Kanna landed in the filth of the world, in the place where all its waters met. She laid with her back on the ground and gazed up at the sky with wide open eyes while the serpents—now unleashed—burst around her in every direction. She gasped in the frigid air as the eye of the moon stared back, and she coughed at the impure smell of swampy waste, and she writhed in the mud against the vibrating sounds of a world that sang in discord with the silence underneath.
The snakes unraveled into freedom—into the open world that she had created with them—leaving her empty enough to hear that silence underneath her ringing heart, underneath the human cries and the engine roars that sliced through the landscape.
She watched the snakes flowing freely into that world with each labored breath and pulse. She watched the empty space between the few stars overhead and the headlights flickering around her, but none of the light shined into the dark bowels of the ditch where she had landed, and so her snakes were free to wreak havoc.
She laughed in relief. She had awakened from the nightmare. She had never been confined in the first place.
“Pull back, pull back!” a voice cut through her inner silence, a voice screeching from above and inviting her back into the dream—but when Kanna leaned up on her elbows with all of her effort, she could see no one, not even the giant whose shadow had served as her beacon.
She was alone below the banks of an open storm drain. The walls around her were made of mud-smeared brick, growing wetter by the second from both a steady trickle of rain and a thin cascade that spilled over the side. With a lolling head, she watched as her snakes exploded around her and disappeared into the clay, growing more and more faint every second, their colors muting into the grays and browns and dark blues of the night as the outer world became more vivid to her senses.
A plume of smoke burst over her. In the freezing sewer she had fallen into, it was the only source of warmth. She tipped her head back and her own breath mingled with the out-breath of that beast, a huge truck that balanced precariously at the edge of the ditch-side above her, its wheels spinning in the sopping ground, its weight teetering as if it would fall upon her.
“Hold down the brakes! Stop spinning or you’ll slide in! Stop spinning, goddamn you!”
She could see the bottom end of the truck, the endless tangle of pipes and metal, the passageways that forged movement from the burning of her spirits. The wheels shot mud in every direction and speckled her face with more filth. She was mesmerized.
“Stop spinning!” the voice cried louder. It was a husky, overused voice. It was also the voice of a robust woman—Kanna could now tell—though it wasn’t familiar enough for her to be moved by it.
The truck slipped back. With it, a dozen soggy bricks crumbled and a single pebble dropped like hot lead onto Kanna’s forehead.
This was enough to finally move her.
With a cry, she rolled away from the looming shadow and collapsed back into the dream. The monster came splashing down into the mud seconds later, baptizing her yet again with blackened water—but she was grateful for it. She sat shuddering from the near-miss, the flavor of death on her tongue. She watched as the panicked driver rattled the doors from the inside, and as a gigantic woman in a red-collared, black robe leapt from above and landed hard on the hood of the truck.
“Get out!” the woman bellowed. She slammed her foot against the glass of the windshield, and Kanna—still full of odd sensations, still connected somehow to every particle of the world—winced as if she herself would be the one shattered by the heel of that boot.
As the wheels sank lower until the truck looked like it floated in the mud, the driver inside fought the door open through the shallows. A soldier stumbled out, the legs of her uniform already stained as she stood in the sludge up to her knees. Though only paces away, the soldier did not see Kanna at all through the mess and the dark, her eyes trained only on the woman who loomed over her—the woman who had jumped onto the truck with pristine boots and climbed up to its metal roof like the catwalk of a stage—and who was now squatting and peering down into the ditch with a furious expression.
That woman’s face, even in the dark, made Kanna recoil with unpleasant familiarity.
“Don’t you know a direct order when you hear one? I told you to stop backing up!”
“What the hell did you expect me to do? They were coming upon us! They pushed us over! Did you not see, or am I going crazy?”
“If you can’t handle even the beginnings of a light riot, what in the name of the Goddess are you doing in this business, soldier? Who the hell trained you?” Dangling over the open door, the woman in the red and black robes reached inside the compartment and pulled out a heavy chain laced with batons. She tossed one to the soldier and said, “I’ll teach you to handle them. These are fully charged. Set it all the way up and aim for the face.”
