Nimh raises both her hands to her eyes in what’s unmistakably a gesture of respect. “They are the divinities that came before me,” she murmurs.
Seeing such a long row of them—seeing the history she’s a part of—is sobering. I walk past them quietly, only looking at them out of the corners of my eyes.
When we reach the last of the statues, the black paint becomes crisper and cleaner, more recent. The third to last is a barrel-chested man, half a head taller than any of the others.
And then comes the second to last. It’s about Nimh’s height, and it’s clearly a woman, its midsection swelling out to round hips, a few artful lines of black paint giving it straight black hair—except for one white stripe that runs down through the black, a single white lock.
And someone’s done their best to smash it, cracks running up and down its body, gashes taken out of it from head to toe.
This must be Jezara, written out of history for daring to follow her heart.
Next to it stands the statue that must be Nimh, small and slender—they’ve represented her as the five-year-old she was when she was called.
When I sneak a glance at Nimh, her eyes rest on the ruined depiction of her predecessor. Her face is expressionless—but I know what she must be thinking. If not for Jezara’s choice, she would be with her riverclan now.
She has suffered most because of Jezara’s decision. Does she hate Jezara for what she did?
Or does she, somewhere deep in her heart, feel sympathy for her? Does some tiny part of her wonder if it was a sacrifice worth making?
I wish I knew how to ask her.
Nimh straightens, her brow furrowing as she scans the abandoned village. “They should be here,” she whispers, though no one else is around.
I find myself whispering back, unable to shake the feeling of being watched, listened to. “Maybe they all went down to the river, or to forage, or …”
“All of them?” Nimh turns to look back at me. “The infants, the ill, the elderly who cannot walk?”
Before I can reply, a sound cuts through the silence. Neither of us speak, freezing where we stand. Nimh’s wide eyes meet mine, and for a moment everything is still. Then the sound comes again.
A child’s laugh, half-lost on the wind.
Every hair on the back of my neck stands on end, but before I can say anything to Nimh, she’s whirling around, sprinting off in the direction of the laughter.
I swear and scramble after her.
“I am Nimhara,” she calls, “the living divine. I need shelter and aid. Can you help … ?”
We round another bend, the cat running out in front, and the canyon doubles its width, broad enough now for a thin slice of sunlight to reach the bottom. Buildings in various states of repair line either side, from houses carved into the rock itself, to rickety constructions of sun-bleached wood, draped with colorful fabric for roofs. The dark holes of windows in the stone houses seem to follow us.
Nimh slows to a halt, casting about for the child—then stops with an audible gasp.
She’s staring at a small island of red-and-brown sand raised up at the town’s heart. A small pile of rock and rubble lies atop the island in a paler gray stone.
Nimh stumbles to it and drops to her knees, picking up a piece of broken rock with one shaking hand. There are shards of broken red glass mixed in with the rock, and something minute within the stone itself glimmers for a moment in the sunlight.
“What is it?” I ask. But as I speak, I recognize that glimmer. I remember it from the cave we used to shelter from the mist-storm, and from our engines back home. It’s sky-steel ingrained within the rock.
“This was the guardian stone.” Nimh’s voice is trembling. Then she looks up over her shoulder, her eyes wide, but her gaze steady. “Someone has destroyed it—that is why this place was abandoned. It is no longer safe from mist-storms.”
I shift my weight uneasily from foot to foot. “Then we should go. Get back to the river, keep moving. There’s nothing we can do here, and you’re certainly not going to find help in an empty village.”
But Nimh’s looking around, her wide eyes full of distress. “We cannot leave,” she murmurs. “Not without finding that child—they must have gotten lost, separated from the others.”
I want to tell her that the laughter we heard was her imagination—that it was the wind, or birdsong.
But I heard it too.
A flicker of movement in one of the empty windows makes us both start. I realize Nimh’s taken a step closer to me, though I can’t tell if she’s scared, or trying to protect me, or both.
“Show yourself,” Nimh calls in ringing tones. Her life as a goddess has certainly trained her voice, which emerges without a quaver.
The only answer is the faintest whisper of a laugh on the breeze.
Now that my eyes are used to it, they’re finding bits of movement everywhere. A flutter of a curtain here, a shift of the shadows there.
“I am Nimhara,” she calls, in that same bell-like voice, “Forty-Second Vessel of the Divine.”
Nimhara, the canyon whispers back, stretching the syllables on the wind. Nimhaaaaara …
Nimh turns in a slow circle, though her eyes dart this way and that, scanning the windows.
Diviiiiine …
The words float back again just a fraction too late to be an echo. Nimh’s gaze meets mine, her eyes wide. I feel her fear like a knife’s blade trailing down my back.
“Let’s go,” I whisper. “Nimh, let’s just go. The people have abandoned this place. It can’t be safe.”
“They did not abandon it,” Nimh murmurs, reaching out and placing her palm against the base of the broken guardian stone. “There was a mist-storm … Can you not feel it?”
“You mean they’re …” I swallow, trying to imagine an entire village struck down. “Mist-touched. Like Quenti?”
“Oh, no.” She stands amid the ruins of the stone, the rising wind tossing her hair around. Her eyes meet mine. “Much, much worse.”
“I don’t understand,” I mumble, though the worst part is that I think I do. “Where are they, then?”
Nimhaaaaara … , whisper the many dark eyes in the canyon walls.
Nimh shivers, and whispers back to me, “Everywhere.”
Then her eyes flick to the side, fixing on something just behind my shoulder. My body won’t move, so I watch Nimh watch the thing she’s just seen behind me.
Slowly, her gaze never wavering, like that of a falconer approaching a wild bird, she slips one hand into a pouch on the belt she wears. Under her breath, she murmurs something. She visibly draws herself up, fills her lungs, and then casts her fist out, tossing a powder past me.
The air sparks and flashes, half deafening me—but not enough that I don’t hear the hissing, howling sound as her spell finds its target. The cold sensation crawling across my shoulder vanishes, and suddenly I can move again—suddenly I can’t not move.
We run, feet pounding the hard-packed earth, my lungs aching, my pulse roaring. When I risk a look over my shoulder, at first I see nothing, the landscape jumbling up in my gaze as I run. Then I focus, and see movement near the guardian stone, where I’d been standing. Something is writhing, stirring inside like ice-pale smoke, against the ground.