The High Priest and the Idol

by Jane Fletcher

  Of those who seemed to have the most secure hold on their emotions, Jemeryl picked the three with the best command of the Protectorate language, thereby cutting down on the risk of misunderstandings. The disappointment of those not selected was immediate and vigorous in its expression. At several points, it looked as if violence might erupt, and only intervention from the elders calmed things down.

  Other volunteers were even harder to dissuade. All three priests insisted on joining the distraction party, and since they were not subject to the rule of the elders, Jemeryl had no one to call on for backing. As it was, the offers from Alkoan and Botha she was happy to accept in place of more volatile nomads. Even though there was a risk their faces might be recognised, neither had the distinctive nomad looks. Surely the sentinels might be alerted if a group of people with copper skin and fair hair entered the temple at the same time.

  Darjain was another matter. The old man was frail to the point of being unsteady on his feet. He certainly could not walk the distance back to Kradja and he might slow things down in the temple as well. Jemeryl tried to talk him out of it, without success.

  Darjain was resolute. “The people here have mules. Someone will lend me one.”

  If anything, Tevi was even less happy than Jemeryl at the thought of the old man taking part. “You ought to stay here, safe among your friends.”

  “How can I count myself safe, when my god is under attack?”

  “But you don’t have to—”

  “No buts. I do have to. For too long I’ve done nothing. I’ve been lax in my duty. I’ve let this evil grow. My god needs my help.”

  “Your god is immortal. You’re not.”

  “Precisely. I’m an old man. Soon I’ll leave this world. How will I stand before Yalaish if I have failed in my duty to her? It’s not my life here that’s at stake, but my soul.”

  Tevi appealed to the other priest. “Alkoan, Botha, can’t you talk sense into him?”

  Alkoan pursed his lips. “Personally, I think it’s the most sense he’s made since Ciamon took over the temple. I understand his outrage. He has to defend his god, in the same way that I have to expunge the shame Sefriall is inflicting on the name of all Cyclians.”

  Botha nodded. “Nolius teaches that this life is a test that will determine our fate in the next. Whatever happens, Darjain’s life this time is nearly over. It’s right that his mind is set on what’s to come.”

  “Jem?” Tevi turned and held up her hands in appeal.

  Jemeryl shook her head. “I agree with you, but I think, my love, this is one fight we’re going to lose.” She stopped, chewing her lip thoughtfully, and mulled over something else Darjain had said. “But you don’t suppose someone might be willing to lend me a mule as well?”

  *

  The mules had been a good idea, Tevi thought.

  The nomads’ helpfulness had not ended there. They had provided transport, food, and tents for everyone, as well as an escort until almost within sight of Kradja. The escort had then returned, leaving only the last few miles be to completed on foot, alone. The nomads had been generous, clearly providing the best they had. The meal in the tent on the previous night had been wonderful—choice cuts of meat, soft bread, wild honey, and goat cheese. There had also been wine. Surely grapes could not grow in the desert, so what had it been fermented from?

  Tevi tried to concentrate on the problem. She tried to recall the flavour and aroma of the meal. How good it had tasted in her mouth and how full it had made her stomach feel. The warm, soft blurring of the wine. She tried to remember afterwards, making love to Jemeryl in the luxury and privacy of their tent. She tried to call on every delicious memory she could, as a shield against the glamour of the idol, washing over her with its seductive power. She had to stay focused and in control. The moment to act was almost upon them.

  Her clothes were the loose robes worn by many in the desert. The bundle of rods and poles was small enough to be concealed underneath, but large enough that Tevi was aware of them every time she moved. She could not bend in the way she normally did, so extra caution was needed. She had to think about her actions and plan them in advance to make sure the rigidity in her posture would not be apparent, and in order to think, she must not give in to the glamour.

  Tevi manœuvred her way into the middle of a cluster of pilgrims, trying to act like one of them, mimicking their languid shuffle. She could only hope her eyes were not too sharp. Those of everyone around her were glazed over.

