Surely she would not be foolish enough to return.
In the meantime, Seivarden would be sick soon, unless I found kef for her. I had no intention of doing that. And there was food here, and heat, and perhaps I could find something, some hint, some clue to what Strigan had been thinking, in the moment she had thought the Radch were coming for her, and fled. Something that would tell me where she’d gone.
4
At night, in Ors, I walked the streets, and looked out over the still, stinking water, dark beyond the few lights of Ors itself, and the blinking of the buoys surrounding the prohibited zones. I slept, also, and sat watch in the lower level of the house, in case anyone should need me, though that was rare in those days. I finished any of the day’s work still uncompleted, and watched over Lieutenant Awn, who lay sleeping.
Mornings I brought water for Lieutenant Awn to bathe in, and dressed her, though the local costume was a good deal less effort than her uniform, and she had stopped wearing any sort of cosmetics two years before, as they were difficult to maintain in the heat.
Then Lieutenant Awn would turn to her icons—four-armed Amaat, an Emanation in each hand, sat on a box downstairs, but the others (Toren, who received devotions from every officer on Justice of Toren, and a few gods particular to Lieutenant Awn’s family) sat near where Lieutenant Awn slept, in the upper part of the house, and it was to them that she made her morning devotions. “The flower of justice is peace,” the daily prayer began, that every Radchaai soldier said on waking, every day of her life in the military. “The flower of propriety is beauty in thought and action.” The rest of my officers, still on Justice of Toren, were on a different schedule. Their mornings rarely coincided with Lieutenant Awn’s, so it was almost always Lieutenant Awn’s voice alone in prayer, and the others, when they spoke so far away, in chorus, without her. “The flower of benefit is Amaat whole and entire. I am the sword of justice…” The prayer is antiphonal, but only four verses long. I can sometimes hear it still when I wake, like a distant voice somewhere behind me.
Every morning, in every official temple throughout Radchaai space, a priest (who doubles as a registrar of births and deaths and contracts of all kinds) casts the day’s omens. Households and individuals sometimes cast their own as well, and there’s no obligation to attend the official casting—but it’s as good an excuse as any to be seen, and speak to friends and neighbors, and hear gossip.
There was, as yet, no official temple in Ors—these are all primarily dedicated to Amaat, any other gods on the premises take lesser places, and the head priest of Ikkt had not seen her way clear to demoting her god in its own temple, or identifying Ikkt with Amaat closely enough to add Radchaai rites to her own. So for the moment Lieutenant Awn’s house served. Each morning the makeshift temple’s flower-bearers removed dead flowers from around the icon of Amaat and replaced them with fresh ones—usually a local species with small, bright-pink, triple-lobed petals that grew in the dirt that collected on the outside corners of buildings, or cracks in slabs, and was the nearest thing to a weed but greatly admired by the children. And lately small cupped blue-and-white lilies had been blooming in the lake, especially near the buoy-barricaded prohibited areas.
Then Lieutenant Awn would lay out the cloth for the omen-casting and the omens themselves, a handful of weighty metal disks. These, and the icons, were Lieutenant Awn’s personal possessions, gifts from her parents when she had taken the aptitudes and received her assignment.
Occasionally only Lieutenant Awn and the day’s attendants came to the morning ritual, but usually others were present. The town’s medic, a few of the Radchaai who had been granted property here, other Orsian children who could not be persuaded to go to school, or care about being on time for it, and liked the glitter and ring of the disks as they fell. Sometimes even the head priest of Ikkt would come—that god, like Amaat, not demanding that its followers refuse to acknowledge other gods.
Once the omens fell, and came to rest on the cloth (or, to any spectators’ dread, rolled off the cloth and away somewhere harder to interpret), the priest officiating was supposed to identify the pattern, match it with its associated passage of scripture, and recite that for those present. It wasn’t something Lieutenant Awn was always able to do. So instead she tossed the omens, I observed their fall, and then I transmitted the appropriate words to her. Justice of Toren was, after all, nearly two thousand years old, and had seen nearly every possible configuration.