Which was why Nannaferi realized she had to move. More and more the copper talents came to her palm, rather than to those other beggars raised beside her. More and more they landed with a knowing clink, a momentary hesitation. One young girl, a Galeoth slave, even gave her an onion, whispering, “Priestess-Mother.”
It always happened this way, even in cities as great as Iothiah. The human heart was ever bent on exchange. Even though people knew the purpose of the Beggar’s Sermon, they were still drawn to her once the rumours of her presence spread. They felt the pinch of their offering, and assumed that this made it Gift enough. If you asked them whether they were trying to purchase the Goddess’s favour, they would insist they only wanted to give. But their eyes and expressions always shouted otherwise.
Such a strange thing, giving, as if the arms of beggars could be the balance of the world.
So Nannaferi would be forced to move, to find someplace where anonymity could assure the purity of the offerings she received. To take from those angling for dispensations was a kind of pollution. And more importantly, it saved no souls. For adherents to the Cult of Yatwer, ignorance was the royal road to redemption.
She undid the veil from her old and cratered face, pocketed the coins in her sack-cloth robe. As though to verify her conclusion, three more coins plopped into the dust before her, one of them silver. Excess generosity was ever the sign of greed. She left them in their small oblong craters. Other Yatwerian priestesses, she knew, would have taken them, saying waste not want not or some other trite blasphemy. But she was not one of the others—she was Psatma Nannaferi.
She grabbed her cane and with shaking elbows out began to hoist herself to her feet …
Only to be struck to her knees.
It began as it always did, with a curious buzzing in the ears, as though dragonflies swarmed about her head. Then the ground bucked and flopped like cloth thrown over fish, and watercolour haloes swung about every living form. And she saw her, though she could not turn to look, a shadow woman, spoked in sun-silver, walking where everything and everyone exploded like clay urns, a silhouette so sharp it cut eyes sideways. A hand reached out and pressed the side of her hooded head, irresistibly gentle, forcing her cheek down to the pungent earth.
“Mother,” she gasped.
The shadow held her, as though pinning her below unseen waters. “Be still, child,” it said in a voice that crawled like beetles up out of the heart of things. It seemed that she would crack open, that her marrow would climb out and wrap her in a newer skin.
“Your brother has finally arrived. The White-Luck Warrior has come.”
The hand leaned down upon her, a sun-swallowing mountain.
“So soon?”
“No, my love. On the anointed day.”
Her body was but a string tied about an infinite iron nail, woollen tailings that trembled in an otherworldly wind.
“And the D-D-Demon?”
“Will be driven to his doom.”
Then the roar vanished, sucked up like smoke from the opium bowl. The blasted streets became a wall of onlookers, peopled by vendors, teamsters, harlots, and soldiers. And the shadow became a man, a Nansur caste-noble by the look of him, with concerned yet gentle eyes. And the hand was his hand, rubbing her poxed cheek the way you might massage a sleeping limb.
He does not fear to touch—
“It’s okay,” he was saying. “You were seized, but it’s passing. How long have you suffered the Falling Disease?”
But she ignored him—and all the others. She clawed aside his hovering hands. She fairly beat herself a path with her cane when she clambered to her feet.
What did they know of giving?
The city of Iothiah was ancient. Not so old as Sumna perhaps, but certainly older than the Thousand Temples—far older. As was the Cult of Yatwer.
The recently built Chatafet Temple in the northeast of the city was where most of Iothiah’s faithful congregated to worship, mourn, and celebrate. By all accounts, it was one of the most successful Yatwerian temples in the Three Seas, bolstered by the ever-growing number of converts among what had been, until the First Holy War, a largely heathen population. But for those initiated in the greater mysteries of the Cult, it was little more than a point of administrative pride. The true importance of Iothiah lay in the funerary maze of the Ilchara Catacombs, the great Womb-of-the-Dead.
The once famed Temple of Ilchara had been destroyed by the heathen Fanim, its marble and sandstone looted over the centuries of their tenure. Now it was little more than a gap in the rambling network of tenements surrounding it. All that remained were gravel heaps hazed by desert scree. Here and there ragged blocks rose pale as ice from the shag of grasses. Sandy tracks marked the paths taken by generations of playing children. Were it not for the black banners stitched with Yatwer’s sacred sign—a harvest sickle that was at once a pregnant belly—nothing immediate would have identified it as hallowed ground.
