The Changing of the Sun

by Lesley Smith

  The bowels of the tower still smelled like blood, a coppered tang which every one of the blind oracles had picked up on like a forest cat does food. Eirian had done what she could, but eyes were necessary for this and Hsia had been the one to strip the sheets and mop the floor. Her body might have been returned to her birth-clan for the customary burning but Vashi’s pain remained, hanging like a malaise on the air.

  Stopping outside Keiue’s cell, Hsia realised the smell wasn’t coming from the place where Vashi had died. The smell reminded her of a slaughterhouse in the market place, the one place Hsia hated above all others.

  Though the animals were dispatched quickly, the blood lingered and assistants were forever having to wash it into the gutters. This past Harvest, a sickness had passed over the temple and Healer Senara had prescribed a simple stew made from offal and bones. Hsia had visited each day for a half moon to get the ingredients, and it had left her never wanting to eat meat again. She knocked gently on the closed cell door, a warning and politeness to the occupant. Keiue was known for her relationship with Geetha and Vashi had, once or twice, acted as agent to ensure the two had a few hours of the night together, a moment’s bliss in a dreary world even if Jashri would see them dead for sharing themselves.

  The smell washed over her and Hsia bent double, gagging. The vomit clung to her lips even as her meal from the previous evening spilled onto the floor and she was glad of the wall for support.

  “Keiue?” she asked softly. “Oracle, are you all right?”

  Fear washed over her. No smell like this could ever come from good things, and Hsia wiped her mouth on her sleeve and stepped over the threshold.

  Keiue and Geetha lay on the pallet in each other’s arms. Normally, such a moment would be one of love, but both were still; they were too pale and their limbs already frozen like stone. Jaisenthia had walked these halls during the night and taken them, the knife by which they had summoned her was still covered in blood, and was left next to a stick of long-burned down incense that tried to hide the smell of death and the blood drying on the walls.

  Hsia’s mind recognised the words written on the wall above them, saw the way the blood had dripped as if forces unbeknownst to them had tried to pull it back to the women’s bodies. A prophecy…but there was no time for that, not now. The girl, half numbed by shock, ran to get a cloth and hot water, to wipe the message away before Darus or one of his minions saw it.

  The shock was what separated Saiara from Hsia’s mind, flinging the new oracle back to her own sleeping form. The jump from Hsia’s mind to her own was so fast, the awakening so jarring, that for a moment she was unsure who and where she was. She could feel sunlight on her face; time had passed and the bell for morning offices was tolling. The markets would be opening now and Hsia, if she could still walk into the tower, would be attempting to serve the sisters’ breakfast.

  Did they know yet, why Keiue and Geetha were not among them? Would she say?

  Saiara wiped away tears she didn’t even know she had shed and quickly pulled on her robes. She needed to speak with Eirian, this madness could continue no longer.

  Nahris was the last person to see the Edoi boy, Jio, or rather, the last person to hear him. She had heard him, feet pounding as he scaled the roof to chase a dennabird. She caught sight of his tail and he was gone, blowing through the shattered Artisan’s Quarter like the breeze. She’d played with him briefly, even though a couple of years separated them. She was a little too far ahead of him—more adult than child, and closer to that world than his.

  The summer before she might have joined him, relishing the feel of the warm tiles on the pads of her feet, feeling the rush as she climbed and ran and flew through the streets of Aia’s city. Now, though, her feet were firmly on the ground, and the adult Nahris was becoming liked it that way.

  Thaeos was rising and she had washing to hang out to dry in the morning rays. If she didn’t, Jibran would beat her and then work tomorrow would be twice as hard. The laundry would take half a day, and then she had a household to cook for. Jibran was not the worst master, but he was still her master and enslavement, be it to the temple or to a private trader like Jibran, well, it was still a life lacking in freedom however you looked at it.

