with their own wind, the stamp of his footsteps falling lost in the thrashing waters of the moat below.
The man did not pause as he passed the masked Acolytes standing on duty in the shelter of the guard house at the far end of the bridge. His gaze remained fixed to the ground as his pace bore him through the empty streets of the surrounding Temple District, his skin constantly itching so that he kept scratching at his arms and face. A few fellow priests scurried past, their similarly hooded heads bowed low in submission to the elements. Puddles boiled without reflections. A white cat huddled in a doorway, silent and watching.
Behind him, ever further behind him, the Temple of Whispers loomed amid curtains of rain like a living thing; its flanks bristling with spikes in such numbers that they looked like a covering of fur; a tower that was not one tower but a great twisting column of fluted pillars and turrets wrapped and warped by bands of stone. With every step, the young priest could feel it at his back, a massive sentinel watching him. It was a presence that flattened his mood even further – this sense of confusion he had awakened with on the morning of his twenty-fourth birthday.
The further he went, the busier the streets grew. Ahead rose a clamour of voices, and wild cries as though from some exotic menagerie. The rain had settled into a steady drizzle as the priest entered the great plaza called Freedom Square, where distant marble buildings lined three sides of the open space, and behind them, in turn, were visible lesser skysteeples – pale spikes partly obscured by the shroud of rain.
The bad weather had barely diminished the vast crowd of devotees already gathered in the square in anticipation of the forthcoming festival of Augere el Mann, which was still almost a month away. The majority were pilgrims from across the Empire, drawn in ever greater numbers than usual by this Augere marking the fiftieth anniversary of Mannian rule: men and women alike, foreigners who had fervently embraced the religion of Mann even though many of their compatriots still grumbled bitterly and called for insurrection. All wore the common garb of the lay devotee, a vivid red robe hanging almost down to their bare feet. The front of their sodden garments bore the testimony of their past conversions: white open-palmed handprints flaking with age so that many were now a mottled pink.
After several years living in this city, the young priest Che was still barely inured to the sights and sounds of these mass devotions. As he splashed his way across the flagstones paving the square, he eyed his surroundings from within the reassuring folds of his hood.
The pilgrims called out in tongues whilst thrashing about wildly on the spot. Or they listened with bright eyes to the inflammatory sermons of priests perched on canopied podiums, firebrands who shouted and gesticulated with fervour at their nodding heads and calls of concordance. They skewered their bleeding faces with spikes, or paraded with scalps afire, or copulated on the ground, or simply wandered about like dazed sightseers, with mouths agape at everything going on around them.
Che skirted a great block of conformity that stretched from one side of the square almost to the other, ten thousand converts who stood facing the rain-shrouded Temple of Whispers, all dressed in unmarked red robes, their arms raised above them, mouths chanting constantly, faces aglow with the same fervour that had drawn them all the way to Holy Q'os for the ritual of conversion.
As one, they knelt on the flagstones, ten thousand robes rustling like a murmur of the wind. They bowed prostrate on the ground then stood up again, only to repeat the ritual. The young priest continued past lines of such dripping converts as they waited in turn to step forward and receive the press of a painted hand upon their chests from an ordained priest of Q'os. Che did not slow in his stride even here, the pilgrims clearing a path for him, as soon as they recognized his white robes. He walked between the legs of a dripping statue of Sasheen, the Holy Matriarch, sitting astride a rearing white zel, and another of Nihilis, founding Patriarch of the new order, his bronze face grim and ancient.
Towards the eastern end of the square, the press began to thin, pilgrims mixing with ordinary citizens going about their daily business. The usual vendors' carts had been set up, with their simple, sagging awnings, from beneath which their owners sold paper cups of hot chee, bowls of food, bundled rainslicks. Others stood in the rain hawking souvenirs: cheap tin figurines of Sasheen, Mokabi, Nihilis. They observed the practices around them without fondness in their eyes, and cast furtive looks at the plain-clothed Regulators who stood in pairs around the edges of the crowd, watching over all.
A pair of guards mounted on zelback halted to give way to him, their unstrung crossbows resting on their laps. Che did not bother to acknowledge them, but marched on out of the square through Dubusi street on the eastern side. He took a quick left and then a right through some smaller side streets, the noise of the crowds fading behind him with every step. His senses grew alert for any indication that he was being followed.
By the time he approached one of the smaller skysteeples, the constant rain had soaked his white robes grey. The cloth clung to his arms and legs, showing the hard wiry muscles beneath. His face still itched abominably, so that he paused before the bridge accessing the smaller tower, threw back his hood and stared up at the dark sky, then twisted his neck back and forth in the soothing rain. After a minute of such self-indulgence, he spat out a mouthful of the acrid water and wiped his eyes clear.
A flight of bat-wings were circling up there in a slow descent. They were larger than the type he had become accustomed to seeing above the city, which were used for surveillance or as couriers dispatched from one temple to another. He assumed these must be the new Warbirds that the Empire had been developing over recent years, purportedly strong enough to carry ordinance in the field and he knew it was so when they suddenly turned and swept towards Freedom Square: a fly-over, intended to dazzle the pilgrims with the endless innovations of Mann.
Che set foot on the bridge, treading slowly. Reaching the entrance, he stopped by a stout metal door. A grille was embedded within it at head height, though it was too dark to see the eyes he knew were watching him from behind. A hatch slid open at waist level, to acknowledge his presence. Che scratched at his neck one more time, before sliding both hands into the black space now revealed.
As a series of clunks announced the manipulation of the door's many locks, the young priest withdrew his hands, and a smaller door opened within the larger one. It was narrow and low, intended to force any visitor to stoop and turn sideways in order to step through. Being short, Che was able to enter without having to duck.
Every hindrance a blessing, he thought drily; and even here, in the heart of the Holy Empire of Mann, he did not find it odd to be recalling that old saying of the Rshun.
*
The Sentiate Temple was quiet at that early hour. Its circular ground floor was as dim as it always would be, windowless and lit only by a few gaslights sputtering along the curving wall. The two Acolytes on duty watched from behind their masks as Che shook his shaven head dry, as a dog would, and then his dripping robes too.
'It's raining,' he explained, as though in apology.
The guards wondered if he was an idiot, one of those privileged young priests that sometimes slipped through the examiners' nets by way of money and parentage.
The taller loomed over his head; like another tower watching him. 'We serve only the high caste here,' the guard said. 'State your business.'
Che frowned. 'Mostly this, I'm afraid.'
They had time enough only to widen their eyes before the two punch-knives drove up through their throats.
The two Acolytes convulsed where they stood. Che withdrew both blades simultaneously and at the same instant stepped aside to avoid the discharges of blood he knew exactly where and how would follow. He walked a tight circle around the spreading pool of gore as he glanced around for any witnesses, and returned in time to see the two guards only then crumple from the knees up, one man folding sideways to the stone floor, the other on to his backside, and then on to his back.
Che felt nothing.
He was quick to drag the corpses out of sight, behind a statue of an imperial celebrity; Archgeneral Mokabi – retired – he noticed when he paused long enough to inspect the alcove it stood in. The pools of blood would eventually give the game away, but in this gloom only if someone chanced to pass them directly.
It would do, for all the time his work here would take him.
He crouched in the shadows, using a knife to cut free one of the men's robes. He bundled the garment beneath his arm.
The north stairwell was merely a spiral of steps fixed around a central pillar. Che followed it upwards for seven floors, proceeding casually as though he rightly belonged there. No one he encountered cared to challenge
