The Temple

by Jean Johnson

  Each brother had to conserve his magical strength where possible. The reason why it had taken them such a short time to circumnavigate the entire globe, delivering priests partially by ship and partially by mirror-Gate, was because each of the three Puhon brothers were above average in magical strength. Each had the capacity to shield their ship from any storms in the sky, any rocks below the waves, and any beasts or pirates thinking that their transport would be easy prey.

  Despite being born to a nation filled with lakes, inlets, and bays, Krais hadn’t known there were so many nautical spells in the world until this voyage. Unfortunately, not a single one of them would be of any use at deflecting their sire’s unjust anger. He sighed and wiggled to get comfortable in the hammock, shutting out Gayn’s mutterings.

  Except, he couldn’t. Just a simple phrase, “ . . . If I had made it to Disciplinarian . . .,” caught at his ears. Reminding Krais of the reason why he had failed to enter the ranks. His failure hadn’t been under the eyes of the Goddess of Writing, petitioning Her for the right to bear the secret sigils that would allow a Disciplinarian to interrupt and lock down another mage’s magics, as Gayn’s had been. As Foren’s had been, too; both younger brothers had found themselves rejected each in their own time, their own attempt during their initiate’s vigil in the Temple.

  No, Krais’ rejection had occurred much earlier than that. To be a Disciplinarian, one had to be able to submit as well as dominate . . . and Krais could not do it. He could not submit. He couldn’t even fake it just to please his father. Faking the mindset that a Goddess would read midway through his training would not gain him the position Dagan’thio wanted his eldest son to attain. Even as a youth of eighteen, before his father had become the Elder, Krais had known that. Thirteen years later, he served instead as the head of a sort of private mage-warrior army of three.

  But it was never enough for their father. Now the Puhon sons came home with a big, fat failure as the only result for all their effort. The Elder of Disciplinarians would not treat that failure lightly, however impossible it might have been.

  Sleep did not come quickly for Krais, despite the comfort of his swaying, makeshift bed.

  * * *

  * * *

  Pelai did not know how she came to be standing in a vast, rolling field of wheat. Nor why dozens of gondolas could glide through the rippling stalks as though they were waterways. In retrospect, the cattle grazing in the lakes and streams should have given her a clue. Wading through the golden, bearded stalks felt like wading through strangely scratchy warm water. Walk as fast and as far as she could, she could not keep up with the gondoliers poling through the fields like they were land-bound reed beds.

  Villae dotted the landscape sumptous manor-homes surrounded by ornate gardens; white plaster gleamed off their walls, their golden and green tiled roofs peaking in arches at the ridgepoles and curling up at the corners. Redwood pillars supported the porticos and porch roofs, and blue and gray stone tiles lined the floors . . . which formed another point of oddity; she could see into the heart of every home. Here, a child played with a miniature wooden cart and the rag-animals used to pull it; tools for woodworking sat in the wagon’s bed. There, a father chopped up a book into little cubes and fed them one spoonful at a time to his baby, while smiling and telling tales to go with each morsel of information.

  Okay . . . this is definitely a dream. Nobody would dare chop up a book within Mendhi’s borders, Pelai thought. Knowing it was a dream, of course, did not wake her from the dreaming. She waded through the wheatfield waters, her combat kilt brushing aside the sharp stalks, protecting her thighs to her knees just as her plate-guarded boots protected her from knees to toes. Her fitted vest covered her from waist to shoulders, leaving most of . . .

  No, even her wrists were bare, she realized, protectively bringing them in close to conceal the special disciplining tattoos inked on their insides. The power to suppress and subdue at will another mage’s energies was not lightly granted to anyone. After nearly fourteen years of owning them, she held to the habit of hiding her wrists even in the privacy of her own home, so to be walking about in public with her wrists exposed—even just in a dream, in a broad wheat field/pond thing with no misplaced gondoliers near her—unnerved her.

  A strong wind blew through, tossing her hair around her face in dark, writhing tendrils. She scraped it back, squinting against the sea-scented breeze, and watched the stalks of wheat bob and sway, bending and twisting unnaturally into letter shapes.

