“It’s alright, I know what to do now.”
I crossed behind the altar, away from Nihil-the-representation, and down the short steps. A few more strides and I was at the gilded mirror, with its thousands of jeweled insects and their gleaming eyes. They weren’t watching me: they were beautiful, like so much of what the Temple created, but they couldn’t see; they were as blind as the Temple, too.
The Nihil simulacrum didn’t turn to face me at the mirror, as I expected it wouldn’t. It continued to face out at the congregation. The god making it move was staring through this mirror and didn’t need to turn to see me.
I held both palms up and whispered to the real Nihil.
“I made a mistake at the prayer well,” I said. “And I don’t know how to fix it, but I can ask you for one thing.”
The simulacrum spoke facing the congregation. “And what is that?”
“Let her go,” I said.
“Or?”
“You know what I’ll do.”
Nihil sighed. “S’ami did say you were bright. Such a waste.”
I heard another of Amaniel’s screams, louder this time and more urgent, her voice rising in pitch and trailing off into a sob.
Both my palms met the mirror at once, feeling the coolness of the glass. I was figuring out how to work my un-magic, that it was tied to my emotions and I had to be angry enough to invoke it. Well, that wouldn’t be a problem. Rage coursed through every part of me, pulling at that mirror, plucking its magic free and sending cracks up its smooth face. I pulled away in time to escape the thousands of shards that crumbled at my bare feet. My fingertips bled.
The music stopped.
The shouting started.
I glanced around. The simulacrum had indeed vanished. Men reached toward me, trying to break free of the crowds, their faces contorted in rage. Feroxi guards lined the aisles, pushing everyone back with their shields. Valeo positioned himself in front of the dais, holding a sword across the chests of several men. Just yesterday, I’d thought the crowd was on my side and against Valeo. Maybe I didn’t have any power with people after all. I bit back a wave of disappointment and frustration and shook my curls loose around my shoulders.
Mami rushed up the dais and pulled Amaniel off the altar then tugged her to safety. Across from her, S’ami shouted at the guards while Reyhim motioned for everyone to settle down. A guard left S’ami’s side and picked up a prayer rug, tossing it down beside me so I could cross barefoot over the broken glass. He escorted me to the Azwan.
I exhaled. “What now?” I asked S’ami.
“Patience.”
With chaos unleashed around me, I didn’t think I had any patience to spare.
I pulled at S’ami’s sleeve. “Tell them I had no choice.”
“We always have choices.”
“It was my sister.”
“All these people have lost someone in recent days.”
I hated when S’ami was right. “Tell me what to do, then.”
He patted my hand. “I’m already doing enough for you by not instantly killing you.”
“But Nihil’s gone, right?”
I got a bemused look by way of an answer.
Across the room, Mami hugged Amaniel, enveloping her in both arms, shielding Amaniel’s nakedness from the crowd, not looking at me. Angry, confused, terrified women had left their segregated enclosure and swarmed around the two of them, jostling and screaming. Mami held fast, returning their fury with stoic silence, maintaining her calm amid a roiling sea of madness. This was the right thing to do. But I needed a signal from Mami, something. It seemed such a flimsy thing to hope for, just a look amid all the reddened faces, but I had to know I had one ally in the whole world, and that my mother of all people hadn’t shied from defending me when everyone else was demanding my death. She glanced up, gave a curt, tight nod, and pulled Amaniel closer in. That would do. I let out a burst of air that rattled with grief.
I buried my face in my hands, struggling to regain my poise despite the swell of furious worshippers. They’d been so fickle. Yesterday, they were ready to evict the Temple. Today, they were back to being blindly devoted.
My breathing grew ragged, until I couldn’t tell whether the swell of emotions included relief or remorse or more terror. I couldn’t tell anything anymore. S’ami pulled me into a loose hug, rubbing my back and making soft, reassuring shushing sounds. Reyhim’s angry rasp cut through the noise.
“I’m going to tell these people to calm themselves. I can still conjure, that should reassure them.”
