The Wings of Ashtaroth

Bonus Chapter III: Meriatu

Luqiferus laughed, as though at Aelifus's expense. "I know what a number is." He paused. "I am a member of Grey Faction."

Meri took the terminally dull and pointless conversation as an opportunity to lean in to Meros Qristos—in whatever role he was playing today—and ask: "What happened?"

Qristos grinned. It was a delightful expression that lit up his pale face. "Try not to laugh, but apparently our dear governor mistook his favourite abacus for a toy."

"A . . . toy?" Meri tried to read Qristos's face, but it was hard with his eyepatch covering his right eye and his long yellow hair falling across his left.

Qristos's expression hardened. "He broke one of the sticks off. For use in the bedchamber."

Meri could at least feel sorry for Aelifus for once. She, too, had a favourite abacus. That probably made her just as boring as he was, but at least she made up for it with a lively inner life. "The beads . . . ."

Qristos winked. "Now that remains a mystery."

Meri stared at Luqiferus with renewed respect. "I hadn't thought he'd be that creative."

Qristos smiled. "It might not be true."

They settled into silence after that. With only Aelifus's lecture to listen to she found her attention wandering to the shadows beyond the throne. The blinding midday light poured through the skylight, creating a neat circle of illumination around the throne and its immediate surroundings, but casting the back wall in even greater darkness. The shadows felt denser than usual somehow, as though thick with something besides the perfectly ordinary lack of light.

Meri gripped the shimmering black and gold palla she wore around her shoulders and hugged it closer, wrists aching from how tight she pulled it. These days, she felt the cold so easily, and she still wasn't used to such wide, drafty spaces even after three months standing in for Hemet. If Hemet had been cold though, he'd never have complained. Big stupid oaf of a man that he was he always—he had always carried on with a smile, even in discomfort. No complaints. Not then.

Not then.

Just this morning she'd found him weeping at the top of the stairs over a lost trinket he claimed his long-dead brother had stolen and thrown from the window. The way he'd cried for his toy—the way he'd screamed the name of a dead man she didn't have the heart to tell him had been gone twenty years or more. It broke her heart.

It broke her heart every time.

She'd tried to explain at first, the way she'd increasingly struggled to stop doing over the last few months, but it was so difficult not to. It seemed she should be able to find a set of words—a magic formula—that would cut through his delirium and reach the man beneath—but if there were such a phrase she hadn't the wisdom to find it. She ought to be able to simply explain, calmly and rationally, that he wasn't where or who he thought he was. He wasn't a child, or an acolyte, or a stranger, or whoever he'd settled on that day. He was Hemet eq-Hemet, heq-Ashqen of Adonen in the Pearl of Indas. He was Meri's big stupid ox who used to hoist her over his back and pretend to carry her kicking and screaming to the bedchamber.

He was hers.

And most of the time he didn't remember it.

There she went again, thinking when she shouldn't. Her throat was tight and her skin clammy now, along with the cold. She was virtually heq-Ashqat with Hemet ailing—a fine representative of the temple of Adonen in Luqiferus's court. A fine example of a woman. When he died, they'd all be well rid of her.

Something hard thwacked her bony elbow.

"Meri." Qristos stared her straight in her eyes. He cocked his forehead toward the stone steps leading up to the governor and his vizier.