Though the soldier caught the baton all the same, she was shaking her head. “Are you insane? Look! There are so many of them!”
Kanna followed her gaze up to the ditch-side, and indeed she could now see a crowd closing in—the choir of voices she had heard coming from overhead. They gazed down at the scene below with keen interest, though they were not as rowdy as they had sounded before, as if some tension had been spent from them. They had a mix of curious and satisfied looks, from which Kanna could decipher the possible guilty parties, but it was hard to tell them apart besides this, since they were all one mass wearing white bathing robes.
“Let us out! We’re sick and tired of these games!” one of them shouted—a shivering woman drenched from head to toe.
“We’ve been trapped in this courtyard for hours!” another said. “My wife works at the central tower and she will have something to say about this tomorrow to her superiors, I promise!”
“Let her say it,” the woman on the truck roof muttered as she clutched one of the rods in her fist and tested the trigger. “Let her come down and say it to me.” When a tiny spark of lightning crackled between the probes, the arch was strong enough to light up her face—and then there was no mistaking who she was:
She was Goda’s master.
The engineer stretched up to her full height, until her head nearly cleared the top of the ditch. Even as the crowd looked down at her, it felt almost as if they were looking up. Some of them seemed to recognize her and stepped away quickly, but most stubbornly remained in place, and one of them—another robust woman—called out:
“Who the hell are you to be keeping us prisoner in this bathhouse? It’s far after midnight, we have families to go back to and the priestess’s funeral to prepare for! If you’re not going to open the front doors of the building, then at least tell the other trucks to move out of the back gate!”
The soldier in the mud near Kanna winced. Recoiling, she nearly stepped backwards onto Kanna without seeing her, her eyes locked on the crowd. “We’re not keeping you prisoner, for God’s sake!” she said, holding up one hand in a placating gesture—but still clutching the electric baton in her other fist. “There’s a blockade in the road that leads out of here and you wouldn’t be able to get home anyway. We were told not to let anybody out of the bathhouse until they can ensure that no one will go uphill to the central temple. There’s nothing we can do! It’s got nothing to do with us, so have some patience!”
“That makes no sense. If we can’t go to the temple, then what the hell was that whole funeral procession for earlier? Doesn’t the priestess’s ceremony start an hour before daybreak?”
The soldier and the engineer exchanged a look, one that Kanna did not understand.
“Well…,” the soldier began carefully, as if she were tiptoeing in a pit of hissing snakes. “The funeral is postponed for now. For undisclosed reasons.”
“What?”
The question emerged at the same time from several voices. An angry murmur spread through the crowd, and this seemed to attract even more onlookers, until the collective had nearly spilled over the edge.
Helplessly, the soldier lifted her arms higher and nearly dropped her weapon. “Look, I don’t know much more than you do! Somebody at the procession went around spreading rumors that they saw the priestess’s body move, and then a bunch of people showed up at the temple mount demanding to see her. She’s not ready to be shown yet—the Mother hasn’t even witnessed her—and besides all that, everything up there has turned into all-out riot, so we’re not about to add more people to the chaos!”
“Enough!” the engineer shouted. “Why are you even trying to reason with these idiots? Don’t you know how a mob works? The more you tell them, the stupider they get!” She leapt onto the side of the ditch towards the crowd, and though she slid down at first, she regained her footing and pulled herself up over the ledge. “Move! I need a path through to the front of the bathhouse. We can’t go on like this, I need to get some backup and ask the High Minister when we can let you people out in an orderly fashion.”
She had yelled this at the mob, but the half-naked robust woman on the banks of the ditch still held her ground. She caught the engineer by the shoulder and shouted: “Again! Who the hell are you? If you’re fixing to make your way out, then you’re taking me with you! You’re letting all of us out!”
But the engineer did not answer. Instead, she shoved the baton against the other woman’s throat and fired. The bather landed hard on the ground, her bravado overcome with a stiff shock. Without any pity, the engineer tapped her on the side with her boot, then glanced up at the dense crowd.
“Fight me,” she said. Her posture was open, her chin raised to show her red-collared throat. “Go on, fight me tonight, then find out exactly who I am in the morning.”