  The good thing was that the worshippers were too lost in their entranced state to react quickly to anything. The sentinels would have to physically shove bodies aside to get to her and the others. Admittedly, this would not take much doing. The worshippers would not have the coordination to resist, even if they wanted to, but the few extra seconds might be vital.

  A short way to her left, Jemeryl was also imitating the spellbound pilgrims. Ashkinet was to her right, nearest the stairs to the upper balcony, and Larric was directly opposite, on the other side of the idol. All were in position. Now all they needed was the distraction.

  Tevi’s eyes returned to the idol. It was beautiful. Waves of love engulfed her and for a moment she was assailed by doubt. How could she plan on harming it? Desperately, Tevi dug through her memories. That morning, waking beside Jemeryl and knowing she was where she needed to be. Last night, Jemeryl’s body, naked in her arms, how good it felt, how right. The taste and the smell and the touch of Jemeryl. Tevi recalled the softness of Jemeryl’s breast under her hand, a hard nipple against her tongue, and the taut thigh muscles as Jemeryl’s body arched. If Tevi closed her eyes she could see Jemeryl’s face staring down at her. Even the change in appearance did not hide the emotion in her eyes. The memory filled Tevi with joy. This was love, pure and unshakeable. Compared to it, the glamour was no more than the crudest sham. For an instant, the spell was broken, and then it flowed back, but weaker and more transparent than before. Tevi smiled. She was in control.

  “Destroy the false idol.” The cry rang out from near the main door.

  “Yalaish is the all-mother.” The words were in a thick, nomad accent.

  “This is no true god.”

  “Forgive me, Yalaish.” Darjain’s voice wavered with the effort to maintain volume.

  The diversion had started.

  As Tevi had suspected, nobody around her, neither pilgrims nor sentries, showed any reaction to the uproar. However, the sentinels who were positioned around the walls were already moving to counter the threats contained in the angry shouts. Tevi wasted no time watching them. With a sharp tug she released the bundle from beneath her clothes. The items clattered to the floor. Tevi knelt. Now she would be even harder to spot from the perimeter of the hall.

  Within seconds, they had the poles laid out in a pentagram. The crystal clips snapped into place. Threading the rods through and into the stone talisman took a little more precision, and trying to rush was counterproductive. Somehow, the holes had been so much bigger and easier to locate when practising in the tent the night before. Tevi slapped her hand on her thigh as a spur to concentration and slid the last two rods into place. The device was complete.

  Tevi leapt to her feet and held the pentagram out, towards the idol. On the other side, Larric was already in place. A few moments later, Ashkinet and Jemeryl also bobbed up into view, with assembled pentagrams in their hands.

  Always before, when practising, they had never had more than one pentagram assembled at a time. Jemeryl explained that the devices needed to interact with each other to do their job of unravelling magic. One on its own would achieve nothing, and until they were in the temple, she did not want any other spells, such as their disguises, accidentally undone. This was thus the first time the devices had been tested. The sorcerers were all certain they would work. Tevi could only hope they were right, because very soon they were going to have a large number of angry sentinels to deal with.

  Yet something was clearly happening. Tevi was holding
the central talisman, as she had been instructed. The stone was warming in her hand while the pentagram was quivering to a rhythm like a heartbeat. Could she hear a faint whine? And surely she could smell summer lightning.

  “Look! By the idol. Those people.” The shout came from the stairs, followed by, “Get them! Stop them! Whatever they’re doing.”

  Tevi grimaced but did not move. Time was running out. The pentagrams had better work quickly. She heard shouting and movement, coming her way. Some of the worshippers near her were stirring, staring around blearily like woken sleepers. The disturbance was getting closer. Mere seconds were left.

  “You. Stop that!”

  Tevi could not turn to look, but the sentinels must only be a step or two away.

