651 - Come Back to Us

I flung my gloves over my ears as the Temple started making this agonizing shriek, loud enough to freeze everyone where they stood.   

Almost everyone.  Minis froze as though struck by lightning and Idiesas, already moving, shoved past the Fenjitzae, the Imperial robe falling to one side with a clatter, grabbed Minis and dragged him bodily back through the doors of the Temple. Virani-e was shouting, "Just one dart he's dropped it he's THAT WAY!"

Idiesas was yelling orders, even as he moved Minis back, but my husband moved as though he were a solid statue, not a body, his arms and hands frozen, half raised, and when Idiesas laid him down on the stone he went down stiff and he ‘clicked’ as he was laid flat.

I saw all that, heard all that, even as I ducked under Inensa’s protective hand.  Jorasa had the baby and dodged the other way. The Mahid girls had closed around us and were getting us back, away from the dart-shooter or shooters, into the Temple.  I wanted to go that direction anyway but not away from Mins. Someone, Idiesas and Chevenga and Kallijas and half a dozen others were calling for a healer, yelling orders.

Not for nothing had I trained with the girls in the faib bowl even though they were trying to protect me.  They weren’t going to keep me from Minis.  I’d ducked under Inensa’s hand and turned sideways, flung myself skidding past Jorasas’s knees and then up and over to my husband’s body.

And that was when everybody went still as though cast in glass.

The noise from the Temple went up and up and down and down till Minis’s stiff body and I were jouncing up and down on the tiles and people were falling over and there was this high, thin note that was like a lance of lighting.  I couldn’t tell if it were from all Ten Gods or just one but from inside the Temple this lance of wiggling light reached out and touched the tip of the dart in Minis’s chest.

It spread out over his chest, the black lines following what I assumed were veins and my hands jumped and shuddered on him and my heart thudded in my chest and I screamed at the Gods “You aren’t driving me away!”  I closed my hands on his arms hard and clung. He was hard, like a statue, not breathing, not warm.  Rigid.  In the wild light of the fire from Selestialis his hair stood out all around his head, like mine.

There was a lot of screaming and shrieking and orders going on outside and near us but no healers coming and I looked up and found that the Temple had somehow shut us away from everyone.  There was a cage of fingers of lightning reaching from the top of two pillars, closing us in. I could feel the quivering light all around me and the crackle as fingers of light joined to make a bright wall, so bright my eyes were full of tears.

Temple was touching, touching, touching Minis with fingers of lightning inside here with us. Our hair stood on end, puffed out all around but I refused to let go of my husband.  “Heal him, oh Ten, I plead.  Save him!”

Idiesas was just outside the bright, dangerous fingers of God. He was all right enough that he was gesturing outside.  He’d pulled Minis into the Temple and the Temple had put a shell around us.  There was scorched and burned and melted gold tile all around us, the edges of my dress and my sleeves but Minis was cool as marble.  Still as ice.

The dart was gone, evaporated but the blackness of the lightning tracing along his pale skin I could see.  “Selinae, Mother, help, let me help!”

I don’t know if She answered me but I pulled my crackling, distended hair down and wrapped it around his stiff body in an echo of Her holiness.  “Mother help us.”  My own hair stung my hands as I wrapped him in it.

I was strong enough to pull his rigid body into my arms, all with the Temple lightning playing over him and over me.  I quivered and shook and caught my breath and felt as if I were on fire and jumping and shivering, but I would not let him go.  “Risae, Mikas, Anae... mother of darkness take this darkness, as Aitza I plead with you, Oka Goddess, cleanse this most insidious of poisons, the darkness of death.”

His face was still.  His lips were pale as marble.  We sat, encased in fire, with haze of light all around us making it very hard to see anyone outside. Inside the crackling thunder of the lightning the noise from outside was strange and muffled.

I kissed his still, marble lips, willing warmth and softness and life into them, even as they sucked the heat out of mine.  “Come back to me, Minis.  Come back to us.”