The priest’s uncaring attitude toward the lives of these girls disturbed me.
A man’s voice whispered from behind my shoulder, “Elder Enchantress Hiresha, I prophesized your coming.”
The voice surprised me, and I swiveled my head, one eye seeing past the profusion of silk spreading from my neck in frills, scarves, and collars. Morimound’s second priest, Salkant of the Fate Weaver, I believed, had slunk behind me in a manner most discourteous. If one had the habit of sneaking up on people then bells tied to one’s feet would be a matter of simple courtesy.
“I didn’t expect you so soon,” Priest Salkant said. “I only sent out a messenger last month. The Fate Weaver must have guided you here with all eight of Her hands.”
Salkant of the Fate Weaver wore black robes patterned with blotches of venomous yellow. Cobwebs stuck to him, and he had lost a few finger joints on both hands, no doubt due to carelessness in regards to spider bites.
“Priest,” I said, purposefully leaving out the honorarium of “Lustrous” because he had snuck up on me, “I must have passed your messenger on my journey.”
I refrained from mentioning that the Once Flawless’ message had brought me here, as an association with her at this moment seemed of dubious repute.
He glanced at the green Priest of the Ever Always and said, “I fear Abwar has mistaken the signs. The webs do not confirm this to be a divine act, nor one of benevolence. If anything, the strands point to the opposite.”
“How could this be anything but an act of divinity?”
“This the webs do not tell, and I worry. Morimound’s women…that is, all those my acolytes spoke to…they haven’t quickened.”
“Have not kicked?” I was dumbfounded. “They are in their third trimester, are they not?”
“Most unusual, I know.”
“Unusual? It is an implausibility too rude to be considered.”
“Fate decides what is possible,” he said, “not you or I.”
“You old spider,” Priest Abwar interrupted, “what’re you whispering to the enchantress? And you won’t be wheedling away all the credit, because I don’t have to read webs to foretell that she will one day be known as the city’s paragon.”
Salkant of the Fate Weaver nodded. “Lustrous Enchantress Hiresha, at the center of every web I see the patterns of the outcast, the sage, the secret benefactor, and the spinster. These all refer to you.”
“I find some of those implications abrasive, Priest.” I again refrained from calling him “Lustrous Priest” due to his effrontery. My mind reeled at what he had said about the lack of quickening, unable to fully grasp the ramifications.
“From the center, the strands grow tangled and senseless. You must right them or break them. You will bring about Morimound’s salvation, or its destruction.”
Abwar of the Ever Always asked, “What’s this about destruction?”
“I am no spider at the center of a web,” I said, although in the next instant I wondered if I had said something foolish. The temperature had begun to escalate within the insulation of my gowns, the heat boiling away my thoughts.
“A spider? Certainly not.” Abwar of the Ever Always stroked his jowls as he regarded me. “A flood of fabric, maybe. Yes, I like that. ‘A flood of fabric with a froth of jewels.’ I want a scribe to write that down.”
Salkant of the Fate Weaver leaned so close that I had to suffer his stale breath. “You must guide the city through its time of strife, as its arbiter.”
“Through its time of plenty,” Priest Abwar said, smacking his own bulbous green belly. “You will be the first among jewels, the Flawless of Morimound.”
I tried to work out if they had suggested I become the city’s highest mediator. I believed they had, yet I could not conceive of it. If I spent all my time officiating the city then I could never return to the Academy and cure my somnolence. My head had grown light with heat, and I widened my stance to form a firmer tripod with my cane to stop swaying.
I knew also that the Flawless could never marry.
“I cannot accede to this.” The thought of staying in this city with so many happy mothers agonized me. “I must return to my position and studies at the Academy.”
“The future of the city depends on you, the webs leave no question to that.”
“Stay and witness Morimound’s diamond age.”
“You do not need me. Free Sri the Once Flawless from her cage and return her to this court as arbiter. You can hardly fault her for an act of divinity.” Then again, I recalled that she had said something about her shame.
