The Temple of Doubt

by Anne Boles Levy

  Maybe that was a terrible failing, to want to live. If I was meant to avoid a conflagration, I ought to be willing to die. Valeo had been willing to die. I corrected myself—he’d been willing to die as a soldier. He had the right to die on his feet with a weapon in his hand, not the way I’d seen him last.

  He didn’t deserve the death the Temple had dragged him to. All the lies, recited with such self-righteousness, such smug disregard for those of us worshipping at Nihil’s feet, had been piling up, and the punishments, the humiliations, the tramping through the swamps and trying to leave us there, even then, the way S’ami had ordered Mami into the boat to surrender her life, even then. It all spun together, a cyclone of hate and resentment.

  A man’s voice filtered through the mirror. It was a tenor, rich and pure, the consonants perfectly articulated, the vowels long and soothing. It was the voice of a god. The rolling music of that voice found the eye of the storm within me, giving me a peace I knew wouldn’t last. Yet my heart trilled at the sound of it. “Hadara of Rimonil. Explain this to me. ‘The star comes to you as you come to it.’”

  I peered into the mirror’s darkness and tried to keep my voice steady. “Great Numen,” I said. “I know not.”

  “You have some sense of it, perhaps.”

  This was my chance to explain some of what I hadn’t translated back in the swamp, how I thought the Gek were afraid of it, how they wanted it for me, how most seemed to think it was harmless. I had lied to S’ami then, but I would do something worse in front of my god, and tell him as little as possible.

  As I paused, Reyhim answered instead. “There was a Gek at her home, Fey One. It told her something about unmaking.”

  He tapped my shoulder, which I took as my cue to speak. “She said, ‘The star doesn’t make bad. It only unmakes.’ Forgive me, kind Master and shaper of all Kuldor, if my words offend.”

  Or if what I don’t say and won’t reveal offends, too, I thought to myself.

  The mirror answered: “As long as you translate accurately, the offense is only with the speaker.”

  “I praise your incarnations, may they be infinite,” I said, bowing my head. I remembered at least some of my schooling.

  “Very well,” the mirror replied. “Let us see what we can unmake.”

  The Azwans raised me up and, after another bow toward the mirror, pointed me toward the steps to the altar. My brief audience was done, and he hadn’t thought to ask anything about my family or grandmother or what I thought might be in the Gek box. He’d sooner notice the dust drifting up from the prayer rugs than a simple island girl. My knees wobbled the entire way to the dais, where we joined the high priest, who stopped chanting and rose as the Azwans approached. The orange glow faded.

  The altar came to my waist and was ornately tiled in a shiny, elaborate sprawl of meanders and geometric shapes in dazzling hues, few of which I could make out in the orange half-light. The priests usually burned nothing more than incense here. Since Nihil had never visited us, no one had ever climbed atop it to be sacrificed to him. It hadn’t occurred to me until this moment that this might be the kind of rite Reyhim had in mind. It certainly was what my parents had pictured.

  It didn’t seem right to be alone with these three men, to have no family here to wring their hands or beg me to be brave. I had to invent them in my head, Mami seething at the Temple’s betrayal, Babba keeping his chin up, Amaniel whispering explanations to a teary Rishi, the prayer mats filled with everyone I knew, praying for my soul as it shredded before them.

  Imagining this way gave me a few drams of courage as I faced the three men across the altar, my back toward the mirror and the god who watched from within. Each cleric held up his totem. The high priest’s was a two-headed fish, a favorite symbol of seafarers. Not that it mattered. All that I ever bothered to learn about constellations or anything else had amounted to nothing in my short life. I’d be dead before I’d ever used another jot of it.

  “What must I do?” I asked.

  “Wait,” said S’ami. “Patience.”

  My eyes adjusted to the dim light. I could make out the tin box atop the altar, its lid torn off, its hinges mangled. The Gek had woven a dense cushion of grass and leaves inside it. Nestled into the matting lay an egg larger than any I’d ever seen. It could easily fill my cupped hands. No bird I knew could lay something that large, unless it had somehow enlarged its casing. It emitted a vivid, orange glow from deep inside the shell. That wasn’t at all what I’d expected. There was no meteorite or rock of any sort.