  Hush, little Guardian; stand your ground.

  Wisdom faked will try to know.

  The sight is different from the sound.

  Spoken words aren’t what scrolls show.

  Those words . . . The wind whipped harder around her, dissolving the wheat, the boats, the buildings, until she hung suspended in a maelstrom, a whirlwind . . . the Vortex. Six months ago, Pelai had struggled to control and master a Fountain completely unlike the orderly, well-shaped one at the Temple. She had failed. She had not been able to reshape it in the ways needed, and had been forced to just maintain her grip, her own self-control.

  The Vortex of, well, the land was no longer Mekhana, no longer had a name, though one day it might call itself Guildara . . . that land’s Fountain had shaken her confidence on being able to control the Fountain of the Temple of the Painted Warriors of Mendhi. Forcing herself to stay calm and still, keeping herself focused in the dream, Pelai watched the winds and waters of the Vortex ripping things into horizontal strips and stripes around her. If the Temple Fountain ever went rogue . . .

  It will not go rogue, she reminded herself. Guardian Alonnen explained that his Fountain was the result of generations of poorly trained mages weaving obfuscations and illusions to hide themselves from their God . . . their ex-God, rather. My hubris lay in thinking that one Fountain would be exactly like any other. I will remember that I was never harmed by the Vortex, as any weaker mage might’ve been injured, even incinerated. I simply could not master the complex chaos of that place.

  Our Fountain is a model of calm purity. . . . Is that what You meant by telling me that “Wisdom faked will try to know,” my Goddess? she asked the dream, calming her thoughts so that she could listen and watch for the words of Menda. I now know that my false confidence needs to be tempered by experience. Through it, I know true wisdom . . .

  With inner calmness came exterior calm. The shredded bits of landscape slowed and slid back into place around her. Wind still ruffled the fuzzy heads of wheat, dancing them in rippling gusts. For a moment, she watched a clutch of elderly and younger men stepping off the deck of a ferry barge, their clothes dusty from travel, their staves worn at the bases from striking the surfaces of a thousand roads. Wherever they went, whether it was the tread of their worn sandals and boots, or the scrape of their clothing and cloak hems against the wheat now covering everything, the wheat looked blighted and moldy.

  Then a clutch of stalks right in front of her bent themselves into Mendhite characters, recapturing her attention by forming a very clearly marked No.

  The wheat stalks parted abruptly, as if plowed aside by the prow of a spell-speeded boat. Whatever invisible hands parted the landscape, it arrowed straight to the men in the distance, circled around them hard enough to kick up seeds and stalks all around, then shot straight back to her . . . and geysered up around her, kicking her into the air, too. Flung up high, she looked down for one moment at the shape of the wheat flattened around the scholarly men, some sort of circle with stubby rays around the edges, a shape that looked annoyingly familiar . . . then she came crashing down.

  Naranna Pelai jolted herself awake before she could splatter on the ground. Always a good idea, when dreaming. Unfortunately, jerking up into a sitting position prompted a disgusted yowl from Purrsus. Not that she could really see her cat, though she felt his weight and heat curled up atop her bedding by her hip, but she felt his annoyed swipe at her
through the thin blanket and sheet that were all the warm summer night needed.

  She heard him yawn, felt him pushing his paws against her thigh as he stretched, the retraction of his dainty feet as he curled up into a ball again. Heard him begin to purr, a sound louder than the slowly calming beat of her heart. Squinting protectively, Pelai leaned over and touched the runes that controlled the crystal on her bedpost. Purrsus grumbled at the low but still intrusive golden light she summoned. His black leather collar, studded with lapis stones picked to match his eyes, gleamed faintly, until the shadow of his dark gray foreleg lifted up over his dark muzzle, just so that the cat could hide those blue eyes from the evil, awful, horribly rude light.

