by Shannon Page
He gave her a few more glances, no doubt thinking himself stealthy. Well, it made conversation easier.
“Do you follow the Butchered God?” she ventured.
“Oh, yes; we all do.” He smiled and opened his arms, indicating the circle around the bonfire. “It’s exciting, don’t you think?”
“Mmm,” Sian said, noncommittally. “And his priest?”
The boy’s eyes shone. “A saint among men. When he speaks …” He gestured again, helpless, beaming.
“He’s not … here now, is he?” In the shadows around the fire, Sian could not make out much in the way of individual features on anyone.
“No. You would know — the crowd would be enormous. You have not met him then?”
She shook her head. “How does one find him?”
The boy shrugged. “One doesn’t. He shows up when he has something to tell us.”
“I’ve not had the pleasure of hearing him speak yet. Do you think he’ll come tonight?”
“Who can say?” The boy sidled closer to Sian. “At least we have a fire.”
“Yes.”
Well, this was worthless. She waited a polite minute more, then said, “I must get home,” and slipped into the darkness before he could answer.
Sian finally got a decent meal into herself, then went back to traveling the islands until she found a larger, more purposeful line. It was now full dark and raining in earnest. That, and her inconspicuous attire, emboldened her to join the marchers this time.
As she shambled along with the chanting, muddy crowd, she asked several people about the priest, but no one could tell her any more than the boy had. This new religion was an odd one indeed: its adherents walked the streets day and night; its priest could turn up anywhere, at any time, or could vanish for weeks. Yet everyone spoke of him, and his message, with radiant awe. Whatever he was telling them, it was something they were desperate to hear.
Unless he was merely god-spelling them as well. But to what end?
Frustrated, and soaking wet, Sian kept deciding to abandon the search for the night, then following one more prayer line, across one more bridge, sustained by her strange, newfound strength and stamina.
Somewhere near the night’s twelfth bell, shouts suddenly rang out as four huge men boiled from a narrow alley, armed with heavy lengths of wood. A man in front of Sian shrieked and fell under a great blow; his attacker then turned to smash a woman in the face with his fist, breaking her nose, even as he spun to smack another youth with his stick. Chaos erupted around Sian as the four thugs laid waste to the panicked prayer line, as skillful as they were dispassionate.
Sian cried out as she dodged the backswing of one man’s bludgeon, then ducked and rolled toward the edge of the melee — toward the woman with the broken nose, who lay screaming in the mud. “Lady, here,” Sian said. Without any time to think, she put her hand on the bloody mess. Her own nose ached and swelled; if there was ginger in the air, she couldn’t detect it — and here came another injured woman, barely more than a girl, bleeding from a torn ear — which Sian healed too, just grabbed it and let it go before turning to another victim.
It was over in minutes, though those minutes seemed like hours as Sian healed at least a dozen brutal injuries, enduring the echoing pain of each one. The thugs vanished into the downpour as quickly as they had arrived.
There was only a shocked silence now, as the people around her realized what had happened. “You … healed me,” said the woman with the formerly broken nose. She reached up and slowly wiped away rainwashed blood. “You healed me.”
“Don’t tell …” Sian begged. “Please!” But it was hopeless. She scrambled to her feet and started running, before the crowd could find any coherent will to follow her.
Must I always be running away? Sian thought helplessly. Is this my life now? But she ran on, mud spattering up the backs of her legs, slowing only when she reached Viel.
Walking through the last streets before the townhouse, she began to ponder what had happened. She had not heard of prayer lines being attacked before; was the Factorate cracking down? Or the Justiciary, or even the Mishrah-Khote? The thugs had worn no uniforms or insignia, but they were clearly professionals. This was no private grudge, nor youth pushing a drunken dare too far.
She reached Meander Way with a sigh of relief. She had no idea what time it was, but it would feel good to get out of these sodden clothes, clean up, and get at least a few hours rest before dawn came. She could resume her search for the priest tomorrow.
“Domina Kattë?”