  The unease built up within me, and my breathing came in choppy bursts. I didn’t know what this meant. I hadn’t fully understood what the Azwans had meant by possession or how something could leap inside a person. I’d pictured swallowing a talking rock. This was an egg that shone from within, and I felt as if the ground shifted beneath me before I had time to rethink my ideas and adjust my bearings.

  I waited for it to do something, anything. It lay there, its glow fading, its light dying. The men began their incantations, the same as the high priest’s, the one used only for the most desperate situations, when other spells and divinations fail. The egg fired to life again, piercing the darkness. I shielded my eyes.

  “Don’t turn away,” S’ami said. “Take a long look.”

  I put my hand down. The egg had risen out of the grass matting, leaving an oval impression behind. It levitated above the altar at eye level, spinning top to bottom, gyrating and whirling in a crazy, nonsensical way. Its motion made flashes and arcs of orange, and its grating whine began to drone. My ears stung as much as my eyes, but my back straightened, and my balance steadied. I had nothing left in my stomach, so my insides achieved a sense of calm even if my brain kept whirling. It was so much like being in the fens with a snake or a stingfly swarm on the loose. If I couldn’t escape it, then I had to face it with my mind working instead of panicking.

  The men kept up their chanting, except for S’ami. “Brave Hadara. Sweet Hadara,” he murmured. “I don’t believe you brought this on yourself. The Gek have played you, for some reason. They’ve suggested, through your careful translation, that the demon chose you specifically.

  “In all other contests through history—you’ve read Scripture, you know this—no demon has targeted someone this way. It raged from one body to another until someone found a way to kill it. But this creature has stolen some sort of bird’s egg, a mere egg, and it confounds us. It can’t be destroyed. It rests when we rest, fights as we fight, and as fiercely. Our strength has gone into keeping it from doing to Ward Sapphire what it did to the wilds beyond your city, a place, I believe, to which you are partial. We understand it better for our trying, but that knowledge is incomplete. Is there something, anything, you haven’t told us from the Gek? Something about your role in all this?”

  The good girl in me wanted to recount every last moment ever spent with the sprightly tree-dwellers. The doubter in me realized with a shock that the Temple was admitting failure. Nihil didn’t know everything. Nihil could no longer even guess what was going on inside that egg or how to get at it and kill it. I’d been told that Nihil stayed away because, if he encountered it in person, it would destroy the entire world. The two couldn’t battle face to face. So here were two Azwans, sent in his stead, forced to improvise.

  I was seized by the wonder of it all. Great warriors had been infected by other demons and had finally died. Yet a fragile egg was stumping the mighty Azwans. Did I want Nihil to win this, even at the cost of my life? Or the unknown and apparently unknowable egg monster?

  “Hadara?” S’ami asked, in a gentle voice I imagine he might’ve used on his daughter.

  I froze. A brief squeak of air escaped me. Whose side was I on?

  Think, Hadara, think. Maybe I didn’t have to decide just yet. I could talk this through a little.

  “My family has had dealings in the fens and swamps for generations,” I said at last. “The Gek knew us better than any other humans. They didn’t sa
y why they wanted me.”

  “But they were anxious that you take hold of it?” S’ami said.

  I nodded. “That was my feeling, yes.”

  “What might it mean ‘one who knows to undo what must be undone’? That was the other part of their prophecy to you. And tonight a Gek told you the star unmakes? Undoing and unmaking, these mean anything to you? They have some context in Gek culture, perhaps?”

  I shook my head. “They hate anything supernatural.”

  “We know this.”

  “Spells harm them.”

  “Nihil’s theurgy is a poison to them; we know this, too.”

  “Perhaps, I don’t know, perhaps . . .” I fished in my memory for anything that could keep me alive a few more moments. When memory failed, my imagination would have to do.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Perhaps they mean undoing or unmaking magic.” I thought that sounded sensible and safe.

  “This was our guess, too. But why you?”

