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 Chorae 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.
Nannaferi shook her head. 'We are a different Cult.'
This was no vain conceit. With the possible exception of Gilgaцl, none of the Hundred Gods commanded the mass sympathy enjoyed by Yatwer. Where other Cults were not so different than their temples, surface structures that could be pulled down, the Yatwerians were like these very halls, the Womb-of-the-Dead, something that could not be pulled down because it was the earth. And just as the Catacombs had tunnels, abandoned Old Dynasty sewers, reaching as far out as the ruins of the Sareotic Library, so did they possess far-reaching means, innumerable points of entry, hidden and strategic.
Wherever there were caste-menials or slaves.
'But Mother-Supreme,' Phoracia said. 'We speak of the Aspect-Emperor.'
The name alone was the argument.
Nannaferi nodded. 'The Demon is not so strong as you might think, Phori. He and his most ardent, most fanatical followers march in the Great Ordeal, half a world away. Meanwhile, all the old grievances smoulder across the Three Seas, waiting for the wind that will fan them to flame.' She paused to touch each of her sisters with the iron of her gaze. 'The Orthodox are everywhere, Sisters, not just this room.'
'Even the heathens grow more bold,' Maharta said in support. 'Fanayal continues to elude them in the south. Scarcely a week passes without riots in Nenciph-'
'But still,' Phoracia persisted, 'you haven't seen him as I have. You have no inkling of his power. None of you do! No one kno-' The old priestess caught herself with a kind of seated lurch. Phoracia was the only one of their number older than Nannaferi, at that point where the infirmities of the body could not but leach into the soul. More and more she was forgetting her place, overspeaking. The intermittent impertinence of the addled and exhausted.
'Forgive me,' she murmured. 'Holy Mother. I–I did not mean to imply…'
'But you are correct,' Nannaferi said mildly. 'We indeed have no inkling of his power. This is why I summoned you here, where the souls of our sisters might shroud us from his far-scyring eyes. We have no inkling, but then we are not alone. Not as he is alone.'
She let these words hang in the sulphur-stained air.
'The Goddess!' sturdy old Sharhild hissed. A bead of blood dropped from her scalp to her brow, tapped onto the pitted stone of the table. 'We all know that She has touched you, Mother. But She has come to you as well, hasn't she?' The dread in her accented voice outlasted the wonder, seemed to hone the sense of mountainous weight emanating from the ceiling.
'Yes.'
Once again the Charnal Hall erupted in competing voices. Was it possible? Blessed event! How? When? Blessed, blessed event! What did she say?
'But what of the Demon?' Phoracia called above the others. The sisters fell silent, deferring as much to their embarrassment as to her rank. 'The Aspect-Emperor,' the prunish woman pressed. 'What does she say of him?'
And there it was, the fact of their blasphemy, exposed in the honesty of an old woman's muddled soul. Their fear of the Aspect-Emperor had come to eclipse all other terrors, even those reserved for the Goddess.
One could only worship at angles without fear.
'The Gods…' Nannaferi began, struggling to render what was impossible in words. 'They are not as we are. They do not happen… all at once…'
Her eyes narrowed in fatuous concentration, Aethiola said, 'Vethenestra claims-'
'Vethenestra knows nothing,' Nannaferi snapped. 'The Goddess has no truck with fools or fakers.'
The Struck Table fell very still. All eyes followed the wandering crack that led to the Chalfantic Oracle, Vethenestra, who sat in the tight pose of someone at war with their own trembling. For the Mother-Supreme to refer to any of them by name was disaster enough…
The woman paled. 'H-Holy Mother… If I–I had cause to dis-displease you…
Nannaferi regarded her as if she were a broken urn. 'It is the Goddess who is displeased,' she said. 'I simply find you ridiculous.'
'But what have I-?'
'You are no longer the Oracle of Chalfantas,' she said, her voice parched with regret and resignation. 'Which means you have no place at this table. Leave, Vethenestra. Your dead sisters await.'
An image of her own sister came to Nannaferi, her childhood twin, the one who did not survive the pox. In a heartbeat it all seemed to pass through her, the whooping laughter, the giggling into shoulders, the teary-eyed shushing. And it ached, somehow, to know that her soul had once sounded such notes of joy. It reminded her of what had been given…
And those few things that remained.
'Awa-await?' Vethenestra stammered.
'Leave,' Nannaferi repeated. There was something about the way she held her hand, an unnerving gestural inflection that implied destination rather than direction.
Vethenestra stood, her hands clutching knots of fabric against her thighs. Her first steps were backward, as if expecting to be called back, or to wake, for she looked at them with a stung and stupefied glee, a face that had forgotten what was real. She turned to the black maw of the entrance. Each of them felt it, an ethereal squeezing, a wringing of empty air. They blinked in disbelief, gazed in horror at the issue. Ribs of menstrual crimson wound like smoke through the dark. Glistening curlicues, twining into nothingness.
