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.
IV . DESPERATE IMPROVISATION
“I pitch like my hair’s on fire.”
Mitch Williams
CHAPTER TWELVE. THE FAT PRIEST FROM TAL VERRAR
1
WHEN LOCKE AWOKE, he was lying on his back and looking up at a fading, grime-covered mural painted on a plaster ceiling. The mural depicted carefree men and women in the robes of the Therin Throne era, gathered around a cask of wine, with cups in their hands and smiles on their rosy faces. Locke groaned and closed his eyes again.
“And here he is,” said an unfamiliar voice, “just as I said. It was the poultice that answered for him; most uncommonly good physik for the enervation of the bodily channels.”
“Who the hell might you be?” Locke found himself in a profoundly undiplomatic temper. “And where am I?”
“You’re safe, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say comfortable.” Jean Tannen rested a hand on Locke’s left shoulder and smiled down at him. Usually rather fastidious, he was now several days unshaven, and his face was streaked with dirt. “And some former patients of the renowned Master Ibelius might also take issue with my pronouncement of safety.”
Jean made a quick pair of hand gestures to Locke: We’re safe; speak freely.
“Tut, Jean, your little cuts are fine repayment for the work of the past few days.” The unfamiliar voice, it seemed, came from a wrinkled, birdlike man with skin like a weathered brown tabletop. His nervous dark eyes peeped out from behind thick optics, thicker than any Locke had ever seen. He wore a disreputable cotton tunic, spattered with what might have been dried sauces or dried blood, under a mustard-yellow waistjacket in a style twenty years out of date. His spring-coils of curly gray hair seemed to sprout straight out from the back of his head, where they were pulled into a queue. “I have navigated your friend back to the shores of consciousness.”
“Oh, for Perelandro’s sake, Ibelius, he didn’t have a crossbow quarrel in his brain. He just needed to rest.”
“His warm humors were at a singularly low ebb; the channels of his frame were entirely evacuated of vim. He was pale, unresponsive, bruised, desiccated, and malnourished.”
“Ibelius?” Locke attempted to sit up and was partially successful; Jean caught him by the back of his shoulders and helped him the rest of the way. The room spun. “Ibelius the dog-leech from the Redwater district?”
Dog-leeches were the medical counterparts of the black alchemists; without credentials or a place in the formal guilds of physikers, they treated the injuries and maladies of the Right People of Camorr. A genuine physiker might look askance at treating a patient for an axe wound at half past the second hour of the morning, and summon the city watch. A dog-leech would ask no questions, provided his fee was paid in advance.