The words were spoken as a firm hand came from behind to grasp her upper arm. Sian gasped, and turned to find two black-robed men flanking her; the taller wore a priest-hospitalar medallion on his collar.
So the Mishrah-Khote had found her. So quickly.
Reikos sat in the Eighth Sea Tavern at the end of Meander Way, waiting for his meal. He hadn’t chosen this place in hopes that Sian might pass by: no, it was simply that their bouillabaisse was the best in Alizar — not that he was having stew for breakfast, but Sian had introduced him to the place; and of course he had many happy memories of eating here with her, just a few doors down the road from her townhouse … so … yes, perhaps he did hope to see her pass by. Tangentially.
He sipped his lager and glowered across the nearly-empty common room, then back through the window. It was more crowded than ever out in the streets, but the flood of humanity wasn’t translating into more business in here, at least. This tavern had been busy at all times of day, once, even in the mornings, with workmen come for hot kava or a warm meal before setting to their labor for the day. Alizar was troubled, to be sure. Trade had come almost to a halt. Which was all right, he thought wryly; for if he had sold anything, he might have trouble finding men to unload and deliver the crates now.
Another cursed prayer line wandered past, its leader’s hoarse ritual cries making no sense at all. Not that the followers seemed to care as they murmured their responses. Not bad enough that they had ruined this formerly delightful city; now they had stolen his Sian as well. He heard the prayer line’s rhythm interrupted, then an exchange of angry voices. “Go to work, you fools,” he muttered under his breath.
The barmaid arrived with his sausage and hash, and a chunk of fragrant amaranth bread. Delicious, as always.
As he ate, he thought again of love, and freedom, and adventure. He had once fancied himself in love, as one does, in his early youth; but the girl’s father had forbidden the match, betrothing her instead to one of Lost Port’s borough captains. Konstantin Reikos had been unable to compete with a man of such position. So he had taken to the sea, working his way from indentured seaman on a trading galleon, to crew-partner on a smaller barquentine, then finally saving enough to buy his own little cutter. Now he had a fine brigantine, and toyed with the idea of buying a second, if he could find a trustworthy captain to sail her. Perhaps Kyrios, in a year or two …
Freedom. The giddy joy of it — the open seas, loving arms in every port. Which was why, no doubt, he was sitting glumly in an empty tavern, in a tiny, squabbling island nation at the end of the world, mooning over a married woman.
A married woman with a sudden, inexplicable magical power. What more could any man want?
Reikos looked at his healed thumb. It remained unblemished, the pain gone entirely.
Yes, he had handled that quite poorly. But, damn it all, why would she not let him apologize? Her cold, unyielding note had left him no way to make it up to her, to help her handle a situation which was clearly distressing her.
He wiped the last grease from the bottom of his bowl with bread, washed down with the last of his lager. The barmaid approached as he noticed a new shift in the noise from outside. “Another, sir?”
“No, I am finished,” he said, digging in his pockets for the strange, hard-edged coins they used here as he peered past her out the large front window.
The prayer line outside had become a jumble of folk crowding
the narrow street. Reikos saw two young, strong men in a quiet argument at their center. Had two lines run afoul of one another? More strong men flanked them, listening, as the gentler folk faded toward the edges of the group, or left altogether. It didn’t take instincts honed in a life spent traveling the world to sense trouble. Reikos got to his feet, about to ask the barmaid to show him to the tavern’s back exit, when one of the men outside turned and spotted him in the window.
“Foreigner!” the man cried, pointing. “Parasite!”
The agitated heart of the combined prayer lines turned at once. Then half a dozen burly men poured into the Eighth Sea. “Get out of here!” the barmaid screamed, but no one heeded her. She ran to the back of the common room, disappearing through the kitchen door.
“Stop, you fool!” Reikos heard someone shout, as the man who’d called him a parasite knocked over chairs in his haste to get to him. “The god abhors violence! Our quarrel is not with foreigners!”
