The Sea is Full of Stars

night. Everything had a prayer of its own, everything had a power and a purpose.

Although the men could not fly, they did have some gifts from the gods that were uniquely theirs, including the music. Women could chant and intone tunes for the rituals, but the men composed and played music on harps of their own designs, and on flutes carved from the same reeds that, carved a different way, could be used as blowguns by the warriors.

She liked some of the men and particularly liked to listen to their music, but she’d felt no urge to mate. Some of the acolytes had done so and borne children, and it had been most wonderful and fascinating, but the more pleasurable it appeared to mate and to bear and raise children, the higher the value of the sacrifice. She had seen the gifts the Grand Falcon bestowed on the High Priestess, and felt that her calling and destiny lay in that direction.

This in fact disappointed the High Priestess, who didn’t want to face the possibility of training Jaysu in the higher levels. It involved a great deal of prayer and fasting, ordeals and rituals that could drive one to the brink of madness and exhaustion, and it also involved drugs that did terrible things to the mind. Many died in that kind of training; the others went mad. Only one would do it.

The High Priestess knew that Jaysu could make it; her abilities and devotion were so absolute, it was a thing of awe. But what, if anything, was still in Jaysu’s mind, buried so deep down that it could not be reached by normal methods? The High Priestess concurred with the Grand High Priestess in Zone and those with whom the Most Holy had spoken to there. She was told that Jaysu was probably one of the two women, subsequently identified by interviews with the others as Angel Kobe, a onetime acolyte of some other alien religion. It fit nicely with her personality and devotion to assume this.

But might that old faith emerge and conflict with the new and destroy her?

Worse, what if they were wrong and she wasn’t this Angel Kobe? And what sort of monster might the process create in either case?

The High Priestess would have liked to put off the decision, but knew she could not. The gods of the volcanoes were restless; many troubles were coming for the clan from that score. Worse, all that she took to attain and maintain herself in this high position for so long had taken a grave toll. The pain was now there more often than not, and it was getting harder to find anything strong enough to deal with it. The Most High had sent her special drugs from other hexes that helped a great deal, and upon which she was now absolutely dependent, but even they had less effect as the days and weeks and months went by.

She was dying. And the pain would rise to levels she couldn’t control at some point. When that happened, she would go to the cliffs, pray to the setting sun to receive her spirit, and jump.

Flying was one of the things you had to sacrifice to become a High Priestess, and while fishing was part of the lifestyle, none of the Amborans swam very well.

Now she sat in the Inner Chamber, where none other could come, inside the Circle of Fire, facing the Grand Falcon herself, as only a High Priestess could do. After days of prayer and fasting and little sleep, and ingesting special drugs and potions, she was ready to take even more years off her life by diving the patterns. She understood that these were not preordained, but mere possibilities, but they tended to prove out more often than not. They could answer questions no other could answer, and give keys to the future that might well save her people.

The High Priestess swayed to a rhythm only she could hear, surrounded by the steam vents and sulfuric gases of the Inner Chamber, her sight failing as she took the last and strongest of the potions, which would almost certainly kill anyone not prepared for it. She screamed as it burned its way down and seemed to consume her body and even her very soul in a white-hot fire.

But out of that fire and out of the mists came visions. Visions formed inside and with the mists and gases, but primarily within her own mind.

What she saw in those visions were monsters.

Monsters of the sea, rising up, engulfing all that their giant tentacles could grasp. She saw two long, sticky tentacles shoot out like a tree frog’s tongue and snare low-flying birds and Amborans and other flying races as well.

Monsters of the land; huge translucent, sluglike creatures without even mouths to eat, moving slowly, ponderously, over land and through forests and up and down rocks, leaving slime as they went, absorbing any animal and most plant life they contacted, then slowly dissolving them inside themselves while the prey was still alive but helpless. Drawing larger prey to them by saucerlike eyes that seemed to swirl in patterns and radiate an eerie dance for the eyes of others that you could not avoid, drawing you in, making you walk directly into them without even knowing until you were inside that jellylike flesh…

She watched them come out of a boiling dark sea and horrible black skies filled with storms and violence, coming out of the west and covering nation after nation, hex after hex, until the Overdark was not merely a name but a description.

And at the heart of that darkness, something totally evil, something that looked like the tentacled ones but was not; something alien and awful, the enemy of light and the source of all madness. An entity so awful that it was willing, even eager, to take on and massacre even the gods themselves.

Bodies… all over, the blood and the screams of the dying everywhere, and even the volcanoes obeyed the darkness…

Surely this was not the future! Surely this was not the end of all things! The apocalyptic vision was so horrible that she refused to accept it.

And something seemed to whisper to her, not in words, but in flashes of inspiration and understanding.

Until now, life has been service to the gods and spiritual development of the soul. That time is past. This is what you were preparing for, although you did not know it. Now there is only one task, to fight the evil, to stop it, to crush it. Those who do may die. Those who do not will have fates worse than death.

“But how?” she screamed. The pain! The pain was growing as unbearable as the visions, and she dared not yet pass out! “What can Amborans do in this fight against such power?”

But in response came only a riddle. The Avenger must strike the blow that is the reason for his existence. The Avenger can strike only when the five are one through the North, and when all are willing to pay the price…

There was one last brief vision, of the investiture of Jaysu as High Priestess, just one brief glimpse, and it was gone. The priestess didn’t even have the time to plead for more information, for more detail. She passed out, and for many hours, alone on the platform, she lay there as the radiation and fumes did their worst to her and her body struggled with the poisons that gave both wisdom and pain.

When she finally awakened, it was to a body still in pain, but a different sort of pain, in which every joint and muscle in her body ached. She could not see; that last encounter had robbed her of what was left of her failing eyesight. Still, she managed to find her staff of office and use it to rise, and with memory of a place she knew better than any other, and the cues of heat and loud, rushing steam, she managed to make her way off the platform, past the veil, through the small maze and into the great room of the cave.

There was momentary shock from the priestesses there, some of whom had been keeping vigil and sympathetic prayer and fasting rituals for two days. Then they heard gasps and rushed to help her.

Jaysu was among them, feeling deep guilt for having involuntarily passed into sleep several times in the past few hours, but then just concerned for their Holy Mother, the only mother she remembered.

A mother who had been pretty if middle-aged when first they’d met only a year earlier, and who looked not much different when she’d gone into the Inner Chamber, but emerged old and wrinkled and wizened, blind and partly deaf, and barely recognizable to any of them.

They carried her to her chamber, where she was propped up on soft pillows and allowed to lie on her side. They watched, fearful that she would die at any moment, but after passing into a trancelike sleep, the High Priestess awoke and said, in a weak, low, old woman’s voice, “I do not have much longer.”

“Please, Mother, you must rest,” Gayna, one of her most senior adepts, said. “We can talk later.”

“No! We must speak now. I do not know how much time I have, and if I do not speak, then all this was for nothing! There is a great evil coming, and soon, from the west. An evil that will destroy all our people, our whole race, unless we become its mindless slaves. The Blessed Grand Falcon showed it to me, at great price, yet I would rather be like this than to not have seen and so be consumed by it!”

“Oh, no, Mother!” they began crying, but she silenced them with a contemptuous wave of her hand.