“In half. Every one.” A nap seemed like a capital idea all of a sudden. Why didn’t he take more naps? Devils knew he deserved them.
“Are you sure you don’t need Köz’s valet to tend you?” said Purna skeptically, and before Maroto could point out that he’d never said anything about not needing a sawbones, the darkness that forever lurks behind the eyes of mortals rushed up to give him a hug. I missed you, too, he thought as he blacked out in the sand, an arrow in his ear and a bloody-toothed grin straining his mouth. He still had it.
CHAPTER
19
The queues to the public booths were a constant of Diadem. Hundreds upon hundreds of citizens lined up each morning, the succession of sinners stretching out the wall of doors of the Lower Chainhouse and down the wending stairs to the streets far below. After a feast or festival, the lines numbered in the tens of thousands, the citizenry waiting all day and all night to have five minutes alone in the confession box.
The members of the clergy and the noblesse had their own booths in the Middle Chainhouse, and the wait there was rarely more than an hour. When Sister Portolés reached the front of the line and a confessional opened up, she did not wait the customary cooling time before entering. The old priest leaving the box before her had barely removed his thin, guttering candle from beneath the bench when Sister Portolés inserted her wider tallow into the alcove and entered the cramped booth. Settling onto the narrow bench, she found the iron bands of the seat still warm from the previous candle.
“Mother forgive me, for I am unclean.”
Portolés never enunciated so well as when she was in the confessional. In all the corners of the Star, in all the chambers of the church, there was nowhere she felt more at home… save at her penitence bench immediately after a confession. Anticipating her sentence, she had exchanged the undergarments that usually protected her from the rough wool robes for a hair shirt and collar, tightly cinched garters of jagged glass rosaries around her legs. Each of the four thousand steps from her cell to the confessional hall had been a private hell of rasping friction, the hair of her vest turning to steel wool with the first drop of sweat, and despite the armor of calluses her chafed nipples and scarred thighs were bleeding by the time she arrived at the queue.
“How long has it been since last you cleansed yourself?” The grate separating penitent from confessor bubbled out in an iron reproduction of a face. Portolés had heard the grate was designed so that the innocent should see the benevolent visage of the Fallen Mother, Savior of Humanity, but that the guilty would instead behold the inhuman face of her brother-husband, Creator of the World, Deceiver of Angels and Mortals alike. Portolés only ever saw the one, but then she had never come to the box free of sin.
“Nearly four and twenty hours,” she said, marveling at just how much the world had changed in such a short span.
“How much sin could one of the Fallen Mother’s chosen accumulate in so few hours?” asked the confessor, and Portolés squirmed on the rapidly heating seat. Before Kypck, this had been the pinnacle of her desire, to come here and confess her wickedness so that she might be free of her deviltry, if only in the moments when the bench singed stripes into her robes and the flesh beneath, and after, when the scourge’s chains licked her back and breasts, when the crown of barbs kissed her brow. Now her eagerness for atonement warred against the orders Queen Indsorith had given her, and despite the queen’s confidence in her charge, she struggled with how to proceed.
“I defiled my temple,” she began, reasoning that if she started at the beginning of the previous day she might better chart a safe path to the end. “Again.”
A heavy sigh from the grate, which led Portolés to believe it was Mother Kylesa on the other side. “How many times have you committed this deed, sister, and how many times have you atoned for it?”
“I… I am not sure. Many times, Fallen Mother forgive me.”
“She forgives those who regret their actions, and who struggle to improve their behavior.” Even filtered through the molded grate, the confessor’s voice carried a caustic tone. “It is a grave enough business when a lowly peasant chooses to sin and sin again, thinking so long as she confesses after she can do as she wishes. For a sister to behave so repulsively is another matter entirely.”
“It’s true,” said Portolés, shifting from side to side on the bench despite herself. The scalding lines radiating from the seat made sitting still impossible, much as she deserved the pain. “I keep sinning despite your efforts and mine. I can overcome temptation, I can, and I do, more often than not… but sometimes I am weak, and I think it is not such an evil thing I do, so long as after I come here with an honest heart.”
