This in fact disappointed the High Priestess, who didn’t want to face the possibility of training Jaysu in the higher levels. It involved a great deal of prayer and fasting, ordeals and rituals that could drive one to the brink of madness and exhaustion, and it also involved drugs that did terrible things to the mind. Many died in that kind of training; the others went mad. Only one would do it.
The High Priestess knew that Jaysu could make it; her abilities and devotion were so absolute, it was a thing of awe. But what, if anything, was still in Jaysu’s mind, buried so deep down that it could not be reached by normal methods? The High Priestess concurred with the Grand High Priestess in Zone and those with whom the Most Holy had spoken to there. She was told that Jaysu was probably one of the two women, subsequently identified by interviews with the others as Angel Kobe, a onetime acolyte of some other alien religion. It fit nicely with her personality and devotion to assume this.
But might that old faith emerge and conflict with the new and destroy her?
Worse, what if they were wrong and she wasn’t this Angel Kobe? And what sort of monster might the process create in either case?
The High Priestess would have liked to put off the decision, but knew she could not. The gods of the volcanoes were restless; many troubles were coming for the clan from that score. Worse, all that she took to attain and maintain herself in this high position for so long had taken a grave toll. The pain was now there more often than not, and it was getting harder to find anything strong enough to deal with it. The Most High had sent her special drugs from other hexes that helped a great deal, and upon which she was now absolutely dependent, but even they had less effect as the days and weeks and months went by.
She was dying. And the pain would rise to levels she couldn’t control at some point. When that happened, she would go to the cliffs, pray to the setting sun to receive her spirit, and jump.
Flying was one of the things you had to sacrifice to become a High Priestess, and while fishing was part of the lifestyle, none of the Amborans swam very well.
Now she sat in the Inner Chamber, where none other could come, inside the Circle of Fire, facing the Grand Falcon herself, as only a High Priestess could do. After days of prayer and fasting and little sleep, and ingesting special drugs and potions, she was ready to take even more years off her life by diving the patterns. She understood that these were not preordained, but mere possibilities, but they tended to prove out more often than not. They could answer questions no other could answer, and give keys to the future that might well save her people.
The High Priestess swayed to a rhythm only she could hear, surrounded by the steam vents and sulfuric gases of the Inner Chamber, her sight failing as she took the last and strongest of the potions, which would almost certainly kill anyone not prepared for it. She screamed as it burned its way down and seemed to consume her body and even her very soul in a white-hot fire.
But out of that fire and out of the mists came visions. Visions formed inside and with the mists and gases, but primarily within her own mind.
What she saw in those visions were monsters.
Monsters of the sea, rising up, engulfing all that their giant tentacles could grasp. She saw two long, sticky tentacles shoot out like a tree frog’s tongue and snare low-flying birds and Amborans and other flying races as well.
Monsters of the land; huge translucent, sluglike creatures without even mouths to eat, moving slowly, ponderously, over land and through forests and up and down rocks, leaving slime as they went, absorbing any animal and most plant life they contacted, then slowly dissolving them inside themselves while the prey was still alive but helpless. Drawing larger prey to them by saucerlike eyes that seemed to swirl in patterns and radiate an eerie dance for the eyes of others that you could not avoid, drawing you in, making you walk directly into them without even knowing until you were inside that jellylike flesh…
She watched them come out of a boiling dark sea and horrible black skies filled with storms and violence, coming out of the west and covering nation after nation, hex after hex, until the Overdark was not merely a name but a description.
And at the heart of that darkness, something totally evil, something that looked like the tentacled ones but was not; something alien and awful, the enemy of light and the source of all madness. An entity so awful that it was willing, even eager, to take on and massacre even the gods themselves.
Bodies… all over, the blood and the screams of the dying everywhere, and even the volcanoes obeyed the darkness…
Surely this was not the future! Surely this was not the end of all things! The apocalyptic vision was so horrible that she refused to accept it.
