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 Gilgaцl 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 sun-white, 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.'