“What you are doing is the greatest sin of all.” The Deceiver’s face seemed to breathe in the heat of the box, sweat stinging Portolés’s eyes. The light from the candle under her seat cast writhing shadows on the walls, as if she were already engulfed in flames. “You do not sin of ignorance, or even passion. You do not fall victim to temptation. You make a choice, sister, a choice to commit foul acts abhorrent to your Savior. You do this in spite of the example you are supposed to set for your peers and the laity, in spite of our many conversations on the matter. Yes, perhaps ‘spite’ is indeed the only applicable term, for why else would you continue to do this to those who love you?”
“Spite?” Of her many weaknesses, Portolés had never believed that to be one of them. She knew she had rebellious impulses, but truly believed in the goodness of the Fallen Mother with all her heart. “Mother, I swear I do not commit these acts out of ill will.”
“No? And whom do you hurt with your actions? It is not only yourself, is it? You seduce your fellow anathemas, and then you come here, sin after sin, forcing we sisters who are far above such wickedness to sit audience to your crimes. I wonder, is it the sin itself or the act of rubbing my nose in it after that gives you more pleasure?”
“I’m sorry,” whispered Portolés, bracing her arms on the warming walls of the narrow box and pressing herself down on the bench. The much-needed pain brought clarity, as it always did. The confessor was absolutely correct, yet try as she did to feel remorse, all Portolés felt was an eagerness for further penance. “I do try, Mother, I do, but you’re right. I am base, ruined, wicked. It’s what I am.”
“Excuses,” hissed the Deceiver, his mesh face leaning inward to Portolés, as though he meant to whisper in her ear, or steal a kiss. “It’s easy, isn’t it, to blame your nature? To lay all the fault on whatever ancestor of yours lay with a devil? To abuse yourself and others to sate your criminal appetites, and then shrug your shoulders and say it’s a defect of birth? To blame the Fallen Mother for your own weakness?”
“Yes!” whimpered Portolés, her upper half warring with her lower to keep her buttocks pressed to the bench. She could smell the steam rising from the sweaty wool of her habit, taste the curl of smoke on her scarred tongue, and pushed herself down harder, knowing none of this yet was the worst. That would come when she had to rise from the seat. “Yes, yes, yes!”
“Of course.” The Deceiver’s breath stank of her musky sweat when she lay beside Brother Wan, defiling herself. “You are not so different from the pureborn, Sister Portolés, much as you deny it in your heart, much as they deny it with their tongues. Everyone wants an excuse for their bad decisions, for their selfish desires. Everyone wants to pretend they can’t help themselves. Everyone wants to put the blame on the Deceiver for creating them with evil already festering in their souls instead of thanking the Mother for giving them both the awareness to know their own sins and the strength to fight them.”
Too ecstatic to speak, Portolés nodded and wept. It was all true. She caught her left hand reaching down to pull up her habit and shoved the fist into her mouth, biting the knuckle until she tasted her own salty blood. Still she throbbed, and clenched her thighs together to grind the rosaries in deeper, pulling the scalded flesh free of the bench as she did. This brought on a dizzying rush
far more perfect than anything she could effect with her fingers—the touch of the divine upon her wretched frame.
Before, when Portolés was at her most vulnerable, her confessor had insisted the witchborn’s thirst for sin came from the Deceiver. That she sinned for base pleasure, to blaspheme. Her confessor was wrong. Here, when the candle of Portolés’s faith burned away all distractions, she knew the true motive for her own compulsive sinning: she was seeking her Savior. For a good and pious anathema like Brother Wan, faith must come effortlessly, but Portolés never felt the presence of the Fallen Mother during prayers or mass or carrying out her holy duties. She had to hunt for her god, and in a lifetime of obedience to the Burnished Chain, the only times she found her were when she dared to transgress the holy laws, when she risked her very soul to capture the attention of its keeper. It was the touch of the Fallen Mother that gave Portolés the courage to sin, and it was her touch that released Portolés from the agonies of confession. If Portolés’s sins were acts of rebellion, as the superiors insisted, they were rebellions against the Chain, not its maker; for all Portolés’s doubts in herself and her monstrous ilk and even her church, with all its contradictions and cruelties, the one thing she never doubted was her elusive Savior.