  The high priest stopped chanting. “I have explained about her family, worthy Azwan.”

  S’ami kept his gaze on me. “Worthy brother, keep praying. I wish to hear the girl’s own account. She’s already mentioned her family of her own accord. Hadara, you’re very brave for doing so. You mustn’t think you’re betraying anyone. There’s little you and your mother get up to that we don’t know about anyway. It’s just your dealings with the Gek, some shading or nuance we’re missing that might help us.”

  “And you know about my grandmother,” I said, sneaking a sidelong glance at Reyhim. He snapped his head toward me and leveled a fierce stare. “I was forbidden to speak of her.”

  S’ami nodded. “You may speak of her now.”

  I took a deep breath. I was stumbling into a murkier swamp than ever. I wanted to talk to the egg and find out what it wanted, but I didn’t want these men to know that. I wanted to hear what it had to say, but that meant keeping my own mouth shut. So I had to think up something to say about ol’ grandma that said nothing at all.

  “I only know she chose nature over Nihil. And maybe the Gek knew that, somehow, or sensed it, and picked me as the next in line.”

  “Why would they do that? Do you agree with her choice?”

  I hesitated a half a moment too long. Three pairs of eyes turned toward me. A flash of light from the mirror told me Nihil had overheard. “No, no, of course not. People are more important than plants.”

  “I see. Then why bother with the plants at all?”

  “Because. Sometimes. They, uh. They can help. I just want to help. I hate seeing people sickened.” I want to help them even when Nihil doesn’t. But I couldn’t say that, not with my god watching. I was panting, from fear and nerves and a feeling I was about to be stripped naked again with words instead of an enchanted gaze.

  I was right.

  My hesitation and stammering had done me in. I could see it in the pure contempt in Reyhim’s eyes and even the high priest’s. S’ami regarded me coolly, as he had looked over the Gek he’d killed with his blue light shield.

  “A few things to consider, Hadara.” S’ami’s voice took a more commanding tone. He was again the priest, and I was about to get the sermon of my life. “This is a demon. Not a rock or a star-creature or a friend of the Gek’s or nature or anyone. Do you know what a demon is?”

  “The opposite of a numen?” I felt like I was in class again, getting the answer wrong.

  “That is correct. It isn’t here to enlighten or uplift; it won’t build any civilization or heal the sick you care about so deeply and movingly. It has its own ends, and it seeks its own means to that end. You’re the means. We don’t know why, but it wants you, and we don’t intend to let it have you. We intend to destroy it, but you must do what we say without wavering.”

  I remembered what S’ami had said in the swamp when he’d asked Mami to watch over the tin box. She’d be easier to defeat than a Feroxi guard. I’d be even easier than that. I fumbled for a little more time. “Are . . . are you sure I have to die?”

  Reyhim cut in. “It’s heresy to question us.”

  S’ami held up a hand to Reyhim, and the fatherly voice returned. “It’s natural to want to save your own life. But this isn’t nature; it is a higher endeavor than mere instinct. There is little we can say, however, without risking the demon understanding us. It’s time, Hadara. Know that we shall honor your family, and they’ll remember you with love, always, no matter what happens here.”

  He would know. He must remember his dead daughter after all. I nodded, unable to speak. Tears trickled down my cheek, but I didn’t try to fight it. I felt entitled to them. I’d earned them. But I wondered if my father would grow as hard as S’ami after losing me. At least he hadn’t lost Amaniel, his favorite. I gulped back a sob, my tongue jamming the back of my throat. Babba’s favorite. His pious, sweet Amaniel. Not like me, the stubborn doubter.

  What would Amaniel do, if she were me?

  And then I knew. She’d do whatever they’d asked of her, without question, and beam with joy about it. She would fill herself with the warmth of conviction, knowing there’d be an Eternal Tree, and god’s love, and all the love in the universe, just sitting there waiting for her to pluck and savor forever and ever.

  If a doubt had ever crossed her mind, she would not have nurtured it, and it died of thirst.

  I loved my sister. I adored her. She was everything I could never be.

