The False Martyr (11 page)

#

Later that night, Ipid
laid awake. Eia was pressed against him, slow breaths tickling over
his arms where they held her. He thought about her, about how good
it felt to be there with her, to feel her warmth, the softness of
her skin, to smell her, to have the taste of her lingering on his
tongue. He wondered if he loved her. It seemed strange. He barely
knew her, had hated her only a few days before, now he couldn’t
imagine being without her. And to love again. He had not even
thought that was possible, had not thought he could ever again be
this close to another person. But here he was, with a woman held in
his arms, and no desire to be anywhere else, no desire to escape.
He had not felt that in more than a dozen years, and it felt good.
He knew that he shouldn’t, that he had far too many worries to
allow himself the luxury of happiness, but he could find no way to
dismiss it. It appeared that happiness had finally found him. Found
him and sunk its teeth in at the strangest possible
time.

Chapter 6

The
15
^th
Day of Summer

Teth shot from her bed.
She screamed into the night. Her hands clutched at the darkness to
fend of the talons, teeth, blades, and demonic faces closing from
every side. Gasping, she clasped her throat to quell the blood that
must be pumping from her open veins. She panted. Her heart beat so
hard it hurt in her chest. But there were no monsters, no corpses,
no bloodstained fields. She was alone in the darkness, in the dead
quiet of a sleeping commune. “A dream,” she told herself in
disgust. “A stupid, Order-cursed dream.”

Her head dropped into her
hands. Water sprayed from her hair, fell in streams from her nose
and chin. Her clothes clung to her as if she had taken them
swimming. She laid back in her bed, but it was cold and sodden. Her
clothes and hair clung to her giving her a chill despite the
relentless heat. And the images would not leave. She tried
reassuring herself, tried laughing the dread away. It was futile.
The bodies were still there, bloody and mutilated. The battle still
raged, a maelstrom of brutality on every side. The monster still
clung to the shadows, their teeth glinting in the reflected
moonlight. The fear, the horror, the guilt still consumed
her.

Against the protests of
her legs and back, she rose and stripped off the skiff she had made
from an abandoned flour sack. She replaced the nightgown with the
brown robe and walked from the room. Outside, the hall seemed
bright compared to her room. The moon shown directly through the
window at the far end, casting silver light. Beyond that, the halls
were not lit in any way. As far as she could tell, there was not a
single source of light in the entire compound. When the sun fell,
the Weavers completed their tasks in the dark as if light were in
no way necessary for their function, which, given the strict
regularity of their routine, it probably wasn’t – they could
probably conduct their entire day without a single one of their
senses.

Teth walked to the window,
watched the moon sparkling off the wide expanse of water. The sky
was clear with a perfect blanket of stars peeking through the
darkness. She searched for aberrations in that blanket, for the
creatures circling the sky. She fully expected to see them, could
not accept that she was safe here or anywhere.
Only a matter of time
, she told
herself.
And then. . . .

She shivered despite the
warmth. “Where are you, Dasen?” she asked the darkness. “We need to
run. Something is coming, but I can’t get away without
you.”

#

Teth had barely slept, but
there was no more use in trying. The nightmares seemed there to
meet her whenever she closed her eyes, and no amount of insisting
could get her mind to relinquish them. The sun was just lighting
the eastern horizon, making the wisps of clouds glow pink, but the
Weavers had risen and paraded past her room what seemed like hours
ago. The slap of their sandals on the stones had been as regular as
the beating of their looms, the matched steps of the world’s most
elite regiment on parade.

Emerging from the silent
dormitory through the eastern door, she heard the low hum of two
hundred voices droning in unison where the temple defined the
eastern half of the compound. The grass cracked and snapped under
her bare feet as she closed on the structure. The sun was not even
up and the day was already hot, the air so dry that there was not
even dew.