  Her family had sold her at childhood’s end. She’d not expected being an adult to be like this, though. Debts were mounting and she was their only asset, and they valued their freedom over hers. Nahris didn’t blame them, it wasn’t an uncommon thing and she was a child of the city, not Edoi or even Cavari. The cityfolk valued their own standing over the lives of their children and even Kaiene had not been able to abolish the practise. It had, according to scripture, been her one regret.

  “Ho, Jio!” She called out, wondering if he’d hear. “Run well, my friend, and watch where you put your feet.”

  Laughter followed in reply, drifting on the wind, and she left him to his hunt.

  Eirian tried not to think of her first days as Iasei’s successor. She had not been a priestess and the things a High Oracle had to learn seemed so large that they might as well have been mountains. Mountains she had had to climb blind, and even with Iasei and Khannam there to support her, it was still no easy task.

  Khannam’s love had saved her. He had been a young attendant that Iasei had chosen for her. The High Oracle had asked whether she would prefer a male or female companion and selected him based on his knowledge, to compliment her, as all touchstones must.

  The first year had been awkward; Eirian had known despair, it came with the grief of her position. There would always be a time of adjustment, of sorrow for the untimely demise of her past self, Lenara the Weaver. Khannam had been kind and patient. He had befriended her first, helping to supplement her knowledge by taking her to the library and describing the vast hall. He had read to her from ancient books, everything from Edoi legends to the history of the land.

  He had recognised that she wanted to learn, that history and stories fascinated her, and it became the link which bound them together. Eventually love followed and no one seemed surprised. It was not uncommon, of course, but Eirian had never looked for it.

  Recitation was a skill he had in abundance. Khannam’s father had been a bard and he had learned the orator’s art before he could stand on a podium. She loved to listen to him read. He made even the Rites of Ascension sound interesting, and as she mulled the list of criteria his voice came back to her, drifting through her memories as if they were still young and sitting in the library together.

  “Anyone who has held the mantle of High Oracle may name a successor to that mantle, regardless of whether they currently hold it or did seasons and years in the past…”

  The words fell from her lips, the memory revived. No one studied the tomes anymore, much less the Rites of Ascension, no one except the Companions.

  Jashri had never shown interest in the rules, not unless they would support her argument. She never craved knowledge for its own sake, only going looking when she needed an excuse to justify the unjustifiable. Her case against Saiara was just the latest of such incidents, but for those who truly loved knowledge, it was the greatest power.

  Eirian opened her mouth to call for Vashi and then remembered. Vashi was gone—not dead, thank Aia, and yet her absence in the Oracles’ Tower was palpable. Eirian ate a bowl full of rice gruel that Hsia had brought, the poor girl moving like a frightened sand mouse. Everyone had heard what had transpired, what Darus had done on Jashri’s orders.

  “Hsia!” Eirian called. “Wait.”

  “What, Eirian?” She sounded wary but also tired, as if she hadn’t slept in days, and her voice was too high, like cat gut strings pulled way too tight, like a child about to cry from some imagined or very real slight.

  There was none of the usual venom in her voice, which in itself was worrying. “Hsia? Are you all right?”

  “Do I sound it?” Her voice was quaking. “Darus made sure we all saw her, Eirian. It wasn’t just a message for you. He’s promised t
hat anyone who breaks their bond, anyone who disobeys, will suffer the same fate.”

  “Sweet Aia,” the seer exclaimed. “Hsia, can you hold on a little longer?”

  For the first time, the girl spoke her true feelings, all the things she had locked away under venom to protect herself. “I’m afraid.”

  Eirian reached out to hug her, as if Hsia was her own Naeri, restored to her across the years. “Hsia, you must be strong. Things are moving and you are welcome with us.”

  “You honestly think she will let you leave?” Hsia sounded harsher than Eirian knew she’d meant to be. Oracles did not leave, they stayed just as bondservants did. “I know my fate, Mother, I will never leave this city.”

  “Hsia?” An image crept into her mind, blood and death and pain and ending. “What are you planning?”

  The servant answered her, her voice calm and rational, but also totally set on her course. “I will do what must be done to smooth your passing out of the city and end my suffering. I’ve had enough and at least I can be useful to you.”