  Sympathizing, Pelai waited a few moments for her own eyes to adjust, then found the pencil and tablet of paper she kept by her bed, so that she could write down everything. Gods and Goddesses did not deliver prophecies personally every day. Not to ordinary citizens. Not on ordinary days. But six months ago, the Convocation of Gods and Man had been restarted after roughly two centuries of inadvertent hiatus. During those two weeks, many people around the world had heard the voices of their local Patron Deities murmuring in their hearts and their heads.

  For some reason, Pelai had been included in the numbers of those given such revelations.

  She had seen two prophecies, not just one. In writing, of course, on a great sheet that looked like an ancient palimpsest. Parchment, the inner skin of a sheep or goat, carefully separated and treated to turn it into a thin but tough page, one suitable for writing upon, scraping clean, and writing again with ink, layer after layer carefully used and reused in the parsimony of the ancient days, before wood pulp paper had been invented and industrialized via specialized mage workers to make it relatively cheap.

  Her verse was easy to remember:

  Hush, little Guardian; stand your ground.

  Wisdom faked will try to know.

  The sight is different from the sound.

  Spoken words aren’t what scrolls show.

  For one will walk away from humanity,

  And one of them will betray humanity,

  And one of them will save humanity.

  Love, not hate, is what must grow.

  But beneath that, scraped faint on the palimpsest of her dreams, so that only her trained memory could remember the different letters beneath the shape of her own, had lain the traces of another:

  Hush, little writer; don’t say a thing!

  Granite reveals redemption’s face.

  Accept your penance with no objecting.

  Silence leads you to the right place.

  To hot-aired hate, bend unbreaking.

  Heroes can rise from fallen grace . . .

  For one of you will save humanity,

  Another of you will betray humanity,

  The third will walk away from humanity.

  But all are needed to save your whole race.

  She was not a Guardian. Yet. But not for much longer. Guardian Tipa’thia’s strength faded with each month, each week, and of late, each single day. Any day now, Tipa would either die or resign. Mages could perform miraculous spells and could retain a semblance of vitality for a long while, but even the strongest of mages eventually burned out. Human lives were only ever so long, and with rare exception, never surpassed even a century in length.

  So the first, stronger-written verse should apply to her, to something she would have to do or learn in the coming months. Something to look up in the Great Library no doubt. The half-hidden verse applied to someone who needed redemption, to someone who needed to bow without breaking. To a submissive, perhaps, but more likely to someone who would be assigned to her for disciplining. Otherwise, why would she be allowed to glimpse it?

  Which makes perfect sense, because Dagan’thio is insisting his sons need punishing for their failure . . . and if ever there were a trio who needed a lesson in repentance and redemption, it’s those three overgrown brats.

  She did not have a good opinion of any of them. The middle brother, Foren, tended to just slope through life, following the lead of others. Like a puddle of ink, spilling down into the lowest, most comfortable spot, uncaring of the stains he left behind. The least objectionable of the three, but Goddess, she wished he’d grow a spine and think for himself!

  The youngest brother, Gayn, actively parroted his sire. Everything he did, he did so colored by the attitude that if the Elder Disciplinarian could get away with something, so could he. Crapping all over everything just like a Mendhite parrot, too, and squawking about subjects he shouldn’t have any say in handling.

  Unlike his brothers, who could and did bow to the will of others, Krais wasn’t the least bit bendable. Too rigid, rather, since the eldest Puhon sibling went about his father-assigned tasks ruthlessly. She had been there on the day Krais had been ordered to submit to Disciplining of his own free will. Had seen him refuse to kneel to anyone. Pelai actually preferred that kind of spine, that kind of independence . . . but oh, she wished the stupid warrior would put some thought into the causes he supported, the actions he enforced!

  Annoying, all three of them . . . and all three will be mine to discipline, when they finally come home. Lucky me . . . Oh, the joys of being the senior-most Disciplinarian on permanent duty here at the Painted Temple, on the outskirts of Mendham. Outside of the Elder Disciplinarian, of course, but the law was the law. No matter how much Dagan’thio might wish to take a whip to his own sons, the law firmly prevented that.