  But she was weak, even fragile, despite the strength of her faith, or maybe because of it. I had always doubted, and I’d never surrendered my doubts—and here they were, giving me hope when I ought to have none.

  I had hope, and it wasn’t something faith could give me. Faith could only take it away and make my death a certainty.

  And I was sure it wasn’t wrong to want to live. Yes, it was natural to want to save my own life. A stingfly wanted to save its own life. It’s not that S’ami was wrong. Maybe sacrificing myself for the benefit of others was a higher endeavor, and I was simply rationalizing, conjuring up reasons that made sense only to me. And maybe, being something more than a stingfly, that reasoning is what made me think my life worth living.

  The three men waited without speaking while I sniffled and cried softly for a few moments. Let them think I was afraid. I had my hope, I had my reasons, and, most importantly, I had my doubts. I gulped some air, straightened my shoulders, and met S’ami’s gaze through blurry vision. I was ready.

  His gaze never left mine and held something I imagined to be pity in it. “Hold your hands up, and count to three to yourself. Don’t make contact. You—and we—are safer if you keep a few fingers-width distance from it. We will attack if it tries to leap to you. Ready?”

  I immediately forgot all my numbers. Twelve, one hundred forty-seven, four million, a billion jillion; they all came before three. I lifted my right hand and tried to keep it from trembling. I failed. My fingers quailed like twitchy spider legs. I hadn’t known what a hard thing it is to do, to reach a few head-lengths in front of your face. It took long moments, all eternity, until Nihil’s own doom, to reach the glowing sphere. My fingertips hovered beside it as the men chanted louder, faster, more earnestly, their eyes riveted to the crane’s egg, to my fingers, to the thin strip of air between fingers and egg and whatever came after.

  All my life had come down to this one moment. In another moment, would I be beneath the Eternal Tree? Perhaps Valeo would be waiting for me beneath its endless canopy. But no—how stupid could I be? If he were waiting there, it wouldn’t be for me, the ignorant island girl he’d met only days ago. He was a soldier doing his job. And I would have to do mine.

  Hope. Reason. Doubt.

  The egg grew brighter and gyrated in the direction of my hand. Its compass adjusted to find its version of true north, and I was it. I heard the vibrant, chiming hum of S’ami’s magic and a lower register of tones for the other two men. The room filled with sound and light, no longer orange but a heated amber, the egg rot
ating perfectly on an axis, its small end appearing to spin off my middle finger. Yet I didn’t touch it. Not quite.

  S’ami had said not to.

  So I did.

  My middle fingertip made contact, deliberate and quick, barely a poke.

  The shell shattered.

  An explosion spewed hot egg in my face, searing my flesh. I screamed. I could see nothing. I’d been blinded, my eyeballs scorched through. My right hand was on fire. I could feel flesh melting away. My shoulder thumped against the hard floor. I’d fallen. I thrashed and clutched my right hand, then my eyes. I shouted and wept. A thousand searing needles stabbed into my eye sockets. I could feel the hot wetness of blood on my face.

  The air roared with an extended, sharp crackling. The noise crescendoed to a fury and then fizzled out like a doused fire. Then the only sound was my own screaming, and I could see only black. The chanting had stopped, and so had the music. S’ami’s voice echoed in the quiet hall from directly over me. “Let’s finish this.”

  I felt a jolt.

  Then nothing.

  From our dreams be gently shaken,

  Now we to our chores must go—

  The sun’s first rays bid us awaken.

  Farmer, bent, with scythe and hoe

  Plant this day tomorrow’s bread,

  Kuldor’s largess on us bestow.

  Fisherman, casting nets ahead,

  Should currents and the moons align

  We’ll feast on silvery stars instead.

  Let weaver spin her yarn so fine

  Our shrouds will be of woven gold

  And thus shame Death with her design.

  If, by our labor, we grow old

  Our tired limbs will surge with power

  When Nihil’s garden we behold.

  There, beneath a fragrant bower,

  We’ll revel in our souls’ repast,

  As heaven’s nectar we devour.

  This sun shall set; our souls shall last.

  —“The Dance of Life,” traditional dawn prayer