Chapter IX #2
The Priest bridled. He did not like to hear Ariana bated. Never had done.
“I will thank you not to disturb the other worshipers in my sanctuary,” he warned Gileta, voice flat as he moved to Mortis’s altar to put away the tools he’d been working with.
“Orden defers to my judgment in all matters religious, and so I am able to permit you access to this cavern for your own rites. It would be a shame if I was forced to revoke that access.”
“So the salamander truly does have some venom,” Gileta said with an audible smile. “What could we make of you, Silas, were you more than a Priest?”
“A corpse,” the Priest said bluntly. “It is only my role and my brother’s protection that keeps me alive among my own people. Now, will you honor Silith, or not?”
With a gracious gesture, the Priest offered his altars to Gileta and her retinue.
She swept past him, the air stirring with slight warmth and the lingering scent of incense as she and her followers scattered themselves across the rise.
For a moment that seemed to stretch on forever, silence fell in the cavern sanctuary.
Silent worshipers.
Silent Priest.
Silent ghosts.
Silent gods.
A soundless echo of the moon’s own tranquility and restraint.
It carried on and on, the weight of it growing, the tension of it becoming a song.
Silence twisted through the Priest and twined itself around his bones until he, too, sang.
His own heart pulsed to the beat of that silence, his blood becoming a tide no longer pulled by the unconscious mechanisms of his body and will, but by Silith herself.
The thought unnerved him, the silence unsettled him, and at last the Priest shivered, a chill running through him at some exact and unheard pitch.
Then, into that silence came Gileta’s voice.
Low and soft, it took the shape of a wordless, undulating lament.
A chant of sorrow, a hymn of grief, a lamentation for all that the daughters of the Beloved Three had once held and lost. A funeral dirge for what was and what might have been.
Slowly and singly, Gileta’s attendants joined her, one voice added at a time.
The sound of their mourning grew richer and fuller until at last, piercing the upper reaches of the cavernous dark, a high, keening melody soared above them all, sung in crystalline tones.
Ariana. Not once had she sung to her goddesses in their profaned sanctuary before.
The Priest thought he could not bear a moment more of it.
A dozen times he’d heard Gileta and her followers at their worship, and experience never inured him to the sound.
It bit at his insides, gnawing like a physical pain.
When, inevitably, the hundredfold voices of his ghosts struck up from the cavern’s farthest depths, swelling from the lightless shadows and lending untold strength to the little choir on the rise, the Priest let out a ragged, involuntary sigh.
As he did, he realized with a sharp jolt that he, too, had been part of that song—the aftershocks of half-conscious humming still vibrated in his throat.
With a final searing note, Silith’s daughters and Honoria’s queen fell silent once more. Or nearly silent—a whisper of silk moved toward the Priest, and he felt the presence of Gileta before him.
“Ariana,” the Imperatrice called over to the hearth goddess’s altar.
“That was well done. Don’t think it erases the warning you sent me, but it was well done, nevertheless.
As for you, Priest, you perplex me.” There was confusion, frustration, leftover sorrow behind her words.
“You hear them, don’t you? The songs that are still sung in this sanctuary? ”
They both knew that Gileta did not refer to the voices of her own women.
“Yes. Why do you think that might be?” the Priest asked without interest, as if he did not much care to know the answer. In truth, he wanted very badly to know. It troubled him greatly, that he could hear the sanctuary’s ghosts, when no records of any Priest who’d come before made mention of them.
Gileta considered in silence for a moment.
“Perhaps the incaendium,” she said at last. “You nearly lost your life to witchsmoke, after all. Do you know where our incaendium comes from?”
“I know its uses.” The Priest waved a dismissive hand. “Treated one way, it brings added fertility to the earth. Treated another, it makes witchsmoke.”
“It is the remains of our dead,” Gileta told him, and the Priest fell still.
Across the rise, Ariana drew in a sharp breath, as Gileta bared a secret that perhaps no Inver had been party to before.
“In life, the goddess-marked belong to themselves. In death, they belong to the Beloved Three. Their spirits are brought to a realm of perfect light, and what is left behind is nothing—an object, and a last tithe to the goddesses. It is rendered down into incaendium and treated as the Matrias see fit. Dolenza uses her tithe of flesh to enhance the Solis Plains, as have all the daughters of Raea before her. Lyria’s children burn theirs, sending it up to the stars as sparks.
