charlatan.'
'Is it signed?' asked Kirkus, only partly interested.
'A loyal subject of Mann.'
Kirkus shrugged. 'It is the same everywhere we go,' he remarked, disdainfully. 'The high priest doubtless has his enemies, and now they hope to jostle for position while you are here.'
'You have a fine mind when you put it to some use. You may well be right, but closely observe the man, anyway. It is a skill you must learn, to discern the true believers from the false, and yet another skill to know how to deal with them if they prove to be untrue.'
'We then dispose of them, what more is there to know?' he replied, while his attention returned to the surrounding street, searching still.
'Sometimes,' she crooned from behind her mask, 'your lack of imagination truly startles me. We must work on that fault.' She snapped her fingers, drawing the Acolyte captain to her. 'I think we will go to the high priest's mansion now,' she instructed him. 'I wish to rest there for a while, before we dine with this man who rules our city.'
'As you wish,' the captain replied, with a bow of his head.
The procession stamped onwards.
*
'I'm bored,' announced Kirkus to no one in particular.
The young priest was merely a guest at this meal, yet he sat at the very head of the table, where he had been downing the heady Seratian wine as though it was water.
'Ignore him,' recommended Kira to the family who played host to them this evening. 'He is merely drunk.'
Belias, the high priest of the city, and therefore its governor, acknowledged this statement with a brief if slightly nervous smile, whilst dabbing a handkerchief at the sweat gathering upon his bald pate. He felt oddly out of place here this evening, even though they were dining in the banqueting hall of his own mansion, where he was playing host to these two arrivals from far-off Q'os, the seat of the Holy Empire of Mann. Maybe it was the way the old priestess kept looking at him, something unspoken in her gaze.
Once more he wished they would finish eating and retire to their rooms for an early night. Belias needed to speak to his staff, find out if the city populace had heeded his hastily called curfew. Yet for the last two hours he had been trapped at the dining table with these guests, feigning interest in the old woman's talk while he eyed the rate at which they consumed their food and drank their wine, trying through simple prayer to hurry them up. Surely they must be sated soon?
By his elbow, his plump wife sat in silence. She was dressed in the finest of farlander silks, and sported jewels extravagant enough for a queen, or at least a minor, provincial queen. Again, she cast a demure glance towards the handsome young priest, sitting like a king at the head of the long table; again Kirkus pointedly ignored her attentions. Belias, too, pretended not to notice. He was hardly surprised by his wife's flirtations. She had always been drawn to power – it was why she had married him in the first place
He looked across at his daughter, Rianna. Belias often looked to his daughter when in need of a little support. She was whispering something to her fiance, a man ten years her elder. He was an entrepreneur of the patrician class, who had finished his food long ago and watched all three priests seated at the table with barely concealed distrust.
They were a jolly group, for sure, as they dined silently in the draughty hall, listening to the rain gusting against the windows of stained glass, the munching of food and the tapping of cutlery against plates, the occasional civil comment; that and the cries of the slaves squatting out in the rain in the gravel driveway outside.
Belias had been informed by his chancellor of the occurrences in the streets of Skara-Brae earlier that day. That was partly why he was sweating so badly, and why he had to feign an appetite for the cold remnants of his food. The city folk were in an uproar, by all accounts. They wanted their loved ones back; failing that, they wanted blood. It worried him greatly, these sudden public displays of anger, for Belias understood the Nathalese only too well, and how easy it would be to tip them into open revolt. After all, he was Nathalese himself.
'Are you quite all right, High Priest?' inquired Kira kindly, though he suspected that any kindness exhibited by this woman was more akin to a cat's toying with a mouse. Belias tried to compose himself. No, he was hardly all right. This old witch was the mother of the Holy Matriarch herself, and that lout, lolling in his chair at the head of his table was nothing less than the Matriarch's only son, likely next in line for the throne. It was enough to drive a simple priest from the provinces to distraction.
