Chapter 9 Daesra
DAESRA
I REEL as I come back to myself, blinking wildly. It takes a moment for the world around me to come into focus, because I was just in a different world, seeing through different eyes—Isha’s world through Isha’s eyes.
Seeing Sadaré through his eyes. Feeling her under his hands.
She’s with him. And for a moment, I was, too. Within him, rather.
Already I wish I could unsee it, forget the feeling, despite how much I miss her and how relieved I am to know she’s not trapped in some blood farmer’s cage or waiting in an endless line with her aether if not her blood draining away.
I still have to get her out of there. Away from him.
It felt too real, almost as if my fingers were in her mouth—so much so that I actually rub them together to feel the wetness, but of course there’s only salt and grit there.
And even though I’m back in my own body and my own mind, I’m also as hard as he was, much to my utter dismay.
I try to shake the feel of him—of being him—like a cloak. A filthy cloak. Even though I know it won’t help, I want to claw at my tunic to make the process go faster. At least I have some practice shedding another’s perspective, thanks to Sadaré and the maze.
When I finally feel like I’m wearing my own skin again, I realize we’ve moved.
Orseus, Melé, Pogli, and I have somehow been uprooted from where we stood near the blood farm and shifted to a distant hillside vantage, away from the crowds.
The rusty River of Hatred still cuts across the plain beyond the stretching line of shades waiting for the ferry, and the dark sky still roils like a pot of boiling water above the forbidding mountains, but the additional change in perspective, however slight, doesn’t help my disorientation.
Even Pogli shakes himself and spins in a circle, only to shake himself again.
Melé sits down hard against the sandy hillside, looking stupefied, while I nearly fall over from dizziness, bending over double.
It doesn’t hurt that my motion disguises my still-waning arousal.
“The view not to your taste?” Orseus looms only a few paces away, standing slightly uphill from me.
He doesn’t only mean this new view, for which he must be responsible by moving us in a blink. And he’s not actually Orseus. I unconsciously stumble a few paces back from him, still hunched.
As if he heard my thought, he gestures down at himself.
“This was the face of the last man who tried to retrieve his deceased love from my domain. She’d already made it all the way to the Blessed Isles, much to his surprise.
He expected she would be wandering lost and helpless without him.
In fact, she was quite content where she was, happily enjoying her afterlife alone, and yet he remained determined to ruin it for her.
He, himself, didn’t have access to the Blessed Isles since he was a still-living mortal who’d trespassed here through another god’s deal with me, so he lured her out with a song.
Did I mention he was a supremely talented musician? ”
As he speaks, his face and body morph before my eyes until he no longer looks like Orseus, but an unnerving, unmoving figure robed in black, much taller than Orseus was.
There’s not a hair out of place on his head, either in the folded black tail at his crown or in the cut of his short beard.
His pale face is cold and hard, perfect and unforgiving—devastatingly, painfully beautiful, really—like a distant, untouchable star in the darkness of the night sky, while his metallic gray eyes flare down at me with contempt.
I stare up at who can only be Isha Aggatar, the god of death, in undisguised alarm. Orseus, with his soft springy curls, warm skin, and albeit icy eyes, was much easier to look upon—and yet he was Isha all along.
At least I’m no longer aroused.
Pogli whimpers and tucks himself between my ankles.
No wonder he was acting so strangely afraid of Orseus before.
His animal instincts picked up on what I couldn’t, even as a god.
And yet, if he represents the best of who I am, I do wonder what it says about me that he’s cowering in Isha’s presence.
Melé doesn’t react, still sitting and staring blankly.
Which is a little worrisome, but I can’t spare her the attention.
At least her disorientation likely has nothing to do with seeing through Isha’s eyes, like mine did.
He’d seized me, and me alone, when the memory took over, thank the gods.
It was bad enough to experience it without imagining my mother watching.
Isha continues speaking before I can muster any response, waving away the question I’ve already forgotten.
