The Lioness of Shadi

15. The One with a Thousand Faces

Somewhere in the distance, someone was calling the poet's name. All she could feel was the fire, consuming her alive. She was burning with her sisters: the coals coiling around her leg like a serpent and the flames pouring through her veins. For two days, the Sut Resi had moved, and as they did, Ilati shivered and sweated. Now, with ashen skin and no connection to the reality of the others, she drifted into endlessness. Her struggles to continue without showing pain, to brave her wound without succumbing, those were not enough to save her from infection.

Once she had realized what she was, it was too late to do more than suffer in silence. The fever had dried her mouth into the Desert of Kings itself and then came the delirium.

Again, she heard her name. Slowly, Ilati realized she was no longer on the mule's back. The swaying movement of a beast beneath her had stopped. The priestess turned her head and let her glazed gaze fall on a dark face, almost the indistinctness of a shade. "Ilati, hold on!" it urged in her brothers' voices.

Ilati could not speak through the agony of the fire. She was burning. Could the dead not see that? Surely they knew best that it already consumed her leg, roasting with the awful intensity of flaming oil as the rest of her suffered this terrible heat.

A voice, familiar and female, barked with disapproval. "We should have checked the wound sooner!"

"I will do everything in my power..." An old man began, but the rest of his words washed away like mud-brick in a flood.

Slowly, Ilati's perception unraveled. Her mind opened more and more until the limits between her spirit and the Beyond felt immaterial. The dead were coaxing to her, calling her name. Ilati, come back to us, they whispered over and over. Ilati, come back to us. She was sinking into the river of fire that marked the entrance of Ersetu, land of the dead. They were waving at her from shore, their hands passing mere inches from her face.

Her eyes fluttered closed and Ilati dreamed of being someone else, somewhere else.

—a deep knot of worry wormed its way closer and closer to the center of her stomach as she watched him, a king prowling back and forth before his throne. "You say this oracle will require a sacrifice?"

"One must treat with the One With a Thousand Faces. That is not so easily done," she said. "Fate is jealous with its secrets. Sacrifices are necessary to appease it when you seek to look into the truth."

"How much?"

She purposefully kept her gaze away from any in the room, fearing that to gaze at any would spell their destruction. "You wish to know the course of a life. The One with a Thousand Faces has spoken: a life in exchange."

A hiss of indrawn breath from the left, where the king's daughter by marriage waited, one hand on the curve of her belly. The woman shook her head. "That is too much to ask, creature."

It stung to be insulted so. Was it Ilati's fault that the overseer of souls was so exacting? Still, she could not say that she wholly disagreed. It was a terrible price and worst of all, it was one the warrior king would be all too eager to pay. Great power brought with it cruelty, an insensitivity to the life around him.

The king drew his sword, bronze gleaming in the lamplight. "Bring the magi to me," he ordered. "Let us see if their augury is more honest than their gifts."

Ilati tensed when the guards dragged two struggling men before the great king and his burning eyes. Merciless knots bound their hands to prevent them from casting spells and the removal of their tongues with hot pincers ruined any chance of escape by incantation. The maiming and agonizing wounds on their bodies, washed in vinegar, made her almost regret having exposed the plot. She closed her eyes just as the gleaming blade gashed open the throats, one after another.