5

Waking Nightmare

Exhaustion like quicksand sucking at her limbs threatened to drag Odessa to the floor. She forced herself to stay upright, her back and neck beginning to ache. A sharp pain had been sparked in her shoulder, spurs of bright pain shooting along her collarbone. She set her jaw and breathed heavily through the pulsing pain. The pain was always worse at night.

Poko snored gently in the front room and Odessa wished she could join them in slumber. Instead, she stood on cool slate tile, covering her nakedness with the same cloth that she had used to wipe stale sweat and grime from her body a moment earlier. At first, it had been hard to undress for Yakun’s examinations but eventually, it had become routine.

In the candlelight, Yakun carefully unwrapped the bandage from her outstretched arm, rolling it around his hand as he unwound it from around her bicep.

“How did you feel today?” he asked, unraveling the linen from around her elbow. “How was your fatigue?”

“It was about the same as yesterday,” she said. “Had to take a lot of breaks to catch my breath. Lightheadedness comes and goes.” Yakun was unraveling her bandage from the middle of her forearm. A dry fissure cut through gnarled skin a dark shade of burnt umber. Dry blood from the day before stained the skin around the fissures and clefts in her skin.

Yakun nodded, his unraveling moving further down her forearm. “Tomorrow, you slaughter one of the goats. That should give you enough strength to carry on.”

“I can’t. I’ve had to kill too many of them already. There aren’t that many left in the grove.”

“You can’t keep going on like this.”

“I won’t have to,” she said. “I’ll get something tomorrow. All the game has run further south, the goat-thing said. I haven’t been going far enough to the south.”

Yakun began unthreading the linen from between her fingers and around her hand. “Yes, the goat-thing.” In the candlelight, his icy eyes glinted as he worked. “You should have killed it.”

A tremor jerked her hand back. “But it could talk. It could reason,” she said. “It wouldn’t be right. You can’t kill things that think.”

“Sometimes you don’t have a choice.” The last loops of linen were coming off her fingers. “It’s natural. Whether beast, man, or divine, everything dies eventually. There is no difference between a beast that thinks and a beast that doesn’t.” He finished unwrapping her hand.”We’re all flesh and blood and bone.”

On a table cluttered with jars and stacks of parchment, he set the roll of dirty linen. When he turned back to her, his eyes held an earnest sympathy. “You’ve been forsaken by the gods. You don’t have the luxury of such soft, simple moralities.” He shook his head. “I hate to say it, but it’s true. To survive in a god’s world you must be cunning. You must see the world as it truly is. A world of predator and prey. A world that is nothing more than a mountain of corpses and if you don’t want to be buried among the dead you have to climb over them.” He took a jar of oil from the table.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking down at the tiles beneath her feet. An arcing line of bronze was set in the tiles just in front of her toes, an arc that ran around her to create a circle in the floor. A bronze ring that would take magic like an iron takes heat encircled her. The dormant energy in the circle on her skin was charged with an electricity that always made the hairs on her arms stand up. Energy that could quickly turn the circle into a prison if she let the fire in her veins overtake her. As if the precaution of the circle was not enough, Yakun felt the need to impress upon again what she was. Like she could ever forget. Like she could ever delude herself into believing she was or would ever be normal.

Yakun stopped just in front of her, his feet just outside the circle. “It is not your fault,” he said. “I know what it is like. I was born god-fearing and decent. I thought blind subservience was the only way a man could live. But it is not.” He set the jar on a small chest beside the flickering candle and a low wooden wash basin. “It takes time, unburdening yourself of the holy poison called dogma but eventually you will learn how us Forsaken few live. Now hold your arm out and let me have a look.”

She did as she was told, letting him poke and prod between her fingers and up her wrist. Sometimes he took the candle and held it close to her arm to inspect the fissures and cracks. Drops of hard wax marked the floor and he continued adding more.

“Looks to still be the same color as before,” he said, lifting her arm by the wrist and examining her hand. “Maybe a bit darker near your fingertips compared to last week.” The dark lines running beneath her skin were growing thicker and merging together from her elbow to her fingertips. Her fingers were nearly black with the vascular mass of lines.

He let go of her wrist and she let her arm drop. The candle was back on the chest, dripping tallow onto the He put a foot over the circle’s edge and she held her breath. It’ll be over quick, she told herself.

His cold hand sent a shiver rippling up her arm. His fingers worked up her arm, brushing against the fissures and cracks and squeezing the flesh around them. Kneading her hard, gnarled skin. Slowly and methodically moving up. Tracing the web of dark lines.

