Praise for The Temple of Doubt
“The Temple of Doubt launches a powerful new voice in teen fantasy fiction. Anne Boles Levy brings serious game with her first novel. Expect great things!”
—Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Rot & Ruin and The Nightsiders
“Levy shines brightest in her potent descriptions of settings and her imaginative scenes.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“In a society where going against the grain can bring shame, punishment, and even death, being different is dangerous. But Hadara’s differences are what make her special and Hadara’s struggles to defend her family, her world, and her soul against the Temple’s meddling make for a gripping adventure. The Temple of Doubt’s inventive and richly realized world will have readers immersed from the start and eager for the sequel.”
—Sarah Jamila Stevenson, author of The Latte Rebellion, Underneath, and The Truth Against the World
“The Temple of Doubt fascinated me. With a determined heroine who forges her own path, intricate worldbuilding, and a tantalizing plot that hints at more intriguing revelations to come, Anne Boles Levy shows herself to be a promising new writer. I can’t wait to see where Hadara’s journey takes her next.”
—Eilis O’Neal, author of The False Princess
“Hadara may think of herself as a bad student and a wavering believer, but in truth, she is brave, strong, and often hilarious as she struggles to protect her family and find a place for herself within a culture that devalues her. Levy has a knack for exposing the ridiculousness of rigid belief while highlighting the real power that doubt has to transform a society.”
—Sara Holmes, author of Letters from Rapunzel and Operation Yes
“A thrilling fantasy introducing an exceptional new heroine whose fearless challenges to authority and adventurous spirit could make or break her entire world. The Temple of Doubt captivates page after page, twist after twist. Clever Hadara is in danger from all sides, from the invading army, the compelling soldier Valeo who tears her city apart, and the secretive and devious Azwans who sacrifice innocents to serve their powerful god. Yet something more powerful than these has fallen from the sky—something alien and shining that is meant only for her.”
—Janet Lee Carey, award-winning author of In the Time of Dragon Moon
“Fiercely original with a capable and plucky heroine, The Temple of Doubt rips open a door to a fresh new fantasy world. With a gorgeously written narrative and its intricate world building, fantasy readers are in for a treat. Hadara is a compelling heroine whose misadventures and missteps will only make you love her more.”
—Amalie Howard, author of the Aquarathi series, the Almost Girl series, and Alpha Goddess
“What a wonderful heroine and wonderful world Anne Boles Levy has given us in this beautiful debut novel—one I certainly wish had been around when my daughters were young. They’d have fallen in love with Hadara as much as I have. Can’t wait for Book II!”
—Bruce McAllister, author of The Village Sang to the Sea: A Memoir of Magic
Also by Anne Boles Levy
The Temple of Doubt
Copyright © 2016 Anne Boles Levy
Maps by Kerri Frail, copyright © 2016 by Skyhorse Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Sky Pony Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
Sky Pony Press books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Sky Pony Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Rain Saukas
Print ISBN: 978-1-63450-193-4
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63450-625-0
Printed in the United States of America
To Brett
You see no purpose in traveling among the galaxies and taking their measure, you are content to watch life unfold on planets whose air you will never breathe. I cannot bear such sameness, each eon unfolding as the last. Let me journey, let me stray, let me see how no day on one world shall dawn the same as on another. I am brave enough to face whatever comes, assured that the worst danger is the one yet to come, on a day still several days away.
You are content to stand still and remain unnamed. I am not made this way.
—From Verisimilitudes 9, The Book of Unease
1
Your soul must come to me, clean and unblemished, purged by fire of sin and fleshly weakness. From the fire shall your soul be released, and your ashes scattered that your sins do not stick to one place and curse it.
—From Oblations 3, The Book of Unease
It was my task to clean up after the drunks, sobered by having their heads split open, huddling in corners, puking, looking unsure how they’d gotten there. A mop became my best friend as I swabbed away piss and blood and worse things. The gore wasn’t much different than the muck and mires I’d waded through, and a mop handle was lighter than an herb basket. I threw myself into my job, the more mindless the better, happy for any distraction.
It’d been a fortnight since I’d begun my apprenticeship as a healer for Ward Sapphire, reporting each morning to the main room of the sick ward, which consisted of two large rooms—one lined with benches for people who could be healed immediately, and one with cots for those who couldn’t. By breakfast, the rows had already filled with the woozy and the wounded. They looked more fidgety and anxious than usual that morning, glancing around suspiciously, even narrowing their gaze at others, as though they’d each appointed themselves magistrate over others’ misfortunes and were sitting in judgment over every clot or bruise.
Today had begun as always: bandages needed rolling, bedpans needed cleaning. I had sheets to lug to the laundry and rows of cots to make up, with blanket corners folded and tucked. A healer would inspect my work, rip out the neat little y at the bed corners, and make me start over. But there was a new tension in the air, a terseness with the way healers snapped orders, even at patients.