Psatma Nannaferi led her sisters across a flower-covered mound toward the Catacomb entrance. Their sandalled feet swished through the grasses, adding a strange melancholy to their sporadic conversation. Nannaferi said nothing, concentrated on holding her head high despite her bent back. It seemed she wore her revelation rather than the black-silk gowns of her holy station, so palpable it had become. She could feel it billow about her in winds that only souls could sail. Immortal attire. She was certain the others glimpsed it, even if their eyes remained ignorant. They glanced more than they should, more quickly than they should, the sidelong appraisals of the envious and overawed.
Even scarred and diminutive, Nannaferi was and always had been imposing, a will of oak among hearts of balsa. In her youth, the senior priestesses never failed to overlook her when doling out the reprimands they used to confirm their superior station. Others they scolded and whipped, but they always passed by the “Shigeki pox-girl,” as they called her, in silence. Small as she was, she seemed a weight too great for their flimsy nets. Something about her eyes, perhaps, which always seemed fixed on their tipping point. Or her voice, whose flawless edge called attention to the cracks and twists in their own.
Gravitas, the ancient Cenieans would have called it.
No one dared hate her, for that would have carried too much admission. And all respected her, for that was the only ingress she allowed, the only way to avoid suffocating in her implacable gaze. So she rose through the layered hierarchies of the Cult of Yatwer the way a stone dropped through flotsam. In twenty short years, she became the Matriarch, the Cult’s titular leader, answering only to the Shriah in Sumna. Fourteen years after that, she was declared Mother-Supreme, a station outlawed when the Thousand Temples brought the Cults to heel long ago but maintained in secret for almost sixteen centuries.
A broad trench yawned before the priestesses. Forced to descend the earthen ramp in single file, they momentarily crowded the edge, flummoxed by the delicate question of precedence. Nannaferi ignored them, reached the bottom before the first of them had dared follow. A band of armed men, local caste-menials chosen for their fanatical zeal, fell to their knees as she strolled into their midst. She glanced across their sun-shining backs, nodded in approval as each murmured the ritual invocation, “Hek’neropontah …”
Gift-giver.
Gift-giver, indeed, she silently mused. A Gift they could scarce comprehend, let alone believe.
She paused before the entrance, knelt to one knee so that she might taste Goddess-earth.
Aside from excavating the ancient gate, the Cult had done nothing to undo the sacrilege wrought by the heathen. Looters had stripped the black-marble panels with the friezes depicting the Goddess in her various guises, Sowing, Tilling, and Harvesting, and they had pried off the bronze snakes that had wound about the flanking columns. They had taken little else otherwise. According to local lore, the Fanim had been loath to enter the Catacombs, especially after the Grandee charged with mapping its depths had failed to return. Apparently the Padirajah himself had
ordered the place sealed, calling it in his accursed tongue Gecca’lam, or Pit of the She-Demon.
They were as wretched as madmen, the heathen, and as deserving of pity, their delusions ran so deep. But one thing, at least, they saw with admirable clarity.
The Goddess was to be feared.
Even the Elder Scriptures, the Higarata and The Chronicle of the Tusk, gave the Goddess short shrift, so drunk were the poets on masculine virtues. The reason was obvious enough: Yatwer, more than any of the Hundred, celebrated the poor and the weak, for they were the growers and the makers, the toiling multitudes who carried the caste-nobility like a foul slime upon their backs. She alone celebrated them. She alone held up her hands to grant them a second, more shadowy life. Celebrated and avenged.
Even her brother War, it was said, feared her. Even Gilgaöl shrank from Yatwer’s bloody gaze.
And well he should.
Planting her cane before her, Psatma Nannaferi strode into the shadow of the ancient sandstone lintels. She entered the worldly womb of the Ur-Mother, descended into the company of her long-dead sisters.