  Something snapped. The sensation was so strong that for a moment Tevi thought she had heard it, but the locus had been inside her. Something huge had vanished, leaving the world cold, bleak, and empty. Wails and screams rose up across the hall even as Tevi recognised what had gone. The idol was no longer projecting its glamour. She gaped at the statue, amazed at the change. The shape was the same but how ordinary it looked. How sad.

  Another wave hit. The force this time was so strong it knocked Tevi to her knees. The pentagram fell from her grip. Her body felt wrenched and swollen. Like a kick in her stomach that radiated out through her bones, an instant of pain made her eyes blur and then it settled.

  Tevi stared at her hands, braced against the floor. And they were her hands, her fingers, her skin. On the backs were the mercenary tattoos, twin crossed swords in red and gold. The magical disguise had gone. She was back in her true form.

  “What have you done?”

  Hands grabbed Tevi’s shoulders and yanked her to her feet. Three sentinels surrounded her. Their faces were terrified and furious. One had a drawn sword. Beyond them, chaos was claiming the temple. Shrieking, sobbing pilgrims surged in a mass and more sentinels were charging into the main hall.

  “What have y—” The sentinel was too enraged to complete the sentence a second time. She raised her sword, either to strike Tevi around the head with the pommel or to slash with the blade.

  What was Jemeryl doing? Why was she not taking control of the situation? Tevi looked over her shoulder and saw Jemeryl, rooted in the same spot where she had been before. She also had reverted to her normal appearance. Her expression was shocked, and surprised, and confused. As Tevi watched, two sentinels reached her and grabbed her roughly. They started to drag her towards the stairs. The conclusion was obvious. The pentagrams had not worked.

  The sound of sharp movement got Tevi’s attention as the sword-wielding sentinel lashed out. Tevi’s body reacted on instinct, ducking under the blow. The questions would have to wait. She had to move quickly. The sentinels would not expect her strength, which would give her the bonus of surprise. Not that Tevi felt she needed it, given the holy warriors’ abysmally low standards.

  She seized the sentinel on her right, hoisted him off his feet, and hurled him into his comrades. They went down in a jumble of arms and legs, taking a few dazed worshippers with them. Tevi darted around the pile of bodies and barged her way through the confused melee, cutting a line across the hall to intercept the pair who had captured Jemeryl. She overtook them midway to the staircase. Both went down with barely a groan.

  “Tevi. It hasn’t—” Jemeryl looked bewildered.

  “I know. It hasn’t worked. We can talk about it later. We need to get the others and go.”

  Tevi looked up. A sick knot formed in her stomach as she realised these two goals might prove impossible. Dozens more sentinels now lined the stairs in ranks. Already Larric, Alkoan, and two nomads were there, securely held prisoners. Knots of red-cloaked soldiers marked where Botha and Darjain were also being dragged away, and yet more sentinels were weaving through the crowd, homing in on where she and Jemeryl stood, surrounding them and blocking off their retreat.

  Suddenly, a new crescendo of screams erupted. One of the nomads on the stairs had shaken free, snatched the sword from her captor, and stabbed him. In an instant she was also struck down, but the sight of blood was too much for the overwrought worshippers. With a deafening barrage of shrieks and roars the people surged towards the doors. Tevi and Jemeryl were carried along by the flow. The isolated sentinels who stood in the way of the mob were trampled underfoot. A two-deep line of the red-cloaked soldiers, blockading the exit, proved no more effective. The fleeing horde knocked them aside.

  At first, Tevi tried to fight her way back to the stairs. The thought of abandoning the others was agony, but their case was hopeless. In the end, she simply hung on to Jemeryl and let the mob sweep them to the relative safety of the market square where the people dispersed, running off in ones and twos.

  Tevi pulled Jemeryl into the shelter of an alleyway. “Are you all right, Jem?”

  “I…” She shook her head. “It didn’t work.”

  “Something did. The glamour has gone, and so have our disguises.”

  “But…” Jemeryl’s eyes were fixed in disbelief on the temple. “What did Ciamon do? How could he—”

  “That’s tomorrow’s problem. Right now, we need to hide.”