“I had forgotten about her,” Abwar of the Ever Always said. “No, I don’t think we can pronounce her the Flawless a second time. Her proportions no longer seem suited.”
He made a rounded motion with his hand over his gut.
“I saw no sign of her reinstatement in the webs,” Priest Salkant said from behind my shoulder. He picked cobwebs out of his hair with two partially amputated fingers. “Historically, the priests have chosen, well, young women. Because purity of decision requires....”
He stole a glance at me.
“...purity of vessel.”
“Of course she’s pure,” Priest Abwar said. “Look at her, she’s untouchable.”
I asked, “Just what are you insinuating?”
“It is true,” Priest Salkant said, “the Fate Weaver has placed the elder enchantress at the center of the Loom of Life. As the Flawless, her thread will be long and all-encompassing.”
“I cannot be the Flawless. My travels to other nations have worsened me, and, well, I am not Flawless.” My fatigue blemished me in every way.
Abwar of the Ever Always said, “With the condition of the rest of Morimound’s women, we can’t be too particular. With the laying on of hands, she becomes the Flawless.”
“No! I insist not!” My imperfections would displease the gods and bring the city to ruin. I had only become an enchantress for the chance of curing my somnolence, and I refused to trap myself within yet another tedious role.
Priest Abwar slid his hand under my sleeve to fondle my naked arm. Salkant of the Fate Weaver traced a finger’s two-remaining knuckles down my neck.
Heat washed and crashed inside me, and I felt as if I had dived into a bubbling, sulfurous springs. I was drenched; nauseating steam spread through my chest.
“Look at her sweat,” Priest Abwar said. “She burns with the power of the gods!”
Salkant of the Fate Weaver nodded. “And trembles with the weight of destiny.”
Priest Abwar withdrew his hand first and turned his gaze to the goggling, pregnant virgins. “Acolytes, return these bundles of blessings to their homes. Sunset nears.”
The priests left, and the girls began to plod away from the Court. Once I resumed control of my breathing, I said, “Spellsword Deepmand, you should have stopped the priests from inducing me. I mean, inducting me.”
“My apologies, Elder Enchantress.” He laid a gauntlet over the gilded plates covering his chest. “The priests speak for the gods, and I thought your protestations appropriately humble.”
Maid Janny lifted her face from its formerly demure position. “You should’ve known something was deeply wrong, with her acting humble.”
After a firm sniff, I underwent the process of turning around to return to my carriage. Pregnant girls stood still to watch me pass, and I recalled the priest’s egregious claim that they had not quickened.
“You will have felt your child kick, of course.” I gestured to their gravid figures.
They looked among each other, nervous, saying nothing.
“Or a fluttering, a tapping, something reminiscent of a growling of the stomach?”
A few girls appeared uncertain. One said, “I don’t think so, Madam Enchantress.”
“Nonsense. All women in your advanced state quicken, all those with child.”
“Then you must be right,” one said.
“Doubtless so.” Yet, I did not feel rea
ssured. Quickening was a crucial event, when the Fate Weaver tied a soul’s thread to a child. Its absence was unthinkable.
Agitated, I approached a group of mature, pregnant women who had waited under a banyan tree during the proceedings. They were embracing the virgin girls, perhaps their daughters, and accompanying them away into the gardens.
“You,” I said to one, “have you quickened?”
“Me? No.”
“What about you?”
“No, Lustrous Enchantress.”
“And you? You must have quickened.”
“I don’t think so, Flawless.”
“Do not call me that.” I stormed through them in a flurry of gowns to the next cluster of women. “Which of you have quickened?”
They looked away and held their silence. The air seemed to have left the sky, for I could not breathe and I gagged on my tongue. The ground appeared a long way below me, and I fell toward it.
I landed on my cane, catching myself. Deepmand steadied my shoulder.
“Elder Enchantress?”