Reikos pulled out his short knife and gave his first attacker a poke in the gut — not enough to kill him, but sufficient to get his attention. The man screamed and fell back against a table, knocking it over into the man behind him. Shouts filled the room, as the men who’d barged inside began attacking each other as well as Reikos, who swiped at another sweating young man, scoring his face. As blood flew, a third man nearly got Reikos in the throat with a long knife, but he fell to the floor and rolled under a table, scrabbling to his feet on the other side.
“We betray the god!” the other man cried again, but Reikos didn’t wait to hear them resolve their differences. He burst through the kitchen door, where the terrified barmaid cowered against the back wall.
“Door?” Reikos demanded, his breath short.
She pointed; he dashed out into the alley and turned right. His way took him past the back entrance of number 45. Sian’s shutters were closed, though the torrential rains of last night had given way to a pleasantly warm day. He ran on, not slowing until he reached a crowded market five or six streets away. From there, he donned an attitude of casual unconcern, and made his way back to the safety of his ship.
Sian fumed in her damp limestone cell, somewhere deep in the warren that was the Temple Mishrah-Khote. After hauling her across the long bridge to The Well, her captors had deposited her here just before dawn, without a word of explanation or even accusation, and no more than a bucket of questionable water and a moldy straw mattress. She had been brought a trencher of thin gruel for breakfast, and again for dinner tonight, with no kava or even tea. And still, no one had come to question or accuse her. Her cell’s high slit of window had gone dark many hours ago. It must be near twelve bells already, but sleep eluded her. Was anybody ever going to come explain what she was doing here, or would she just be left to rot forever, unremembered?
Last night, she had tried repeatedly to talk with the priests who’d brought her here, but once they’d had her in their custody, they’d treated her as if she were invisible. Her apparent jailer, Father Lod, had been the very essence of cold officiousness. No, he could not tell her what the charge against her was; yes, someone would be back to speak with her as soon as possible, things were so very busy at the moment, surely she understood.
Little worm, she thought for perhaps the hundredth time, drifting toward sleep at last.
She was awakened some time later by the soft clank of keys and the jarring rasp of hinges as her cell door opened with a wincing flare of torch light. Father Lod walked in, with two robed underlings she hadn’t seen before.
“You will come with me, Domina Kattë,” Lod said, unlocking the cell door. Sian came out gladly enough, but he dug his hand painfully into her arm as he led her out of the cell block and along a series of corridors. They climbed a flight of stairs, then bypassed a puzzle box of forecourts, gates and offertory halls leading into cloistered precincts deeper within.
Their path took them unexpectedly back into the public spaces, across a torchlit healing hall. Sian had been here once before, when Biri was born. Maleen had married young, and, in a fit of piousness, requested a Temple Blessing for the boy. This uncharacteristic devotion had passed by the time Jila arrived nearly six years later; perhaps the miscarriages had dampened her fervor. Sian’s gaze swept the large room as she was hustled through. Square-cut pillars painted red and blue held up a stepped ceiling where gilded images of the Seven Vile Humors and the Seven Sacred Essences were in glorious ritual array. Altar nooks around the walls offered sacrifice to the unnamed, indeed often faceless, gods of healing.
The scattering of ill and infirm present in this lovely room lay in sickbeds suspiciously well-appointed with cloth-of-gold and Hanchu silks.
Sian was yanked roughly onward toward a nondescript doorway at the room’s far side. “I am not resisting you,” she hissed.
Lod eased up the pressure a fraction. The other two priests walked close behind as she was led into dimly lamplit space barely larger than a closet in a tradesman’s home. One of the silent priests locked the door behind them.
“Sit there.” Father Lod pushed her toward a wooden hold-chair on one side of the tiny room. As she complied, the second priest threw one of its crude iron latches into place around her waist.
“We have news of you which disturbs us,” Lod said, coming to loom over her.
“What news is that, Father?” Sian asked, struggling to keep her voice polite and obedient. It would not serve her to show impertinence to these men, though having never ventured on the wrong side of official powers, she was uncertain of how to behave — or what they might do.
