3
“CLOSER AND closer,” said the priestess, whose voice seemed muffled and distant. “Closer and closer to Death the Transition, to the very edge of the mystery—feel your limbs growing cold. Feel your thoughts slowing. Feel the beating of your heart growing sluggish. The warm humors are banking down; the fire of life is fading.”
She had given them some sort of green wine, a poison that Jean could not identify; each of the dozen initiates of the Second Inner Mystery in his morning class lay prostrated and twitching feebly, their silver masks staring fixedly upward, as they could no longer move their necks.
Their instructor hadn’t quite managed to explain what the wine would do before she ordered them to drink it; Jean suspected that the willingness of the initiates around him to dance gaily on the edge of Death the Transition was still more theory than actuality.
Of course, look who knows so much better, he thought to himself as he marveled at how tingly and distant his legs had become. Crooked Warden…this priesthood is crazy. Give me strength to live, and I’ll return to the Gentlemen Bastards…where life makes sense.
Yes, where he lived in a secret Elderglass cellar beneath a rotting temple, pretending to be a priest of Perelandro while taking weapons lessons from the duke’s personal swordmaster. Perhaps a bit drunk on whatever drug was having its way with him, Jean giggled.
The sound seemed to echo and reverberate in the low-ceilinged study hall; the priestess turned slowly. The Sorrowful Visage concealed her true expression, but in his drug-hazed mind Jean was certain he could feel her burning stare.
“An insight, Tavrin?”
He couldn’t help himself; he giggled again. The poison seemed to be making merry with the tight-lipped inhibition he’d feigned since arriving at the temple. “I saw my parents burn to death,” he said. “I saw my cats burn to death. Do you know the noise a cat makes, when it burns?” Another damn giggle; he almost choked on his own spit in surprise. “I watched and could do nothing. Do you know where to stab a man, to bring death now, or death in a minute, or death in an hour? I do.” He would have been rolling with laughter, if he could move his limbs; as it was, he shuddered and twitched his fingers. “Lingering death? Two or three days of pain? I can give that, too. Ha! Death the Transition? We’re old friends!”
The priestess’ mask fixed directly on him; she stared for several drug-lengthened moments while Jean thought, Oh, gods damn this stuff, I’ve really done it now.
“Tavrin,” said the priestess, “when the effects of the emerald wine have passed, remain here. The High Proctor will speak to you then.”
Jean lay in mingled bemusement and dread for the rest of the morning. The giggles still came, interspersed with bouts of drunken self-loathing. So much for a full season of work. Some false-facer I turned out to be.
That night, much to his surprise, he was confirmed as having passed into the Third Inner Mystery of Aza Guilla.
“I knew we could expect exceptional things from you, Callas,” said the High Proctor, a bent old man whose voice wheezed behind his Sorrowful Visage. “First the extraordinary diligence you showed in your mundane studies, and your rapid mastery of the exterior rituals. Now, a vision…a vision during your very first Anguishment. You are marked, marked! An orphan who witnessed the death of his mother and father…You were fated to serve the Lady Most Kind.”
“What, ah, are the additional duties of an initiate of the Third Inner Mystery?”
“Why, Anguishment,” said the High Proctor. “A month of Anguishment; a month of exploration into Death the Transition. You shall take the emerald wine once again, and then you shall experience other means of closeness to the precipitous moment of the Lady’s embrace. You shall hang from silk until nearly dead; you shall be exsanguinated. You shall take up serpents, and you shall swim in the night ocean, wherein dwell many servants of the Lady. I envy you, little brother. I envy you, newly born to our mysteries.”
Jean fled Revelation House that very night.
He packed his meager bag of belongings and raided the kitchens for food. Before entering Revelation House, he’d buried a small bag of coins beneath a certain landmark about a mile inland from the cliffs, near the village of Sorrow’s Ease, which supplied the cliffside temple’s material wants. That money should suffice to get him back to Camorr.
He scrawled a note and left it on his sleeping pallet, in the fresh new solitary chamber accorded to him for his advanced rank:
GRATEFUL FOR OPPORTUNITIES, BUT COULD NOT WAIT. HAVE ELECTED TO SEEK THE STATE OF DEATH EVERLASTING; CANNOT BE CONTENT WITH THE LESSER MYSTERIES OF DEATH THE TRANSITION. THE LADY CALLS.
—TAVRIN CALLAS
He climbed the stone stairs for the last time, as the waves crashed in the darkness below; the soft red glow of alchemical storm-lamps guided him to the top of Revelation House, and thence to the top of the cliffs, where he vanished unseen into the night.
4
“DAMN,” SAID Galdo, when Jean had finished his tale. “I’m glad I got sent to the Order of Sendovani.”
The night of Jean’s return, after Father Chains had grilled Jean in depth on his experiences at Revelation House, he’d let the four boys head up to the roof with clay mugs of warm Camorri ale. They sat out beneath the stars and the scattered silver clouds, sipping their ale with much-exaggerated casualness. They savored the illusion that they were men, gathered of their own accord, with the hours of the night theirs to spend entirely at their own whim.
“No shit,” said Calo. “In the Order of Gandolo, we got pastries and ale every second week, and a copper piece every Idler’s Day, to spend as we wished. You know, for the Lord of Coin and Commerce.”
“I’m particularly fond of our priesthood of the Benefactor,” said Locke,
“since our main duties seem to be sitting around and pretending that the Benefactor doesn’t exist. When we’re not stealing things, that is.”
“Too right,” said Galdo. “Death-priesting is for morons.”
“But still,” asked Calo, “didn’t you wonder if they might not be right?” He sipped his ale before continuing. “That you might really be fated to serve the Lady Most Kind?”
“I had a long time to think about it, on the way back to Camorr,” said Jean. “And I think they were right. Just maybe not the way they thought.”
“How do you mean?” The Sanzas spoke in unison, as they often did when true curiosity seized the pair of them at once.
In reply, Jean reached behind his back, and from out of his tunic he drew a single hatchet, a gift from Don Maranzalla. It was plain and unadorned, but well maintained and ideally balanced for someone who’d not yet come into his full growth. Jean set it on the stones of the temple roof and smiled.
“Oh,” said Calo and Galdo.
Part IV
Desperate Improvisation
“I pitch like my hair’s on fire.”
Mitch Williams