“We should be getting them to higher ground,” S’ami said.
“You don’t think?”
“Hadara’s left him no other choice.”
My head shot up. S’ami gave me only a cursory glance before turning toward Reyhim, whose slow nod eroded any hope that somehow my ordeal had ended. Reyhim laid one hand on S’ami’s shoulder.
“Despite our differences, it’s been an honor, brother.”
“The honor’s mine, brother,” said S’ami. “I shall die with dignity by your side.”
“To the Eternal Tree, then.”
“To the Eternal Tree.”
I pulled away. “We’re going to die?”
S’ami shrugged. “You’re young. You cannot be expected to understand all the consequences of your actions.”
“How? How does he plan to kill us?” Maybe there was some way to stop Nihil. There had to be.
S’ami and Reyhim had already walked away from me to direct the guards. Shields pushed the crowds back, back, until people burst out the sanctuary doors. Guards propped open the doors facing toward the bay to clear the sanctuary more quickly. S’ami steered me toward those side doors and motioned for Mami and Amaniel to join us.
Amaniel had someone’s shawl wrapped around her torso and my hair lace draped across her shoulders. She gave me a puffy-eyed frown. She’d been crying.
S’ami shook a finger at her. “You mustn’t blame your sister. You’ve been spared a terrible fate.”
“Yes, Azwan.”
Mami hugged her close. “Is there more to come, Azwan?”
“I’m afraid so. You’d best get Amaniel to higher ground. Is your husband in the sick ward?”
“Yes. My other daughter’s with him.”
S’ami scowled. “Get them as quickly as you can. Tell anyone you meet on the way to head for a bluff or a solid rooftop as far from water as they can find.”
“May I ask why?”
There was a kindly, apologetic tone to S’ami’s voice, one I wasn’t used to hearing. “Our reasons remain our own, Lady Lia.”
Mami paused long enough to hug me and then whisper in my ear, “Whatever happens, this will have been the proudest day of my life.”
“But what about Amaniel, Mami?”
“I’m proud of her, too.” Mami beamed down at a teary Amaniel. “My two bold girls.”
With that, my mother and sister hustled out the main doors to the sanctuary and to whatever fate lay beyond. S’ami kept his arm around my shoulders and guided me out the side doors. We climbed up a grassy embankment where we had a flawless view of a gleaming, deep blue bay.
“Feel anything yet?” S’ami asked.
I shook my head. “Should I?”
S’ami dug out his totem and turned it over in his palm. “It’s been getting weaker. Your well is indeed running dry.”
“The prayer well?”
He nodded. “He’s drawing on the power of his brothers and sisters among the stars, as I told you. But it’s not enough, and it’s far away and flickers in intensity. People and their prayers and their wants and yearnings and endless needs are very close, and constant.”
“So what I did worked?” I couldn’t believe it. I had been right after all. It might have been a small victory, but it was something.
“You would’ve made a fine priestess,” he said. “Or revolutionary. A pity we’ll never find out.”
His words jerked me back to the
present. “Why, what is Nihil going to do?”
“You know that answer.”
“Punish me?”
“Your instinct is to leap in with the easiest reply. Reach further, Hadara.”
I thought some more. “Is this really about sacrifice, or maybe vanquishing me? Does he believe the demon is alive somehow?”
“All questions you can answer for yourself.”
I said nothing after that while I mulled what S’ami had said and tried to think matters through with some degree of calm. I’d reacted to Nihil in anger. Nothing I’d done had been level-headed or reasoned. But logic would not have saved my sister and there was no guarantee Nihil would’ve spared the city anyway.
There it was. Reason. Logic. Truth. I had to expect the unexpected, which then became the expected, until Nihil changed his mind again. This, then, was the heart of the Temple of Doubt. It’s not that we were to have confidence in him, but doubt in ourselves. His whole hold over us depended on it.
But why? To generate prayers, that’s why. When people caught themselves in a storm of self-doubt, the Temple provided them shelter. It was their rock, their sturdy foundation.