The temple itself was much
like the other buildings in the compound, a block of spotless white
stone simply but solidly built. It rose thirty feet to a sloped
tile roof without the slightest adornment, nook, statue, window, or
steeple to break its expanse. Three stone steps led Teth to the
single door that was the building’s only entrance. She pressed her
ear against the polished wood, listened to the drone of the
Weavers’ meditation, then nudged the door open, and peeked inside.
The temple was empty.

Trying to follow the
droning, Teth’s eyes rose past the carefully tiled floor to the
rows of long wooden benches, the simple dais, and rested finally on
an enormous stained-glass window. Covering the entire eastern wall,
it had the shape and color of the rising sun and faced directly
east so that the actual sun would shine through it as it rose above
the blank prairie that stretched untamed to the horizon.

Flanking the dais were two
life-size statues of Valatarian. The statues were masterpieces.
Teth knew little of art and even less of sculpture, but these were
breathtaking. They were made of smooth, white stone with grey and
black streaks that seemed to exist only where they were needed to
create depth and shadow. The carving itself was astonishing in its
detail – every wrinkle, every crease of the savior’s face was
present. Valatarian stood in both, but in one, his eyes were
closed, head cast back, face placid, captured in deep meditation,
yet his hands stood out, fingers twisted, as if he were conducting
an orchestra. The other statue showed him staring down at his
subjects with cold, hard eyes. His mouth was pulled into a line,
forehead crumpled, brows furrowed. His arms were stretched toward
the worshippers, hands clenched in fists. Teth found herself
drawing in on the statues. She shivered as her eyes bounced from
one to another. They were terrifying. Councilor Torpy had always
depicted Valatarian as a teacher, kind and patient. The savior
shown here was a hard man. His eyes, even set in stone, were
piercing, fiery things. His body was rigid, unyielding, and the
lines of his face suggested the same. This was not a teacher. This
was a commander, a hard lord who would broke no dispute to his iron
will.

Shivering again, Teth
forced her eyes from the statues toward the walls to either side.
Hanging on them, breaking each windowless expanse were a score of
tapestries, each with a different, but equally complex, pattern.
These were obviously the work of the Weavers. Weaver tapestries
were renowned through the world for their quality, the complexity
of their patterns, and their flawless execution. Teth had seen
firsthand what was required to meet that standard and could barely
look at the things for being taken back to the horrific scene from
the previous day.

And still, the humming
continued, seemed to resonate from the very walls without any sign
of the voices that made it. Creeping between the empty benches, she
finally found what she was looking for. To the side of the dais,
along the north-eastern corner, was a passage that was nearly lost
in the gloom. The sounds of the monks resonated from the hall and
filled the temple through some acoustic marvel that Teth could not
begin to understand. She padded silently to the passage, glanced
around the corner, and found a square room that was filled with
hairless men laying over their folded knees, heads pressed to the
stones. They were stacked in rows that gave each man just enough
room to keep from touching his fellows. The rising sun cast beams
of red and gold across their bald heads through an east-facing
window that Teth could not see.

For a long moment, she
watched the monks. As one, they moved from position to position
ranging from laying prostrate to standing on a single leg with arms
spread. They hummed at different timbres to match each pose,
flowing effortlessly and in perfect harmony from one to the next.
Teth was hypnotized by the motion, by the low melodic hum, until
she found herself fighting the need to join them, to match her body
to theirs. She found her arms moving involuntarily, her legs –
somehow painless – bending, her eyes closing, her larynx
buzzing.

And then, with a great
crash, the Weavers brought their hands together and released a
collective “Oohhh.” Teth jumped at the sudden sound and recovered
herself just in time to dodge the first of the men as they emerged
from the meditation room and walked in perfect unison to the
temple.

Not a one of the men so
much as glanced at her as they walked past, close enough that their
robes brushed her. They stood before the benches until they were
filled. Finally, the man who had spoken to Teth the previous day,
at least she thought it was the same man – it was very hard to tell
among the multitude of hairless men in identical brown robes – took
a place standing on the dais before them. “Sit,” he commanded, and
as one, the Weavers sat.

