"How confident are you?" the Queen asked.
Anathi didn't need to turn her avatar away from the window. Her consciousness saw the Queen sitting in a copper bath in the middle of the bedroom, leaning forward and sliding her hands along her shins, white suds sloughed down the curve of her back as she did so. The movement was lethargic, deathly so. A human mouth and nose would not pick out the boa salts in the water or the yeasty stench of beer on her breath, but the effects of the deep-sleeper ritual were clear as the beat of her slowing heart. She would need to come out soon.
"Please." A bead of sweat rolled down the crease of her brow, to the tip of her nose, and dripped into the bathwater. "How prepared?"
An audacious question. Anathi's human part, that grit of sand buried at the bottom of her seismic consciousness, was almost offended.
Anathi pushed a bit more of her consciousness into the avatar, and the room took on a slight haze. A moment ago, she had been aware of the twelve different tannins in the floorboards, as well as the specific ash in the soap that had washed the Queen's linens, but as she centred herself the clay body, the room melted into a swirl of old wood, fresh cotton, and steam.
In that clay imitation, she centred herself just below where a human liver would be. An invisible tether linked her spirit to the rest of the house. She tugged on it, and ceiling trembled. Annoyance. It had been so long since she had done this. She tugged again, a little firmer. A clod of clay fell from the ceiling and plonked on her shoulder. She drank it in. She tugged again, and caught the next clod in her pure-black hand.
Her avatar didn't grow any bigger or change shape as she did this. Clay absorbed clay, deepening to the density of wood, then bone, then bedrock. When Anathi was done, the ceiling was bare wooden beams and the floorboards creaked underneath her. (She had made sure she was standing along a reinforcement beam in the tunnel below.)
"Come closer," the Queen said, eyes hooded. "Let me make sure."
It was awkward shifting the weight of an elephant with the frame of a twelve-year-old girl. Somewhere in that grit of memory, Anathi had the vague notion of climbing out of a lake after a morning of swimming and taking those first heavy steps onto the shore. By the time she stood in front of the Queen, however, her balance had mostly reconciled with the impossibility of the clay's properties.
"Strong?"
Anathi nodded.
The Queen pressed her thumb against her canine and drew a single bead of blood. Every particle of Anathi's spirit told her to attack, to quell danger, to staunch, but the Queen had drawn her own blood so it would not be too much for her to control the Sunspear. Still, the change was enough to remind her what itching skin felt like.
Only the old King and the Queen's family had ever looked deep enough into her eyes to notice the slim yellow fractals in the brown irises, flecks of gold in a sandstorm. They sparked when she pricked her thumb, then flared, then glowed bright enough to reflect off that single pearl of blood. Something changed in the air. It wasn't as overt as a foul smell or the thickness of humidity, but despite its subtlety, it was low and wide and far-reaching. A glamour, meant to settle fear into the hearts of man in the way a coming quake told frogs to scatter.
She looked up at Anathi's featureless face. The bathwater rippled around her, not away but towards. The tub's legs groaned, and at the bottom of its copper belly, a drop of condensation had formed, less than a hand's width from the floor. It quivered, then dripped.
The Queen's strike was viper-quick. Well, quick by the standards of creatures bound to the temporal plane. Anathi watched the Queen's fist arc up towards her chest with all the interest one watched a leaf drifting along a meandering stream. That was disappointing. She had great respect for the Queen but it was moments of paranoia like this that tempted her to kill the corrupt power within her once and for all.
Great rivers thrived because they did not doubt their own power. If the Wayfarer ever stalled to contemplate itself, it would flood the land. The stone titans sleeping under the earth's crust made volcanic mountains and sky-blotting waves when they crashed, but if they ever stilled in fear of the collision, there would be no magma to melt the fireglass in the northern ranges and pour it the Wayfarer's headwater, where it would make the deposits of clay that formed Anathi's body now. Unlike the Queen, whose spirit was still tied to flesh, Anathi's power was in the uncompromising forces that had erupted and melted and hardened to bring her into existence...
