I kicked my legs and held my arms out to steady myself. My body moved slowly, as if I swam through mud instead of the water I saw all around me, as if I swam in a dream. Light filtered down from above and fell upon the gate of bone and upon the fins of a mighty whale that swam in the depths below.
A human hand, the same gray-blue as the whale’s fins and as long from wrist to fingertips as I was tall, emerged from the darkness. An arm, encrusted in barnacles and dappled in white and gray, followed. The figure unfurled its great length, and I found myself face to face with a giantess, her upper body bare and mottled with coral, and her waist tapering down to the tail of a mighty whale. Her hair was long sea-grass, and colorful fish darted between the fronds. Her face, angular and sharp-toothed, held a whale’s huge dark eyes. She studied me with one, and I saw myself reflected in it, tiny and distorted. Unhurried, she turned her head to fix me with the other.
I could not move. Distantly, I was aware of my body breathing, though I remained submerged in the otherworldly sea. A terrible deep note sounded through the water, shaking the bones of the gate and stilling my heart for a terrifying moment. There was a question in that note, and in the wide-set eyes of the giant. At last, I understood: I swam before Nashurru, goddess of the deep and the places between, and she wanted to know why I had come to her.
“I must pass through that door,” I said. The black ocean dampened and distorted my voice, and I could barely hear my own words.
Nashurru turned her eye to me again. A piercing, silver note shivered through the water. I saw her long, ridged throat vibrate with it.
I looked to the gate, and imagined the bar of light across it lifting and its luminous hinges turning. I pictured Khalim, as best as I could remember him after more than a year, long-fingered hands and soft dark eyes and a wide, earnest smile. His face already faded from my memory, and fear and grief in equal measure welled up through my body, cold as the abyss.
Two great hands came together before me, churning the water. Nashurru’s palms alone were as large as the deck of a ship. Eerie blue light coalesced into a globe between them. She sang once more, and I felt as though my bones had turned to water. In the light, I saw a city.
A street of white marble stretched out into the distance. Houses of wood and stone stood at regular intervals, and people in robes of bright colors passed in and out of the vision, carrying wooden boards and iron tools. The road ended at the foundations of a marble palace, covered with a temporary shelter of canvas stretched over wooden poles. A wooden table lay under the shelter, carved with figures of hunting dogs and eagles—a gift fit for a king. Atop it was scattered a collection of maps and figures, showing grids of intersecting streets and a drawing of a high dome, supported by a network of beams.
Familiar faces clustered around the table. There stood Reva, the head of the Phyreian miners’ guild, her back straight and her hair like glossy obsidian; beside her was Roshani, princess of House Darela, in a riding costume of fine blue silk. Artyom of House Kaburh bent over a map, tracing an inked street with a blunt forefinger. His beard had grown longer since last I saw him.
At the head of the table was a figure even more familiar, and I thought for one wrenching moment that I saw what I had come here to see. Tall and serene, with long brown limbs clothed in plain linen, an iron circlet upon his curls, stood the god, Torr, in the body of my beloved.
Once, I could have told the difference between Khalim and the god he had carried in a glance, but I lingered in hope for the space of a breath. He turned his head up as though he could see me, fixing me with his hard golden eyes. I looked away.
“Please,” I begged the goddess. “Don’t show me Phyreios. Nothing remains for me there.”
Her head tilted to one side, and her deep green hair fluttered. Pressing her palms together, she collapsed the vision.
I had believed myself inured to the measuring gaze of a god. Torr had once judged me and found me worthy, but under the whale-eyes of Nashurru, I felt myself come short. I curled into the semblance of a bow, tucking in my head and holding out my open hands.
“Mistress of the sea, of the abyss and the places between,” I said, “goddess of the priestesses of Ewandar and of the maiden Noa, I humbly request your help. The one I seek is no longer upon the earth. He resides in the realm of the god Torr—or, at least, that is what I was promised. Will you let me see him?”
The waters trembled as the goddess sang another low tone. With a crack, a mighty tusk broke free of the gate and tumbled, end over end, into darkness. Light bloomed from her hands again, washing over me and illuminating the gate of bone with a pale, ghostly haze.
I lifted my head. Again, the vision showed me a street of marble the color of fresh snow, but this was not Phyreios. Its buildings were new, shining in the red sunset. Its streets showed no dust, no footprints, no debris. Nothing moved in that field of white, and no vegetation grew between the paving stones. For all its beauty, it was a dead city, and Khalim was not there.