To Kanna’s surprise, the sea of people broke open—partly—and the last few that had crowded around the engineer retreated, though Kanna wondered whether it was from this show of fearlessness or if they had also come to realize who she was.
The woman was insane, Kanna thought. The bathers had clearly sensed it, too—but much as it had been with Goda, that same insanity had opened up a path for Kanna all the same.
She would follow. She would let this giant lead her out into the world.
Kanna dragged herself along the sopping ground of the ditch and towards the wall. Along the maze of the brick mortar were some gnarled roots that led up to a sparsely-covered tree. It was the only thing that dwarfed the engineer at the ditch-side. Kanna grabbed a handful of the roots to start her climb, but before she had even risen up to her feet, a startled scream echoed through the trench.
The soldier from before splashed down into the waters. She had finally noticed Kanna’s movement—Kanna’s presence—and as the last few serpents changed color and merged into the wall, the woman stared at Kanna with wide eyes.
“What is that?” she cried. She peered hard through the darkness, her eyes dancing wildly all along Kanna’s features and the spiraling shadow of the snakes. “Who…are you?”
Kanna glanced at her. For the first time in her life, she looked down at a soldier with pity.
“I am no one,” she answered—and then she continued to ascend without another thought, leaving behind what she had been born into only moments before. Though the wall was slippery with the slime of her birth, she was able to wedge her fingers into the grooves that the Goddess had provided and use her roots to pull herself up onto the white stone of the courtyard.
At first, no one noticed her. She looked across the expanse of bodies, hundreds crammed into a garden hardly bigger than the one she had seen in Karo, the only gateway to the street blocked with quaking trucks. A stone building loomed over them, too. Its tall, spiraling columns cast many shadows, and when she focused, she could still see a faint rippling of snakes in the darkness and a thin sheet of pristine water that had coated the stone in many places. It was fed by a broken fountain in the center that sputtered what seemed like a freezing stream, as the bathers who could not escape it ducked under the shelter of the few small trees.
The back entrance to the bathhouse—the only other exit from the courtyard that Kanna could see—was stuffed with people shoulder to shoulder, far too many for her to see any sign of a front door that led to the street. They leaned and rippled in a stand-still wave as if they were trying to desperately flow further inside, as if they were held in place by some unseen force. The open windows were exploding with people as well, some spilling out along with all the steam.
But even though the bathhouse was full to bursting, Kanna spotted the engineer pushing her way towards the threshold, knocking bathers out of the way as if they were merely hollow statues. Crouched, Kanna dashed between human columns, staining pristine legs with wet mud every time she bumped into someone. It was hard not to leave her mark: People stumbled around her, pushing each other, dancing and flowing in wild, opposing directions. Every touch felt harsh to her senses and jolted her. Every touch sent a new surge of emotions that she could not understand, as if new snakes had been born from the contact alone.
When she crawled into the wake of the engineer’s robes, where the path was most open and parted, she reached out to grasp her master’s master, to not lose her in the horde. With a flinch, she thought better of it. She pulled back instantly—but by then it was too late.
“Who touched me?”
The question sounded ridiculous to Kanna. With both of them swimming in a sea of hundreds of bodies, who had not touched her? Still, Kanna did not flinch again when the woman spun around. The engineer looked at her with astonishment, as if Kanna were some mythical creature of the night that had materialized from the shadows of the courtyard.
There was an odd quiet. Kanna felt a widening yawn growing behind her, and she glanced over her shoulder to find that others were staring at her as well, in utter shock, avoiding the muddy slug-trail that she had smeared from the open ditch.
There was no sense in hiding anymore. The monster inside her was out in the open, so Kanna merely looked up at the engineer with no feeling of fear, or of aversion, or even of deliberate courage. On her hands and knees, covered in filth like a shameless animal, she had never felt so much dignity.
“You,” she commanded. “Give me the key to Goda Brahm.”
And then she held out her hand.
Their mutual stare lasted an eternity—many more centuries than Kanna had expected—but slowly, very slowly, the woman’s gaze transformed from one of revulsion to one of realization.
She crouched. Narrowing her eyes against the mix of ice and steam between them, she peered deeply into Kanna’s face.
“…Rava?”
To be continued…