  Shifting her hand to the silky, long-furred cat curled up by her hip, Pelai gently petted Purrsus. His head came up briefly and a soft, sleepy, prrrpt sound escaped, before the feline sighed and returned his soft, dark-muzzled head to its place between his paws. A noise in the distance pricked at both their ears, bringing Purrsus’ head up. The sound jangled again. Someone . . . ringing the bell outside her front door? At this hour, in the middle of the night?

  Tipa’thia. It could be the Guardian herself, though walking this far was a dubious prospect. Her health wasn’t the best anymore. Or maybe the Puhon brothers are home early, and their father is demanding they be punished right away, despite the fact it’s the middle of the night. Dagan’thio doesn’t let the schedules of lesser beings disrupt his own desires.

  Hearing the bell ringing again, Pelai sighed and scooted out of bed, shrugging her shoulders in the way that activated her garbing tattoos even as she moved. Between one breath and the next, her sleeping tunic vanished, replaced by the black-dyed leathers of a Disciplinarian. Leather kilt, leather vest, knee-covering boots, tattoo-covering bracers, and a belt with the flogger of her calling hooked onto it.

  Had she been a member of the Painted Army, her leathers would have been boiled in oil until hardened brown, and tooled with the runes and sigils needed for protecting their fighters in combat. A sword or a pair of daggers would have taken the place of the flogger. And had she been a simple citizen, her clothing would have been woven from sensible, lightweight wool or cotton and dyed in cheerful hues, not made of potentially sweat-inducing leather. A Painted Warrior could wear any shade of leather he or she liked, so long as it didn’t bear the pei-slii tooled and lined in gold paint like hers did, but nobody wore leather without cooling runes in the tropical nation of Mendhi.

  A pity my leathers are only gauged for hot weather, and not for that cold, mountainous land of ex-Mekhana, she remembered, hurrying down the stairs. They’re only farther north by, what, a thousand miles at most? But, brrr, much higher in elevation instead of sensibly at sea level, and quite, quite cold in winter.

  Reaching the front door as the bell jangled a fourth time, she touched the rune that activated a brighter version of the outside lights than softly glowed out there currently, and opened the panel. The woman on the other side looked only vaguely familiar, some Temple staff member. The taga she wore, a soft, finespun, cloud-gray wool, draped in
folds from pins on her shoulders down to the rope sandals wrapping their way up her shins. The fabric, gathered at her hips by a braided leather belt, had been bound with woven trim featuring the traditional pei-slii of the Painted Temple; a sideways, striated teardrop with a tip that curled in an exaggerated spiral, reminiscent of ink, scroll, and feather quill all in one.

  She wasn’t a priestess Pelai immediately recognized, but then it was fairly dark, even with the crystal glowing on the edge of her doorframe. Still, the colors of those pei-slii designs were mostly light purple, while the brooches holding up her taga had been crafted from golden curled teardrops enameled in white. Light purple embroidery meant a Healer-priestess, and the two white pei-slii feathers meant she had been formally assigned to serve Tipa’thia herself. But she wasn’t immediately familiar.

  “Doma Pelai?” the woman asked.

  “Yes. Is Tipa’thia ill again?” Pelai asked. “You’re one of her Healers, yes? Assigned this last month . . . ?”

  The woman nodded, her round face catching the light of Sister Moon rising off to the east. “Healer Robyn, assigned this last week. I’m afraid her condition is worsening. The other Healers and I think she has only a few days left. She woke with a premonition in the middle of the night, and wishes for you to . . .”

  Footsteps made both of them turn and look out across the night-shadowed grounds, with the Healer falling silent, clearly not wanting to discuss the condition of a patient in the presence of an outsider. Pelai tensed, wondering who else would be coming up the path to her quarters at this hour. It was possible they came to visit someone else, of course; her quarters were merely one of several built side by side in a row along the shore of an ornamentally gardened lake on the edge of the Temple grounds. Possible, but not likely.

  The fellow who approached wore the brown of the army. That narrowed Pelai’s eyes. She definitely did not recognize him, but that was okay; she had far more dealings with the Healer-priests of late, thanks to Tipa’thia’s illnesses, than she ever had with the army. Unless it was an officer in need of disciplining, of course.