  Eirian felt grief but this was between Aia and the girl, and while she abhorred the idea of taking another’s life, it was not her place to stop Hsia. “Whatever you do, make sure it is for the right reasons, child.”

  “As you say, Mother,” she replied. “There is something else.”

  “What, child?”

  “Keiue and Geetha passed in the night. I found their bodies this morning and I left the room undisturbed, sealed. They were still entangled together, a knife on the floor and their blood spilled to write prophecy on the wall…”

  Eirian felt the weight of the world suddenly threaten to crush her. She remembered the Purge, remembered how Jashri had discovered the two oracles were in love and how she’d reacted. She couldn’t banish them as she had the attendants, so she bound them; if they ever slept together she would have them killed, painfully and slowly. Eirian quietly cursed even as she prayed for their peace. Jashri was so scared of visions and the act which often preceded them that she had denied even her sisters some solace.

  “There was something written on the wall,” Hsia told her. “Someone needs to tell the Companion, if that even matters now.”

  “You could read it?”

  “Yes, Vashi was not the only one to learn her letters. One of them, it looked like Keiue’s hand, wrote a verse there: ‘The water is coming to drown the city. Thaeos waits to burn the remains, to wipe Aiaea from all maps. We go first and more will follow, because the Order must die to be reborn. The Changing of the Sun is coming.’.”

  “Do one last thing for me then, Hsia?”

  “As you ask.”

  “Send word out into the city, tell whomever you can without revealing yourself as the source. Tell them a new Oracle will stand on the steps today at noon.”

  “But Jashri hasn’t—”

  “I don’t care!” The words came out too harshly and they stopped the servant girl in her tracks. “This is too important, Hsia.”

  Hsia finally agreed. “All right.”

  “Hsia, Vashi isn’t dead.”

  “What?”

  “She lives. That wasn’t her corpse Senna and Jeiana carried out of the grounds last night, it was her.”

  “No one could have survived that!”

  “No one should have,” Eirian said. “There is a woman, a survivor of Caerim and she glowed, like the gods are supposed to in the old legends. Sometimes, in the darkness, a miracle provides just a little light—enough to see by at least—but she was blinding.”

  “Who would have the power to do something like that?”

  “That’s what I find myself wondering,” Eirian said. “I know what I think—who I believe she is—but whether it’s the truth remains to be seen.”

  Darus moved through the halls and all those he passed gave way, sensing only misery would follow if they didn’t. The ceremony for the passing of Keiue and Geetha had tempered the mood of the temple, allowing each and every soul bound in Jashri’s unhappiness to give voice to their pain and suffering. They were not weeping for the loss of two almost-nameless oracles, two unknown women in a sea of souls dedicated to the gods, but for themselves, and it sickened him.

  Jashri herself hadn’t even attended. She refused to leave her rooms, not even for services, and she had refused food. Rumours said the death of her beloved handmaid had broken her, and if Darus ever found out who was the source of this gossip, he intended to see them silenced too.

  Silencing people was not something he liked doing, but after the first time, after he had filleted Lyse’s ieshiya from her back like you would take the spine from a fish, he discovered that if you projected the person you hated most onto the person you were hurting, it turned the experience into something cleansing. Flaying the skin from Vashi’s bones, that had been a transcendent experience which was not mortal but divine. He was the giver of death and taker of life.

  He hated Jashri. He hated her with every bone in his body, ever fibre in the void left by his soul. This revelation was worn and tired but still gnawed at him, even after so long. He had been young when the Feium Asun had brought a blind foundling girl to the temple, named by their leader for some obscure saint few but the Edoi had ever heard of.

  Eirian had known, of course, and she had asked for an attendant. He had been chosen, by fate or the whims of Aia. He had never thought when he rebuffed the advances of the male trainees that his personal preferences would see him scarred and broken by a frightened girl terrified of anyone who dared to come too close.