Healer Mistress Leba Mara, a big woman with a voice to match, worked the line herself, her sturdy frame squeezing between the rows, using magical incantations to heal cracked ribs and the shallower stab wounds. I hated to watch the spellcasting: it created a jarring shock of electricity that only I could see, and a metallic taste that only I could sense. This was one of many secrets I kept, and one more reason I should’ve kept my head down and bent on minor tasks. But I never could. I was always looking up and butting in. I didn’t aspire to be an orderly, after all. I wanted to do what Leba Mara and the other healers did—but without all the irritating magic.
All I had to do was figure out a way.
Leba Mara did triage as she went, sending the severely injured inside to cots, with me following along to sop up any trail of blood. Orderlies carried the injured to and fro on stretchers that never looked empty. I hustled from one room to the next, darting around busy people, my hands trembling only partly from fatigue.
I had to find a way. All this magic—it belonged to
Nihil, and it should’ve stayed with him.
“You should do me first,” a shopkeeper shouted out, waving his swollen and obviously broken wrist. “I’m the only one that’s legitimate.”
He cradled the injured wrist in his good hand as Leba Mara gave him a disapproving up and down glance.
“Well, it’s true,” he persisted, his haughty air crumbling into a working-class accent. “I just got mine’s with a fall. Tripped over my own clumsy feet, is all. These others … huh. Guards had to drag ’em out of doorways and knock ’em sober. They’re pyre fuel for sure.”
I had to wedge myself between a suddenly very awake and angry drunk and the shopkeeper. I received a face full of stale, boozy breath and my smock became dotted with blood as the man wobbled into me. I propped him back up, but he swayed like a buoy at high tide. Soon, I thought I’d get dizzy, too. This, too, was part of my job.
“Tripped and fell, by Nihil’s scrawny buttocks, you did,” the drunk man said, waving his fists. “The guards was settling accounts with you again, wasn’t they?”
Leba Mara cut in with a harsh, “Gentlemen!”
“Don’t know what you’re saying, you souse,” said the shopkeeper. “Sober up and shut up.”
But the drunk wasn’t letting up, shouting past my shoulder at the other man. “Tipping your scales again? We’ll see who ends up in an ash heap.”
An orderly and I pinned the drunk’s arms to his side and walked him back to a bench while Leba Mara held a meaty hand over the shopkeeper’s mouth.
“You’ve both said enough,” she said. “Nobody’s going to the pyre today. Seal those lips or I’ll sew them up.”
She looked like she could do it, too; she was bigger than both men combined, and most of that heft was muscle. Added to that was her infamous Glare of Doom, and both men soon settled into a terse truce.
“Worse than usual,” muttered the orderly who’d helped me, a stocky man named Til. “This place is getting crazy.”
I shook my head but didn’t argue. To my mind, all the crazy was being marched right out of us. Port Sapphire was a busy way station between continents, and we’d been a prosperous port until the Temple of Doubt sent us two Azwans and four hundred guards to hunt down a demon. They’d stuck around longer than anyone had wanted. Far longer. The throngs, the shouting, the hustle and bustle and daily messiness of living in the middle of the map had steadily seeped away last summer, replaced by a wary silence, empty canals, and orderly streets.
Somehow, the Temple had gotten sixty thousand stubborn, willful, wayward people to behave themselves and suddenly find religion. How awful. All my favorite shops closed early, and, even when open, people were too polite, too restrained. No one argued or haggled anymore, though no one could remember anyone banning it, either. It was as though we all knew we’d been naughty children, and now we filed obediently, heads down, onto ferries instead of paddling ourselves home every which way. No one bothered telling us what, exactly, we’d done, and we were all trying to guess what good behavior looked like after so many years of getting it wrong.
The gloom added to my own sadness, the storm cloud that had gathered over my heart and wouldn’t stop raining self-pity. If I didn’t have that mop to distract me, I’d be wallowing in grief over, ironically enough, one of the very guards everyone feared and hated and yet couldn’t figure out how they’d ever gotten along without. Valeo, his name had been. He was dead, and I had my duties to help me forget.
“What’s all this talk of the pyres?” I whispered to Til.
“Dunno,” Til said. “They’re all jabbering about it this morning.”
“Well, let’s go see,” I said.
He shrugged. “Should tell a healer, I suppose.”
The healer we asked insisted on coming with us and said he knew a way onto our roof. It involved me hitching up my skirt and clambering up the narrowest flight of steps I’d ever seen, only to find myself sitting precariously on the roof’s terra-cotta tiles. I had to dig my sandals into a groove to keep myself from sliding down, but I loved the feeling that I was doing something vaguely forbidden, even though several other people were already around. We all squeezed shoulder to shoulder and peered northward, where smoke drifted lazily out to sea.
The funeral pyres usually burned far north of Port Sapphire on a stretch of solid ground, too far away to leach any of the smoke or stench into the city. Pyres were a normal thing: all of us could expect to be burned after we died so our souls could be freed from our bodies and fly to the Eternal Tree if we were found worthy of such redemption. At least, if you believed all that, which I didn’t.
