The bodyguards had given her an assortment of lights, tools, flares,
even a weapon. She carried them to the little bridge across the river that
marked the boundary of familiar tourist territory. She left everything on the
bridge but the candles and matches she carried in her pockets. The oldest
images had been made under the earliest form of light; they would speak, she
guessed, more clearly in the flickering uncertainty of fire than in the glare
of a flashlight.
She carried several tapers together, enough to illumine the shallow water, to
draw an image on the stone walls out of the dark, then let it melt back into
black. Most repeated the patterns of the early ones in the sacred cave. But as
she wandered farther from the pool, now and then something would surprise her:
the goddess’s face, with its stark, powerful gaze, its wreath of hair,
attached to a human body, or that same face with light, or water, or power
streaming from its eyes. The Calluna itself quickened under that gaze; the
water’s voice changed, became stronger, cleaner, as its waters gained depth
on its journey to the sea.
The paintings came to an end where all the books Perdita had seen on the
subject ended: the goddess’s face on one side of the river’s wall, on the
other a pair of hands, cupped, angled down, spilling drops of water shaped
like tadpoles or tears. Beyond them, two massive wedges of stone leaned
against one another across the river. The water pushed through the narrow
opening between them, carving more deeply into its bed, its voice grown
assured, imperative, echoing against the walls as it ran on, clamoring for the
world and light.
The dark beyond the huge stones, Perdita knew, was caused by the human hands
that had shaped the tunnel above the Calluna River to support the busy street
named for the goddess. In an earlier century, the river had unearthed itself,
glittered with sunlight, expanded in the luxury of meadows and fields for a
brief, innocent moment of freedom before it met the Severen and was swept into
the embrace of the god.
There, at that point of collision, a god dying of thirst, a mighty river
drying up, might well have drunk gratefully and ceaselessly from the stream of
water whose birthplace was buried underground, its source untouched by the
light that had burned with such ruthless destruction across the whole of the
land from the wyvern-riddled mountains to the sea.
Here, where the princess stood, was the goddess’s face on one wall. There, on
the opposite side, were her hands, water flowing out of them. In this form of
the early tale, the sacred, powerful, life-carrying vessel took the simplest
shape of all: the open hand.
Perdita, gazing perplexedly at the goddess’s face, at her hands, wondered if
they had ever truly taken any other shape.
Then she thought: The story isn’t finished. Where is the god in distress?
On impulse she stooped, held her bouquet of flames above the dark water
rushing between the slabs of stone. She tried to see beneath the surface to
the river stones and what they might reveal if, perhaps, they had once been
part of the ceiling or the walls. They might have spoken, continued the story
long before the monstrous machines of a later era had shaken them down into
the water.
A face formed in her light.
Her own reflection, she thought at first, seeing only the suggestion of a
human in the coiling, rippling flow. Slowly it took on color, dimension. Her
lips parted. She sucked air, felt the quickening, terrifying touch of the
goddess on the nape of her neck. She knew that face like she knew her own. She
stretched her hand toward it, her mouth opening soundlessly; her fingertips
touched the water, and the face, the reflection in the goddess’s eye, misted
away.
Daimon.
11
Pierce drove through a cleft in a dry, golden hill and found himself on a
six-lane span across the astonishing breadth of Severluna Bay. The city
sprawled at the end of the bridge, a tidal wave of civilization spilling so
completely over land bordered on three sides by water that the land itself had
vanished under it.
Pierce’s hands grew damp, locked on the steering wheel. He was surrounded by
more vehicles than he had seen in a lifetime; it took every nerve he possessed
not to stop the Metro in the middle of the bridge so that he could get out and
slink back into the hills. The Metro kept moving; the city grew. Streets
appeared, going everywhere at once. Signs gave him choices, all unfamiliar.
Since he would probably die, chewed up by the monsters snorting on all sides
of him before he got safely off the bridge, choices seemed moot. He was
slowed, at the end of the bridge where waves roiled and broke far under him,
by traffic bottlenecking toward a tollbooth. The bill he proffered in
trembling fingers was snatched away by the wind. The toll-taker eyed him
implacably as he rummaged through his wallet. Finally, he did something right;
a light turned green; the man waved him on, nodding, even smiling a little,
while sounds of Severluna—horns, wind, engine growls, gulls, tide—poured
through the open window like some kind of maniacal welcome.
He drove. Signs queried him constantly. Me? they asked him. Do you want me? He
was frozen again, unable to say yes or no, right or left; he could only stop
when everyone stopped and move forward when everyone else did.