The God-Touched Man Page 14

  “Yes. I suppose it’s true all the sancta are built along the same model.” Ayane crossed the room to where one of the paths between the pews began and approached the altar that lay at its center.

  “Are you certain you should do that?”

  “The altar’s not sacred except during rituals. They consecrate and deconsecrate it every time. Besides, I’m the prophet. I doubt they’ll criticize me for wanting to be close to the God.”

  Piercy ground his teeth and followed her. Ayane was a skilled fighter and extremely clever, but she also had no common sense and it was going to be the death of him someday. Possibly today. He ran his finger along the back of one of the pews; it felt warm and slick, like soap. He sniffed his fingers, but smelled only the faintly sour odor that reminded him he hadn’t been able to bathe in nearly a week. That was the first thing he intended to do after returning. Other than helping Hodestis return to his lady. He was increasingly convinced the little man didn’t understand how dangerous it could be to return overland to wherever it was he came from. Even in the present, there were bandits on the edges of Dalanine.

  He came to stand next to Ayane, who despite her words hadn’t touched the shining black marble surface of the altar’s circular top. It was about ten feet across and was supported by a base of polished ebony Piercy guessed was pentagonal, though he didn’t want to walk around it, crouched over, to verify his guess.

  High above, embedded in the ceiling, was a clear stone that gave off a bright white light, brighter than sand reflecting the noon sun on Midsummer day. It played across the marble altar, turning it mirrored, and Piercy looked at his reflection and hoped he didn’t actually look as unkempt as the mirror suggested.

  “You’re the prophet,” a woman said, and they turned around to see a woman with very white hair and a deeply lined face approaching, her hood thrown well back on her shoulders. “Praise Cath. We have been waiting for his doom for nearly four years. We will perform the ritual immediately; who knows how much time we have?”

  Ayane gave Piercy a wide-eyed look that clearly said I’m going to find a way to tell them. Piercy nodded. They could still make it seem the necklace was destroyed, because the monastery would be razed no matter what Ayane “revealed.” “I am Princess Ayane’s bodyguard,” he said to the prime, “and I am pleased to bring her to this monastery. Please excuse me now, as I should not intrude on the ritual.”

  “Not at all,” the prime said. “You asked to take part in our worship, yes? Any follower of Cath is welcome.”

  “But…I’m not that devoted a worshiper. I really don’t think—”

  “Cath decides who’s worthy, young man. And I think you deserve a reward for having escorted the prophet here. Really, I insist.”

  Now Ayane’s wide golden eyes said Think of something, idiot. “I thank you, my lady, for your invitation. I’m really very honored. I will make sure our companion needs nothing—he took sick along the road, and we are entirely grateful for your hospitality—and then I will return to participate in this most sacred ritual.”

  “I’ll have Harn look in on him. You don’t have to worry.”

  “Oh, my lady, thank you so much, but he’s my uncle and it’s my duty to watch over him as I have over the prophet. It shouldn’t take long, and you’ll have to gather all the ascetics, yes?” Men and women in hooded robes were filing into the room from several directions and taking their seats on the pews.

  The prime glanced at Ayane, then said, “You’re right, it’s a duty you owe your uncle. I’ll make sure to save you a spot near the front.”

  “Now that truly is too much,” Piercy said with a broad smile. “I’d feel so conspicuous. I will be more comfortable sitting at the back, and we wouldn’t want anyone distracted from the ritual by my obviously inappropriate attire, would we?”

  “I don’t think you have to worry about that, but I’m impressed with your concern for the purity of the ritual,” the prime said. “You are exactly the sort of humble person Cath would entrust his prophet to. Hurry, because the ritual will begin soon. O prophet, will you come with me?”

  Ayane nodded at Piercy and followed the prime along one of the gritty pathways. Piercy tried not to bolt back down the one they’d come in by. He had to press himself almost flat against the side of the passage to avoid the ascetics going toward the sanctum, none of whom were inclined to give way to someone not of their faith.

