The nightmares were following her. They drifted after her under the cover of the dreamfire’s light, their brittle bodies skittering along, their flat, lidless eyes watching her. She didn’t have to look back to know they were there. When she’d stumbled she’d felt their fingers reach inside her skull, settling darkness inside her. So she ran faster. Around her the dreamfire grew wilder and wilder still, its howls a cry of fury.
In the dark inside her own mind, Mehr saw Amun and nothing but Amun, his sigils livid, his face warped with pain. Her own scarred chest ached. If she closed her eyes she could see the vow tying them, golden and strong. If she let it, it would lead her right back to him.
But she wouldn’t go back. Amun had asked her to run, and she would. She had.
Eventually she stopped running. She kneeled down on the ground, hands flat against the sand, and struggled to breathe. The nightmares had faded bodily behind her, but Mehr could still feel their darkness clawing at her skull, threatening to drown her. She breathed shallowly, and oh so carefully pushed the fear away.
Beneath her the sand rippled softly, like water.
Her fear was not misleading her. She was sure now.
The storm was wrong.
Mehr had danced with the dreamfire enough to know what it was supposed to feel like. This storm was far too fierce, far too bright. It was as if the storm had thinned the wall between the world of spirit and the world of flesh, bringing the Gods and their fury close to the surface of the world.
She had not danced the rite. Amun had not danced the rite. The Gods were dreaming around her, dreaming freely, for the first time in centuries. Their nightmares crept around her, within her, their rage made brittle flesh. The world around her—sand, sky—wavered around, fragile and weak as glass.
Mehr lowered her head to the ground. Tears stung at her eyes. She cried because she was tired and she was afraid. She cried because she had left Amun behind.Breathe, she thought.Breathe. Be strong. Don’t stop running yet.
The world rustled again. She heard the nightmares draw back even farther, skittering under the cover of the light. But it was the silence that followed—deep as the beat of a dream—that made Mehr look up.
A veiled woman sat before her, hands folded primly on her lap, legs crossed neatly under a skirt of voluminous white silk. Her veil fluttered in the breeze of the storm; beneath the thin mesh of cloth her eyes were the only features that were visible. They glowed with the steady constancy of prayer flames.
It took Mehr’s fevered mind a moment to realize the woman was no woman after all.
Daiva.
The daiva looked more human than any daiva Mehr had ever seen before. Its shadowy hands, clasped so neatly in its lap, were utterly mortal in shape, with fine nails and creases at the knuckles. Only its eyes revealed its true nature. Its eyes reminded her of the ancient daiva she had seen in the desert so long ago. She wondered if it was the same daiva after all, all its billowing edges transformed into the neatness of the human form.
The daiva gazed at her tranquilly, its candle-flame eyes flickering. There was no urgency in it.
She had never seen a truly ancient daiva, only had heard people speak of them in hushed, fearful whispers, in tales of time long gone. Perhaps this ancient one had come to take her, to carry her away to the place beyond the sand where the Gods slept. Perhaps it had come to grant her peace. More likely, it had come to exact the suffering she deserved for all the heresies, large and small, that she’d committed in the Maha’s service, and to save herself from it. The thought should not have comforted her, and yet somehow it did. An end. At least it would be an end.
Mehr raised a hand to touch her chest. She touched her seal, Amun’s seal, hanging on frayed thread. She touched her scar, which was livid and aching. The screaming inside her, the sound of the Maha trying to draw her back to servitude, had quieted. But it was still there. The pain was a sign, at least, that she was still alive.
The daiva raised a hand, carefully mirroring her movement. Then it slowly uncurled its fingers and held them out to her. Mehr was reminded, ridiculously, of the little bird-daiva that had rustled its wispy wings on Arwa’s window ledge. Just as she’d known what the bird-daiva wanted from her, she knew what this daiva wanted too.
“I have no knife,” Mehr said. Her voice was nothing but a rasp, thin and tired. She shaped her hands into the sigil forblood, drawing her left hand back in a negation.
The daiva held still for a moment. Its little finger twitched. Then in a quicksilver motion it moved, darting across the sand until its hand was a hairsbreadth from Mehr’s cheek. She barely stopped herself from flinching. It was only then that she realized she’d been weeping.
“You want my tears?” she asked, uncomprehending.
The daiva waited, watching her with its soft flame eyes. It did not move.
Tears were not blood. They were not the sacrifice of the knife, the reminder of shared blood and an old, old vow passed from progenitor to progeny. What could the daiva want with tears?
“Why?” Mehr asked. She bit her tongue, suddenly angry with herself. She tried to raise her hands, to speak respectfully in the daiva’s language, but it was already leaning back, shaping sigils with quick fingers.
Flesh. Blood. Tears.A fist held to the daiva’s chest.Heart.
The daiva shaped a circle, cinched with a flourish by fingers shaping a knot. Mehr knew that sigil. It was the sigil for that which could be made, but couldn’t be broken.
Vow.
Mehr nodded.
“Take my tears, then,” Mehr whispered. “I hope they are as good as blood to you.” She shaped the sigil forgift, laboriously, afraid her suddenly trembling hands would fail her.