I followed everyone’s stare to the place where thick, gray plumes lifted above the line of thatched rooftops. The smoke looked thicker and more robust than usual. The last time there’d been that much smoke had been when Ward Sapphire held funerals for all the fallen guards. They’d battled the fierce Gek in the swamps, and Valeo had been one of the men felled by poison darts. Measly, lousy, tiny little darts.
And I’d never forgive myself for it.
I’d been brooding angrily about his death for three six-days—ever since I’d heard the news from one of the Azwans. I’d stared at the horizon a few times, wondering which puff of smoke would contain the last cinders of his bronzed skin or stately frame, the ropes of muscle or the hard angles of his scarred and rugged face.
But where were all these new bodies coming from? I hadn’t remembered any sort of plague, and while the guards were gleefully breaking open heads, no one had told me of any sudden killing spree.
“This is just since this morning?” I asked.
The people around me shrugged. No one said anything, so I kept asking questions. Who are they burning? Who died? Does anyone know anything?
I received only uncomfortable silence, a few coughs, cleared throats, and faraway looks until a familiar woman’s voice bellowed from below us.
“Well, blast you all to the Soul’s Forge,” shouted Leba Mara. “Is my entire staff taking a Sabbath? What’s going on up there?”
One of the healers shouted down to her about the billowing smoke, prompting her to crane her neck as she struggled to make out the distant plumes. All she did was shake a fist at us.
“Beat on my doubting behind, then,” she said. “Get down here, all of you.”
We clambered down, most looking more defiant than chastened. The healer who’d escorted me folded his arms across his chest and huffed at the Healer Mistress.
“If you know what this is about, we sure wouldn’t mind the explanation,” he said. “A lot of scared folks on those benches today.”
“Yes, but not many on the roof, is there?” she snapped right back at him. “While you’re talking, people are hurting.”
The healer held his ground. “Ah, right, then we’ll just watch them all hang, one by one, for a bunch of doodads and whatsits the Azwans decided weren’t worthy enough. That’s what this is, isn’t it?”
“Then pray they don’t find anything of yours in that pile. I hear it’s all sitting in a warehouse right outside the Customs House, anyway. Right where a certain Lord Portreeve might see it.”
The small group looked at me. She was talking about my father. My jaw flapped open and closed. No sound came out.
“Me?”
My voice squeaked.
“A big warehouse holding all our little heretical items,” Leba Mara said. “Practically out your babba’s back door, stuffed to the rafters with all our contraband.”
Heretical items? Contraband? I caught my breath, unwilling to believe what I was hearing. Every time I thought the worst was over, the Temple returned with something new.
When they’d first arrived, the Temple Guards had raided our homes and seized anything with even the faintest taint of sacrilege to it. Even my two younger sisters had had items taken: a scrap of needlework and an old doll. And here we’d thought everyone would be safe and fine with the Azwans on their way back to the far-away Temple compound now that the de
mon business was all over. Apparently, the many tokens of our doubtfulness were keeping them busy.
I let out a small sigh, and Leba Mara must’ve guessed my thoughts, picking up the thread of my anxiety and weaving it into something fiercer. She scanned the horizon for the smoke and shook her head.
“Of all the unambiguous nonsense,” Leba Mara fumed. “I’d of just burned those little whatnots, not the people who made them. And how do they know what belongs to whom? By all Nihil’s incarnations, the Temple folk aren’t like our local priests. Can’t leave a single doubting soul alone, can they?”
The other healer scratched his chin. “So, you’re no wiser about this than the rest of us.”
“Wiser? I’m wise enough to keep myself to the certain path,” Leba Mara chuffed. “We’re to doubt our merits and be sure of Nihil’s. If there’s more reasons you want, you’ll find them on the benches inside. Off, now, and do what the worthy priests pay you for.”
The other healer sighed, defeated. He held a hand to his heart. “Nihil’s ambiguities are the best salves.”
“That’s more like it,” Leba Mara said, patting her own chest.
I bit back any response I might’ve wanted to give. My days of defiance were also over. I might not believe a word of it, but I kept that to myself. I just wanted to heal people, that’s it—if it could be done without magic. And if I had to do that under the protection of the hated Temple, well, so be it. There was nothing I could do about any of this anyway; just one person, a girl at that, and a lowly apprentice. I had rid myself of anyone’s expectations of me but my own.
We filed back inside, or at least everyone else did. Leba Mara waved me over.
I thought she meant to ask me more about my father and whatever connection he may have to the sudden increase in pyre smoke. Instead, she adjusted the blue uniform scarf that wrapped my waist-length curls in a high pile atop my head. A few wayward strands had flown loose atop the roof.
A guard stationed by the doorway kept his eyes on my head wrap, despite people coming and going around us, as though he’d zeroed in on an archery target, taking careful aim. Like his comrades, he was a good two or three heads taller than human men and stared down his long nose in a way that was both condescending and cruel.
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