A grim and condescending smile. 'I am.'
'He also says you are the reason we found these lands afire when we arrived.'
She nodded. 'I am but a vessel. I pour only what has been poured.'
Even after so few words, Malowebi knew her for a formidable woman. Here she stood, naked and manacled, yet her gaze and bearing communicated a confidence too profound to be named pride, a majesty that somehow upended the stakes between her and the famed Bandit Padirajah.
'And now that your Goddess has betrayed you?'
'Betrayed?' she snorted. 'This is not a sum. This is not a wager of advantages over loss. This is a gift! Our Mother Goddess's will.'
'So the Goddess wills the destruction of her temples? The torment and execution of her slaves?'
The longer Malowebi gazed at the woman, the more a weight seemed to press against his brow. Her eyes seemed bright with moist vulnerability, her body fetching in the lean way of peasant virgins. And yet watching her, an impression of something hoary, hard, and old continued to plague him. Even the downy curve of her sex… She seemed a kind of visible contradiction, as if the look and promise of virgin youth had eclipsed the sight of a hag but not the corona of meaning that hung like a haze about it.
So even now, as she glared at Fanayal, it seemed something reptilian peered through her peering, the look of something vicious and remorseless with age, flashing from the gaze of a woman, flushed and breathless and so very inviting.
'We take such gifts that come,' she crooned. 'We suffer this worldly trifle, and She will save us! From oblivion! From those demons our iniquities have awakened! This is but the arena where souls settle eternity. Our suffering is dross compared to the glory to come!'
Fanayal laughed, genuinely amused. But his humour cut against the obvious unease of his court.
'So even your captivity… You think this a gift?'
'Yes.'
'And if I were to deliver you to the lust of my men?'
'You will not.'
'And why is that?'
In a twinkling, she became coy and whorish. She even glanced down at her breasts, which were firm with improbable youth. 'Because I have been reborn as black earth, as rain and sweating sun,' she said. 'The Goddess has cast me in Her image, as sweet, sweet Fertility. You will not allow other men to trade me, so long as your loins bur-'
' My loins?' Fanayal cried out with forced incredulity.
Malowebi gazed and blinked. She literally tingled with nubile promise, yet still she carried the air of old stone. Something… Something was wrong…
'Even now,' she said, 'your seed rises to the promise of soft earth deeply ploughed.'
Masculine laughter rumbled through the chamber, only to falter for want of breath. Even old Malowebi could feel a tightness in his chest and a matching thickness crawling across his thighs…
With no little horror the Mbimayu sorcerer realized the Goddess was among them. There was peril, here- great peril. This woman walked with one foot on the Outside…
He opened his mouth to call out in warning but caught himself on the very hinge of his voice.
He was no friend to these savage people. He was an observer, interpreter. The question was whether Zeum's interests would be served if Fanayal were alerted. Ally or not, the fact remained that the man was a fanatic of the worst kind, a believer in a creed, Fanimry, that made devils out of the Gods and hells out of the Heavens. To strike an alliance that earned the enmity of the Mother of Birth would be a fool's exchange. The Zeumi might not pray to the Hundred, given their intercessory faith, but they certainly revered and respected them.
''Soft earth deeply ploughed,'' Fanayal repeated, gazing upon her form with frank hunger. He turned to the lean and warlike men of his court. 'Such are the temptations of evil, my friends!' he called, shaking his head. 'Such are the temptations!'
More laughter greeted these words.
'Your sisters are dead,' the Padirajah continued as if immune to her wiles. 'Your temples are pulled down. If these are gifts, as you say, then I am in a most generous mood.' He paused to make room for a few frail guffaws from his assembled men. 'I could give you a noose, say, or a thousand lashes. Perhaps I will have Meppa show you what kind of prison your body can be.'
Malowebi found himself wondering whether the woman had even blinked, so relentless was her gaze. The fact that Fanayal weathered it with such thoughtless ease actually troubled the Mbimayu sorcerer. Was the man simply oblivious or did he possess a heart every bit as hard as her own?
Either possibility would not bode an alliance well.
'My soul has already left and returned to this body,' she said, her girlish voice scratched with the harsh intonations of a crone. 'There is no torment you could inflict upon me.'
'So hard!' Fanayal cried laughing. 'Stubborn! Devil-worshipping witch!'
Again the desert court rumbled with laughter.
'I would not ply your body,' Meppa said without warning. So far he had stood silent and motionless at his sovereign's side, his face directed forward as always. Only the asp, which curved like an onyx bow across his left cheek, faced the lone woman.
Psatma Nannaferi regarded the Cishaurim with a sneer. 'My soul is beyond your devilry, Snakehead. I worship the Dread Mother.'
Never had Malowebi witnessed an exchange more uncanny, the blinded man speaking as if to a void, the shackled woman as if she were a mad queen among hereditary slaves.
'You worship a demon.'
The Mother-Supreme laughed with the bitter hilarity. The cackle rang across distant walls, echoed through the high crypt hollows, gelding all the humour that had come before it. Suddenly the assembled men were nothing but ridiculous boys, their pride swatted from them by the palm of a shrewd and exacting mother.
'Call her what you will!' Psatma Nannaferi exclaimed. 'Demon? Yes! I worship a demon! — if it pleases you to call her such! You think we worship the Hundred because they are good? Madness governs the Outside, Snakehead, not gods or demons-or even the God! Fool! We worship them because they have power over us. And we-we Yatwerians-worship the one with the most power of all!'
Malowebi squelched another urge to call out, to urge the Fanim to spare her, to set her free, then to burn a hundred bulls in Yatwer's honour. The Mother was here! Here!
'Gods are naught but greater demons,' the Cishaurim said, 'hungers across the surface of eternity, wanting only to taste the clarity of our souls. Can you not see this?'
The woman's laughter trailed into a cunning smile. 'Hungers indeed! The fat will be eaten, of course. But the high holy? The faithful? They shall be celebrated!'
Meppa's voice was no mean one, yet its timbre paled in the wake of the Mother-Supreme's clawing rasp. Even still he pressed, a tone of urgent sincerity the only finger he had to balance the scales. 'We are a narcotic to them. They eat our smoke. They make jewellery of our thoughts and passions. They are beguiled by our torment, our ecstasy, so they collect us, pluck us like strings, make chords of nations, play the music of our anguish over endless ages. We have seen this, woman. We have seen this with our missing eyes!'
Malowebi scowled. Fanim madness… It had to be.
'Then you know,' Psatma Nannaferi said in a growl that crawled across Malowebi's skin. 'There will be no end to your eating, when She takes you. Your blood, your flesh-they are inexhaustible in death. Taste what little air you can breathe, Snakehead. You presume your Solitary God resembles you. You make your image the form of the One. You think you can trace lines, borders, through the Outside, like that fool, Sejenus, say what belongs to the God of Gods and what does not-errant abstractions! Hubris! The Goddess waits, Snakehead, and you are but a mote before her patience! Birth and War alone can seize-and seize She does!'
The Mbimayu sorcerer glanced out over the festooned court, his attention drawn by gasps and murmurs of outrage. The desert men watched, their faces caught between fury and horror. Several of them even signed small folk charms with their fingers. The oddities had been piled too high for them not to realize something profound was amiss.
'Stay your curses!' Fanayal cried, his humour finally beaten into fury.