Only then did Teth see
that one of the seats on the benches was empty. Three rows back and
a few places in, it stood out as stark as the gap in a child’s
mouth when his first tooth falls. Teth wondered for the briefest
second if the space were meant for her. She even considered taking
it.

Then the sun broke the
horizon. Almost magically, the window caught it and refracted the
light into two hundred shafts that fell somehow on each of the men.
The Weavers greeted the sun with a collective gasp as if receiving
tremendous pleasure from a simple ray of light. Matching the gasp,
the men stiffened, their heads fell back, their hands rose and
contorted, and they shook. And on the dais before them, their
leader took on the exact countenance of the statue to his right,
head back, arms stretched, fingers twitching. He screamed, a
horrifying mix of pleasure and pain. The Weavers joined him, voices
rising in such decibels that Teth had to cover her ears as she ran,
trembling from the temple.

She tripped down the
stairs, fell to her knees – hands scraping on the stones of the
path – and retched. Images swam before her as the screams, the
terrible sounds of pain and loss, transported her back to the
battlefield. There was no unity in the sound, no order. It was the
sound of two hundred men releasing all their emotion as one, of
them giving up everything inside them. Only men facing death or
caught in the greatest possible rapture could scream like that.
Teth had only heard such a sound once before, and she wanted
nothing more than to never hear it again.

She stumbled to her feet
and ran. She burst through the door of the dormitory and cried,
“Dasen!” She stopped and looked down the dim hall, panting, in a
near panic. “Dasen! Where are you? I need you! We need to go!” She
ran down the hall, throwing herself against the doors on either
side, forcing them open and searching each for the fraction of a
second needed to confirm it was empty. “Come on,” she urged under
her breath. “Where are you?”

Door after door, she
reached the end of the hall and dashed up the steps, ignoring the
aching of her legs. “Dasen!” she yelled down the hall before
repeating her search. She was panting, soaked with sweat by the
time she reached the end of the second level. She forced herself up
the final flight, rounded the corner, and threw the first door
open. It was sliding shut before she realized that the room had
been different. There had been someone, a body covered by a
blanket, lying on the bed.

“
Dasen!” she called as she
burst through the door. “It’s me. It’s Teth. What happened? Are you
. . . .” She threw back the blanket and staggered in shock. Dasen
was dead. White skin, sunken cheeks, dead blue eyes staring into
space. She panted, cried, nearly lost her balance as her knees
buckled. “Dasen!” she howled. She fell to her knees by the bed,
grasped the corpse, tears welling in her eyes, vision blurring. She
looked down at her husband, lying cold and lifeless.

And saw an old man. She
shook her head. It had been Dasen. She had seen him, had seen his
face, his eyes. But that was not who she held. She held the corpse
of an ancient man. His hairless head and face were a mass of sags
blotched with spots of age. His lips were pursed around a toothless
mouth, his unseeing eyes were clouded with cataracts. How had she
thought this was Dasen?

Teth fell back to sitting
and wept. Her head fell to her hands, supported between her knees.
She trembled. “By the Order, what’s happening to me?” she asked no
one. Hands shaking, eyes streaming, she pulled the blanket back
over the old man and stumbled to her room.
Wrung out,
despondent, and fearing for her own mind, she pushed the door open,
fell onto the bed, and cried herself to sleep with images of
Dasen’s dead face burnt into her mind.

Chapter 7

The
16
^th
Day of Summer

The web stretched forever,
connections infinite, possibilities endless. The Book called it a
tapestry, a great weaving of threads extending to the ends of the
world, to the end of time. Lius could see it all, every thread,
every connection, all the patterns and possibilities. It was beyond
overwhelming. He could not hope to trace them any farther than a
few connections before he became as lost as a toddler in a wood,
unsure even where he had begun and with no idea where to
go.