  The scars from where her nails had scraped were so deep he was sure his skull would bear the marks long after the flesh had been burned away. They had healed cleanly over the months after Jashri’s frenzied attack, but they lingered in the words and memories of the temple whose collective memory was longer than that of any slave or oracle. Halom Davos might have been a sexist dolt, but he knew the healing arts, except his own sickness, of course, but then healers always made for the worst patients.

  Those four gouges, and the fifth, as delicately shaped as the thumb nail which created it, should have taken his right eye. Instinct had saved it, but the jagged scratch travelled the full length of his face, stopping at his lip and resuming on his chin. They still burned now and again, a phantom agony which woke him in the depths of the night with the dreams and nightmares of the day Jashri had struck out at him.

  Darus had been young and naive, he understood that now. He’d seen her pain and fear, and he had only wanted to share it, to help her in her burdens as all attendants were taught to do. No one knew, of course, about her past, and she herself never spoke of her former self and how she came to be found in the hell that was the Southern Desert.

  Worse, as he lay in the Hall of Healing, she had bound him. Temple statute said a High Oracle must have an attendant, but she didn’t want him near her. So he gained a new title, that of ‘High Chamberlain’, in a move which unsettled many. Kaiene’s rules were left in place out of respect for the first Oracle, they’d not been changed in ages, in lifetimes, and she was some newly Ascended child changing the rules to suit her own whims. It had not sat well with Eirian, with the matriarchs of the other Orders, or with Darus himself.

  She had bound him, and he wouldn’t run even if he could. The oath he’d sworn still meant something, even after all this time. Attendants were emotional rocks, they were there to serve and he wouldn’t chance half a lifetime’s worth of tutelage. He had been offered to the temple; this was the only world he knew and he couldn’t leave, there was nowhere else to go.

  Lyse had been his darkest moment. She had seen into his heart as all true oracles could. She was Jashri’s true successor and yet he had deafened her from the whispering voice of the Disembodied Goddess, had rendered her just another mortal woman, no different from a common bondservant. When he broke her, all he had seen in her blind visage was Jashri staring back at him.

  As he moved through the temple complex it felt oddly empty, as if people wer
e in the main worship hall during the offices. But it was the wrong time of the day for that—late afternoon and the marketplace would be slowing, the traders beginning to pack their stalls for the day as Thaeos descended, darkness coming behind him.

  He heard the sound before his brain registered what it meant, a handheld gong only used in sacred ceremony. It could cut through silence and ice and the noise of the marketplace. He had heard it once before, as a young attendant, standing beside the High Oracle-Ascendant as she made her oaths before her people and accepted the ceremonial map and census.

  Darus broke into a run, pushing past the servants blocking his path. Eirian wouldn’t dare, she couldn’t! He had read the old tomes; knowledge was power and a High Chamberlain was expected to be as versed in lore and rite as any attendant, as any Codexmaster. He had read to Jashri for years, sometimes reading hidden text and sometimes reciting the actual tomes from memory. Old Beren might have noticed, but who would argue with the High Oracle?

  He knew any High Oracle could name a successor to the mantle, even if their time had passed and they had descended to retirement, and Eirian was so convinced that that girl was the future. It had blinded the old woman. Eirian didn’t care what happened to him, to Jashri. What would become of them if Saiara was Named, if she Ascended?

  The temple steps; it had to be done there, in front of the people. The map, the census, they were ceremonial gifts, but they also weren’t what mattered. It was the investiture by a predecessor.

  The gong sounded again and a hush swept over the city. Darus pushed through the throng and it was like trying to swim up-current, to climb over a hundred small hills properly called mountains.

  A sea of heads, of children on their elders’ shoulders. Tails tripped him and elbows dug into every vulnerable part of him, but still he fought through the crowd. There was a knife in his boot; he needed ten feet to throw it and kill Eirian stone dead before the words slipped out of her mouth. With her gone, no one would ever name the upstart, and he would see her dead quietly, just another oracle who took her own life, the latest in a long and miserable line to invite Jaisenthia in with a vial of poison or a blade. She might even invite the Lady of the River herself, given enough prompting, and save him a job.