James Clemens - Shadowfall

The matron reached the door and tugged it open. As Dart pulled into her slipper, she heard the matron’s announcement and the shocked responses that followed. Wincing, she stood in the shadows, sheltered behind the large woman’s bulk.

Healer Paltry placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder and leaned to her ear, speaking low and urgently. “I don’t know what you did with Master Willet, but I promise you I’ll find out.”

Dart gasped. Understanding struck her immediately. She had passed the healing wards on the seventh floor on her way to the rookery. The room tilted, and her vision darkened. Paltry was Willet’s partner. The healer had lied about her purity a moment ago. She remembered his fingers… in her, probing… possibly even appreciating his partner’s bloody handiwork.

A shudder passed through her. She felt violated all over again, her momentary hope dashed into ruins. She felt unmoored, terrified, trapped.

“I’ll be watching you, Dart.” His voice was as gentle as ever, but his fingers dug deeper, painful, threatening. “In the meantime, it seems we both have secrets to keep.”

Matron Grannice spoke above the babble of shocked voices from the hall. “Come, Dart. Night won’t wait on you forever.”

With a small cry, Dart fled the healer’s grasp and into the passageway. Forty pairs of eyes narrowed at her in angry rebuke. None came to congratulate her on the blue cross on her forehead. She felt a bone-deep urge to flee to the nearest privy and scrub the mark off. But for now the cross was all that stood between her and banishment.

She continued down the hall, refusing to look back. She had won back her home for a short time-but was it even worth it?

Laurelle and Margarite met her at the end of the hall. They stared at her as if she had been freshly dredged up from the muddy bottoms of the Tigre.

“What happened back there?” Laurelle asked.

Dart shook her head. She had a more important mystery to ponder: What was she going to do now?

Night came much too quickly.

Dart huddled with the crowd of other supplicants in the hall below the High Chapel. In the center of the room, a spiral brass staircase wound up to the sacred domed chamber above, but the way remained locked, awaiting the rising of Mother moon’s full face and the chiming of the oracular bells.

Earlier, after sunset, Dart and the others had been sent here to prepare themselves. Small altars dotted the walls of the hall. After fasting the entire day, the supplicants to the Oracles were required to burn a stick of incense, sending their prayers up into the aether, while dropping leaden weights into deep watery troughs to shed their sins into the naether below.

With this final purification complete, only the waiting remained.

Dart stared around her. Off by the staircase, in a place of honor, the young men and women of the fifth and sixth floors gathered, stubbornly struggling to look calm or bored, but Dart saw their terror. Time ran short for members of this group. It was the very last ceremony for some of them, the last chance to be chosen.

On the other side of the hall, the fourthfloorers chattered merrily, wide-eyed and still fresh to the ceremonies, excited by the pageantry of it all.

Closer at hand, a sea of boys surrounded her, all thirdfloorers, dressed in the traditional black breeches, tucked into gray boots with loose gray shirts. The likelihood of being chosen was slim for those of such tender age. As such, their attention was focused away from the spiral staircase and toward the odd trio of small girls in their midst: Laurelle, Margarite, and Dart.

Word of the incineration of the illuminaria had spread rapidly through the Conclave. A few glared at Dart with murderous intent, others seemed merely intrigued, while most simply found it all too amusing.

“So they blew up?” Kessel asked, motioning with his hands and whistling. “I wish I could have seen poor Healer Paltry’s face!” The boy screwed up his own face into a mock of outraged shock.

His young attendants almost burst from trying to stifle their laughter, patting him on the back, holding their sides, and trying not to make too much noise.

“It was not funny!” Laurelle huffed at him, pinning the others with a baleful glare. “The… the accident ruined the chances for the other girls. Now they have to wait half a year, until the midwinter ceremony.”

“That only leaves more chances for all of us!” Kessel said with a shrug. “We should be thanking that girl.”

The gathered gazes focused back on Dart. She tried to shrink away.

“Don’t worry,” Margarite said heatedly. “The other girls will be thanking her later up on our floor.”

“That’s if she isn’t chosen first,” said a boy in the back. Dart did not know his name, but she had noticed him before. He was new to the Conclave, arriving only last year. He was taller than the others, his skin a deeper bronze than theirs, suggesting he came from one of the lands far to the south. But he never said exactly where, not even to his fellow thirdfloorers.

“She’ll never be chosen,” Margarite shot back. “Look at her, wearing hand-downs from storage. She smells of mothguard and mold.”

Dart kept her arms crossed over her black dress, tucking down her frayed gray half cloak. Even her boots were mottled white with age, not like the rich gray leathers of Margarite’s and Laurelle’s footwear.

“It is not the cut of one’s cloth that will be judged here,” the bronze boy said, turning away dismissively.

Dart appreciated his support, but it was futile. Despite the blue cross on her forehead, she was not pure enough to kneel before the Oracles of the Myrillian gods. It was not only mothguard and mold that would be sniffed out by these blind seekers of handmaidens and handmen. They would surely know of her corruption. The servants in the High Chapel were not mere boxes of old humour, like the illuminaria. They were the very senses of the gods.

The best she could hope was not to be exposed. And if she did indeed escape such ruin, what then? The punishment that would surely be inflicted upon her by the other girls was nothing compared to the terror that awaited her in the empty halls, where Healer Paltry would be waiting.

She had only one other hope.

Pupp appeared out of the crowd of boys, winding around some, passing straight through others. The crowds had him all excited. He pranced to her side, glowing brightly, his brass-plated muzzle steaming, a tongue of flame lolling from his razored mouth. At her side, he shook out his mane of copper spikes, ruffling them like real fur.

As she reached a hand to him, chimes began to ring overhead.

The oracular bells.

The room immediately went silent. Laurelle and Margarite grabbed each other’s hands and pulled in close.

At the top of the spiral staircase, double doors were thrown wide. The musky scent of darkleaf flowed down from the open doorway, accompanied by bright moonlight. The beaten silver doors shone like shields of pure light.

The ceremony had begun.

The fifth- and sixthfloorers headed up the brass stairway, winding around and around. They would be presented first, followed in order by the other floors. As everybody waited to mount the steps, tension in the room grew thicker. Many were already in tears, wiping them away quickly lest they appear weak. One boy from the third floor ran to an altar stone and emptied his belly with a splash of fluid. None derided him. All felt the same.

Now was the moment when dreams were either lost or fulfilled.

As the last fifthfloorer disappeared into the vast vault that was the High Chapel, the fourth floor’s group headed up the steps, their earlier chatter strangled away by the austere moment.

At the base of the staircase, the boys from the third floor had already gathered. Their faces craned upward, bathed in moonlight. Only one remained bowed, eyes on the floor: the bronze boy who had come to Dart’s defense. His lips moved in silent prayer.