His fingers worked her skin more gently as he came to her shoulder. They followed the dark lines below her collarbone, rubbing where the lines faded into the bronze of her skin. “I don’t think they’ve spread much,” he said, his fingers lingering for a moment.

When he had thoroughly massaged her dully throbbing arm he took a washcloth from the basin and wrung the water from it. She flinched when the wet cloth touched her shoulder. Cold water ran down her arm as Yakun worked his way down, scrubbing away the old oil and dried blood.

Jaw clenched and eyes shut tight, she tried to find the oasis within herself as Yakun had told her. To find the place where she was most at peace. Her breath whistled through her nose in short bursts. Her chest was tight and suffocating. All she found was fire and blood. Kalaro, bathed in the light of the plaza’s massive fire. The hands of people she had once called family and friends tearing away her clothes. Scrubbing her skin until it hurt. Until she was clean enough to not sully the afterlife.

In the fire, there were screams and cries, barely human in their harshness. The scrubbing was rougher. The hands of Kalaro were rubbing ash on her raw skin, packing it into her bleeding wounds.

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“You’re doing well,” Yakun’s voice came through the fire and smoke, a tether for her to hold onto. “You’re almost done.”

Odessa breathed deep, focusing on the cold tile beneath her feet and the circle’s energy pulsating against her skin. But she could still hear the screaming. Taste smoke choking her throat. She wanted to open her eyes but irrational fear sealed them shut. As if when she opened them she would find herself back in Kalaro, about to climb the steps to her demise. The past is dead, she repeated in her mind as Yakun had instructed. The past is dead and I am alive. The past is dead and I am alive.

Amidst the screams, one voice rose above the rest. The ka-man’s voice broke through the screeching bedlam. “You cannot hide, Odessa. I will have you bow before me and you will be my instrument of cleansing. My vessel and my scourge.” The ka-man’s voice stretched, becoming rough and raspy as he spoke. “There is no hiding from me. There is no life outside what I afford you. You will find no salvation out there. Only pain and horror.” The ka-man gave way to Talara, her disembodied whisper booming in her mind. Echoing in her skull, a chorus of righteous indignation and condemnation. “You are mine and when you are strong enough, I will have you totally and immutably.”

A chill ran through Odessa’s body. She tried to pull free from the hands that held her in front of the fire but they held firm, ghostly fingers digging into her flesh.

“If you continue to eschew your destiny I will bring you to heel,” Talara said, the words loud and abrasive. The towering fire sputtered and belched sparks in its last guttering gasps. Behind the dying fire, obscured in a churning, impenetrable darkness, was Talara. Odessa could feel the goddess’s presence like a dense pressure bearing down on her every molecule. Permeating her very being with grave-cold dread.

“My mercy comes at a price,” Talara said. “Cease your hiding and become what I require you to be. Or I will have you brought to me in pieces.”

The fire flared in one last explosion of fiery incandescence and Odessa fell back whirling.

She landed on the tile, a sharp burst of pain in her tailbone. Her arm throbbed, waves of stinging heat pulsing beneath her skin. Blood wet her right arm and dripped onto the floor in small drops. Her eyes whirled blindly. Fiery afterimages swirled in her vision. She tried to rub the afterimages from her eyes but as her hand reached towards her face, a great weight fell upon her. Her arm jerked down and was pinned against her chest. She crumpled on her side against the floor, a pressure so great it crushed the air from her lungs and kept her from moving even a twitch.

Yakun’s voice could barely be heard over the thrumming crush of energy crashing upon her. “Weight of the world, become shackle and chain. Weight of the world, become shackle and chain.” A low, crooning chant looping again and again, each repetition bolstered the swell of energy. She gasped and tried to suck in a breath but the unrelenting force would not allow her.

Her vision was darkening, the tile in front of her eyes blurry and dim. Yakun’s voice faded and even the rush of energy sounded distant.

Without warning, the crush of force was gone. She gasped in a shallow breath and coughed, rolling onto her belly and propping herself up on a shaky arm.

“Odessa?” Yakun asked, his voice strained.

Odessa’s forehead dropped to rest on the tile. Her back heaved as she alternated between gasping, coughing, and retching. Her throat was raw and her thoughts muddled as they flooded back into her mind where smothering blackness had begun to take hold.

“Odessa!” Yakun shouted. “Are you there?”

A confused groan was all she could muster in reply.

“What’s going on?” Poko’s voice called from behind the door of Yakun’s sanctum.

