The Temple of Doubt

by Anne Boles Levy

  “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. Add to that her infamous Glare of Doom and both men 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’s like we all knew we’d been naughty children, filing 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 that 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 had died, 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 I was doing something vaguely forbidden, even though there were already several other people 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. Measely, lousy, tiny little darts.

  And I’d never forgive myself for it.

  I’d been moping 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? What does anyone know?

  I received only uncomfortable silence, a few coughs and 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 there 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.”

  She was talking about my father. The small group looked at me. 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 else.

  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 and that the Azwans were on their way back to the far-away Temple compound now that the demon business was all over. Apparently, the many tokens of our doubtfulness were keeping them busy.

  It was as though Leba Mara heard my thoughts and picked up the thread of my anxiety, 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 have 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, and it was riddled with defeat. 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, especially 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, then. There was nothing I could do about any of this anyway—just one person, a girl at that, and a lowly a
pprentice. I’d rid myself of anyone’s expectations of me but my own.

  We filed back inside, or at least everyone else did, but Leba Mara waved me over.

  I thought she meant to ask me more about my father and whatever connection he’d 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 could be both condescending and cruel.

  I fumbled to fasten my scarf even with Leba Mara’s help, my breathing coming rapidly. My fingers couldn’t seem to make the knot, and I finally gave up and let Leba Mara fix it. It wasn’t perfect, but I had no mirror and however it looked would have to do. The guard gave a short nod at Leba Mara and turned his attention to the flow of wounded and sickly through our doors.

  “You’re lucky,” she said, her voice a whisper. “They’ve been cutting women’s hair off right on the spot, whipping out daggers at the first stray lock. You can’t even let a flirty curl or two show.”

  “Yes, and now the pyres,” I said, shuddering. “What is going on? I’m sure my father doesn’t know.”

  If he did, would he have said anything to me? I wondered.

  “I’m just as sure he does,” she said. “Even if he knows no more than I do, it’s still plenty. And he has pull that even I don’t have.”

  “He’s only a civilian though,” I said, which drew a sharp scowl from Leba Mara. For all her brashness, she didn’t tolerate a sharp tongue from subordinates. “With all due respect, Healer Mistress. He is secular. Anything he says to the Azwans wouldn’t be the same as coming from a priest or, surely, a healer?”

  “Ah, but his eldest daughter is the Temple of Doubt’s new favorite, no? Surely, there’s something to be made of that, especially if that daughter should ask her father to intervene on our poor little city’s behalf? Maybe ask them to spare a few of us, or find out when they intend to return to our Great Numen’s side, where I’m sure our Kindly Master has more need of them?”

  These were serious hints she was dropping. I’m lousy with hints. Usually, I need someone to beam me across the head with whatever they want, but she was making her message as obvious as she could without embroidering it onto my smock.

  I hesitated. Babba hadn’t mentioned my almost-sacrifice since my Keeping Day, as if there were some sort of taboo against it. It also felt wrong to use my father’s new position to wheedle him into helping. He’d been made Lord Portreeve, head of the civil government, a position the Azwans had wanted him to have as a sort of repayment.

  And, yes, the Temple owed us a lot. More than a lot. Reyhim, the Azwan of Ambiguity, had said as much the night he took me to the altar to be sacrificed, which hadn’t worked out the way anyone had expected. But if anyone could make anything happen in the secular world outside of the Temple’s sphere of influence, it would be Babba. The warehouses were all in the commercial district, so they would fall under Babba’s jurisdiction, right?

  At least, that seemed to be where Leba Mara was headed with this. Maybe she was right. I might be helpless, but Babba would know what to do. I had absolute faith in my father’s ability to make it happen. Even so, it didn’t pay to over-promise.

  “I’ll try,” I said, with as much unconcern as I could fake. “I can’t promise my father has any more pull than anyone here.”

  “It’ll have to do, then.”

  We went inside after that, under the careful eye of the guard, who gave me a disapproving once-over as we passed.