  “It’s…right.” Jemeryl shook her head, as if to clear it. “Where are the others?”

  “Prisoners.” The word stuck in Tevi’s throat. “They’re all prisoners except us.”

  “What’ll happen to them?”

  Tevi linked arms with Jemeryl and towed her down the alley. “The same as will happen to us if we don’t start moving.”

  “Tevi?” Jemeryl’s tone required more of an answer.

  “The nomads were putting up a fight, so they’re probably already dead. Larric said the priests captured before now have been hanged. I can’t see why anything different should happen to Darjain and the other two.” Tevi clenched her teeth, fighting to stay in control. Giving in to grief and guilt would help no one.

  “Larric and Ashkinet?”

  “I don’t know. Sefriall may want them as bargaining chips with the Coven. Or she may not.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We’re going to make ourselves less conspicuous.”

  By the time they reached the Four Winds House, Jemeryl was showing signs of getting over her shock and thinking more clearly. “We can’t stay here.”

  “True. As soon as Raf recognises me she’ll be claiming her reward from Sefriall.”

  “She isn’t the only one who can identify us.”

  “We need a new disguise.” Tevi crouched beside her backpack in the corner and dug through the contents. Her fingers closed around the small bottle she had bought some days earlier. “I got this for Ashkinet. I thought she might need it.”

  “What is it?”

  “Dye.”

  Jemeryl frowned. “For clothes?”

  “For hair and skin. In case looking like a nomad became a bit too dangerous. But it will do for us. Maybe not my hair. It’s that colour anyway.” Tevi started pulling her clothes over her head. “But first we need to strip.”

  Deep brown skin softened some of the angular contours of Jemeryl’s face while accentuating others, and with her wavy auburn hair hacked short and dyed black she looked very different, at least to a first glance. Tevi knew her own appearance would not have changed so much, but she was less well known to the sentinels.

  For clothes, they stayed with the loose robes. Tevi kicked them around the floor to pick up as much dirt as possible, and mimic the look of someone sleeping rough on the streets. Fortunately, Raf had not swept the room before renting it out. The tattoos on Tevi’s hands were less conspicuous under the dye. She further concealed them by tying strips of rags around her hands like a labourer.

  Jemeryl held up her arm with the black sorcerer’s amulet. Up until now, it had been hidden as part of her altered form. “Disguising this isn’t going to be easy.”

  “Can you take it off?”

  “Maybe, if I had my magical abilities an
d a month to do it in. It’s one of the tests to show if an amulet is genuine. If you can get it off then it isn’t genuine.”

  Tevi pursed her lips as a couple of ideas came to her. “I know what we can do.” She looked around. Nothing in the room would help. “Wait here.”

  News about the events at the temple had clearly reached the inn. The dusty courtyards were buzzing with animated knots of people. Tevi could imagine the heights of invention the rumours were reaching, and luckily the stories were more interesting than the sight of a dark-haired, dark-skinned woman hurrying to the stable. Nobody spared her more than a quick glance.

  Within a few minutes, Tevi was back in the room with what she needed—two thin lengths of wood. Tevi ripped strips from spare clothes and started to bind the slats on either side of Jemeryl’s forearm.

  “You know, it was really clumsy of you to break your arm like that.”

  Jemeryl gave a wry grin. “I guess I shouldn’t have drunk so much.”

  “You said it.”

  “What do I do if some sentinels want to examine what’s under the strapping?”

  “Scream as loudly as you can and see if you can scare them off.”

  “Will that work?”

  “It might.”

  With the slats bound in place, from Jemeryl’s palm to her elbow, not even the outline of the amulet was noticeable. Tevi completed the fake splint by making a sling and tying it behind Jemeryl’s neck. She stuffed food and other useful items into one of the backpacks, which she then swung over her shoulder.

  “Time to go.”

  “Where?”

  “We could try the mansion I told you about. There might be some free space. If not, Kradja has an extensive selection of doorways to chose from.”

  “Sounds wonderful.”