She’d known the way all along.
The Hirana led her to a cloister room—a small, unassuming cloister room—that had once been tended to carefully. Even in those days long gone, it had been plain, bare but for the pattern of waves etched into the walls and floor.
The lines flowed around Priya’s feet as she walked.
The way to the deathless waters was not fixed. It appeared where it chose to. As a little girl, Priya had sprawled more than once over the opening, her head tipped over the edge in room after room, listening to the howl of the cavern beneath, the hollowness inside its stone shell. It had sounded mournful. Like sea. Like song.
The floor had no opening now. But Priya kneeled down. She set her hands to the stone.
She should not have been able to open the way alone, only once-born, with none of the stronger gifts of her fellow children. But the deathless waters wanted to be found. The Hirana had been shaped by temple hands, temple child flesh—living and dead—and it moved and clung and changed around her with the ebb and flow of her own heart. It wanted this for her.
The ground rippled beneath her, great waves of stone drawing back. The earth opened.
Priya stared down into the darkness. Pressed her teeth to her tongue, a light and grounding pain, and sat on the edge. She lowered her feet. Nothing met them, for a moment, and then the earth moved once more, vegetation forming a step beneath the soles.
She straightened. Took another step. Another.
It was a long way down into the dark. At least her memory hadn’t lied about that. By the time she reached the bottom—felt cool loam beneath her feet, and the chill of deep darkness around her—she was parched, all the magic in her run dry.
But she didn’t need it any longer. The deathless waters lay before her, a long coil like the great sinuous curve of a snake. In the dark beneath the world, it glowed a faint blue. She heard it in the silence: a drumbeat, a whisper, a music in her soul.
Priya looked at the waters. She thought of Bhumika begging her not to follow this path, the look in her eyes saying she’d had no real hope of controlling Priya and never had. She thought of Ashok, twisting his hand in her chest, driven by fury, and how he had held her when she was small and they were alone. She thought of Rukh, whom she’d tried, in her own small way, to hold and protect in turn, living her childhood all over again.
Priya was not here for them, or despite them. Their voices remained with her, but underneath it all was one simple truth: Priya had wanted to find the deathless waters not for Ashok or her dead temple siblings, but for herself. She had always hungered for it. And now she was here.
She didn’t allow herself to think anymore. She took a step forward, and another, and immersed herself.
A rush of water. The grip of pressure around her skull, a band like clutching bones around her lungs, luminous blue meeting the snap of her opening eyes and—
Silence.
ASHOK
“So how do we proceed then?”
“Proceed?” Kritika’s voice was deferent, as it always was. Ah, ever-watchful Kritika.
“What,” said the man, an edge of impatience in his voice, “will you give us for the weapons?”
The men before him were Ahiranyi and Srugani, and they’d taken this village, abandoned when the rot overran it, as their own. Someone had done a poor job burning the rot away, and it still hung about them: vivid flowers hanging from the walls, slick and venom-bright. Great curling roots, pulsing with a fleshy sentience, poured through the cracks in the floors. Most of the men had some hint of rot about them: a dust of strangeness to the veins of their hands, or pollen in their hair, or a quality of bark to their faces.
They wore sacred wood, for what little good it would do them. It was the only reason they weren’t all yet dead.
Ashok and the brothers and sisters who’d joined him in drinking the deathless waters were safe from the rot, or so it seemed. The rest of his followers had taken suitable precautions, and wore cloth bound about their mouths and noses, their hands swathed in gloves, beads of sacred wood bound on long threads around their throats.
These thugs—this militia—had nothing to live for and no one else willing to barter with them. Although rot couldn’t be spread between people, the rot-riven were still shunned. There were precious few other gangs that would consider causing them harm, but none would trade with them either, and from the pinched look of the man’s face, the starkness of his cheekbones, food was running scarce. It made them both willing to sell their fine weapons for any ridiculously low barter they could manage, and also made them entirely volatile. Either Ashok’s people would leave with everything they wanted, or the thugs would try to ensure they left with nothing at all.