood running through her, would she somehow show him favor despite his wicked deeds?
But the cold fire that burned in her chest assured her she would not prove disloyal to the king. Shadir was enemy to Babylon, to her family, and to her. And she would not back down.
Tia raised a hand, pointed a finger, like an oracle delivering a prophecy. And indeed, she felt the holiness of truth as the words passed her lips. “Your life will be required of you this night, Shadir. For your treachery against my mother and against Babylon.”
He huffed, straightened his pouch, and took a few steps across the patterned floor.
“Stop!” Her upraised hand was a flat wall of refusal now, refusal to let him pass.
He pulled up as though physically rebuffed.
The dark light of his demon gods built in his eyes, a chill spark that seemed to suck in the light of the room, and at the edges of her vision the braziers flickered.
“You have no power here, girl.”
“I have the power of the One God, my shield and my deliverer.”
Tia had expected him to scoff, to ridicule her newfound faith in the Judaean God. Instead, there was a rapid blink of the eyes, a tiny backward step.
Shadir himself knew the power of Yahweh.
With slow deliberation, he removed the leather pouch and set it upon the central table, never taking his gaze from her. The simple motion had all the marks of a man preparing for war.
So be it
.
Silence weighted the Hall as they faced each other, neither with weapons forged in metals, but each with power nonetheless.
“The Babylonian gods are naught but demons, Shadir. They control you even as you seek to control them. They use you to control the people. To keep them from truth.”
He sneered. “And what of it? The people have little need of truth. They seek only their own comfort, their own pleasures.” His eyes narrowed. “Even princesses.”
The beam of his hatred focused on her, his own child. There was more of demon than of man in him. The oppression that had followed her, plagued her, frightened her, since the night her husband died seemed to build within the Hall, to reach for her there on the steps, and pull her into itself. She descended the steps, her feet sluggish, against her will.
Her mouth went dry and she tried to swallow the tightness in her throat. “What are you doing?” Her feet took her closer to him, drawn by an invisible thread stronger than any woven cord.
Shadir watched, his face impassive.
Tia put the table between them, as it had been once before. Gripped its edges until her fingers hurt.
Had she known that it would come to this? Facing Shadir to fight for herself and her family? The One God of the Jews asserted over the many gods of the Babylonians? Somehow, she had known.
The darkness around them swelled, but she was not frightened.
The braziers flickered and went out, but she held her ground.
Only the moonlight showed her Shadir’s face, Shadir’s fear, as the pressure mounted around them in the unseen realms. The smell of burning reached her nostrils, watered her eyes. She did not blink.
Shadir’s voice was a guttural hiss. “You have no power here.” His eyes in the half-light were two white flames with a smoldering center.
Weak repetition, feeble words.
Tia agreed with his assertion. “I have no power.” Then raised both hands, releasing her fearful grip on the table. “But I have Yahweh!”
With the name, a shriek tore from Shadir’s throat and echoed off the tarred walls. That preternatural wind, hot and swirling, snaked into the Hall and eddied around them—an unseen sandstorm of malevolence.
She did not take her eyes from Shadir. Not when clay tablets of incantations flew from shelves and shattered on the mosaics. Not when darkness threatened to choke the air from her lungs, nor when Shadir’s face vibrated with an inhuman energy. In all this, she stood her ground and let the name of Yahweh forge her protection.
And like the storms of the desert, the deviant gust at last played itself out. It had been the bluff of a defeated enemy—designed to frighten but lacking in strength.
It blew out like a snuffed candle, and with it, Shadir’s support visibly collapsed inward. His expression hollowed, a thin veil of flesh upon a skeletal shell. A man without ally.
His hand clawed at the table, searching in vain for his pouch.
Tia snatched it and threw it from her. Heard it strike the wall, impossibly far away.
His eyelids fluttered, his lips twitched, every part of his face seemed to crawl with insects. She had never seem him so alive, and yet so dead.
I could kill him where he stands
.
Without weapons, yet she knew it to be true.
But it was not her place to mete out retribution.
Shadir seemed to sense her deliberate withdrawal of power, as though she had opened the bars of his cage for a brief moment. He used the table to pull himself forward on stiff legs, then shot past where Tia still stood, watching.
Up the stairs, under the columns, purple robe billowing and chased by the Most High, Shadir fled into the night.
Words spoken over her by Pedaiah returned, and this time her heart beat with blessed agreement.
May those who seek our lives be disgraced and put to shame
.
May those who plot our ruin be turned back in dismay
.
May they be like chaff before the wind, while You drive them away
.
May their path be dark and slippery, while You pursue them
.
Yes, Yahweh would be her salvation.
To return to the Akitu House was to return to a house of death. And yet this was where they must meet, all of them, with their people. This was where the future would begin.
Word of the mass slaying of the magi had ripped through the city. It seemed every Babylonian within the city walls had taken to the streets in confusion and fear, though some must also cower in their homes.
Tia pulled the hood of her robe over her head and pushed through the crowds. Would they all be there? Assembled as they had planned?
Troops still surrounded the Akitu House, weapons drawn to hold back the curious and the outraged. Tia whispered to a soldier at the outskirts of the fray and was rewarded with an escort through the massive bulk of loyal men.
Thankfully, they took to the outside steps of the Akitu House, avoiding the carnage within. The smell of death clung to the building, rising to the star-flecked sky like an unholy sacrifice to the demon gods.
Tia paused at the head of the steps, surveyed the roof, and smiled.
Her parents, arms entwined, stood in the center, and it was as if the years had dropped away. The king was bathed and shaved, his hair cut and his royal robes on his shoulders. And beyond the physical transformation, he seemed to glow with something new, a radiance that shone like truth. Surrounding him were her sisters and their husbands, their children.
And Pedaiah. He had come.
As though Tia had called his name, Pedaiah’s head turned to her and he returned her smile. They savored and lengthened that moment, apart and yet together at last.
And then he held out an arm, and she ran to his embrace.
Her parents fell on her as well.
“Tia!” Her father’s voice was sharp, reprimanding. “You should not have chased after Shadir!”