But there’s not much left of this hideous night, Nora thought, scrunching down in her seat and wrapping the blanket around herself. The night had already lasted decades. And it was centuries since the morning, when she’d woken up on Aruendiel’s cloak in the sunshine and watched him come toward her, smiling.
The tears came so fast that she knew they had been waiting for quite some time for another chance to fall. Nora buried her face in the blanket—an empty gesture, she didn’t actually care what Sisoaneer thought—and let her sobs detonate, messy, harsh, hiccuping, until finally it seemed to Nora that she and the blanket both were soaked through with tears and snot and sadness, and she had only enough room left in her exhausted soul for leaden grief. Tired of tears and laughter, tired of everything but sleep.
“Is it so very bad?” she heard Sisoaneer saying wonderingly. Nora closed her eyes. Water slapped the hull of the boat softly, then more softly. She felt the blanket around her shoulders being adjusted. “Yes, I suppose it is,” Sisoaneer said.
Chapter 13
Nora took Raclin home to meet her parents—who were somehow no longer divorced—and the four of them were sitting in the den, on the gray plush sofa and armchairs that her stepmother had thrown out years ago. Her father had just asked Raclin where he worked when it came to Nora that she had already killed him.
Oh, fuck, she thought, how am I going to explain this to Mom and Dad?
She turned to watch Raclin’s severed head tumble slowly from his neck as blood soaked through his white cotton shirt and into the upholstery.
Nora opened her eyes. Her first thought was relief: my parents don’t have to know.
She was not in her parents’ den. She was wrapped in a quilt on a thinly padded mattress that didn’t quite make up for the hardness of the stone floor beneath.
There was nothing else in the small, white-walled room, except for a long, blue-gray article of clothing, hanging on the back of the wooden door. Through the open window she could hear water gurgling somewhere nearby. Although the room had a well-scrubbed look, the air held a damp, mossy rankness.
Nora wrapped the quilt around her naked shoulders. They had taken her ruined clothes away early that morning, letting her wash herself in a basin of water that reddened quickly in the gray morning light. Now, looking down, she saw that she had missed a smear under her right breast. She scrabbled at it with her nails, loosening brown specks of dried blood, until the skin turned pink and angry.
Her left hand looked oddly off-balance with the little finger missing. It felt all right, though. No pain. Was the finger really going to grow again, as Sisoaneer had promised? There was a faint white scar where the ring finger had been reattached, and you could still tell where Raclin’s ring had been, by the band of paler, untanned skin. Nora resolved to bake her hand in the sun at the first opportunity.
She went to try on the garment hanging on the door. It took some figuring out, like the paper gowns in doctors’ offices, and finally she decided arbitrarily that the short sleeve went on her left arm and the long one on her right. There was a long strip of material left over; experimentally she wrapped it around her waist.
On the other side of the door was a second small room, almost as bare. A few cushions on the floor, embroidered with a brilliant zigzag pattern, and an iron brazier. Another wooden door. Nora was apprehensive that it might be locked, but the door swung open when she pushed it.
Stepping outside, she blinked in the slanting sunlight. Late afternoon. She must have slept all day. This morning, climbing tiredly out of the boat, she’d had the impression of being in the center of a large, paved courtyard with tall stone walls. That wasn’t right, she saw now.
She was at the bottom of a ravine. A vigorous stream, a young river, snaked along its bottom. Weathered, pale-gold cliffs rose around her. Trees leaned over the rim, leaves shifting in a light breeze. Above, she glimpsed stout, rounded mountains that leaned companionably against each other, their flanks marbled with the bright greens of early spring. Downstream, the gorge widened into a sort of natural amphitheater. A narrow stair descended from the doorway where she stood to a path that ran along the water.
“Praise to Her Holiness! You have rested enough?”
The woman standing on the path waved up at Nora, who recognized her after a second’s hesitation: one of the people who’d helped her from the boat this morning. Salt-and-pepper hair; large, slightly worried eyes set in a soft, pouched face. Something about the overly hearty good cheer in her voice gave Nora the idea that she’d been lingering nearby for some time, waiting for Nora to emerge.