  Once in the main hallway, he had a moment’s confusion over where he was, surrounded by the blank walls and the identical doors, and had to backtrack all the way to the entrance and count the doors going forward again until he found Hodestis’s room. The little man still slept, though he already looked better, less green around the lips. Piercy let him sleep and closed the door behind himself. Now he knew his location more certainly, it was time to explore.

  He was now the only person in the outer passage, and the silence echoed off the stones. He found himself holding his breath because the sound of the air rushing in and out of his lungs was so loud he was sure someone would hear him and drag him off to witness the ritual. Whatever it was. He had no doubt Ayane could keep the ascetics occupied for more than the time he needed to find the necklace, even if some other unexpected thing happened. Unless they summon the God. They can’t do that, can they? It certainly won’t be human sacrifice; Cath dislikes it when people are sent to a premature death. He dismissed those thoughts impatiently. He was wasting the time Ayane was procuring for him.

  He’d already observed that the doors on the—he’d have to call it the outside of the pentagon, that made sense—that those doors were identical, age-blackened oak with a deep grain, and evenly spaced. But there were other doors opposite them, at irregular intervals, most of them wider and all of them taller, as if the roof were higher at that side of the corridor.

  Piercy walked a short distance down the hallway and tried the first door he came to. It opened easily, without even the creak he’d expected from this unsettling pile of black, mildewed stone. The room beyond was completely dark. Piercy went back for one of the little torches—it was so small it scorched the hairs on his hand from proximity to the flame—and peered inside. Lots of benches, lots of tables, and a couple of doors at the far end. Refectory. He shut the door and moved on.

  More of those wide doors housed other necessities: bathing chambers, a couple of libraries filled with fat tomes and battered scroll cases, storage rooms packed with crates and bags of foodstuffs. He passed another of the little holes that opened on one of the pentagon’s inner spokes ultimately leading to the sanctum. The refectory had had doors on the far side that probably led to the kitchen, which had to be accessed from the sanctum side; suppose what he wanted lay farther inward?

  He cursed silently and kept going, more speedily. He wouldn’t worry about that until he’d eliminated all the possibilities of these corridors.

  Another hole, then some kind of giant closet filled with robes and hooded cowls. Perhaps he should borrow a set—that would make his roaming through the monastery easier. On the other hand, the God might think it was blasphemy, and the key point of this plan was not to anger Cath. He moved on. Another large room, this one storing gardening tools; it had another door on the opposite side. How did they get into the Garden spaces, anyway?

  On a whim, he closed the door behind him and crossed to the other door. No noise came through it, probably because it was centuries-old oak, and it was locked. Odd that none of the others had been. He took out his lock picks and went to work, trying not to become frustrated at the delay. With his luck this would turn out to be another storage room.

  The lock ground open, too slowly. Piercy stuffed the picks into his waistband just in case he needed them again quickly, then pulled the door open a crack. Still no noise, no chanting or singing or whatever it was Cath’s ascetics did in a ritual. He again had a momentary qualm about Ayane usurping the role of the actual prophet, but if the monastery was going to be overrun in less than twenty-four hours,
the actual prophet, whoever she or he turned out to be, was going to be far too late to make any difference. Maybe we are the fulfillment of prophecy, he thought, then rolled his eyes at himself and opened the door wide enough for him to slip through.

  This room was smaller than the others and oddly shaped. Hollowed-out niches just larger than man-sized gave the walls a bumpy appearance; they were perfectly smooth and made a strange contrast to the unfinished surfaces surrounding them. Disks of black marble were set into the floor beneath each one, like bases for statues that ought to go in the niches. Unlike everything else in this place, the spaces between them were asymmetrical, and there were eight of them. The only door was the one he’d come in by.

  Piercy made a slow circuit of the room, looking for differences between the niches, but found nothing. He pursed his lips in thought. No other exits, no reason I can see for their existence. Something is missing. It looked so much like a Midwinter crèche that he absently began fitting figures to the spaces: the Lady, the Lord, the Fool…well, he was a fool about many things, but he didn’t think he was a fool about this. He stepped onto the marble circle where the Fool should stand—

  —and found himself in a hot, barren desert, lit by the waning moon above. Piercy immediately turned around. Nothing. No black stone niche, no marble disk beneath his feet. Perspiration broke out on his forehead and under his arms, only some of it from the heat. Where was this desolation?

