Two acolytes walked on either side of the group as Illiya led them to an enormous door at the far side of the audience chamber. Mirroring the position and size of the hearth, the door was the only wooden feature in the room. It looked ancient, its dark surface rich and shining from generations of oiling. Iron hinges affixed it to the wall and a matching latch held it shut. It was an anomaly, unworn by the omnipresent sand.
Illiya led the aliens in, and the door closed behind the group, leaving Talis in the receiving room with the silent acolytes.
Chapter 25
Illiya’s acolytes served Talis iced mint tea and showed her back to the padded stone settee in front of the hearth. She chewed on a stray piece of fresh mint leaf and stared into the flames.
She turned quickly when she heard the door grate open again, and the cold tea splashed over her fingers. Illiya emerged alone.
“The Lady has granted them an audience,” she said, then dropped her affectations. She strode across the room and threw herself, robes and all, onto the settee with Talis. “What fermenting wastewater have you gotten yourself mixed up in, old friend?”
Talis held out the mint tea. Illiya smirked, then reached into the inside of her cloak and pulled forth the chased and jeweled silver flask that Talis suspected would be there. Her old friend never drank anything innocent. The high priestess poured a generous amount into Talis’s glass, then reached out to accept the fresh tea, half-empty, that an acolyte brought for her. She emptied the rest of the flask into that glass.
Talis shifted to face Illiya and leaned back into the pillows behind her. “I got myself mixed up with an Imperial captain who set me up with a bad contract, tried—though thankfully failed—to shoot me out of the skies, and left me no course but to make a deal with aliens.”
Illiya took a long sip of her tea, making it look like a meditation.
“Would this Imperial captain be Hankirk, the old flame, by any chance?”
Talis would have rebutted the romantic implication, but she was too surprised. Of course, Illiya being one step ahead of the game was hardly shocking. “And, I assume, the power of all his Cutter-crazed friends behind him.”
Illiya nodded. “And you sold the aliens the ring.”
“You know about that, huh?”
“Wouldn’t be much of an intelligence agent if I didn’t.”
Talis tilted her cup back until the ice hit her teeth.
“What would you have done?”
“Refused the salvage job.”
Talis coughed a laugh around the last sip of her drink. Welcomed the light feeling it sent up her shoulders to the sides of her head. “Advice I’d happily go back and give to myself as well, believe me.”
Illiya pulled one long leg up and tucked it under the other. “Onaya Bone wants to speak to you next.”
Now she really coughed, sitting up to place the emptied glass on the table between them and the hearth. “Helsim’s cavernous colon, are you kidding me?”
“Blasphemer. Though I like that one. Not certain what it means, but I like it.”
“‘Blasphemer’ is exactly my point. You gonna send me in there so I can get myself zapped out of existence?”
“I’d like to be present.”
“Like to see it, yeah, I bet you would.” She chewed her lip. “Don’t suppose I can decline?”
“You could. But could you really live not ever knowing what she wants to say?”
Of course she couldn’t. Of course she’d go.
Talis squeezed her eyes shut, wishing she hadn’t invited Illiya to spike her tea. Talk to the goddess, why not?
The door was made from petrified wood, Talis saw as she stepped past the aliens on their way out of the communing chamber. More stone than what it once had been. And the striations, up close, played into the temple’s name. Cellulose grain, cut at a diagonal, so the lines swept back from their cores like the individual strands of a feather.
Her nostrils filled with the warm air beyond the doorway as she stepped through, Illiya’s hand on the small of her back. It smelled of heavy spices, of sand, and of feathers. She glanced back toward the fire where the Yu’Nyun were being freed of the ceremonial garb by acolytes who carefully lifted the robes over the aliens’ arching head crests. They appeared agitated, and she wondered if Onaya Bone had denied them the answers they came for. Or if the answers were no help to them. Or too cryptic to decipher. With Onaya Bone, the aliens would have faced their equal in enigmatic indirect conversation.
The cone-shaped room was lined with an obscene amount of copper. Engraved and studded in swirling patterns, and burnished between, it reflected the warm lighting but no distinct images. Small candles flickered from tiny alcoves up and down the length of the wall. The flames and their velvet-soft reflections in the metal walls pulsed with life.
Neatly folded bits of cloth were suspended from the high ceiling, delicate chains formed from generations of the prayers and wishes of Bone supplicants.
On the polished turquoise of the stone floor, neatly centered in a circle of age-worn cushions, sat a bronze censer. Its surface was perforated with the shapes of flying ravens and etched with designs of blowing, swirling sands. Heavy purple smoke poured from it and collected along the floor like morning fog. The space was meant for meditation, for those who entered the room but were granted no audience. As with those worshippers whose cloths dangled above her head, prayer would have to serve when Onaya Bone did not deign to communicate directly.
Reassuming her role of high priestess, Illiya crossed the meditation circle to a curtained booth. Small tables on either side held more candles and incense. There was a common wooden-handled broom displayed on a stand, a strange companion to the rest of the room’s objects. It was meant for use on her way out, to remove any dust that entered