When the Queen's fist was three-quarters to her chest, Anathi centred her spirit under her liver again then nudged it outward. Fireglass pushed through the surface of her skin until she was armoured in it from head to toe. She waited for the Queen to break her wrist on her breastplate.
...and yet, there was that grit of humanity that reminded her what it meant to be small and breakable, and painfully aware of your own temporary self.
She caught the Queen's wrist just before it struck her. There was the force of a rushing elephant in the blow, so when suddenly had nowhere to go, it pushed back towards itself. The bathtub made grooves in the floor as it flew back three feet and the boards under Anathi's heels cracked. She pushed a little of her clay through the bottom of her feet to seal the splintered wood.
The drop of perspiration that had dripped from the tub finally hit the floor.
Anathi turned the Queen's wrist over and sealed the tiny cut in her thumb with a bit of clay. She absorbed her glass armour back under her skin, picked up the woman slumped against her thigh, and carried her to bed. She was about to climb back up to redistribute her form across the ceiling when the Queen said something.
"You think you could stop me, don't you?"
Her back was to Anathi, so she wasn't really expecting an answer. Besides, she was whispering so softly Anathi had to focus on absorbing the vibrations of her voice through the air.
"A thumb prick, sure. A few scratches on my back, maybe." She turned to face Anathi, her eyes cooled to the deep brown. The only sheen in them now came from candlelight reflecting on the sheen of tears. "Are spirits capable of complacency?"
Sometimes, Anathi signed with her left hand.
"Are you?"
She hesitated. Sometimes.
The Queen nodded against her pillow. The window behind her was open; the breeze that bellied the curtains made the drops of water along her bare side quiver.
"Honesty is good. It is a lack of honesty that got us here, so it must be a lack of honesty that gets us out, but a drop of truth is nice every now and again."
Anathi stood, waiting. A moment passed. How long, she couldn't say, but long enough for the Queen to grow cold and crawl under her blankets.
Her eyes were halfway to closing now. "Have you ever lied to me, Anathi?"
No.
"Have you ever lied to my children? My mother?"
Again, she made herself still as stone. Well, vibrations in the earth could make stone move -- she was stillness made perfect.
"Ah, that's right," the Queen said. "You don't lie, you just wait for the question to pass you by, just as all things in the temporal plane eventually pass you by."
The bathwater was cold when the Queen spoke again.
"That's what I've always feared most about you -- feared and admired. You're the only person--" She yawned. "You're the only person who sees things as I would like to see them, as passing, as inconsequential."
All things have consequence.
"Do they?" She laughed, or rather her lip twitched and her breath huffed. "If I died, would you mourn?"
No.
"See, no consequence."
If you died, you would be with me in the spirit plane, and you would finally understand me.
Her eyes flicked to the featureless void that was Anathi's face.
Why mourn that?
No laugh this time, but that twitch on the Queen's lip lasted a little longer. "The Sunspear's spirit is bound to mine -- I don't think you would want a demon like that in your plane." Her lips flattened, and the lines on either side deepened with the furrows in her brow. "This... thing, it can never blight the land again. It has made scabs in the earth where villages used to be, and if all the life in history were a night sky, it would be a blank moon cratering the stars."
Stillness. Awaiting.
"When my children return, Ndoda must finally be made king, Khaya must be sent away to his rite, and Asanda must take on the role of Head Councillor. When all my children are where I have raised them to be... you and I, we end this."
End this? Whimsy even by the Queen's standards. The Sunspear could not be killed -- how can you cut the head off something that awakens when it bleeds?
"Yes," said Nomvula, she who was named after the eastern storm god. "The milkwater pool under Asanda's bed. Despite what she thinks, it wasn't just built to douse the Sunspear when it was awakened, otherwise why build it twenty feet deep?"
Not one for human gestures, Anathi didn't nod but she understood. Still... Drowning yourself is suicide -- your spirit would die with your flesh.
"Not just my spirit."
And with that, the Queen closed her eyes, and she slept.