thing, I think.” He could still taste the essence of that soul he’d freed; he understood now how she had lived for so long. The lives entering her had passed to her a little of their being, each one rolling back her age. “Once upon a time, you lost your wits. You had already a power, a great and fearful power that frightened your people, and in the madness of isolation this gift transformed. It grew. You became as I am.”
He drew beside her. His hands embraced her, and for the only time in her life Missansha felt what it was like for others to stand near her. There was no pain, but she was sundering from the world. “Am I dying?” she asked.
Death answered, “No. Something else.”
She could not think what to say.
When it was done, her metempsychosis, they opened the eggs together and let Missansha’s songs fly. It was orgasmic. The songs swirled and swept through her. She leaned back her head, and her tongue flicked at the sky. She moaned and would have swooned but Death caught her. “You’re not used to it,” he told her. “So many at once is dizzying.”
She would have agreed had she been able to speak, but her voice failed her. She looked into his empty eyes and realized that she could see. He, as if apprehending her confusion, said, “Your corporeal eyes could not see; but you no longer have need of them.”
Soon the last of the souls had been released from where Missansha had collected them. She had been preserving them—though she hadn’t recognized it—as a dowry for her groom.
When, after some days of speculating, the surviving people climbed the tower, they found the room at the top abandoned. No trace remained of Missansha save for her cast-off skin. Her body was missing and the floor covered with shattered eggshells, dry and empty; covered also with the bodies of a hundred spiders, curled and desiccated.
Of Death himself there was no sign, either.
“And that,” said the snake, raising his head from her lap, “is how my people met Death. In return for providing him with a bride, we were given very long lives. And we’ve never been sure if that was his blessing or his punishment for how we’d treated her. What do you think?” He leaned over Leodora; the sun had all but set now, and the penultimate orange glow glittered in his eyes like hunger.
“Both,” she answered without hesitation, and the snake tilted his head thoughtfully and then gave a small nod.
“Ssseeyash,” he said and placed his head on her shoulder.
“What does that mean?”
His tongue darted. “It’s not translatable; you don’t have the concept in your language. It references the shedding of the skin, the death of the old shell and the life manumitted beneath, the balance of the two coexisting being true existence, and so it is a word that expresses ultimate truth.”
“That’s a very complicated way to say you think something is true.”
“Yes, which is why we have a simple word to hold all of it.”
She reached up and stroked his nose. He sighed and closed his eyes. After a moment he muttered, “You’re dangerously brave, Leodora.”
“Foolishly so?”
“That has yet to be determined, and won’t be by me. You imagine that stories protect you, and that makes you brave. But it doesn’t mean it’s true.”
“Is that a warning?”
“Advice. Nothing more. Death comes looking for everyone eventually.”
“I’ll try not to invite him.”
“I suppose you must take it lightly,” he replied. “To do otherwise is to admit your fear.”
“If I let it stand in my way, I’ll never get off this boat. I wouldn’t have gotten on in the first place. I wouldn’t have ridden a sea dragon. I’d have married the choice of my uncle.”
“All concrete objects of fear, real and tangible,” said the snake, and she knew by the way he said it that there was another kind of fear he didn’t speak of.
She would have asked him, but at that point one of the crew members raced past to the boat’s prow, and she turned to look where he did.
Riding the horizon, a black sail protruded against the sun’s ember. It was tiny, but clearly a ship.
Soter walked up beside her. She looked at him, and saw abject horror on his face. His gaze flicked over the water to where the crewman was looking, then down at her as he said, “You have to come inside. Now.”