Instead, Bexoi’s eyes widened. “Is nothing sacred?” she demanded. “Are there no bonds between women?”
Anonoei thrust with all her might. And now Bexoi grew afraid, alarmed. The emotion touched her body. I have her now. I will win.
At once she felt her body grow hot. A fever beyond any she had ever felt.
“The trick,” said Bexoi, gasping, “is to heat all the body except the head, so that you can remain conscious through the entire process of burning alive.” Bexoi was hurrying, heating her body quickly, trying to distract Anonoei from her probe. And it was working, Anonoei knew, because it grew harder to concentrate on her outself. Her inself was screaming: I’m going to die!
In that moment of desperation she thought of Set, the manmage who never dies, because his ka is free of any flesh. But that’s because he has never fully bonded with a body. I have. This body, this burning body.
Flames erupted from her skin. But she could still see. Her muscles still, for this moment, responded to her will. So she leapt forward, threw her arms around Bexoi, embraced her.
“Don’t you know that I can keep the fire from touching me?” said Bexoi scornfully. “Now die, whore.”
The sudden surge of heat destroyed Anonoei’s whole body in an instant.
But in that instant, Anonoei followed the road she had found into Bexoi’s mind, and then on into her body. I am not dead yet, she thought-but, lacking a mouth, could not say. I am here in you, Queen Bexoi. Not as a visitor, not as a beastmage partnering with his heartbeast. I am here as a ka that knows how to fully possess a body of flesh and bone.
Anonoei felt the cool skin of the new body, the Queen’s body. Suddenly she could see again-through Bexoi’s eyes, because they were now Anonoei’s eyes. She willed herself to move, and she moved.
Moved, and in the movement became the master of this body. She could still feel Bexoi inside her, struggling to control the body, failing, failing.
Anonoei’s dead body was still brilliantly hot, and the bones, not yet crumbled, still held it up. The arms were still wrapped around Bexoi. But Anonoei had no skill as a firemage and did not know how to control it. Nor did Bexoi have access to the body’s ability to command the fire.
So the heat of the fire suddenly passed the boundary between the charred corpse of Anonoei and became an agony of burning flesh in Bexoi’s body, whose pain both women felt.
Anonoei screamed and thrust the burning mass away, but too late. Her own-Bexoi’s own-clothing had been charred in the instant, and the skin of this unfamiliar new body was burning. Anonoei had no knowledge of how to put the fire out. Bexoi knew, but if Anonoei let her have enough control to block the flame, Bexoi’s strong ka would take her body back.
Either die now by being thrust out of this body by its evil owner, or die later from these agonizing burns. Nobody could burn like this and live. I will have died twice by fire, Bexoi only the once.
But then she thought: fall to the floor, smother the fire.
It worked to put the fire out. But it restored nothing. Her flesh was charred. Her bodily fluids were flowing out of the entire front of her ruined body. The pain was so agonizing that Anonoei knew she would faint.
But she could not faint. If she did, Bexoi could take her body back.
Then, to Anonoei’s surprise, she felt something else: Bexoi’s inself was retreating, fading, ceasing to reach into every corner of this half-burnt body. It had never occurred to Anonoei that Bexoi might surrender. It had to be a trick.
No. Not a trick. It was death. Bexoi’s body, the ape her ka had once controlled, was dying, and Bexoi knew it, not intellectually, but deep in the core of her being. It was time to shed the body and move on. Bexoi was no manmage. She did not know how to attach herself to a body and hold on. But Anonoei did.
I will be alone in here.
For a moment that felt like triumph. In the next moment she realized it was failure.
Only if Bexoi’s ka remained in this body was there any hope of having access to her firemagery-not to mention her role as Queen, the love of Prayard, and …
The baby.
The baby, thought Anonoei. The baby! she screamed inside her mind.
If Bexoi heard the thought, she did not respond. She continued receding, dying.
Stay! It was Anonoei’s will, her demand that Bexoi refuse to die.
Here, thought Anonoei, I give you a place to remain. Here are the hands and feet, here is the mouth, the eyes, the groin, the belly with a baby in it. See? I invite you back. No, I will not leave to make room for you. There is room for both. We can both control this flesh, this tortured and dying flesh.
Only half understanding what she was doing, Anonoei drew Bexoi’s ka more firmly and fully into the dying flesh. You will stay through all of it, thought Anonoei. Just as you were going to make me stay conscious until I burned to death-you will stay here in this body until it dies.
But Anonoei knew that was not what she meant at all. For she had not despaired. To her, this body was not dead, was not going to die. For the flake of ba that she had put in Wad was still there, still calling, still demanding that he come. And if he came soon enough, if he came now, he could still pass her through a gate and save this flesh, save even the baby.
That was when she felt the vibration in the floor. Someone standing there. No door had opened. No one had heard the talking or the shouting, or if they heard, they didn’t want to intrude. So only one man in all the world could be standing here, though Anononei had no power to raise her head, no voice with which to speak, no strength to move.
“You killed her and then you burned for it. Justice.” Wad’s voice was quiet. She could feel the grief and rage. “Everything I love you take from me.” So he did love her. It was not just any-bed-when-the-need-comes-on.
And then she realized: He is talking to this dying body on the floor as if it were Bexoi and only Bexoi. He has no intention of healing her. He is going to watch her die.
Save her! Anonoei shouted through the bit of her ba that dwelt in Wad’s mind. She did not try to control him; she did not dare use more than this small bit of her attention, lest the distraction give Bexoi a chance to either slip away entirely, and die, or to wrest control of her body back again.
She could feel Wad’s torment as he wrestled against the impulse she was sending him.
I am Anonoei! Yet how could her wordless ba make such a strange thought clear in Wad’s mind? The ba dealt only in emotions and kinetic memories.
It was emotion, not identity that she needed to send into him. All her love for him.
The trouble was that she did not love him. Not so very much. Enough, yes, to share his bed. But he was also the torturer who had damaged her children. She had managed to thrust her rage into another compartment in her mind, to save it for another time, when it might more usefully be expressed. But it meant that she could not thrust into Wad her love for him because there wasn’t enough of it. Nor could she control him enough to remind him of his love for her, because she knew that he did not love her so very much, either.
But she loved her children. And she knew that he had loved his own child. And there was a living child-still, for one moment more-in the belly of this woman. A child who did not deserve to die, whatever the mother might have done.
Love of a child. Anonoei’s love for Eluik and Enopp. She also reached for his own memories of holding his son, Trick, of playing with him, talking to him. Anonoei had no idea what Wad had said to his son, but she knew that he had talked to him, and she could touch those memories and rekindle them. And she could make him think of the belly of the dying woman lying on the floor of Keel’s office.
She felt his decision at the very moment he passed a gate over her body-for it was hers now, as surely as it was Bexoi’s. The gate did not drive her out of the body; nor was Bexoi any longer trying to die.