And it was all built on lies.
Whatever was about to happen, I had to stay in control—of myself, of my powers. I promised myself for Mami’s sake, wherever she was right then. She’d defied the Temple all her life and kept her head and they’d left her more or less alone. I’d have to do the same, even if this was the last thing I ever got to do for anyone.
The sun climbed higher in the sky as we watched from the Ward’s patio overlooking the bay. We waited for something to happen, but the Azwans said nothing, only gazing out at the deep blue waters. From far away, smoke from smoldering warehouses drifted above the battered skyline. It was hard to see through the haze that clouded the western half of Port Sapphire. Sea breezes swept the worst of it away from where we stood.
A throng milled around us, made up of priests and guards and worshippers who’d filed out the side doors with us. The gallows were still there, but the ropes and their hated nooses had been tethered to one side to keep from swaying. I couldn’t spot Valeo and didn’t want to make a scene looking for him. Everyone but the guards chattered at once or asked the Azwans this or that, but the two holy men kept their mute vigil over the bay. Both palmed their totems, S’ami rolling his over and over, waiting for some signal that took its time in coming.
I rubbed my toes on the paving stones and tried to hide my mounting anxiety. My stomach was tying knots around itself, and the jitters crept across my flesh. My head began to ache. Maybe that was only from the sun, or fear, or a mess of emotions that tumbled from a door in my head that refused to shut.
At last, from far across the city came rapid bursts of a horn. A guard murmured to S’ami, “That’s a warning horn, Azwan.”
“Find out more. Find out everything you can. Quickly.”
My jitters reached a fevered pitch and began buzzing in my ears.
“Oh no,” I said. “I recognize that.”
S’ami stared at the totem in his palm. “I do, too.”
“Is it starting?”
“Don’t keep asking me questions to which you already know the answer.”
I spoke through clenched teeth. “Is this a good time to tell you that I absolutely hate you?”
“As good a time as any.”
“Well, I do.”
“Save your strength. Something worse than me comes your way.”
S’ami pointed toward the bay, where I saw only the tide winding its way out to sea.
I waited, waited some more, and waited yet more.
Until I realized that the waiting itself was the trap.
33
Which of your gods can make it rain? I asked. Which can make the ground shake or the moons wax and wane?
Ba’l named the gods who made rain or temblors or moonlight. So call on them to make the ground shake, I said. Ba’l took up his staff and prayed, and was met by silence. The people moaned their disappointment.
I slammed my fist into the city. The walls shook and crumbled and the people fell to their knees. They shouted, You are our god! We shall worship you.
I was satisfied, and spared them.
—“Nihil Converts Ba’l,” from Verisimilitudes 5,
The Book of Unease
Sandbars that hadn’t been seen since the last triple full moons cropped up as the tide receded. The sea was pulling back, revealing the bay’s muddy bottom and swells of stranded crayfish. Cranes and shore birds swooped in for easy kills and raced off again.
That was wrong, something I knew even without connecting it to the fizzing magic that rippled up and down my spine and rattled around my head. Nihil’s music chimed faintly in the distance, and I scanned the horizon in vain for colorful rays of power or any other sign of his theurgy.
The guard S’ami had sent away came racing back. “The Gek are darting around the city, pulling people onto rooftops, Azwan.”
“And people are letting them?”
The guard nodded. “It’s as though they never fought.”
“They haven’t retreated toward their swamps?”
“No sir. That’s the odd thing. The ones that aren’t on rooftops are scrambling toward higher ground, where you sent the congregation.”
Reyhim had overheard and nodded his head. “They know.”
The guard pointed into the distance. “There, sir.”
A ridge of water grew at the horizon. The sea that pulled itself back was pushing the ridge higher and higher. A moment later came the sound of a horn I’d been taught to memorize as a child. Three short bursts and three long ones, over and over again.
It signaled a tsunami.
Reyhim raised his voice. “It’s time to pray. May Nihil redeem us, even now.”
Either I acted, or we all died. It was that simple.
