The Judging Eye (19 page)

With the Chorae before her, the
implication was plain: She meant
one of them
.

Several gasped. Maharta, the
youngest of their number (and a political concession to Nilnamesh), actually
cried out. Sharhild, with her piggish eyes and radish cheeks, watched with the
expression of bland stupidity she always used to conceal her cleverness.
Vethenestra, of course, nodded as though she'd known all along. What kind of
Oracle would she be otherwise?

A hush fell upon them, so
complete it seemed they could hear the dead ashes breathe.

"B-but Holy Mother,"
Maharta fairly whispered. "How could you know?"

Psatma Nannaferi closed her
eyes, knowing they would be globes of crimson when they snapped opened.

"Because the Goddess,"
she murmured, "lets me see."

Shouting clamour. The clinking
thump of a stone stool falling. Eleva leapt to her feet, her arms outstretched,
her eyes and mouth shining sun-white, her hair and robes boiling in some
intangible tempest. An uncanny mutter fell from the arches, the walls, from the
circumference of all things seen—a voice that crumpled thought like paper.
Sharhild flew at her, knife out and stabbing, only to be tossed back, thrown
like soiled clothes into the corner. Spectral walls parsed the Charnal Hall,
the ghosts of cyclopean bricks. Screams rang through the closeted deep. The
priestesses scrambled, scattered. Shadows twisted about the hinges of things.

The thwack of iron on wood. A
blinding incandescence. A sucking roar.

Moans and small cries of
disbelief rose through the sulphurous reek. Maharta sobbed, crouched beneath
the eaves of the Struck Table. "Eleva!" someone cried.
"Eleva!"

"Has been dead for
days," Nannaferi spat. She alone had not moved. "Maybe longer."

The cane tingled in her hands,
as if still shivering from the impact. Using it, she walked up to the fallen
witch, stared down at the cracked statue of salt across the floor. An anonymous
girl, forever frozen in anxious, arrogant white. Buxom. Improbably young.

With an involuntary groan
Nannaferi knelt to retrieve her Chorae from the powdered floor. Her blessed
Tear of God.

"They hunt us with
witches," she said, her hatred warbling through her voice. "What
greater proof could we have of their depravity?"

Witches... The School of Swayal.
Yet another of the Aspect-Emperor's many blasphemies.

Several stunned heartbeats
passed before her sisters collected themselves. Two helped Sharhild back to her
seat, full of praise for the old Thunyeri shield-maiden's ferocity and courage.
Others crept forward to look at the dead witch who but moments earlier had been
Eleva—one of their favourites, no less! Maharta continued crying, though she
had been shamed into snuffles. Vethenestra resumed her seat, cast blank looks of
apprehension about the Table.

Then, as though once again
answering to some collective logic, they erupted in questions and observations.
The low-lintelled ceiling of the Charnal Hall rang with matronly exclamations.
Apparently Vethenestra had dreamt this would happen a fortnight ago. Did this
mean the Shriah and the Thousand Temples scrutinized them? Or was this the work
of the Empress? Phoracia claimed to see Eleva touch a Chorae not more than
three months previous in Carythusal, during the solstice observances. That
meant the witch had replaced her recently, did it not? Sometime close to the
secret summons they all received...

But how could that be? Unless...

"Yes," Nannaferi said,
her tone filled with a recognition of menace that cleared the room of competing
voices. "The Shriah knows of me. He has known of me for quite some
time."

The Shriah. The Holy Father of
the Thousand Temples.

The Demon's brother, Maithanet.

"They have tolerated me
because they believe secret knowledge a valuable thing. They accumulate
conspiracies the way caste-merchants do ledgers, thinking they can control what
they can number."

A hard-faced moment.

"Then we're doomed!"
Aethiola abruptly cried. "Think of what happened to the Anagkians..."

