“What?”
“Run,” Mehr said gently, “while you still can. I don’t think the temple will be safe much longer, and I still have work to do.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The honeycomb corridors of the temple were dark, the lanterns snuffed out. Mehr could barely see. She walked slowly, tracing the walls with her fingertips. She was glad, now, that she’d worked so hard to learn the layout of the temple. She had nothing but her memory to guide her through the gloom. She saw none of the mystics, but as she walked she heard the occasional sobs and cries cutting through the howling darkness. She thought of the girls who had welcomed her and taught her karom, and shivered, dread for them coiling in her stomach.
Mehr was sure the mystics had marked the windows with Amun’s blood to keep the daiva out, but the Gods and their nightmares had made no promises on Amrithi blood. There was darkness in the temple now, a smell of iron in the air. Mehr heard a skittering, drawing steadily closer. She froze.
The nightmares were walking the corridors.
She closed her eyes. Stayed very still.You will not find me. Not now, not yet, not today—
The noise passed. Mehr waited a moment, then kept walking.
Mehr found her way to their old room by memory alone. She walked up the stairs. The room was bathed in the light of the dreamfire pouring in through the open shutters. Abhiman was nowhere to be seen. She didn’t know if Bahren had found him and told him to run, or if he had made the decision himself. She didn’t know if the nightmares had caught him. She didn’t really care.
“Amun,” she whispered.
Amun lay on the divan. He was thinner than he’d been before, bruised and very still. She saw water with a ladle on the ground beside him. Someone had gone to some effort to keep him alive, but his skin was gray, his body soaked with sweat. His sigils were as faded as the rest of him. It was only when she placed her hand against his lips, her own fingers trembling, that she was sure he was still breathing.
It broke her heart and healed it over again to see him alive but so harmed. The Maha’s death may have released him from his vows, but the bond between them was still hot with his pain. After all he’d suffered she wasn’t sure, couldn’t be sure, that he would recover from what had been done to him.
She wanted to lie beside him and feel the warmth of him beside her. But there was no time. Instead she placed a hand on his chest, on the place where the scar of their marriage vow lay. She leaned forward and kissed him, a bare brush of her lips against his own. The light of their bond was a golden knot binding them together, so bright it burned her fear clean away.
“I’m going to survive for you,” she whispered. “Please, survive for me in return, my love.”
She left him there. She had no choice but to do so.
She walked back down the stairs and made her way toward an exit that led to the desert. The doors were flung open. Mehr stopped and stared at the lashing dreamfire, the waves of sand rolling as swift as water with the wind. She had never seen a more awful storm.
The Maha was dead. His mystics were in disarray. Mehr would not have their prayers running through her to guide her or give her strength. Amun would not be with her, performing the rite at her side. She had no partner. No ritual clothing. No kohl around her eyes, no ornaments wreathed through her hair. She was just a woman, thin and hurt and tired. She was no more than human, no more than that, and that would have to be enough.
She kneeled down and took off her boots. Then she sucked in a breath, straightened her shoulders, and stepped beyond the temple walls.
The sand wasn’t smooth beneath her feet. It didn’t even cling to her strangely, as it had when she’d left her mother’s clan. Instead it kept re-forming into new shapes beneath her, collapsing into hollows, then re-forming into jagged edges that made her stumble and struggle for balance. Around her the wind transformed from blistering heat into bitter cold. In the cracks between the dreamfire, the sky was a cavernous void, then a seething mass of pale things. It was as if the shape of the earth were constantly altering.
Mehr bit her lip and kept on walking.
The daiva surrounded her fast. They swept around her, not harming her, their golden eyes blinking in and out of sight between the gouts of dreamfire. Mehr took strange comfort in their presence. They made her feel a little less alone.
Deep in the storm, she stopped walking. She breathed in and out, trying not to choke on the sand around her. She reached for the seed of immortality within herself. There was no more time left to build up her courage, to remind herself of what needed to be done. It was time to act.
Mehr raised her hands. Set her feet against the ground. She began to dance the rite.
The dreamfire poured into her. It was an obliterating fire, too big for her body, too large to leave her soul whole. She let it come. It rose through her blood, filled her eyes and her ears and her throat with light, lifting her bodily with its power. She submitted to its power, bending with the storm, refusing to allow it to break her. She had to survive. She had to turn her will to the task of bending the Gods.
This time she did not have the Maha’s will or the mystics’ prayers. She did not have Amun to guide her or save her. The only hands shaping the dreams of the Gods were her own. She poured all her heart and soul into a rite that was no longer a two-person act of creation but an act of pure lonely desperation. She drew forward the dreams toward the only thing she desired: survival.
Do not kill us, do not end the world, oh Gods, do not send your nightmares for us, please, do not send your nightmares—
She was thrown back into her body. Her lungs ached. Her eyes stung. She was flat on the ground, arms pinned by clawed, pale fingers. A nightmare hung above her, its face a thousand pale, fractured shards around flat silver eyes. She turned her head and saw more of those eyes watching her. They were everywhere. The storm had breathed life into them.
Mehr wanted to laugh. She’d achieved the opposite of what she’d asked for. The Gods were angry indeed.
The nightmares were no longer simply a cold, creeping horror at the back of her skull. The fury of the Gods had carved them into flesh as hard as bones. It hung above her, but its whispers were inside her too, filling her skull with cold terror.
Images rose up in her mind, blotting her vision out: Hema’s throat cut; Usha dead on the ground; Kalini’s cold eyes; Amun gray and broken; the feel of Abhiman’s hands around her throat; the Maha’s fist against her face; Amun’s eyes, starless and bleak. There was so much darkness inside her. She’d locked it away for so long. Feeling it now, rising up, nearly destroyed her. Sickened, she felt tears force their way from her eyes. A scream began to claw its way up her throat.