  Chapter Thirteen

  He took a step forward and looked around again. No sign of the room he’d come from. In the distance, he saw a black hill or wall—no, it looked too regular not to be man-made. He headed in that direction, his boots slipping on the sandy soil. The air was so still he almost thought he’d gone deaf, except he could hear his feet scraping along and his breath coming too rapidly. Just the heat. He’d find a way back.

  Ahead, not as far in the distance as the wall, was a figure lying on a large rock that was about four feet tall and twice as large around. “Hello!” he shouted, and ran toward the person. “Where is this place?”

  The person didn’t answer. Piercy’s steps slowed as he drew nearer and saw the man, or woman, wasn’t moving. “Are you well?” he said, kneeling beside the rock that gleamed, here and there, with quartz crystals. The naked man lay on his back, stretched spread-eagled across the rock, his unblinking eyes staring at the sky. Piercy took in the whip marks on his torso and legs, the way he was chained to four posts hammered into the ground, recoiled, and dropped the torch in his shock.

  In another second he recovered and leaned in close to look at the man’s face. It wasn’t human, but an unnervingly realistic model; in the sunlight, he would never have been mistaken for a real person. Piercy unclenched his fists and picked up the torch, which had gone out, then dropped it and looked around again. Now that he knew what to look for, he could see other human shapes chained to rocks, tied to the dead boles of branchless trees, even a few smaller things that turned out to be the heads of mannequins buried in the ground. His breath was rapid, panicky, and he calmed himself and ran toward the wall, keeping his gaze firmly fixed on it.

  It only took a few minutes for him to reach it. To his astonishment, it was the wall of the monastery. But this wasn’t the land surrounding it; how could it have changed so much? His mind went into a panicked spiral—transported to another place—sent forward, or backward, in time—driven mad by the horrors—and he began running again, this time along the wall, looking for an entrance, or an exit. If he were trapped here, if Hodestis returned to the present without him….

  He passed a small square opening and ducked, trying to fit himself into it. It led to a cooler space, one with a draft that carried the scent of burning incense, and he stopped struggling and drew in great lungsful of the sweet air. Incense, and a warmer light—wait. He’d seen what lay beyond the opening before. The corridor. Sanity reasserted itself. He wasn’t lost in time or space; this was one of the Gardens between the spokes. It had to be the Darklands. The marble disk and the niche had sent him here.

  He took a step back from the wall and closed his eyes. Fortunate Ayane had not been there, because she would never have let him forget his momentary lapse. He crouched and listened at the opening, and now he could hear a distant tide, the murmuring of a hundred voices joined in a chant. Ayane still had them under control. He just had to find a way out of this place.

  He continued along the wall until he reached the place where it joined with the center of the pentagon. Now he could see the great central spire and a few others piercing the sky, and the voices were louder and more distinct, just at the volume where he thought he’d be able to make out words if he concentrated. A short distance away, the wall of the hub buckled, leaving a dent in the flat, roughly finished surface. No, it was a niche. Piercy ran to it, shoved his sweat-dampened hair back from his face, and almost threw himself onto the marble disk without caring that it might not take him back where he’d started.

  Blackness greeted him, and he quickly stepped off the disk and crouched with his hands on his knees, blessing the damp coolness of the room. When his breathing was once again normal, he felt around until he found the wall, then carefully followed it until he found a place where the wall curved away and became smooth. He crouched again and patted the floor, feeling the ridge where the smooth marble met the worn black granite of the floor. He was back in the crèche room. With no light. And time was running out.

  In his head, Ayane said Take a chance, choose one and see what happens. Ayane was too reckless. He fumbled around until he found the door and ran back through the storeroom, almost tripping over a rake someone had improperly put away, and snatched another torch, then ran back to the crèche room.