Fast as it came upon her, Portolés slumped back on the bench, empty again, confused and scared as she always was after surviving another confession. She shivered, and realized the seat beneath her had cooled, and the booth had gone dim. Her candle must have burned lower than it ever had before. Wiping sweat from her face, she nervously met the mute gaze of the Deceiver—had she cried out?
“You shall wear the Mother’s Crown, which her jealous husbrother forced upon her brow before casting her out of heaven,” the confessor recited in her clear voice, what had appeared to be the Deceiver again but an artfully wrought grate. “And you shall lash thyself with the Scourge of Angels, as she was lashed by those anathemas loyal to he who made the world with his word, instead of she who questioned it with hers. Two score and six lashes, and the Crown until you are next called from the Dens by a superior. Perhaps you may provide an example yet.”
Forty-six lashes. Portolés could not even offer the customary thanks, her scarred tongue glued behind her file-corrected teeth. Forty-six. She had never heard such a sentence. The most she had ever received at one time was a score, and that instance had nearly killed her. Brother Wan had tended her throughout her long recuperation. No pureborn could undergo such an ordeal and live, and Portolés doubted one of her kind could, either.
“Now, before you undergo your penance, we do need to discuss another matter. Lenience may be retroactively applied to your sentence, and indeed, those given for future infractions. All you must do is offer up the truth of what transpired last night, omitting nothing of what was said or done.”
What was this, now? No wonder Mother Kylesa hadn’t even asked if Portolés had more to confess before handing down the sentence—it was always going to be a fatal penance. The queen had warned Portolés that her superiors would likely pump her for information following their private meeting of the night before, but Portolés had believed they would simply ask her. This sort of low trick she had never expected, and it hardened her heart. Had Mother Kylesa plainly put the question to her before, as she was undergoing her righteous agonies, she might have ignored the orders of her queen and freely told all there was to tell. She would have betrayed the first person who had ever placed absolute trust in her, even knowing as she must that if she repeated the queen’s secret to a confessor the sovereign could lose her very throne.
But now, being threatened instead of asked, Portolés found herself all too eager to accept Queen Indsorith’s standing offer of absolution. The Crimson Queen of Samoth had powers of spiritual dispensation equal to the Black Pope—it was one of the Chain’s major concessions to the Empire during the Council of Diadem, the parley that had ended the civil war. Portolés had never before found herself in such a precarious position, forced to make a decision that would not only affect the rest of her life but doubtless the fate of her eternal soul. This was a test of the Fallen Mother, a test every bit as dire as any found in the Chain Canticles, and until this moment Portolés herself had not known which path she would take… To refuse a confessor of the Burnished Chain was so grievous a sin that Portolés had never even fantasized of it, but now she found that like all her transgressions, it came as naturally as breathing.
“Why, Mother, to what incident might you be referring?” she said. “I cannot believe you would press me to reveal anything our queen might have spoken to me in private. Surely to betray the confidence of our sovereign is tantamount to treason.”
“A crime against the state, even one punishable by death, is nothing when weighed against a crime against the church. Presuming your mortal frame can bear the weight of your mandated penance, sister, I shudder on your behalf to think of what further tolls you must incur if you blatantly go against the will of your Savior.”
“Of course,” said Portolés. “I understand your meaning, Mother.”
“It relieves me to hear this,” said the confessor. “I am ready to hear you testify as to what was discussed.”
“Then you’ll be waiting some time,” said Portolés, ashamed of the pleasure it gave her to speak the words. It almost felt better than lifting her scalded bottom off the bench as she pressed her forehead to that of the Deceiver, a little skin coming off her buttocks like damp flesh adhered to frozen metal as she hissed into the grate, “I have a decree from our sovereign absolving me of all existing sins, and any new ones I might accrue in the service of carrying out her orders. If you wish to know what the queen and I spoke of, I suggest you ask her yourself, or wait until I am finished and return here of my own volition.”