Silith’s followers alone use their incaendium in medicines or in trade, whichever will best forward the will and interests of the Wise Moon.
So I wonder, Silas, could you hear our fallen sisters before you were touched by a weapon made from the remains of our sacred dead? ”
The Priest did not answer, knowing any reply would stick in his throat like splintered bone.
He had not heard the cavern’s ghosts before he was maimed.
And the thought flashed across his mind for an instant that perhaps the pain and difficulty he suffered had been worth it, to hear Silith’s lost daughters sing.
He dismissed it at once with a stab of anger.
If he were more Inver, he would never consider a wrong done to him as worthwhile in the end.
If he were more Inver, Silith’s forgotten harmonies would not move him so.
Or perhaps this was the most truly Inver aspect of his nature—that the hymns of the moon goddess’s daughters filled him with a fierce longing, strong as hatred, bitter as love.
He wanted to govern or be governed by them. He wanted to kneel or force them to their knees. He wanted. He wanted. And that was all.
“A fool and his ghosts,” a rough, dismissive voice said from the foot of the altar rise.
“I, too, hear the women his forefathers slaughtered. It doesn’t take a dose of moldering bones, only an inclination toward the moon’s ways.
The Invers’ Priest is less faithful than they believe, or perhaps than he himself knows. ”
The Priest recognized that voice at once.
It had burned its way into his consciousness as he stood by Orden’s side in the audience hall and sat by him at the feast table, listening to Afon of Caervallion’s gravelly laughter, his entirely confident way of speaking.
Afon possessed everything that recommended one Inver to another, everything the Priest felt himself lacking.
The Caervallin king’s heavy, certain steps drew closer, and tension sang between him and Gileta.
Brave of her, the Priest realized, to come to a place where she was so at odds with her peers, and where she must deliver censure on behalf of her goddess.
“Hello, Priest,” Afon said mockingly, and somehow his use of the title was worse than the ungranted intimacy of Gileta speaking the Priest’s old name. “I’ve heard a great deal about you.”
“Have you?” the Priest answered. “Until today, I never thought of you at all.”
“Such a sharp Inver bark he has,” Afon said, sounding darkly amused, though he spoke to Gileta now. “They all consider themselves so fearsome, with their petty jibes and barbs and infighting. Silith will delight in eating them up, when I finally serve them to her on a platter.”
Irritated, and unwilling to let it show, the Priest fell back on old wiles, old stratagems.
“Our sanctuary is at your disposal,” he said to Afon with flawless courtesy. “Will you make a blood offering to our god of war? Silith may be satisfied with a prisoner slain unjustly in the audience hall, but Tyrus is more particular.”
“Yes,” Afon answered without hesitation. “I believe I will.”
“Priest,” Ariana said from the hearth goddess’s altar, the word a warning.
Gileta let out a faint, disapproving sound, and beyond the stone rise, a full-throated murmuring began. The Priest’s ghosts were restless. He could feel their attention bearing down on himself and the Caervallin king as they moved to Tyrus’s altar.
“Your knife, or mine?” Afon asked, as he bared his left arm and held it out to the Priest. The Priest could feel Afon’s skin and sinew, weathered and ropy as it brushed against the backs of his hands.
“It doesn’t matter,” the Priest answered with an easy shrug.
“But your understanding of our mode of worship is outdated. An Inver petitioner no longer spills their own blood for Tyrus, as your people do for Silith. Our gods have no need for self-sacrifice, and so I have reformed our offerings. A gift to the divine must be taken from someone else. Given your actions upstairs, one of our prisoners of war would be fitting, should you like me to have one brought out for you. It would lessen the offensiveness of your earlier sacrifice. Or you can proceed in the ordinary manner—Tyrus, of course, is less pleased by an incomplete sacrifice, but it’s better than nothing. ”
As he spoke, the Priest rolled up both sleeves of his plain linen shirt, fingertips alive to the network of raised scars that crosshatched his forearms like a form of writing—an Inver sort of scripture, cut into his very skin.
Afon let out a small, disdainful sound, and it came as no surprise to the Priest. What he’d made of his role required too much abasement, too much indignity.
Only a father was meant to mark his son in this way, whereas the Priest was marked by every Inver who wished to spill blood for the gods.