“Come down! It’s almost time for the evening meal.”
Nora edged down the stairs, which had no railing. The rooms where she had slept, she saw, were part of a rambling stone edifice that leaned against the side of the ravine and appeared to have been constructed a few rooms at a time, like shoeboxes piled up next to a wall. Ladders and steeply pitched stairs led up to other doors.
“The Old Dormitory isn’t in the best of repair, truthfully. We had some flooding this year when the snow melted—just the lower rooms, but what a mess! Your room was fine, dry as a broken pitcher,” the other woman was saying. “But the water almost went into the sanctuary, and Oasme says that hasn’t happened for three hundred years.”
“The sanctuary?” Nora asked.
“Have you seen it yet? No, of course not, we put you right to bed. You can have a proper tour after dinner, at evening prayers.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name from this morning,” Nora said. “And what is this place, exactly?”
“I’m the Second Deaconess,” the woman said. “My name is Uliverat.” She swept an arm through the air. “This is the Deep Court of the Sky, and the sanctuary is upstream a bit. But now we’ll go downstream, to the lower complex, where the refectory and sick house and all the other buildings are.” Pointing, she started down the waterside path.
“But what is this place? I mean, the whole thing,” Nora said, following her slowly, her eyes moving over the ravine. The cliffs were easily two hundred feet tall, turning ocher in the afternoon light. A few trees, looking deceptively small, grew out of fractures in the rock face. Ahead, the stream’s braided channels glittered, but the far side of the gorge was already shadowed as the sun moved behind the rim.
She had an intimation that wherever she was, it was a long way from where she had started. A long way from Aruendiel.
“Oh!” Uliverat sounded surprised by Nora’s question. “You mean Erchkaii? Erchkaii Oais Ninoes.” She seemed to be taking some care to pronounce the words correctly. “Which translates as the Beautiful Secret Mountain Temple of Life, in their old tongue.”
“A temple.” In the time she’d spent in this world, Nora had seen relatively few religious edifices, except for a few big official temples in Semr. There was a part-time priest in the market town nearest Aruendiel’s castle, and many of the villagers had tiny altars in their huts. “What do you worsh—” As an unbeliever in two different worlds, she was not sure how to put this question without causing offense. “Um, what religion do you practice?”
“We honor the mysteries and glory of the great Queen of Holy Power.”
Sisoaneer hadn’t said anything about a temple or the great Queen of Holy Power. Nora frowned. “I don’t think I’ve heard of her before.”
Uliverat gave a complacent smile. “Well, the goddess has many faces, and some worship her by a different name. It is all the same. She loves all who love her.”
Warily Nora nodded, mentally edging away. God loves everyone—they said it all the time at her mother’s church, but they didn’t necessarily act as if they believed it. Although, Nora had to admit, the idea that God was female carried a definite charge.
Uliverat was looking Nora up and down, lips pursed. “Excuse me, dear, your maran,” she said. “Do you mind if I adjust it a little?�
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She meant the doctor’s office dress; she was already untucking the long strip that Nora had wrapped around her waist. Nora stiffened as Uliverat draped the material over her left shoulder, then brought it around her body again, and looped the trailing end over Nora’s head. The deaconess’s dress was draped the same way, Nora saw. The effect was somewhat togalike: full, graceful, perhaps better suited for standing in one spot and declaiming than running very fast or doing any physical task that involved bending at the waist.
“It doesn’t feel as though it’s going to stay on,” Nora objected. “Where are my other clothes, the ones I was wearing when I arrived?” Maybe Faitoren blood could be soaked out.
“Those poor rags!” Uliverat gave an unexpectedly deep, chugging laugh. “We thought you might want to burn them as a thanksgiving offering. You look fine, dear. There’s a knack to wearing a maran—keep your back straight and your head high—and you get used to it. It’s traditional, you know. I never wore one, either, until we came here, and now I like it better than the gown I used to wear. It suits my figure better.” She added: “You can pin it, if you have to.”
