Mistakenly so, it seemed.
Putting my back into the makeshift lever, I reflected that I had been quite the fool. Working my strength into the effort, I reflected that I was continuing to be quite the fool, but for different reasons.
It took me three tries, and the lever shaking hard with a splintering crack, before the masonry slid away. I leaned into the resulting hollow to pick up a dead woman. There was no reason to believe I knew her, but even if I had, her face was crushed beyond recognition.
Still, I drew her out and laid her in the street with as much respect as I could muster. Doubting terribly, I climbed back into the rubble to look again.
It had been a strange explosion. I was no expert on artillery or the alchemical arts-far from it-but I was fairly certain objects exploded in either one direction or another. From inside to out, as it were. Or the other way around.
This looked as if someone had taken a bowl full of temple and beaten it with a strong spoon. Everything was folded and mixed. Some material had gone inward, some out. Certain objects were pulverized, others nearly whole.
I clambered over the wreckage, searching for more bodies and looking for I knew not what else. If the gods of the Temple Quarter had been roused before, an attack such as this should have them on their feet and erupting from their own rooftops. Or did even gods know fear?
Some of the bricks that appeared grimed enough to have been the old outer wall had chalk marks on them. Sigils. Spells. Random scribblings, perhaps.
As I searched through the piles, the metallic tang in the air faded. The place already had the air of an old rubble pile. Magic, taking the urgency of the moment with it, covering the site over with varnished layers of time. Climbing back down, I looked into the rubble gap from where I’d pulled the dead woman, and realized another woman had lain beneath her.
This one might still be alive.
I cursed myself and leaned back into the gap. When I worked her free, she groaned. Her eyes were rolled back to whites, which did not encourage me, but her ears were not bleeding, and there was no foam bubbling from her mouth.
Perhaps she would survive.
Dragging her out could not be helping whatever was wrong inside her body, but leaving the woman under the bricks seemed even more foolish. I began praying to the Lily Goddess-the closest I knew to Marya, whose protections had so obviously failed here.
I do not know these women, Goddess.
They are not of Your priestesses. They have probably never even heard Your name. They are hardly of blameless virtue, I am certain.
But if their goddess is not able to ease their passing, or bind their souls back to their bodies, I pray You can do this thing for them on her behalf.
If no one claims them, I will wash their bodies and paint the white and the red, in Your name. Better they should rise up and live longer, though.
Not much of a prayer, and smacked more of funeral rites than a healing chant, but it was what I could manage in the moment.
I laid the women out side by side. The first victim was beyond all hope. Even if the very spirit of the goddess took over her body, her face and neck were crushed. She would never breathe or eat, though somehow her brown hair still seemed rich as life. The second one, whose dark hair and freckled coloration suggested they might have been sisters, at least had found her breath.
Water spattered on me. I looked up for rain, but saw only silver light. The air tingled.
I realized the Lily Goddess had not only heard my prayers, She was answering them directly. In that moment, I was too exhausted to drop to my knees or show obeisance, so I sat back on my butt and impatiently awaited the divine.
Now I knew why no one had run to aid me. I was cloaked in the goddess’ glamour. I had witnessed this in Kalimpura, that only a few could see Her while most others knew nothing but echoing, chilly silence.
“I am here,” I announced. “You might as well get this over with.”
The Lily Goddess stepped out of a place between the air and the sky and smiled sadly at me. Much as with Blackblood, I saw someone who could have been mistaken for ordinary from a distance, except Her body fairly vibrated with power. My goddess was an explosion contained in the shape of a woman. Her hair was the color of all women, Her eyes shifted from gray to green to black to blue to violet to silver, all with the twisting flash of a windborne leaf in autumn. She was all sizes and shapes and ages, from gawky girl to matronly mother to withered crone.
She was all women.
“You never manifested so in the Temple of the Silver Lily,” I said softly. Always She was a wind, a rush of water, a voice possessing the Temple Mother.
Never before have I appeared to you.
Had I been standing, Her words would have driven me to my knees after all. Her lips moved, but the sounds did not quite match. That sense of power arced out of the goddess like water from a stormy sky. My loins went soft and wet, and I felt the first shudders of orgasm take me.
I knew that the tingle of power from the Eyes of the Hills I now carried was less than one of Her nail parings.
Though I tried to answer Her, my own words were muted.
You are Green.
All I could do was nod. That was like moving boulders with my neck. Pleasure arced through me, so intense it was painful, all the worse because I was not free to throw myself into the sensation.
You follow one of My daughters.
It was slowly penetrating to me that this was not the Lily Goddess. Another nod, more rocks dragged by the sheer force of my neck and head. Fluid rushed from my sweetpocket, as it could when a lover touched me just so for a time.
She stepped-if that could be the word-to the two women I had laid out.
My grandchild Solis is dead.
The woman with the crushed face seemed to sigh and settle. She had been lost to life already, but something more had just gone out of her. I clenched my thighs and tried to control myself, against the mad, mad pressure.
A titanic! The realization was so horrifying I wanted to flee into unconsciousness. If I could have stopped my heart to escape Her, I would have.
My grandchild Laris lives.
The surviving sister-if that was who they were, siblings-seemed to breathe easier, though still trapped in the awkward unconsciousness of the badly wounded.
The goddess turned back to the shattered temple. My breathing shuddered so hard I feared to choke. Then I prayed to choke.
My daughter is passed from the world.
The grief in Her voice was the mourning of the ocean for those mountains ground to sand along its beaches. She cried as the stars do for one of their number tumbled from the night sky to strike the earth. I wanted to die for Her loss, to lay myself down as a cloak over Her suffering, and spare Her even a beat of the anguish that threatened my very sanity.
In that moment, I saw for the first time what it might mean to be a god. Not power, but responsibility. Not awareness, but omniscience. Not emotion, but something so large it would shatter the human soul.
You know Me now.
“Yes, Mother,” I whispered, as though the words were drawn from me as with burning pincers. The fires of my lust were all but forgotten.
Your Lily Goddess is one of My daughters.
Desire.
The girl-child you carry is Mine, through your goddess.
Once again, my passion blinded me to sensibility. All I could think was to rise up in anger, ready to shout: You will not have my daughter! The flame of my rebellion, never truly doused, flared even under Her eternal burden of time, power, and sorrow. Nearly crushed beneath the majesty of Her titanic awareness so poorly contained in the swirling woman’s body She wore, I still had to laugh. Or tried to. By the Wheel, this was difficult.