The vision moved with me as I turned my head. I followed the main street to a vast, domed temple, and then in the opposite direction to a gilded gate, flanked on either side with a magnificent statue. My body, left behind in the temple, inhaled sharply when I recognized their faces. On the left stood Lord Ihsad, head of House Darela, and on the right stood his only son, Jahan. Between them, the gate was heavy and sealed shut. I could no more open it than I could the gate of bone.
A wall of white, like a cruel northern blizzard, impeded my search in all other directions. Within its bounds, the city was still and silent.
“He’s not here,” I said aloud. “The god—he lied. Khalim is gone.”
For the first time since I submerged myself in the Dreaming Eye, I felt as though I was drowning. My breath came in gasps, struggling against the weight of the water around me. Pressure stabbed into my ears like a pair of daggers. I had walked for months from the dragon’s temple to get here, and it had all been for nothing. Icy water gripped my feet from below, pulling me down, and the light from above me faded.
Movement caught my eye. A dark shape entered the vision, flying over the gate and coming to rest on the shoulder of the statue that looked like Jahan. It was an owl, shaking out its black-feathered wings, its face white as the marble surrounding it.
My dream-body was heavy as a stone. I reached up, driving my hands through water turned suddenly cold. As I struggled, inch by inch, the owl shook out its feathers, looked around the tiny, constrained city, and flew off over the gate and into whatever lay beyond.
I gasped for breath, my chest expanding against the crushing deep. “He’s gone,” I said again.
The owl came and went as it willed. Perhaps Khalim had been in this cold, marble prison, and I had let my anger overcome me and accuse the god of dishonesty. Khalim would not have wanted to stay here, in a place where nothing grew and none lived to keep him company. But I had no way of knowing what lay beyond the gate where the carved faces of my former comrades stood watch. Even if I were to breach the gate of bone now, I would wander for an eternity and never find him.
Nashurru closed her hands, and the vision darkened and vanished. She reached out with one forefinger, tall and thick as a marble pillar, and touched my brow with utmost care. I fell, again, though instead of plunging into the blackness below, I felt dry air and smelled smoke, and felt the chill of the temple’s waist-deep water. My ears filled with the sound of the priestesses’ chant.
I took another breath, and plunged once again into the Dreaming Eye.
I floated face to face with the goddess. “I am looking for my beloved,” I said. “He was taken from me six seasons hence, and I must find him again. His name is Khalim, and he is the kindest and gentlest who ever walked upon the earth, and the stubbornest, as well. He has left the realm of the god Torr. Can you show me where he wanders?”
The whale-song that followed my request weaved earth-shaking notes with aimless, sweet fluting, a tapestry of sound that swept over me like a wave. Nashurru called up another sphere of light, and it drew me in toward a swirling vortex of colors for which I had no names. The chaos peeled open like a tropical fruit, and lay flat beneath a black sky of alien stars.
Upon those colors, under that sky, walked Khalim. His head bent under an invisible wind, and he held his threadbare coat around him, shielding his eyes with his other hand. His feet were bare, and his jaw clenched with a familiar, determined tension. How could I have ever mistaken the god for him?
“Khalim!” I cried, and he lowered his hand and turned, as though he could hear me.
His dark eyes met mine. The hallucinatory landscape became a river, wide and shallow. Beyond it lay a rice field and a stretch of rust-colored sand. Beyond that sprouted the Iron Mountain of Phyreios, dark against an early morning sun, and a thick forest of emerald green that held the sky in its branches. More desert flickered into view from between the trees, and another rice field, in a confusing patchwork of natural features.
“Where are you?” I asked as the vision went dark for the final time.
I awoke alone in my hammock strung between palms on the beach. My ears filled with the sound of waves, and the first rays of the sunlight warmed my skin. I had returned to the waking world.
I stood and walked to the edge of the water, the place between the land and the deep, and I knelt in the surf and gave thanks to the goddess of the abyss for the glimpse she had granted me of my beloved. Against the bright horizon, a great whale spouted and dove, silhouetting its flukes against the sun.
But I also wept, there in the wet sand in the early hour, for the loss of that vision. A second time I had lost Khalim, and in my deepest thoughts I cursed Torr and Nashurru in equal measure, as shameful as it was. When the grandmothers woke, they found me there among the shallows, and brought me back to dry land.
Back to Chapter IX: The Temple Under the Mountain
Forward to Chapter XI: Ashinya Waters
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