The maran felt both binding and precarious. Nora had an urge to shrug the whole elaborately draped affair off her body, but she settled for pushing the scarf end of her maran back, so that her hair was partly uncovered. “Where is Sisoaneer?” she asked, but Uliverat was continuing: “And here—these are the Stairs of Healing. Many have been cured here by faith alone, just by praying for the strength to climb these steps. And below, you see the lower courts.”
They had come around a broad bend in the gorge, and the stream to their right tumbled abruptly over another tall ledge. The Stairs of Healing had only about three dozen steps, but they were precipitously steep, with no railing to block the sheer drop to the foaming churn under the waterfall. “That climb seems like a pretty strong test of faith,” Nora said, “for a sick person.”
“The goddess protects those who love her,” Uliverat said.
“I see,” Nora said.
“And for those who really can’t climb at all, we have a litter. The ganoi are good for some things,” Uliverat added with a shrug and a half laugh.
“The ganoi?” Nora asked. Uliverat rolled her eyes and said it was unfortunate, they were more trouble than they were worth, but they’d been here forever and you couldn’t run the temple without them.
Below the stairs was a collection of tile-roofed buildings, one or two stories high. Those closest to the water were on stone piers. The deaconess pointed out the functions of the different structures as Nora followed her down the steps—“the New Dormitories; the kitchen; the refectory, where we’re going; and the big one is the sick house.” Most of the stone buildings with their shuttered windows stood at odd, intimate angles to one another, squeezed into the narrow strip between the cliffs and the water. Uliverat led her across a courtyard and along a winding route among the buildings.
The refectory was one of the more graceful structures in the complex, roofed with a shallow oval dome, arched windows lining the walls. Approaching, Nora smelled something savory, onions and fish, and felt her stomach rumble. When was the last time she’d eaten? “You must be hungry,” Uliverat said. “You fell asleep this morning before we could get any food into you.” Nora was about to ask Uliverat about what kind of dinner would be served when she noticed that a trio of figures outside the tall double doors, two men and one woman, had turned to look at her.
The woman stepped forward. She was young, taller than Nora, her black hair pulled into small knots. Her dark blue maran seemed to hang on her body with considerably more ease than either Uliverat’s or Nora’s did. “I greet you, Mistress Visitor,” she said. “I am Yaioni, the First Deaconess of Erchkaii, Keeper of the Pure Mysteries. Praised be Her Holiness.” Her large dark eyes swept over Nora with disdain. Or perhaps that was only her bone structure; she had the kind of bold, sharply modeled features that would always make her look regal and slightly annoyed, Nora thought.
“Praised be Her Holiness,” Uliverat and the two men chorused with a precision suggesting long practice. “Welcome to the House of Life and Blessing,” the older man said. He was blunt-faced, about forty, with close-cropped hair and small plugs of greenish stone set into his pendulous earlobes. He bowed slightly. Nora copied him.
“It’s nice to meet you. My name is Nora.” Nora felt her self-introduction sounded slightly curt, with no titles or religious sentiments to rattle off. Indeed, there was a slight awkward pause, as though her companions were expecting her to say more.
“Nora.” Yaioni pronounced the name in a way that made it sound as though she were clearing her throat. She stood directly in front of Nora, blocking her way. “I invite you to share our meal, the gift of the goddess.”
“Thank you, it’s very kind of you,” Nora said, and again felt an almost imperceptible chill after she had spoken. Evidently, she had not used the correct polite formula: something-something about how wonderful their goddess was.
“All inside now.” Uliverat gave a sort of wiggle, creating the impression of bustle without actually taking a step. “The ganoi—we should be keeping an eye on them.”
