Chapter Forty-Four The Maiden at the Cave of the Oracle
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The Maiden at the Cave of the Oracle
“Are you in the market for prophets? You will find many false, and only one true. I am the only mouthpiece of the Great Goddess in the world. I have seen all the other worlds, and those that are yet to be. I know your fate. Will you hear it?”
“No thank you,” the Golden Cobra told the Oracle. “Honestly, I’m hardly ever honest, even with myself. That truth sounds like more than I can bear.”
Time of Lies, ANONYMOUS
Her brother had already been to see the Oracle, and apparently he had told the Cobra exactly how it went.
One climbed the path almost to the top of the peak, and eventually the Oracle’s guards, trying to be stealthy in the undergrowth, would come out and escort you to the mouth of the cave.
You went in alone, the Cobra said, though Caracalla was hoping they would be allowed to go in alone together.
Then you knelt before the Oracle, and offered her drops of blood for the pool in which she saw the future. A simple matter.
She who dwelt in darkness and dealt in prophecy waited for seekers after truth. Her words were harsh, her truth as cold and unyielding as her mountain. The Oracle would know what to do.
“What truth do you wish to know?” Caracalla asked her companions as they climbed.
The Cobra considered. “A redemptive truth.”
Ink frowned. “The real truth.”
“As opposed to the fake truth?” the Cobra murmured.
Ink directed her frown at him. “A villain like you wouldn’t understand.”
The Cobra laughed. “Are you a hero, then?”
“Yes!” said Ink, serious as the grave. “I want to be a hero. I’m going to be a hero.”
Caracalla wished they would learn to get along better.
“I don’t want to be a hero or a villain. I don’t wish for any truths. I don’t want to be part of a story, only to tell one. I want to write a song,” said Merel as they neared the summit, and rounded a curve in the path.
Caracalla had been wondering why they didn’t see any of the Oracle’s guards. She saw a guard now, clad in gold-touched white for the sun, lying face down in the dry grass. Ink gave a terrified shriek and grasped Caracalla’s hand. The Cobra surged forward.
“Don’t bother.” Merel’s tone was very practical. “He’s dead.”
“The Divine Order got here before us.” The Cobra began to run towards the cave, waiting for them as wide and dark as an open mouth about to speak.
The Cobra never reached the Oracle’s cave.
He staggered and almost slipped, and Caracalla saw that what she’d taken for shadows at the cave entrance was dark water.
Fragments of light and colour flashed and disappeared in the water before Caracalla’s eyes.
She glimpsed a tower as bright as a lamp.
A blasted landscape under a red sky. The dark water was a liquid mirror, tarnished and now broken, and reflecting glimpses of impossibility.
This was the Oracle’s pool, overflowing.
Truth had left its cave and spilled out into the world.
Another body lay at the cave’s mouth, half floating and half drowned in the rush of truth. This body was a frail, crumpled thing, wearing a dress of a dozen soiled layers, though beneath its greenish underwater cast, Caracalla saw black and white.
The Cobra skidded to a halt in the brackish water, and fell to his knees. He took the body in his arms, turning her carefully. She was not dead yet. The voice of the Great Goddess, their Oracle, lay gasping soundlessly under the open sky.
Every time Caracalla thought there might be hope, hope was lost. She wanted her brother.
Who would drag an Oracle out of her cave? Who would spill the sacred waters of her pool?
The Oracle’s eyes gleamed as white as a fish that had never seen the sunlight.
When her clawed fingertips scrabbled at the Cobra’s gold-embroidered sleeves, Caracalla saw they were black to the first knuckle, as though she had dipped her hands in ink.
She opened her mouth once more and noise came out – a birdlike caw, nothing like language.
When she cawed, Caracalla saw the tip of the Oracle’s tongue was black as well, as though she had been drinking ink for years.
“What can I do for you?” asked the Cobra. “I’m listening.”
“Every story is a tragedy, if it goes on for long enough,” whispered the Oracle. “You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain… and then you die. In every story, you die. If you go to war, a great kingdom will be destroyed. The prophecy is always one of doom.”
“She’s raving.” Merel’s voice was as crisp and cold as winter air, though his eyes softened with sympathy.
The Cobra paid attention only to the dying woman in his arms. “Did the Great God do this to you, so you wouldn’t be able to call on the goddess?”
The Oracle nodded, then croaked out, through pale lips and blackened tongue, “The coward of the court, they called you, and they were right. Always dancing and weaving away from the truth, from pain, from reality. Truth’s coming for you this time.”
She sounded so tired.
The Cobra stopped frowning. He took the clawed, ink-stained fingers in his steady hands, as if to warm them, and he laughed at her. Not a mocking laugh, but sympathetic, reassuring, as if inviting her to marvel at the absurdity of life together.
“O sacred Oracle, is talking this way a test, or does it make you feel mystical and important?”
Faintly, ever so faintly, like the faintest ripple in a pool, the Oracle smiled back at him. “One grows accustomed. And I get confused. It’s good to see you again.”
“We’ve never met.” The Cobra spoke softly. He didn’t sound puzzled. He sounded scared, as of a dawning realization.
“Not in this world,” murmured the Oracle.
“Not in this version of the story. Everything changes. The flicker of a butterfly’s wing creates a storm.
