I had been only twelve when I had arrived on Cantardene. Things I had learned before that time were indistinct in my memory, but I recalled reading of a human tribe who had had such a god, such a worship, such an obsession with blood and pain. They had built high temples, they had torn out the hearts of their victims, cut off their hands and feet, let the blood flow until the temples were red with it. Even so late as the twenty-first century, only shortly before my own time, there were makers of films and plays who had rejoiced in gore, who had made suffering an object of prurient amusement for desensitized audiences. Some such were even produced in the name of religion, as though cruelty could ever elevate mankind! Viewing cruelty, religious or not, only did to the viewers what it had done to the K’Famir. It helped create new torturers.
The gods of the K’Famir, however, went further. They took pain and horror and created from it creatures like the one to which Adille had fallen prey. Every time the ritual was held—and this was just one city of Cantardene, there were many other cities, probably many other hills and rituals—living persons were tortured to death and things were produced. Did anything of the victim live on in the horror in the cage? I thought it unlikely. Only the pain and horror were embodied in something that lived to create more pain and horror.
And was the god really a god, or was it some other kind of life-form? Some other, unknown race of beings? Though, of course, such life-forms might be considered gods, of a kind…
And where had the strange sacrifices, those little rat-sized beings, come from? Where had the little boy come from? The pools of light and dark inside the mausoleum, how had they come there? A mausoleum was a death-house. Progzo had said he obtained it through the death-house. Traded for it? If the pools of light and dark were gates into other places, could trade pass through them, even of living things? Perhaps the strange machine was some kind of control…
I could do nothing about it. Not yet. All I could do was go back to work.
“Are you well, Miss Ongamar. You look quite pale.”
“Quite well, thank you, Lady Ephedra.”
“We have much work today.”
Much work indeed. I took my place in the fitting room, my ears alert as I listened, listened, listened.
I Am Margaret/on Tercis
As I well knew from my eighteen years on Tercis, residents of the Rueful Walled-Off (officially listed as Tercis, Expiatory Sect 909) are expected to be at services each Rueday morning. In The Valley—as the southern, sloping, arable half of Rueful is called—Ruehouses are found even in small hamlets, such as Crossroads, Sorrowful, and Repentance. Contrition City, supporting its own notion of its importance, has a dozen or more, as does Deep Shameful, and others are found in every town in the northern, more mountainous half of Rueful, the Heights. In Rueful, on Rueday, one goes to services unless one is bedridden, witless, or dead.
Around Crossroads, attendance is expected even of the walking comatose, a chronic condition afflicting several local residents: Hen Kelly, for example, or the Johnson brothers. Bodily present, spiritually and cerebrally nowhere, they let their heads fall back onto the edge of the pew while their sagging mouths exhale vapors strong enough to stupefy any congregant within breathing distance. Ma Bastable from Ma’s Kitchen and Ms. Barfinger from the Boardinghouse, both very high-chinned and solemn in their Rueday lace collars, always sit behind these miscreants, glaring at the back of their heads from opening prayer right up to the end of services when the pastor says, “It is time to rue.”
Ceremoniously the two Keepers open the Ruehouse doors to let the penitence flow down the hill into River Remorseful while all of us stand perfectly still until the last person finishes ruing. However long it takes, no one moves or makes any kind of noise until the pastor speaks the words of forgiveness. When something really bad happens in Rueful, it will always be blamed on an interrupted ruing that’s risen up to become a contumacious influence. Well, no. What they actually say is, “Damn rue-bug is loose amongst us!”
On this particular Rueday, Bryan and I and our twin daughters, Maybelle and Mayleen, were almost last to leave the Ruehouse, walking slowly and solemnly to give all that contrition time to get well away, so we wouldn’t step in it and track it home. Truth be told, both of us were so weary we couldn’t have walked any faster if we’d tried.
“Pastor,” said Bryan on the front stoop, gravely nodding.
“Doctor,” the pastor returned, with the same nod, and a slightly less formal one to me and to the children. “Missus Margaret. Miss Maybelle, Miss Mayleen.”
The other congregants had scattered, some to the northern road, some to the road that led across the river bridge, some to the streets of the little town of Crossroads, at the south end of which stood the clinic and the doctor’s house, our house.
“Well, even though I didn’t get enough sleep last night, I still stayed awake,” said Maybelle with a sigh.
“You were very good,” I told my sixteen-year-old daughter unnecessarily. Maybelle was sometimes wakeful at night, possibly because of her heart condition, not immediately dangerous, Bryan said, but one he would keep an eye on. “Thank you for not snoring during services.”
“She wasn’t any better than I was,” said Mayleen angrily. “I was just as good, better even.”
“You were very good,” I said wearily. “No one said you weren’t, Mayleen.”
“You and Maybelle are twins,” said Bryan in his falsely jovial, ‘speaking to Mayleen’ voice. “Equally good, equally pretty, equally smart, in