“Odessa!” Yakun said. His hands, fingers splayed and tattooed palms exposed, were poised for another incantation. “Are you there? Have you lost your godsdamned mind or not?”

The muscles in her neck twitched and trembled as she lifted her lolling head from the floor. Yakun stood a few paces outside of the circle. In the candlelight, she could see how the color had drained from his pale face. His mouth was a hard line and his brows were knit above narrowed eyes, sharp and wary. The fingertips of his right hand were bright red, a stark contrast to the faded blue runes on his pale skin.

Odessa tried to speak but for a moment her tongue could only form a sputtering of garbled syllables. Her heart still pounded from the nightmare she had found herself slipping into. Her thoughts moved much too quickly to get a hold of. “What happened?” she murmured, rolling to sit on her knees and clutching the fallen cloth to her chest again. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Yakun looked at her a moment longer and then, with a sigh, let his hands drop. The tension in the energy around her lessened and she could breathe easier. His body slouched and he sat, slumped on the chest. The hardness in his face softened but there was still something in his eyes, some sharpness that had not dulled with the rest of his demeanor.

“Your arm, Odessa,” he said flatly with a slight edge of reproach. “It burst in flame. If I hadn’t jerked away fast enough my hand would be nothing but a charred stump right now.” He held up his reddened hand, layers of skin peeled away from his fingertips. Blisters were already beginning to form along the outer edge of his little finger.

“No,” she whispered. “There’s no way. I can control it now.” To her dismay, her arm was hot and the skin at the edges of the furrows and clefts were red and wet with thin streams of blood. The bone-deep throbbing left in the wake of the flames was unmistakable. In the circle in front of Yakun lay the burned remains of the cloth with which he had washed her arm. Her eyes misted. “I can control it, I swear. I don’t know what happened.”

Yakun dipped his scorched fingers in the basin of water, showing neither pain nor relief. His eyes remained on her, inscrutably attentive. “Is there something wrong?” he asked, the question sounding more like an accusation. “Are you angry at me, perhaps?”

“Of course not,” she said quickly. Anger had been the gateway to controlling the flames. It was easy to coax them from her arm with rage and hate. They could emerge unbidden if her anger was strong enough. But she had gotten past that. She could restrain it now. “I don’t know what happened. I closed my eyes and tried to find my oasis but it didn’t work. I was back home on that night again and I heard…” She cradled her throbbing arm in her lap, blinking away childish tears. “I heard the ka-man and Talara and there was fire and next thing I know, I’m on the floor.”

Yakun leaned forward, pulling his hand from the water and letting it drip onto the floor. Poko’s shouts from the other room continued but Yakun ignored them as if they were not there. “You heard Talara?”

Odessa’s stomach dropped. She had never told Yakun that Talara had spoken to her through the mouth of Obi’s corpse out of fear that he would refuse her. She had told him everything but had skirted around the Goddess’s explicit involvement. It had always been mitigated by the ka-man and Obi but now she had come dangerously close to exposing the High Goddess’s vested interest in her. If Yakun knew that Talara wanted her personally, he would abandon her. She knew it. And he would have a good reason. Making an enemy of a High God was suicide. Guilt squeezed her throat but she couldn’t tell him the truth. “It had to be Talara,” she said, trying her best to feign a bit of uncertainty. As if the voice she had heard was not the voice that often graced her nightmares. “I’m sure of it.”

“What did she say?”

“She…,” Odessa started. “She said that I was damned. And that I would never see my family ever again.” She wanted to tell him the truth but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. “She said that no matter what I did, there is going to be no salvation for me and that there is no avoiding my fate.” Skirting the truth made her deception all the more painful. But once she had forced the words out they began to tumble into place, weaving a thread of lies that wound around her throat and compounded the suffocating grip of guilt. “But my nightmares never made the fire come before. Why would they do it this time?”

Yakun ran his fingers through his beard and his eyes became distant for a moment. “Shit,” he whispered. “Shit, shit, shit.” He rose and looked at her. “Your flames came out because that was no normal nightmare. It had to be some malignant spirit or something such as that.” He began to pace around the room, rifling through cluttered tabletops and overladen shelves. “The wards must be much weaker than I thought.”

Odessa's blood ran cold. If that had been no mere nightmare then it had also been no spirit either. That had been no trick of the mind. No trauma unearthed by a maligned spirit. Talara had found her. Arm unbound and wards faltering, Talara’s gaze had fallen upon her again.