I clambered down the embankment to a dock for the city’s many ferries, ignoring the nasty splinters that immediately found the soles of my feet. I concentrated on the receding tide, the evilness of it, holding back to give us only enough time to flee uselessly in the face of it, holding back death only long enough to mock us. Below me, the dock soared over empty sand; the sea had retreated too far for me to jump off safely.
I tried to ease myself over the side, but got tangled in rows of ropes and the waterwood buffer nailed to the docksides. I pushed against the bulky hunks of porous waterwood but only tiny crumbles broke off. The buffers were nailed in place to keep boats from bashing their hulls against the dock, but they barred my way. I tried to slide between them, but rusty nails jutting from the sides caught the seam of my dress. The fragile silk tore. I was getting used to ruined clothes. I tugged myself free and dropped a full body length into the sand.
Once I felt wet ooze between my toes, I closed my eyes again and tried to feel for the direction of the magic. The ridge growing into a mountain deep into the bay might not be the right place to run. If the magic came from somewhere else, then that was where I needed to be.
Nihil’s trick with the mirror had taught me that.
Behind me, guards kept back the crowds. Their shouts and finger-pointing began to give way to chanting and praying. That was fine with me. They could pray all they wanted. I was the only one who could help them, and I couldn’t expect so much as a thank-you for it.
The tsunami horn kept blasting and blasting, ringing clear across the city. Screams and shouts came from the farthest corners of town. Above all those sounds came the beating of drums, thousands of drums, crashing and pounding out unfamiliar rhythms. I remembered what the guard outside my door had said. Flutes that time, not drums or horns. This was all drums. I was hearing Nihil’s war cry. Far out at sea, storm clouds gathered and whipped the ridge of water into a foaming frenzy. The drums added peals of thunder to their pounding beats.
I raced toward the music, struggling in my long skirt. I tied the hems in knots at either side above my knees and kept goin
g. My feet landed on clamshells that tore them open and I raced harder, faster, as fast as I could manage, and it was nowhere near fast enough. The ridge of water was a mountain dozens of body lengths high and it began to slide forward, fast and angry and ugly, toward a helpless city.
I knew I was getting closer to the source of the magic but I wasn’t a good judge of the distance. A hundred paces? Two hundred? The tsunami began closing fast. My lungs couldn’t hold another breath, my chest hurt with every heave. I kept going.
Someone grabbed my left arm and dragged me forward. Valeo had me by the wrist, running and running, forcing me to keep up with his giant strides. He lugged some sort of wooden shield over his back but all that registered was the sudden speed with which we flew across the sand bars and shallows.
Valeo had me crossing the bay at a diagonal, something that was making our journey longer, but I couldn’t manage enough breath to speak. The drumming resounded through me, beating against my ribs and into my head. Drums competed against drums, against the roar of the giant wave and the distant storm. My knees began to give out and Valeo yanked me up again and onward. My lungs nearly burst from the exertion.
The diagonal began to make sense. The magic that sparked and whirled in my head grew louder and more distinct. Something gold in the sand caught a ray of sun and glinted up at us. I pulled Valeo in its direction until I could see waves of color shoot all around it, beaming strong magic in every direction. Like all the other gold items wielded by magic users, it would be a talisman used to focus Nihil’s power.
The tsunami would reach it before I did.
I lunged forward again, only to be lurched back. Valeo braced my entire left arm by his side and knotted a rope around it. He’d dropped the hunk of wood and it lay wedged into the sand.
“What. Are. You. Doing,” I gasped.
“Catch your breath,” he said. “Do it.”
He’d obviously gone mad. I wasn’t close to the object, but I could get closer. I had to try.
Then it was too late.
We dove into the wave as it thundered over us. I could hear the drums reverberating under the water and swam for the gold item. Maybe I could reach it before my lungs gave way. Some unseen force tugged me upward by my tethered wrist, away from my goal. I tried to wriggle free but the rope had wrapped around Valeo’s thick thigh.
The Well of Prayers Page 27