Jay Lake - Green

I found myself focusing on the smallest details as a distraction from my grief. This room had eight sides of equal length, making the floor an even octagon about twelve feet across. The corners where the sides met were relieved with little projections that rose the thirty feet to the ceiling to form a blunted vault. The walls were rimed with frost, as was the floor. A sigil was etched in marble beneath the frost.

Each wall held a doorway of blank stone. We had entered through the only opening. Septio stepped to the middle of the room. “Join me.”

I did so. He shut his eyes, so I shut mine. I had the sudden sense of something larger and meaty close by us, though it did not have the blind, questing hunger of the skinned thing that had taken the Dancing Mistress. I clenched my fists and stood firm beside the priest, unready to surrender anything more.

His arm brushed mine. “Come.”

The doors had moved. Stone blocked the path where our footprints disturbed the frost on the floor, and the opening now beckoned over virgin rime.

“Dread magic,” I asked, “or a slowly rotating floor?”

Septio gave me a sour look. “Follow where the road leads, Green.”

“I have spent too much time in a temple, and among practical women.” The Dancing Mistress had been one, of course. The greatest of them. My eyes stung with the thought of her.

We passed through the darkness into a room almost as tall as the octagonal chamber, but longer, and thus relatively more narrow in aspect. This one was ranked by stands of dark candles, some deep brown beeswax. As we entered, the tapers flared to life to form a wave of light that reached the far end of the room and bloomed off the hammered silver mirror on that wall. The floor was littered with rugs and cushions and bolsters. A low table holding a few trays and bowls sat at the middle of the room amid the brightest candles.

“Come,” said Septio. “Sit. Let us talk in a safe and peaceful place.”

I watched the mirror as we moved to the center of the room. The reflection was delayed slightly, the way an echo might dally to follow after a noise. I had never known light to do that, and wondered what glamer was on the mirror. Or possibly on me.

“Below has not been good to me lately,” I said as I sat beside the table. Something among the bowls had an interesting aroma. My body, starved for blood, began to hunger for it. I felt guilt at the hunger, as if my need were a betrayal of my lost mistress.

Septio tucked himself down next to me, not touching but still quite close, and reached for one of the bowls. “Try this.”

“How will it help me find her?” I demanded. Or her corpse.

“Trust me in this. You need your strength, and we have time.”

I did not trust him, but neither did I have much choice. Finely shredded meat in a very dark sauce. I lifted some with my fingers and tasted. Salty and rich, with a jolt of spice I would not have thought to find in Stone Coast cooking.

It was a balm to my thinned blood.

Dropping my veil, I began to eat. It was difficult not to make noises as I tore into the food. I felt like a beggar outside a bakery, driven half-mad by the scent and stuffing myself on the scraps before someone took the tray away.

After a few minutes, I slowed myself. There was no reason to lose control in front of this man, even if I did half-count him as a friend. “Now I have trusted you. Tell me, where is she?”

“I told you. With the avatar.”

“And you said rescue was not possible for me. It happens I believe you, or I’d already be destroying this room looking for the way out to find her.” An empty boast, though sitting in a decent amount of warmth and safety was doing much to restore me from the assault. “You led me to believe there might be other paths.” I leaned so close that the warmth of his face mingled with mine. “Tell me now,” I growled.

“That depends upon the god’s aspect.” Septio’s voice was low to match mine. “Skinless is not a theopomp, so it will not lay her directly before the altar. She will be held awhile.”

“Safely, or in pain and fear?”

“Green, what sort of god do we follow here?”

I exploded. “ Why? Why do you honor such a cheap storybook villain? Life is difficult enough without mortifying yourself before a monster!”

“Do you know what we do here? Do you know why?”

“No,” I admitted.

“Then do not criticize. The Sundering of Heaven was a stroke that has echoed across all of the world’s time.”

“You refer to theogenic dispersion.” Sundering of Heaven. I despised his cant. The Temple of the Silver Lily seemed to have managed largely without the mummery so often associated with priests and gods. Simple description had been enough.

“Yes.” Septio was surprised. “It is easier to talk of sundering, for most people.”

I grabbed a lock of his brown, curling hair and yanked him close. “I am not most people. I will grant you that your god is a liver-eater worthy of your respect. Grant me that I know something of what I am doing.”

“You have changed much during your time away, Girl,” he breathed, then kissed me.

For one shocked moment I sat with his lips upon mine. Though he was clean-shaven, his face bristled. His presence was an electrick prickle on me.

Then I came to myself, pulled back, and landed an open-handed blow upon Septio’s cheek. “I am not your harlot!” I shouted.

A long silence followed, which almost tilted into something more. Or less.

“Now where is she?”

“W-we must see the Pater Primus ab-bout the Dancing Mistress,” he finally said. “But I would know some things first.”

“Will she be broken or consumed?”

“N-not until the theopomp takes her up.”

“Who is the theopomp?”

His smile was crooked and bloody. “I am.”

“You bastard,” I hissed in Seliu.

“N-no, no.” His hands fluttered like birds to draw a hawk from their nestlings. “There is a labyrinth. The avatar will be a while passing through it. I can do nothing until it emerges. With luck, she will not recall the journey.”

“Why the focus on pain?” I asked again, distracted.

He sat up and dabbed at his face with a length of damask strewn on the floor. “You follow a southern god, yes?”

“Goddess.”

“A women’s temple?”

“Yes.” I wondered where he was bound with this. I did not want him so close to the Lily Goddess, even with mere words. Not if there truly had been god-killers in this city sometime in the recent past.

“Does she take up the pain of birth? Of illness, or the death of a mother? The death of a child?”

“Well…” I had always supposed She must, but we never celebrated pain there except in the special way the Blades sometimes had of sharing love and hurt in the same moments. “Hopes and fears, yes.”

“Your pain is as powerful as any prayer. Likewise the cripple, or the child who tumbles down a staircase, or a draft horse with a broken leg and the man with the sledgehammer not there yet to end it.” He gasped, his breath shuddering. “Blackblood takes that in, along with the death cries of the prey in the field and the sheep in the pen, and much else that washes the world. My god’s mercies are extreme, but they are mercies nonetheless.”

“So death is his demesne?”

“No, not death. There are dust-dry temples tended by men wrapped in yards and yards of yellowing cloth who offer homage to what passes on the other side of life. Suffering is of this world. Death is of the next.”

“They are almost the same,” I protested.

“You have the right of it. Sometimes they are almost the same.” His smile was sickening. “We celebrate pain as a way of celebrating life. When you can no longer feel the scourge, you are beyond this world.”