Uta: The Temple of Qalita: Qemassen
Eshant was faced away from Uta, a lantern's orange glow beaming from in front of her so that her shadow-black silhouette was bordered by flame—an eclipse in human form. Eshant didn't turn at the crunch of Uta's sandals upon the rubble-strewn path that meandered downhill from the depths of Qalita's temple. Whatever had transfixed her, its claws dug deep.
Even after months making her way past the debir and to the hidden door marked by Qalita's relief, the passage still made Uta's hair stand on end. It wasn't even the knowledge that enumerable Lora bodies still lay crushed beneath the buried path, but the dim light and the constant roar of the waves. Ocean air whistled past the cramped stones that blocked access to the lowest parts of the passage, drenching the thick underground air with salt. Sometimes, when she stood at the wrong angle, the whistling sounded like screams.
Uta tapped her cane against the uneven ground, doing her best not to look at the doors leading down to where Eshant stood waiting. The gods all looked angry in the low light—glimmering evils with hunger in their eyes. The first time Eshant had led her down here, a trick of the light had made it look as though Leven and Pepet were moving. Part of her was anxious to see them frozen in place and have it proved just that—a trick. But the tunnels and rooms beneath Qalita's temple were strange.
Uta cleared her throat before speaking. "I shouldn't think you'd like to acknowledge your handiwork." However much she tried to keep the judgement from her voice, it seeped in anyhow. Some feelings couldn't be neatly tucked away.
Eshant shuffled her weight from one foot to the other, but she never broke her stare at the rocks below. "My handiwork." The words might have been spoken as a refutation, but it didn't sound like it. They sounded like an echo, mournful and reflexive.
As Uta approached, the light from her own lantern—the one given to her by her parents and mysteriously returned to her but a week ago—frolicked across Eshant's back, revealing the rough spin of her plain brown robes.
To Uta's left, lanternlight glowed warmly against Qalita's hideous faces—jackal, ass, and witch—the relief coming alive one moment before sinking into shadow as Uta's lantern swung to the rhythm of her steps. She hastened toward Eshant, the better to put distance between herself and the goddess.
Eshant shifted, nearly turning at Uta's approach. "I'm surprised you care what happened to Qwella," she said. "You hated her like you hate the rest of them."
Surely Eshant knew why Uta would care? "Convincing someone you love them only to stick a dagger in their back isn't something I've been taught to value." She paused, allowing the words to fester. "I can see how in Qanmi's house, you'd have learned a different lesson."
Her words echoed faintly, bounding down the tunnel ahead of her to join the wild call of the waves beyond the blockage.
"If I learned so well," Eshant said, choked. "Why do I grieve?"
Uta loathed everything Eshant represented, but even her throat grew tight. She didn't speak, listening instead to the howls of the tunnel.
"Sometimes I come down here hoping to hear her," said Eshant, louder than before, her voice higher pitched than Uta was used to from the slaves' meetings, where Eshant still pretended at being a man. Either way, it was an affectation.
"Does she ever speak?" Uta asked.
Eshant turned to face her. "You can't hear them?" Her cheeks shone with drying tears.
The freshness of Eshant's grief was uncomfortable to look upon, the dense blackness of the stone-clogged tunnel easier to stare at. Uta focused on a narrow hole between two large slabs of rock. The whistle of the ghost screams seemed to whirl uphill from inside that hole. The deeper Uta looked, the louder the sounds, cloaking her in a second skin that smothered her real one.
