Idol of Glass by Jane Kindred

Author:Jane Kindred
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gods;goddesses;shape shifters;gender bending;reincarnation;magic
Publisher: Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
Published: 2015-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

Nineteen: Vitality

Soth AhlZel was a monument to Ra’s failing. Why in all Meerity had Shiva returned to this abomination? The ancient city rose above her in all its twisted madness. Ra lowered her eyes as she approached the temple, trying not to see the gargoyle mounted at its peak like a figurehead on the prow of a ship. The life-sized shape of a woman stood with legs planted firmly apart and arms braced back against the temple dome as though it were a real woman in a possessive pose over the temple itself. The face was her own.

Perched still and seemingly empty in the morning light, Ludtaht Shiva was thick with the invisible emanations of Shiva herself. Ra avoided the altar room. Mercifully, Shiva wasn’t there but somewhere deeper in the maze of her temple, and Ra was spared facing the place where she’d taken Ahr’s life. Shiva’s blood in her veins seemed to glow red-hot as she came closer, desiring its mistress. By the time Ra reached the divining pool, it burned like acid beneath her skin.

She stopped at the arch of the room that contained the pool from which she’d drawn pieces of her own soul, like fine tatting unraveling in her madness. From which she’d somehow conjured the dead soul of RaNa. The water in the pool was the color of rubies, and Shiva lay beside it.

She was still warm, but her pulse was faint.

Ra carried her to the blood-red chamber into which she’d often disappeared in Ra’s boyhood in the life before, but to which Ra had never been admitted. It was like the web of a spider, carnelian drapes of translucent silk strung in swags like predatory arms across the vaults of the ceiling, down the walls, shrouding the bed. Ra had brought this room back without knowing it, one of the unmistakable vibrations of Shiva she couldn’t have suppressed if she’d wanted to.

Like the gargoyles that perched on Shiva’s towers, there was a touch of the grotesque here. Paintings hung amid the blood-colored drapes portraying the ancients’ idea of the underworld, a menagerie of beautiful creatures locked in perpetual torment—on the points of spikes driven through them, latticeworks of bonds cutting through their skin, and ravagings at the hands of demons. The columns at the arch of the room were similarly etched in images of transcendent beauty among instruments of unspeakable torment.

Ra stretched Shiva’s body on the dark bed behind voile curtains so red they were almost black. It was a peculiar contrast to the colors of Ludtaht Shiva. Her temple was an immaculate tomb, almost puritanically white, with touches of green so pale as to be mistaken at first glance for more of the same. It was as though she’d hidden her secret self here at the center of a labyrinth of indifferent ice.

Shiva’s right arm was raw and terrifying, pooled into a mass of exposed muscle and bone below the elbow. As Ra placed it carefully against the stomach of the leather vest, Shiva gave evidence that she was still alive with an inhuman shrill of pain.

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