Five assassins, convinced they
were enacting Fate, had attempted to murder the Empress on the day of her
youngest son's Whelming. It had been a failure and, more importantly, a
blunder, one that had threatened all the Orthodox, no matter what their Cult.
The rumours of the Empress's revenge were predictably inconsistent: The
Anagkian Matriarch had either been flayed alive, or sewn into a sack with
starving dogs, or stretched into human rope on the rack. The only certain thing
was that she and all her immediate subordinates had been arrested by the Shrial
Knights, never to be seen again.

Nannaferi shook her head.
"We are a different Cult."

This was no vain conceit. With
the possible exception of Gilgaöl, none of the Hundred Gods commanded the mass
sympathy enjoyed by Yatwer. Where other Cults were not so different than their
temples, surface structures that could be pulled down, the Yatwerians were like
these very halls, the Womb-of-the-Dead, something that could not be pulled down
because it was the earth. And just as the Catacombs had tunnels, abandoned Old
Dynasty sewers, reaching as far out as the ruins of the Sareotic Library, so
did they possess far-reaching means, innumerable points of entry, hidden and
strategic.

Wherever there were
caste-menials or slaves.

"But Mother-Supreme,"
Phoracia said. "We speak of the
Aspect-Emperor
."

The name alone was the argument.

Nannaferi nodded. "The
Demon is not so strong as you might think, Phori. He and his most ardent, most
fanatical followers march in the Great Ordeal, half a world away. Meanwhile,
all the old grievances smoulder across the Three Seas, waiting for the wind
that will fan them to flame." She paused to touch each of her sisters with
the iron of her gaze. "The Orthodox are everywhere, Sisters, not just this
room."

"Even the heathens grow
more bold," Maharta said in support. "Fanayal continues to elude them
in the south. Scarcely a week passes without riots in Nenciph—"

"But still," Phoracia
persisted, "you haven't
seen him
as I have. You have no inkling of
his power.
None
of you do!
No one
kno—" The old priestess
caught herself with a kind of seated lurch. Phoracia was the only one of their
number older than Nannaferi, at that point where the infirmities of the body
could not but leach into the soul. More and more she was forgetting her place,
overspeaking. The intermittent impertinence of the addled and exhausted.

"Forgive me," she
murmured. "Holy Mother. I-I did not mean to imply..."

"But you are correct,"
Nannaferi said mildly. "We indeed have no inkling of his power. This is
why I summoned you
here
, where the souls of our sisters might shroud us
from his far-scyring eyes.
We
have no inkling, but then we are not alone.
Not as he is alone."

She let these words hang in the
sulphur-stained air.

"The Goddess!" sturdy
old Sharhild hissed. A bead of blood dropped from her scalp to her brow, tapped
onto the pitted stone of the table. "We all know that She has touched you,
Mother. But She
has come to you
as well, hasn't she?" The dread in
her accented voice outlasted the wonder, seemed to hone the sense of
mountainous weight emanating from the ceiling.

"Yes."

Once again the Charnal Hall
erupted in competing voices. Was it possible? Blessed event! How? When?
Blessed, blessed event! What did she say?

"But what of the
Demon?" Phoracia called above the others. The sisters fell silent,
deferring as much to their embarrassment as to her rank. "The
Aspect-Emperor
,"
the prunish woman pressed. "What does
she
say of him?"

And there it was, the fact of
their blasphemy, exposed in the honesty of an old woman's muddled soul. Their
fear of the Aspect-Emperor had come to eclipse all other terrors, even those
reserved for the Goddess.

One could only worship at angles
without fear.

"The Gods..."
Nannaferi began, struggling to render what was impossible in words. "They
are not as we are. They do not happen... all at once..."

Her eyes narrowed in fatuous
concentration, Aethiola said, "Vethenestra claims—"

"Vethenestra knows
nothing," Nannaferi snapped. "The Goddess has no truck with fools or
fakers."

The Struck Table fell very
still. All eyes followed the wandering crack that led to the Chalfantic Oracle,
Vethenestra, who sat in the tight pose of someone at war with their own
trembling. For the Mother-Supreme to refer to any of them by
name
was
disaster enough...