You pull a thread and the tapestry unravels.
You change one tiny detail of the story, love someone or hate someone or kill someone, and that change is the domino that sends all the rest crashing down. ”
“What’s a domino?” asked Caracalla.
The Cobra frowned down at the Oracle. “It’s a game. You call it muggins, Caracalla, and you play it with bones. We play the same games in every world. Sometimes the game looks a little different, that’s all. My lady Oracle, where do you come from?”
“I don’t remember,” murmured the Oracle. “I have been the voice of the goddess too long. Now I will be silent, as another voice rises. You must remember this. You can still find the goddess in fire and wind, in water and glass. She waits in the gold room. You already know where to look.”
“Do you come from this world?” the Cobra asked steadily. “Or another?”
“What do you know of other worlds!” demanded Ink.
Even if Ink hated him, this was no time to accuse the Cobra, Caracalla wanted to say. But she kept her peace. The Cobra obviously hadn’t even heard Ink. He was listening to the Oracle.
“I come from another world,” said the Oracle. “I was the first through the door. But that was so many worlds and times ago. Had we but world enough and time, and surely I did. But is it ever enough? No time to tell you much, in the end. I’ve never died before. How interesting.”
The Cobra said, like a prayer, “You won’t die.”
“You’re a charmer, Eric Mitchell. That’s why she let you in. But the plan never worked, did it?”
“What plan never worked?” asked Caracalla.
The Cobra clasped the dying woman’s hands tighter. “Maybe it could work this time.”
“No, I don’t think so,” said the Oracle.
“This tale is darker than any before. You once said when we try to change the story, we only make it worse. Perhaps you were right. When I look ahead, I see only darkness. You wish me to speak plainly? The god is watching you. The god is swooping down. The god is coming. Run!”
Her weak voice rose in a desperate, despairing little cry. Her hand rose with it, clawed and straining for the light, as though she longed to touch the sun. Then her hand went limp, all possibility of holding on lost. The Oracle lay still.
In the end she’d said the same thing Lucius had said, with the same urgency in his dead voice. Caracalla held Ink’s hand fast, to drag her away or protect her, she knew not which. Only that she intended to hold on.
“She’s dead, Eric,” Caracalla spoke with resolve. “We have to go. Now.”
Ink approached the Cobra. “I need to talk to you.”
“Ink,” Caracalla said. “You don’t. There is no time!”
When the shadow covered the sun, she knew it was too late.
She lifted her eyes to the skies, and the monster in it. Made of metal, a beast and a sword at once, its wings great blades that cut the air. And the creature’s eyes, the same red that had painted the windows of home when the manor burned and the god came into being behind them.
The Oracle had said, The god is swooping down. Caracalla hadn’t known it would be literal, she had only known swooping would be bad.
It was worse than she could have dreamed.
The dragon descended, iron claws raking up the stones and earth of the mountains.
Metal claws struck Caracalla, snapping closed and open like curved bear traps, trying to pincer in and seize her.
Caracalla threw herself and Ink down the slope, rolling, flat on their stomachs in the grass waiting for the next swoop.
There came a rattle, as a fistful of stones hit the dragon’s shining steel flanks. As the dragon swung its pointed metal muzzle towards the Cobra, the Cobra stooped to pick up another handful of rocks. The dragon opened its jaws.
A throwing-knife struck the dragon in its eye.
The eye must have been glass or something stronger, for the blade glanced off its surface, but the blow left a spreading spiderweb of cracks over the divine-wrath crimson.
The dragon reared. Another knife streaked through the air, aimed at an infinitesimal dark gap between shining scales on its underbelly.
Caracalla knew the blade could not strike true, but then the blade did.
The dragon screamed like a carriage hitting a stone wall, and lurched to the side, wings flaring to take to the sky.
Or so it seemed. The dragon lunged at the last moment, going low rather than taking flight, great claws digging a trough in the mountains deep as a grave.
The claws scooped up earth and grass and stones.
And girls. Ink screamed. Caracalla screamed with her, clutching Ink close and at the same time trying to fight her way out of the dragon’s claws, even as the ground dropped away.
The Cobra came running down the side of the mountain, leaping for them, every laughing line of his face set in terror and determination.
Caracalla thrust her hand out between the iron claws.
Their fingertips brushed. The dragon screeched its rage, a thin jet of flame cutting a black line on the mountain stone, but the flame wasn’t aimed at the creature’s own claws.
In order to seize them, the dragon had gathered up so much earth its claws hung open, earth crumbling away between them like breadcrumbs from a child’s loose fist. It was possible, just possible, that the Cobra could pull Caracalla down through the opening in the metal claws to freedom.
Caracalla saw the shadow of the dragon’s head shift to another angle, and the shadowy jaws open. She didn’t know what the flame would hit this time.
The Cobra got knocked down to the ground by someone who spun through the air with the same incredible swiftness and accuracy as his throwing-knives.
Caracalla knew then she had been deceived. She hadn’t killed those men at the inn. Someone else had.
Merel the minstrel landed, long daggers in both slender musician’s hands, crouched over the Cobra’s body, defending him.
Then the sight of the others, the sight of the very ground, spun wildly away as Caracalla and Ink were lifted up in the dragon’s claws into the hopeless, friendless emptiness of the sky.