And something seemed to whisper to her, not in words, but in flashes of inspiration and understanding.
Until now, life has been service to the gods and spiritual development of the soul. That time is past. This is what you were preparing for, although you did not know it. Now there is only one task, to fight the evil, to stop it, to crush it. Those who do may die. Those who do not will have fates worse than death.
“But how?” she screamed. The pain! The pain was growing as unbearable as the visions, and she dared not yet pass out! “What can Amborans do in this fight against such power?”
But in response came only a riddle. The Avenger must strike the blow that is the reason for his existence. The Avenger can strike only when the five are one through the North, and when all are willing to pay the price…
There was one last brief vision, of the investiture of Jaysu as High Priestess, just one brief glimpse, and it was gone. The priestess didn’t even have the time to plead for more information, for more detail. She passed out, and for many hours, alone on the platform, she lay there as the radiation and fumes did their worst to her and her body struggled with the poisons that gave both wisdom and pain.
When she finally awakened, it was to a body still in pain, but a different sort of pain, in which every joint and muscle in her body ached. She could not see; that last encounter had robbed her of what was left of her failing eyesight. Still, she managed to find her staff of office and use it to rise, and with memory of a place she knew better than any other, and the cues of heat and loud, rushing steam, she managed to make her way off the platform, past the veil, through the small maze and into the great room of the cave.
There was momentary shock from the priestesses there, some of whom had been keeping vigil and sympathetic prayer and fasting rituals for two days. Then they heard gasps and rushed to help her.
Jaysu was among them, feeling deep guilt for having involuntarily passed into sleep several times in the past few hours, but then just concerned for their Holy Mother, the only mother she remembered.
A mother who had been pretty if middle-aged when first they’d met only a year earlier, and who looked not much different when she’d gone into the Inner Chamber, but emerged old and wrinkled and wizened, blind and partly deaf, and barely recognizable to any of them.
They carried her to her chamber, where she was propped up on soft pillows and allowed to lie on her side. They watched, fearful that she would die at any moment, but after passing into a trancelike sleep, the High Priestess awoke and said, in a weak, low, old woman’s voice, “I do not have much longer.”
“Please, Mother, you must rest,” Gayna, one of her most senior adepts, said. “We can talk later.”
“No! We must speak now. I do not know how much time I have, and if I do not speak, then all this was for nothing! There is a great evil coming, and soon, from the west. An evil that will destroy all our people, our whole race, unless we become its mindless slaves. The Blessed Grand Falcon showed it to me, at great price, yet I would rather be like this than to not have seen and so be consumed by it!”
“Oh, no, Mother!” they began crying, but she silenced them with a contemptuous wave of her hand.
“Stop it! There will be enough anguish and tears in the tribulations to come! This is an evil as powerful as any god
we know. This is an evil force so incredibly foul that it dreams of taking on the God of Gods itself!”
They all gasped. It was inconceivable to any of them that anyone would think they could take on and then win against the God of all Gods who lived in the center of the world.
“Can any such force exist that could actually do this?” Jaysu asked her, coming closer.
The old priestess nodded. “Yes, my child. Others have found a way into the Seat of the God who is behind all things, who sits at the center of the Well of Souls and decides all. Most have been thwarted by gods who appear to save us all in those times, but I feel no such god who can walk the entire world and commune with the God of Gods is here. There is an ancient legend of one party that entered, but discovered that even though they saw the whole of creation and its powerful linkages, they could not know what they were doing nor who they would destroy and were thus stopped. This one, though, does not care. This one would have no problems in blowing out the stars, in wiping out all life but its own and recreating all in its own foul image. It is here to destroy the very Well of Souls and proclaim itself the one true god. Whether it can do so is beside the point; it can make the whole of our race, not just our clan, less than a memory, and it can do the kind of evil that none but it could dream of.”
“But surely the most holy Grand Falcon and all the gods and spirits will combine against it!” another said, horrified. “Or the One Behind It All shall raise or summon a champion!”