The woman paled. "H-Holy
Mother... If I-I had cause to dis-displease you...

Nannaferi regarded her as if she
were a broken urn. "It is the Goddess who is displeased," she said.
"I simply find you ridiculous."

"But what have I—?"

"You are no longer the
Oracle of Chalfantas," she said, her voice parched with regret and
resignation. "Which means you have no place at this table. Leave,
Vethenestra. Your dead sisters await."

An image of her own sister came
to Nannaferi, her childhood twin, the one who did not survive the pox. In a
heartbeat it all seemed to pass through her, the whooping laughter, the
giggling into shoulders, the teary-eyed shushing. And it ached, somehow, to
know that her soul had once sounded such notes of joy. It reminded her of what
had been given...

And those few things that
remained.

"Awa-await?"
Vethenestra stammered.

"Leave,"
Nannaferi
repeated. There was something about the way she held her hand, an unnerving
gestural inflection that implied destination rather than direction.

Vethenestra stood, her hands
clutching knots of fabric against her thighs. Her first steps were backward, as
if expecting to be called back, or to wake, for she looked at them with a stung
and stupefied glee, a face that had forgotten what was real. She turned to the
black maw of the entrance. Each of them felt it, an ethereal squeezing, a
wringing of empty air. They blinked in disbelief, gazed in horror at the issue.
Ribs of menstrual crimson wound like smoke through the dark. Glistening
curlicues, twining into nothingness.

Oblivious, Vethenestra crossed
the threshold. But she didn't so much step into the shadows as step
out
,
as though she were no more than her image, twisting away in directions
indescribable to the eye, like a pool soaked out of existence. One heartbeat
she was, and the next she was not.

Something like speech seemed to
rattle in the corners beyond their hearing—or perhaps it was a shriek.

Silence. The very air seemed
animate. The excavated hollows that surrounded them, hall after honeycombed
hall, hummed with emptiness, the deadness of space. Watching her sisters, Nannaferi
could see it slacken the last of their eyes, the comprehending, the standing
underneath
what they had lived the entirety of their shallow lives. The
Goddess
,
not the name they used to sugar their lips, not the vague presence that tickled
their vanity or itched the underbelly of their sins, but the
Goddess
,
the Blood of Fertility, the monstrous, ageless Mother of Birth.

Here
, lending her fury to
the blood dark.

Without warning, Maharta fell to
her knees, pressed tear-streaked cheeks to the soiled floor. Then they were all
kneeling, all hissing or murmuring prayers.

And Nannaferi spoke to the
ceiling, crooked hands held out.

"Your daughters are clean,
Mother...

"Your daughters
are
clean
."

They were abject now, staring at
her with mewling eyes, adoring and horrified eyes, for they saw now that their
Goddess was
real,
and that Psatma Nannaferi was her chosen daughter.
Maharta hugged her about the thighs, bent to kiss her knees. The others crowded
near, trembling with wonder and zeal, and the Mother-Supreme pressed closed her
unpainted lids, savoured the rain of their gentle touches, felt corporeal and
incorporeal, like someone invisible finally seen.

"Tell them," she said
to her sisters, her voice hoarse with the passion to dominate. "In
whispers, let your congregations know. Tell them the White-Luck turns against
their glorious Aspect-Emperor."

They had to take such gifts that
were given. Even those beyond their comprehension...

"Tell them the Mother sends
her Son."

Or that would see them dead.

***

Momemn...

Kelmomas liked to pretend that
the Sacral Enclosure, the octagonal garden situated in the heart of the
Imperial Apartments, was nothing less than the roof of the world. It was easy
enough, given the way the surrounding structures obscured the expanse of Momemn
to the west or the great plate of the Meneanor to the east. From almost any
position along the colonnades or verandas overlooking the Enclosure, all you
could see was the long blue tumble of the sky. It lent a sense of altitude and
isolation.