I fled to the next pregnant pack, finding the same lack of response.
Reaching out, I touched two of their bellies. “Do you not understand? You would have felt your babies move, you had to have felt them.”
They shied away from my desperate tone, and I tugged at a glove, at last pulling it off. My bare hand gripped their engorged waistlines, one after another. Once I finally thought I felt something then realized it had been the shaking of my hand.
One girl asked, “Why is it so important? That we quicken.”
“Because...because....”
Rather than answering, I reached to touch two more women, feeling nothing but a tautness of skin, and I tried yet another but found only stillness. My hand remained on that abdomen, as I felt myself too weak to lift it.
“It means the Priest of the Ever Always is wrong. About all of you. There is no life here.”
Night Three, Third Trimester
I should not have said it, not in front of the pregnant women. The guilt struck me on the walk back to my carriage, and I began wringing my glove. Maid Janny coaxed the cloth from my fingers to pull it back over my hand.
Their children had to be deformed. I could think of no better explanation, and I grew dizzy imagining so many babies paralyzed in their wombs, perhaps entirely lacking legs and arms. The thought horrified me, washing me with deluges of heat and shockwaves of cold, and by turns I felt I would melt or shatter. I swayed and sweated, propping one hand against the coiling root of a banyan tree for support.
This could not be. I had to be wrong, yet any reassuring thought flew from my reach. I had to enter my dream laboratory to clear my mind.
Staggering into my carriage, I closed my eyes to see the hundred marble steps descending to sleep. I ran down them, even as the stair trembled with my anxiety and rippled from the heat The final step lifted me into the black, round room without doors.
Feverish warmth subsided into a chill. My dream maintained a cooler temperature to facilitate thinking, and a filigree of frost rimmed my memory mirror. Disordered thoughts flashed nonsense images and flickers of color over the glass. I gripped my head and forced the nonsense away.
Something was amiss in the bellies of the women in Morimound. If they carried babies, then those babies could never live.
I had heard once of a pregnancy that held no life, only thousands of pearls of skin, bubbles of flesh that multiplied until the mother burst. The midwife’s story had sounded incredible and, if it was true, would account for an eighth path to death for mothers, in addition to the retching death, which I had forgotten in the Court.
The midwife had thought that “froth womb” swelled a mother’s belly faster than a true child, and I did not believe that was the case here, given the women I had seen thus far. The length and quality of their hair and nails gave me an estimate of how long they had carried, as those areas were affected by the feminine oils released in pregnancy. The fact brought small solace because, if the women did not suffer from froth womb, then they faced something that I had even less capacity to explain.
I could mull over the potential causes, such as an epidemic of tumors, yet I sensed the sun had set in the real world, and Sri the Once Flawless would be helpless in her cage. The priests had poisoned her with wormwood then had left her to the mercy of Feasters, condemned for a pregnancy over which I doubted very much she had any control. I could save her; I would save her, lawfully as the Flawless.
Awaking, I directed Deepmand to travel downhill toward the execution cage. Maid Janny entered the carriage and then closed the door behind her.
“You can drive tired horses to death if you like,” she said, “but you won’t have me outside at night. My tastiness would be the death of me.”
“The relative tenderness of your tissues is beside the point,” I said. “Feasters do not consume the physical.”
“Nothing worse than a picky eater.”
Janny sat across from me, scrunched against the sideboards. The carriage had been built to hold six people, permitting her just enough room to squeeze inside among my gowns. My enchanted earrings shone blue light over her grey dress and bonnet, which she filled with an amorphous body. Freckles flawed her face like air-bubble inclusions in an emerald.
Her smile lines remained even as she lowered her chin and frowned. “I know, I know. They slurp souls or some such. Found a girl in a gutter once. Thought she was sleeping drunk and had gone and ruined her dress. Slapped her, and she was cold as used bathwater.”
“Maid Janny, every word you speak further elucidates your ignorance. Feasters do not imbibe souls. Their magic drains power from fear.”