“No! We have been given the task of dealing with this one ourselves! All that we have studied, believed, become, and all that any other races have become, is to this purpose. Our people who are now divided must unite. The Grand High Priestess knows this. Trust her counsel and her judgment. We must learn not to be clans, but to be a nation and one of many nations.”
They were shocked, stunned, and confused by all this, but they were at least listening.
“Jaysu?”
“Here, Mother!”
“You will remain with me. All others must leave. I have visions which concern Jaysu alone.”
“But Mother—” Gayna said, objecting.
“Do you not hear? Gayna, you must accept what the Grand Falcon has decided, just as I must also obey. If you do not, then your faith is nothing, your life is nothing, and all that you believe is hollow. Go!”
Gayna didn’t accept the logic and didn’t want to go, but with a sulking expression and with the others eyeing her, she had no choice but to leave. The others followed, leaving only the dying priestess and the new acolyte.
Jaysu knelt down and drew close to the wizened High Priestess, fighting to hold back tears. It was so awful to see her like this!
“Help me to a kneeling position facing you,” the High Priestess commanded. “Hurry, child!”
Jaysu helped the old woman up, then knelt facing her, almost nose-to-nose. The old woman reeked of sulfur and other chemicals, but it didn’t matter.
“Gayna believed that she was to be High Priestess after me,” the old one said, knowing that Jaysu already understood as much. “She will not take kindly that I pass the staff and authority to one who was not born and raised here.”
“Then do not give it to me!” Jaysu cried. “I do not want it! I would follow Gayna as I follow you!”
“But she would not follow you as she follows me, and that is why she is not worthy. The Grand Falcon allowed me the vision. It is her choice, not mine, that you succeed me. I can no more object or disobey than I can deny my own responsibilities and my life! Nor can you, precisely because you are worthy of the task. I had wondered why you were sent to us, and why as an empty vessel, a blank slate, but now I know. Your innate spirituality shines through. I am convinced that you were sent to us to save our people. Many of the visions, the nightmares, I am going to place as a stain on your soul will repulse you, but so, too, will I transfer the riddle and enigma that are entwined with hope. You must find the meaning, but I am certain they are meant for you.” She reached down into a basket near her bed without bothering to look, being unable to see it anyway, and brought out a vial with a waxy seal across it. “Is this vial red and violet in color?”
“Yes, Mother, it is.”
Wizened, clawed hands pried at the seal, then broke it and lifted it up, then tossed it aside. “I had wondered if this was a wise thing to do. Now I know it was what I was supposed to do.” She drank from the vial, shuddered, and held it out. “Drink what remains.”
Jaysu took the vial, hesitated a moment, then drank it. It was fiery on the way down, yet had a sweet aftertaste. Within a minute she could feel its effects flowing through her veins, giving her a sense of enormous well-being.
Ancient hands came out and grasped her head, and she found herself doing the same, until their mouths met in a near lover’s embrace. Their wings extended all the way out, until the muscles ached from being drawn so far forward that the wingtips of each touched.
Jaysu felt a jolt of electricity that stunned her, and then the whole world seemed to drop away and she had no thoughts, no control. She was in a dream of sorts, locked in an embrace that was all sensual, all emotional, with no thought on her part.
This culminated with a massive orgasm unlike anything she had imagined, and then there was a deep sleep filled with visions, some wonderful, some quite ordinary, some terrifying. But all these dreams and nightmares had in common someone, something, whispering something over and over again, and only to her.
The Avenger must strike the blow that is the reason for his existence. The Avenger can strike only when the five are one through the North, and when all are willing to break the bonds and pay the price…
When she awoke, she found the High Priestess was nothing more than a wizened corpse, almost mummified, looking grotesque in repose. A huge pile of feathers had fallen from her outstretched, stiffened wings, and it seemed there was no fluid in her tiny-looking body.