  He looked around more carefully this time. Eight niches, eight figures in a Midwinter crèche. Belia and Cath, Lord and Lady, Sage and Fool, Birth and Death. Five of the niches would go to the Gardens, and the other three—well, he couldn’t guess at everything the ascetics would want kept inaccessible, but he would wager his walking stick that one of them went to the room in the central spire. It was too obvious. He stepped onto the disk where the God Cath would stand.

  In a blink he was elsewhere. His little torch illuminated the space poorly, but Piercy could see a domed ceiling supported by red arches and painted black between those beams. It looked like the world’s most sinister circus tent. Below the place where the arches met—Piercy would, again, be willing to bet his stick it was the exact center of the room—stood a table whose circular top was inlaid with multicolored woods in a pattern that made Piercy’s eyes water. Five chairs with no backs stood at equal intervals around the table. From all around came the delicate and unexpected scent of freesia, which mixed with the scent of burning wood unpleasantly.

  Piercy pinched his nose to head off a sneeze and went to look out one of the windows: there were five, of course. The moorland lay far beneath him, purplish-blue under the moon’s cold light. Across the room he could barely make out a niche set into the walls of the chamber; there were bare ebony planks where he stood, no disk. There was probably a system to it, but he had neither time for nor interest in finding out.

  A short distance from the window stood a square column on which lay a simple key of iron inlaid with some silvery metal Piercy couldn’t identify. Around the room’s darkened circumference stood columns of varying sizes, all with objects lying on their black marble surfaces.

  Piercy circled the room, looking at the treasures of the Yanceter Monastery. There was a delicate crown set with pale stones that might have been diamonds or quartz crystals; it was impossible to tell in the torchlight. A folded piece of red linsey-woolsey, more brightly dyed than anything he’d ever seen. A man’s ring set with what was certainly a diamond and rubies, far too gaudy for Piercy’s taste, not to mention it would attract entirely too much attention of the wrong sort.

  Then he stopped, his errand momentarily forgotten, and stared at what the largest column held. It was a sword, a slim beau
ty lying propped against its ebony sheath, and it was so elegant Piercy found he was holding his breath in astonishment. It bore no adornment, no jewels or decorative metalcraft such as a fanciful animal’s head on the pommel, just a simple guard made of a dark metal he didn’t recognize and a grip wrapped in black leather that had seen some use.

  Piercy reached out to take it, and his fingers went numb before they could come within an inch of the blade. The air hummed as if he’d plucked an invisible string, rapidly increasing in volume. He snatched his hand back and the humming tapered off, and sensation returned to his fingers. Well, he wasn’t surprised the treasures were guarded. Time enough to figure out a way around it when he’d found the necklace.

  A few columns down from the beautiful sword he saw it—a simple chain of shimmering black links that turned silvery-gray in the torchlight. It looked to be about sixteen inches long, which would make it rather short on a man, but it was delicate enough it must have been made for a woman. It certainly did not look like something anyone might value, though it was unusual and Piercy couldn’t tell what metal it was made of.

  Now he had to figure out how to remove it without being electrocuted, or burned, or paralyzed, or whatever it was the magic did. Piercy took out his epiria lens and muttered the command word, passing his hand across the crystal, then looked at the necklace through it—and saw nothing but a chain of black metal. He cast the spell again; still nothing. He circled the column, examining it, then swore and dismissed the spell. Of course the lens would show nothing; epiria revealed organized magic, not divine power.

  He put the quizzing glass away and considered the necklace. It was unlikely no one in the monastery could touch the sacred things, but that could just mean some of the ascetics, probably the prime and whoever else met with her up here, were specially blessed. Or holding a particular object dismissed the forbiddance, like having the right signal to give at a watch post. Or Cath discerned the intent of one’s heart and allowed those who were worthy to touch his treasures, in which case they had a real problem, because all of this was predicated on Cath not being furious with them for daring to steal from his monastery. Piercy cursed inwardly. He’d have to find another way.