“Don’t care what all they eat, if it comes from me. Breastfeeding was bad enough.”
“It is an honor of motherhood.”
She fretted in her seat, knuckling her chin. “We shouldn’t be out and about at night. We shouldn’t, we shouldn’t.”
“You should have more confidence in Spellsword Deepmand,” I said. “He is trained to defeat Feasters, and I suspect Morimound to have the second least incidence of them of all the major cities.”
“Easy for you to be brave. A Feaster would go hungry rather than listen to you lecture about its dining etiquette.”
I did not care for Maid Janny in the least. Neither did I wish to sympathize with the person who by necessity scrounged underneath my gowns to remove used chamber pots.
She peered out at the deserted and dark streets as they whisked past. “The men in robes said something about gods, but how do they know the women didn’t all have a good tumble in the loft?”
“Exactly what are you implying about the strong-fibered women of Morimound?”
“That they had some belly on belly. They sweet-dreamed. Aired the mattress. Paid the lord.”
“Maid Janny!”
“Oiled the sword. Danced the sheets. Husked the corn.”
“Did you neglect to hear the Lustrous Priest pronounce those women virgins?”
“Poor girls. They missed the best part of having a baby.”
“You refer to no more than a means to an end,” I said. “Maid Janny, it is well that you are unattractive, or you would be entirely insufferable.”
“It is well you’re rich. Or so would you.”
Janny’s impertinence gave me an excuse to contemplate her dismissal. My finger would point out from the carriage, and she would leave, too surprised for a retort.
With my next breath, I remembered her helping me on my first days in the Academy. She had guided me up walls along gravity-defying paths, huffing as she did from the weight of the child she carried. Maid Janny had been young then and I younger still, a girl lost and frightened in an upside-down world.
No, I would sooner do without one of my hands than part with Maid Janny, although I would never admit it to her. To deceive her into thinking I cared nothing for her words, I engaged in sleep.
As jewels meandered overhead in my laborat
ory, I estimated fifteen more minutes would elapse before Spellsword Deepmand procured the key from the jailor then returned to the execution cage to free Sri the Once Flawless.
Janny’s uncouth tongue reminded me of the admonishment of the Fate Weaver’s priest: The pregnancies might not be divine in origin.
A physical explanation seemed less than imaginable. I trusted Morimound women to know whether or not they were virgins, and none of their faces showed an excess of guilt when the priest proclaimed the girls as chaste. The pregnancies of elders such as Sri the Once Flawless rendered a theory of normal conception even more dubious. If geriatric fertility was widespread then I could rule out all means less than supernatural.
I pondered in mid air at the center of the circular room, my gowns drifting around me. To prevent them from enveloping me entirely in a satin cocoon, I batted them back from my face as if parting curtains. I also dimmed the jewel lights, with a thought, for an environment more conducive to meditation.
For the first time, I regretted learning no more than a general education in the less proper magics. I knew of none whose primary or even tertiary effects could cause anything resembling a pregnancy. The intricacy of spellcraft involved would require proximity of the practitioner to the woman, in all probability necessitating physical touch to achieve the most efficient and precise delivery of the magic.
The lack of quickening made this situation altogether more ominous. A spell that had seeded them must have gone awry, unless causing misfortune had been the magic-user’s intent. I wondered who would do something as unspeakable as cast stillborns into wombs.
If a woman did not bear a healthy child then she bore anguish. The thought of my people suffering sent prickles running over my skin, as if spiders crawled over my hands and up my sleeves. I could not allow anything to tarnish Morimound, which was the beacon of decency and civilization in a world full of prostitutes, lepers, beggars, actors, murderers, and bureaucrats.
An amethyst flashed from its place on the shelf, signaling that we had arrived at the cage and Deepmand was speaking my name for me to wake. I Burdened myself, smashing through the dais and back to the real world.
Brood of Bones Page 3