Nora followed the others through the double doors. Inside, the refectory had a worn grandeur, with an intricately ribbed ceiling and massive, scarred tables stretching the length of the long room. As Nora looked to her companions to see where they would take their seats—there were plenty of empty places—the men and women already at the tables stood up abruptly and bowed their heads. Almost all of them had crinkly flaxen or reddish hair, tied back with leather thongs. Something about their heavy musculature, their stained clothes, indicated that they had just come from physical labor. She guessed that these were the ganoi that Uliverat had mentioned.
The man with the green stones in his earlobes was now chanting in a clear, pleasant tenor voice. Nora realized with some dismay that she was part of a small procession toward the dais at the far end of the hall.
Whatever she had expected last night, when Sisoaneer offered to take her home, it was not this. She caught a few echoes of Ors in the chant, but nothing she could make sense of. Every few lines, the others chorused a response. Nora was quiet, not wishing to mangle their prayer or hymn or whatever it was, and also because who the hell knew what they were praying for?
On the dais, they took their places at a table that, like the others, seemed to have been designed for far more people. One of the vacant chairs caught Nora’s eye. Larger than the others, it was carved with ornate, angular figures—women with jutting breasts, tangled snakes, scowling birds. It did not look especially comfortable. Sisoaneer’s seat, Nora surmised.
The buzz of conversation in the hall rose as two women came toward Nora’s table, balancing platters on their heads. Their wooden bracelets clattered as they lowered the dishes. Stewed greens, morsels of white-fleshed fish. The others tore off bits of spongy flatbread to dip their food out of the communal dish. As she followed their lead, she was suddenly aware that Yaioni was staring at her again. Mouth full, Nora smiled at her pleasantly, wondering what grievous breach of good table manners she had just committed, then looked away. She tried to make out the figures in the yellowed frescoes on the walls and to figure out what language the men and women at the lower tables were speaking. It was not Ors but something more high-pitched and percussive.
Her companions, though, were all conversing in slightly accented Ors. The man who had led the chant nodded at her from across the table. “I am Oasme,” he said. “First Cantor to Her Holiness and Keeper of Her Sacred Books.”
His tone was more cordial than Yaioni’s. Nora said that she had enjoyed his singing. He gave her a quick, gratified smile. “It is more important that the goddess enjoys it,” he said, “but your praise honors me.”
The goddess again. Why couldn’t he just accept a simple compliment? Nora cast about for a relatively neutral topic
. “First Cantor—does that mean there are others?”
“Not at present,” Oasme said quickly. “Although Lemoes will likely be a cantor, too, someday. He has a fine voice.” He glanced at the other man, as though to prompt him.
Lemoes smiled and ducked his head, the sort of movement that could mean either hello or please ignore me, or both. “I’m Lemoes. First Acolyte.”
He was younger than Nora had first thought, a boy of maybe eighteen. A beautiful boy, with velvet eyes, warm brown skin, and an austerely elegant profile—the kind of face that you wanted to look at a second and perhaps third time, just to check if he was really as good-looking as you’d thought at first. Nora reminded herself to feel a purely objective, auntlike admiration, and looked at the empty chair, trying to remember exactly what Sisoaneer had said as they disembarked this morning. Something to the effect of she would see Nora soon. But what did “soon” mean?
Oasme, following her gaze, said: “That is the chair reserved for the High Priestess.”
“She’s not here tonight?” Nora asked.
It seemed to Nora that Yaioni bridled slightly. “We will see.” Her voice was hard, sulky.
“As the goddess wills,” Oasme said, his face impassive but his eyes flicking sideways at Yaioni.
“Of course,” Yaioni said. “Praised be Her Holiness! She is good to those who love her.”
“Praised be Her Holiness,” Uliverat said fervently. Half a beat later, the men repeated the same words, Lemoes mumbling through a mouthful of half-chewed food.
How often must they say that, Nora wondered, and how long before it drives me crazy? Sisoaneer had not seemed especially religious last night, none of this Praised be Her Holiness nonsense. This is a waste of time, Nora thought. I’m sitting here trying to be polite to these religious fanatics when I should be looking for Aruendiel.
How to Talk to a Goddess and Other Lessons in Real Magic Page 16