The subterranean cemetery wound deep beneath the ruined foundations of its namesake temple, level wheeling beneath level, making a vast drum of the earth. The lantern-light revealed an endless series of brick-vaulted recesses, each packed with urns, some so ancient the script they bore could not be read. For thousands of years, since the days of the Old Dynasty, the ashes of Yatwer’s priestesses had been brought here to slumber in holy community.
The Womb-of-the-Dead.
Psatma Nannaferi could sense the awe in her sister high-priestesses. They shuffled after her in small, solemn clots, the young assisting the old, the awestruck walking in a kind of stupor, as though only now delivered to the truth of their calling—and so seeing their sham piety for the vanity that it was. Only the bitch that posed as the Chalfantic Oracle, Vethenestra, dared affect boredom. Heavens forfend an oracle who has not seen it all.
Take-take-take. It was a wickedness, a pollution, that knew no bounds.
It was the very essence of the Demon.
Nannaferi held on to this passion as she guided them into the void that was the Charnal Hall. Her middle anger, she sometimes called it, where her judgment smouldered just enough to singe the hearts of the weak. Everything was sinful, everything was accountable; this was simply the truth of an unruly and disordered world. The Goddess was surfeit, the Goddess was wilderness, only beaten with hoe and plow into the feeding of the world. Nannaferi was the hoe. Nannaferi was the plow. And before these entombed proceedings were completed, her sisters would find themselves weeded and tilled … fertile soil for the White-Luck Warrior.
There was no vanity in her task. The Goddess had made her into the rule with which the world would be measured—no more, no less. Who was Nannaferi to take heart or pride in this, let alone question the why and wherefore? The knife, as the Galeoth saying went, was no greater for the skinning.
Only more doused in blood.
She told them to space their lanterns throughout the vaulted hollow, then directed them to take seats about the immense stone table in the chamber’s heart: the legendary Struck Table, where the Ur-Mother herself had once chastised her wayward daughters. Nannaferi took the place of the Goddess, so that the cracks that sundered its ancient planes radiated from her withered breast. A fissure seemed to fork and vein its way to each of her sisters, which was good, she thought, for she would be the light that revealed the fractures in them all.
She sat perfectly immobile, waited patiently for the last of their conversations to fade. Several present had only recently arrived from across the Three Seas; there were more than a few old enmities and friendships here, interrupted by appointments abroad. Since friendship was one of the Goddess’s most blessed gifts, she tolerated their banter. It was a rare thing, she knew, to find oneself in the company of peers when you reached the highest echelons of the Cult. Loneliness was ever the cold price of authority, and it showed in these women. Eleva, in particular, seemed desperate to speak.
But the pall of enormity was quick to silence even her. Soon all twelve sat with the same rigid austerity as their Mother-Supreme: the Oracle and the eleven High Priestesses of the Cult. Everyone save the Matriach, Sharacinth—a fact that none could have missed.
“Only once since the time of the heathen,” Nannaferi said, her voice throat-smoky with age, “has the Struck Table been convened. Many of you were here that day. It was a joyous time, a time of celebration, for at last the Cult had regained this place, our Great Goddess’s earthly womb, where the long line of our sisters dwell, awaiting their Second Birth in the Outside. At that time we celebrated the Shriah and his Holy War, thinking only of what we might regain. We did not see the Demon that slumbered in its belly, that would possess it, transform it into an instrument of oppression and blasphemous tyranny.”
She allowed her outrage to twist this final word.
“We did not see the Aspect-Emperor.”
She slapped her cane of sacred acacia flat on the table. Her sisters jumped at the crack. Then she reached into her gown, whose silken folds seemed almost moist where they bunched against the bent joints of her body, and withdrew a small sphere of iron, no larger than a dove’s egg, ringed with indecipherable script. She raised it high between thumb and forefinger, gingerly set it on the table before her …
A Chorae. A Holy Tear of God.
As though following some irresistible logic, the women’s gazes moved in perfect tandem from the Chorae to her face. To be addressed in such a bald manner was shock enough: The Inaugurals, the ceremonial rites and prayers of initiation, were mandatory on such occasions. Now they stared at her in outright astonishment. They were beginning to understand, Nannaferi noted with grim satisfaction.
Their Goddess girded for war.
“But first,” she said, resting her right hand on the shaft of her cane, “we must deal with the matter of the witch.”