Jaysu felt incredibly saddened and humble all at once, yet realized that the sadness was because she would not be with the Mother again.
She was soon to discover, though, that this wasn’t precisely the case.
She walked out from the High Priestes’s chambers to see the others standing there, waiting worriedly. Gayna appeared less worried than resentful, but held it in.
“Our Mother has passed on and is carried by the Great Falcon to the Well of Souls,” Jaysu announced. “We must prepare her body for the public farewell. Zida, you will blow the great conch and announce this to the people. Someone else must travel to the Center and go to the Gathering Place and inform the other clans and the Grand High Priestess.”
Although they had all suspected it, there were still many tears and even sobs from the eleven priestesses who comprised the clergy of the clan.
“Who will go to the Gathering?” Jaysu asked them. “It must be done quickly, out of respect.”
“Why don’t you go?” Gayna asked curtly. “We have spent our lives devoted to her. You came from outside the clan and have been here but a year.”
She expected that. “Because the Holy Mother commanded me not to, and because I have other things I must do here. If you truly loved her and understood her teachings, you will not dishonor her now, particularly not now, with pettiness and infighting. Like you, I swore an oath of absolute obedience. I am carrying out that oath.”
A couple of the other priestesses didn’t seem to like Jaysu’s take-charge attitude, either; she had never been particularly popular, especially after the High Priestess took her in and so highly favored her over her old acolytes. Still, they looked at one another and then at the surly Gayna, and one of them, Azia, said, “In this she is correct. Let us ensure her proper return to the Well. Then we may speak of other things.”
It wasn’t the sentiment Gayna had in her heart, but it was not something she could fight. She nodded, postponing the clash between them.
Still, it was a difficult next day. The ceremonies, rituals, and sacrifices had to be carried out within
one full day of a death, which required coordination among the priestesses, and somebody had to oversee it. Jaysu tried to accommodate the others by letting them do much of the work, particularly the wrapping of the body, but only one could lead the prayers and carry the staff to the great pit, and Jaysu made certain that she alone kept the staff in her possession. Thus she alone led the prayers and chants to the dead, and led the procession that walked, did not fly, along the ancient trail to the Pit That Always Burns. As the other priestesses lifted up the surprisingly light body wrapped in its funerary ware, it was Jaysu who pronounced the spells and sacred words and gave the signal that bade them tilt the board so the body slid from it and down toward the bubbling red and black surface of the volcanic pit.
For a moment the High Priestess appeared to be flying once more, then she crashed against the hot but solidified rock floating on the lava layer, again seemingly on her own as the slab shifted. Then a stab of red separated the crust from the rest and slowly began to remelt what had just formed, eventually reaching and covering the body, which me churning molten lava turned back into the elements from which it had once come.
Now the warriors spread their wings and took to the air, flying in ritual procession around the pit and then off into the darkening skies. Now, too, the priestesses took wing and flew the same pattern, but then headed back toward the lava cave and its shrine. Most continued their devotions there, the period of fasting and mourning lasting yet two more days, but one at least had to always be on duty to perform those things that the job entailed for the people, and another to follow the prescribed rituals of the temple itself.
Jaysu went into the High Priestess’s chambers once more, feeling as if she would be meeting the now departed occupant but knowing she would not. Though she didn’t know why she was there, once inside she made for the small jars and potions and began to apply colorful ceremonial paints to her face and body. When done, she had virtually covered all parts that were not feathered, and looked a fearsome sight. She emerged then, walking past the others and out onto the platform, and took a kneeling position facing the village, grasping the old High Priestess’s staff of office with both hands as she meditated and prayed, swaying back and forth. No one who saw her could break her concentration, and most feared to do so. Jaysu remained like this, in full view of both her fellow priestesses and the village, until sundown of the third day of mourning, when there was the fluttering of wings, and Macwa, who had been sent to the Center, landed on the platform and regarded her swaying form with puzzlement.
The Sea is Full of Stars wos-6 Page 27