'I'm fine,' he heard himself reply to the old priestess. 'I was just wondering… you see… why you needed to acquire so many slaves today?'
The old woman sipped delicately at a glass of wine, fixing her gaze on him over its rim. She smacked her lips. 'My oaf of a grandson there is soon to undergo his initiation,' she explained, in a voice creaking like old stairs. 'We have been gathering what things we need for the ritual, stopping here and there along the river, at whichever towns take our fancy. I have brought him on the grand progress this last year, you see. I am sure, being a high priest, you have undertaken the pilgrimage yourself.' And for a moment she held up the crystal goblet to study it, as though looking for imperfections, and Belias saw her focus on him through its transparency.
Belias nodded, smiling like an idiot, not entirely offering an answer. No, he had never taken the grand tour himself, though he was not about to inform her of that fact. It was long, and hideously expensive if one wished to see it through in any comfort, and it involved all manner of orgies and ritual taboo-breaking along the way that would probably finish off his weakened heart for good. Somehow, Belias had just never quite got around to it.
'I see,' said Kira, whereupon Belias let the smile drop from his face. He didn't know what she saw, but his heart began to thump a little faster. He forced a slice of sweetroot into his mouth, a simple act of outward composure – though he spoiled the attempt when he tried to swallow, choking on the barely chewed morsel.
His daughter passed him a goblet of water, an expression of concern creasing her forehead. He drained it dry and smiled at Rianna in thanks. She wore a dress of soft green cotton this evening, complementing her red hair and cut high enough to hide the seal she always wore about her neck, at his own fatherly insistence. Belias had snapped at her earlier, privately, for thus hiding the seal from sight, as she always did in company. It was of no use worn like that, he tried to tell her. It is not a deterrent if people do not see it. But Rianna had never fully understood the risks involved in being the daughter of the city's high priest. In a way, he hoped that she never would.
He now regretted those harsh words to her earlier as, across the table, his daughter returned his smile. He knew that she had already forgiven him. She always forgave him.
He was glad, at least, that these two priestly visitors had not turned the conversation to matters of doctrine and ritual tonight. He had always tried to shelter Rianna from the dark heart of this religion, its secrets and hidden rituals. He cherished her innocence; it was the only bright light in his otherwise mundane life.
'Look at him, there!' The old priestess now jabbed a finger at her grandson, though only half seriously, causing her host Belias to flinch. 'Drunk on wine and full to bursting and still he complains that he is bored. Would you believe he has seen an entire empire pass beneath his heels these last twelve moons, sights that only a privileged few will ever be fated to witness? No, he merely whines for more, like the spoiled child he is.'
Kirkus belched loudly at that.
There is no lord but thy own self, Belias silently recited, as though suddenly he was indeed a true devotee of Mann, while he covertly took in the intoxicated condition of the young priest sprawled in his chair. Could this truly be the next leader of both an empire and a faith that spanned two continents, and at least forty different races?
Unlike many of his fellow countrymen who would rather fight until independence or death if they could, Belias was by his own reckoning a realist. It was a trait he judged far superior to any other in his life, and which he found miserably lacking in his fellow Nathalese. Save, perhaps, for the merchant classes, who knew a good business opportunity when it came crashing through their doors boot-first.
All those years ago, when the imperial army had first rolled up to the Nathalese borders, and broken through almost without pause, he had recognized the future imperial occupation for what it truly was – an inevitability. And so, after the final stand of Queen Hano and her forces right here in this ill-fated city, which he had been fortunate enough to escape, through being far away with his wife and child on his family estate, and being the ambitious young politician that he was, Belias had switched sides accordingly. He became, of all things, a priest of Mann, seeing this as the only way to advance politically within the new order. It had been a simple enough business. All he needed to do was study for three years at the newly opened temple complex in Serat, where all manner of provincials were studying likewise to take on the robes of the order, and then to brave his way through the Cull,