“We have heard that you are masquerading as a healer,” Lod replied, “claiming that your mere touch erases injury and illness.” The priests behind him stood silent.
“It is the truth, Father. But I did not choose this curse; I do not want it. It was done to me, against my will. I want nothing more than to be relieved of this burden and go back to my —”
“You lie,” Lod snapped. “You pretend penitence now because you have been caught, but half of Alizar is talking of your fraudulent performances. They call you a new goddess. I am told you are a successful businesswoman. Was that not enough for you?”
Sian leaned as far forward as she could within the confines of the hold-chair, looking up at Lod beseechingly. “I have no wish to be a goddess. I don’t want this power. You are healers — cure me of this thing!”
“There is nothing to cure! Lying is a sin, not an affliction!”
“I am not lying. The curse imposed on me is real, as is my desire to be rid of it!”
Lod’s face blanched nearly white with anger. He slapped Sian hard across the face. Astonished, her eyes filled with tears as her cheek stung. He slapped her other cheek so hard her head snapped to the right and her ears rang. Almost too quickly for her eyes to follow, he whipped a small knife from his belt, and reached up to slice her left earlobe. “Heal that!” he shouted. As Sian cried out, reaching for her ear, Lod grabbed her hand away, crushing her fingers in his iron grip.
She stared at him in shock, pain cascading through her. “What do you want from me?”
“I want the truth,” he hissed, bending several of her fingers back painfully. “Admit that you are no healer.”
“Please!” Sian cried, trying in vain to yield to his grasp, prevented by the chair’s embrace. “Please, stop!”
“I will stop when you stop lying.” Lod shoved her fingers further back with a violent twist. She heard the thin bones snap an instant before new agony filled her. “This is what comes of fraud!” She hardly heard his words through her own screams. “Your pain is nothing next to that of all the suffering, vulnerable souls whom you pretend to heal.”
Sian clutched her broken fingers, struggling to contain the agony. “Heal, oh please heal,” she whimpered to the shattered bones.
And … they did. She could feel her injuries begin to knit together. The sensation nearly made her faint as the shadow pain she felt with every healing now joined t
he awful pain of her bones recombining. The scent of ginger in the air was sickening, overpowering. She would never eat ginger again.
Sobbing, Sian lost herself for a time. When she returned to her senses, she held her right hand out, flexing the formerly broken fingers. They felt stiff and sore, but they were whole. And the pain itself was fast slipping away.
Sian touched her ear and found it slick with blood, but the once-parted flesh was already joined again as well. Exhausted, she leaned back in the hold-chair, panting, and closed her eyes. “Are you satisfied?” she breathed.
“If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes …” murmured the priest closest to the door.
“It is … not possible,” Lod growled, clearly shaken as well. “An illusion. Group hypnosis of some kind … I have seen such vile tricks before.” His voice regained its strength as he convinced himself. “Or something even worse, perhaps. What djinnis have you dared commune with, woman? To what demonic abominations have you sold yourself?”
Sian opened her eyes again, fearing further torture. “I commune with nothing,” she said, trembling. “I told you the truth. This was done to me by the Butchered God’s mad priest! I want no part of it! I just want it gone! What must I do to make you believe me?”
“The Butchered God,” Lod spat. “His would-be priest is the greatest fraud in all of Alizar. If that slippery eel had any power to bestow such gifts, why should he need to hide from us? And why single you out anyway, if you sought nothing from him?”
“He said it was because of my relation to the ruling family. He said I was to carry some kind of message to them from his god. Though he never told me what it was,” she added, fearing they would call her a liar yet again when she could not elaborate.
For a moment, no one spoke, then Lod asked skeptically, “What relation to the ruling family?”
“I am of House Alkattha,” she replied. “The Census Taker is my cousin; the Factor also, though more distant.”
A palpable stillness fell over the room. Lod actually took a step away from her.