“Not important anymore, but she nonetheless left the safety of the Blessed Isles when she heard his song. And yet, even once they were reunited, she refused to follow him back through hell. He tried to force her. In doing so, he scratched her skin, making her bleed, and shades from the Plains of the Forgotten tore her to pieces.” He pauses, pursing his lips in thought.
He looks like a deep, dark shadow without a source against the hillside—apart from it all.
“I enjoyed personally ripping out Orseus’s soul after that.
That was the deal, if he failed. I still keep it as a token—more of a mask, really—that I’ve never absorbed.
It’s amusing to wear his visage, his personality.
Such a mischievous, conceited fellow, even if he was good on the lyre.
His body is still there on the plain, actually.
” The god casts his sharp gaze to the misty horizon on the far side of the delta, as if he can spot it.
“Now only a statue, a lonely monument to his folly. That’s what happens when I tear the soul out and yet keep it intact versus consuming it.
” His eyes refocus on me. “And that’s also what happens when fools think they can enter my realm and defy the rules of death. ”
I finally gather myself enough to ask, “Would you have let her leave the underworld, if she’d wanted to?”
Isha gives me a slow smile. “That’s irrelevant, because he never would have succeeded in making it out alive with her.”
“Then why let him enter your realm in the first place?” But I already know the answer—and that we’re not only talking about Orseus and his lost love here.
Isha gestures at me. “Why, indeed?”
In my case, he even met me at the gateway and guided me inside. Instead of leaving me to the ghouls, he’d helped me. Or had he? Teaching me to crave and consume mortal souls likely wasn’t a benevolent gesture on his part.
“You wanted him to try so he could fail, just as you want me to fail.” I force more confidence into my voice than I feel, throwing back my shoulders.
I stand tall even as an ill-timed breeze tousles my hair, smelling faintly of salt and rot from the beach on the other side of the hill and then shifting to a burnt metallic scent that must be coming off the rusty river.
I hurriedly swipe loose strands out of my eyes.
“You wanted his soul immediately, not after he died of natural causes, just as you’re impatient for mine. But I’m not a mortal man. I’m a god.”
“I’m hardly impatient.” Isha cocks his head, his hair utterly undisturbed by the swirling gusts. “But you’re indeed much more difficult to turn into a statue—and too much to swallow.”
“How flattering of my… size.” Despite wanting to rip him to pieces, I give him a suggestive wink and raise my arms in welcome, the breeze now fortuitously plastering my tunic against my body to outline my musculature.
Once again, his black robes don’t stir at all, and I vaguely wonder what he’s hiding under there—only to better prepare for our inevitable confrontation, nothing more.
At least I still might be taller than him, if only by virtue of my horns, though it’s hard to tell precisely, when I’m standing downhill from him.
“Well, here I am. If you want me, come and get me.”
He doesn’t move, only lifts a brow in an expression similar to and yet so entirely different from Orseus that it makes my spine tingle. I can hardly believe I walked alongside him, conversed with him, touched him, without realizing what lay beneath that smile.
I suppose he was literally wearing someone else’s soul as a disguise, not only their face. The thought of it almost makes me feel bad for this Orseus, even though he sounded like a complete ass.
“Why would I want you now,” Isha muses, “when I have such a beautiful creature in my possession to distract me? You’re far too wild to tame, unlike her. You must be broken first.”
I’m surprised it took him so long to bring up Sadaré—to try to torture me with the vision of her in his memory.
In partial response, I start to shift slowly over the sand in order to gain an uphill advantage.
Fortunately Pogli doesn’t draw attention to my movements by following me, only waiting with Melé—guarding her, rather, with his fur bristling.
Pure wrath burns a hole in my chest while I shrug at Isha with admirable calmness. “She doesn’t look tame to me.”
Sure, she displayed only meager defiance amidst behavior that was all too enthusiastic, but her willingness must be masking a deeper deception.
I know her; I know she loves me. She wasn’t eager to leave me behind, like Isha suggested in the memory, though it cuts me deeply to realize she traded herself for me—or at least made the gesture of doing so.