The confessor was silent, but just as Portolés put her trembling hand on the handle of the booth the woman spoke. “We count pride as a virtue, for ’twas pride that gave our beloved Allmother the strength to turn from her husbrother when he cruelly forsook her. It was pride that gave her the courage to turn her prison into paradise, to take what he crafted as a hell and transform it into heaven. It was pride that gave us this world, and the promise of salvation after. Yet like all virtues, pride can be dangerous, little sister, if it is allowed to swell beyond all dignity—you did not come here to confess, you came here to gloat, and you ought to be frightened by such compulsions. What sweeter fruit for the Deceiver than one of his children laughing in the face of those who seek to save her? What greater prize than a headstrong fool whose vulnerability is the very strength granted her by the Fallen Mother?”
“I shall pray for both of us, Mother,” said Portolés, turning the knob. “For now, though, I have another appointment, and after that I fear I’ll be beyond Diadem’s reach.”
“Oh child,” said the confessor, whom Portolés was no longer sure was Mother Kylesa. “No matter how far you run on hooves, paws, or feet, you shall never be beyond our province. Safe roads guide you to her breast.”
“Safe havens keep you at your rest,” said Portolés, completing the Prayer of Exodus and hurrying out of the confessional before her accursed tongue could betray her further. The queen had expressly mentioned the importance of keeping secret her imminent departure, and what had Portolés done the first chance she got? Pathetic.
The confessor’s words haunted her as she returned to her cell and changed into an unburned habit, the old one going into the Dens’ sackcloth collection, where it would become a patchwork robe for a novice or orphan. It had seemed laughable at first, the idea that such a wretch as she should be prideful, yet the more she meditated upon it, the more sense the accusation made. Of course in the toxic tabernacle of her malformed body a natural virtue would be corrupted, strength becoming poison. If she truly believed her queen had the power to absolve her, why go to the confessional in the first place? And if she doubted the authority of her queen, how dare she spurn the orders of her confessor? Did she really think she could get aw
ay with turning to whichever power patted her head at the moment? Did she actually believe the Allmother would forgive her for using what ought to be atonement as a source of vile pleasure? Portolés shuddered as she rubbed twice-blessed salve into her burns, kneaded the ointment in harder to remind herself of the purpose of penance. The truth was, she never felt so close to the divine as when she was forcibly reminded of her mortality. Of her own baseness.
“Knock knock,” said Brother Wan, opening her lockless door to find her kneeling on the penitent bench, habit hiked up around her waist. “Can I assist you with that, sister?”
“Would that the Fallen Mother granted us the time, brother,” said Portolés, wiping the excess salve on her hip and letting the habit fall as she rose to her feet.
“How many? Five for me.” Brother Wan shuddered, having a more typical view toward penance. “I thought we could supervise each other, and fetch help if one of us atoned too fervently. When I found you last time I thought you were… I thought you had been called home.”
Blunted teeth dug into Portolés’s lips as she imagined herself kneeling on the bench, habit unlaced and pulled down around her waist, the scourge held in both hands to keep from dropping it in fear. Brother Wan standing over her, watching. The thought made the burns on her arse throb, and other places beside. Forty-six lashes would certainly deliver her home, and spare her from navigating the impenetrable waters where she found herself floundering. She would die performing penance, and she would take the queen’s secrets with her to the hereafter—neither Crown nor Chain could fault her for divided loyalties if she made such a sacrifice. Why not put an end to all this endless stalling before damnation? Or perhaps with such an offering she might find her way to salvation yet…
Verily, if the queen had not asked for Sister Portolés’s help, she would have beaten herself to death right there. Yet Queen Indsorith, Heart of the Star, Jewel of Diadem, had requested that Portolés take on this mission, and carry it out by any means necessary. She had not ordered Portolés to action, not demanded her obedience—she had asked, and that made all the difference. The forty-six lashes would be waiting whenever Portolés returned. If she returned.
A Crown for Cold Silver Page 20