With the Chorae before her, the implication was plain: She meant one of them.
Several gasped. Maharta, the youngest of their number (and a political concession to Nilnamesh), actually cried out. Sharhild, with her piggish eyes and radish cheeks, watched with the expression of bland stupidity she always used to conceal her cleverness. Vethenestra, of course, nodded as though she’d known all along. What kind of Oracle would she be otherwise?
A hush fell upon them, so complete it seemed they could hear the dead ashes breathe.
“B-but Holy Mother,” Maharta fairly whispered. “How could you know?”
Psatma Nannaferi closed her eyes, knowing they would be globes of crimson when they snapped opened.
“Because the Goddess,” she murmured, “lets me see.”
Shouting clamour. The clinking thump of a stone stool falling. Eleva leapt to her feet, her arms outstretched, her eyes and mouth shining sunwhite, her hair and robes boiling in some intangible tempest. An uncanny mutter fell from the arches, the walls, from the circumference of all things seen—a voice that crumpled thought like paper. Sharhild flew at her, knife out and stabbing, only to be tossed back, thrown like soiled clothes into the corner. Spectral walls parsed the Charnal Hall, the ghosts of cyclopean bricks. Screams rang through the closeted deep. The priestesses scrambled, scattered. Shadows twisted about the hinges of things.
The thwack of iron on wood. A blinding incandescence. A sucking roar.
Moans and small cries of disbelief rose through the sulphurous reek. Maharta sobbed, crouched beneath the eaves of the Struck Table. “Eleva!” someone cried. “Eleva!”
“Has been dead for days,” Nannaferi spat. She alone had not moved. “Maybe longer.”
The cane tingled in her hands, as if still shivering from the impact. Using it, she walked up to the fallen witch, stared down at the cracked statue of salt across the floor. An anonymous girl, forever frozen in anxious, arrogant white. Buxom. Improbably young.
With an involuntary groan Nannaferi knelt to retrieve her C
horae from the powdered floor. Her blessed Tear of God.
“They hunt us with witches,” she said, her hatred warbling through her voice. “What greater proof could we have of their depravity?”
Witches … The School of Swayal. Yet another of the Aspect-Emperor’s many blasphemies.
Several stunned heartbeats passed before her sisters collected themselves. Two helped Sharhild back to her seat, full of praise for the old Thunyeri shield-maiden’s ferocity and courage. Others crept forward to look at the dead witch who but moments earlier had been Eleva—one of their favourites, no less! Maharta continued crying, though she had been shamed into snuffles. Vethenestra resumed her seat, cast blank looks of apprehension about the Table.
Then, as though once again answering to some collective logic, they erupted in questions and observations. The low-lintelled ceiling of the Charnal Hall rang with matronly exclamations. Apparently Vethenestra had dreamt this would happen a fortnight ago. Did this mean the Shriah and the Thousand Temples scrutinized them? Or was this the work of the Empress? Phoracia claimed to see Eleva touch a Chorae not more than three months previous in Carythusal, during the solstice observances. That meant the witch had replaced her recently, did it not? Sometime close to the secret summons they all received …
But how could that be? Unless …
“Yes,” Nannaferi said, her tone filled with a recognition of menace that cleared the room of competing voices. “The Shriah knows of me. He has known of me for quite some time.”
The Shriah. The Holy Father of the Thousand Temples.
The Demon’s brother, Maithanet.
“They have tolerated me because they believe secret knowledge a valuable thing. They accumulate conspiracies the way caste-merchants do ledgers, thinking they can control what they can number.”
A hard-faced moment.
“Then we’re doomed!” Aethiola abruptly cried. “Think of what happened to the Anagkians …”
Five assassins, convinced they were enacting Fate, had attempted to murder the Empress on the day of her youngest son’s Whelming. It had been a failure and, more importantly, a blunder, one that had threatened all the Orthodox, no matter what their Cult. The rumours of the Empress’s revenge were predictably inconsistent: The Anagkian Matriarch had either been flayed alive, or sewn into a sack with starving dogs, or stretched into human rope on the rack. The only certain thing was that she and all her immediate subordinates had been arrested by the Shrial Knights, never to be seen again.