“Still no word from my brother,” Vicarian said, though likely Kurrik was aware of the fact. Had some report come from the army, Vicarian would have blurted it out as soon as he’d met his friend and fellow priest that morning, not waited until now.
“Your former brother,” Kurrik said, gently. “The Lord Marshal is not of our blood now.”
Vicarian nodded, but only halfheartedly. He heard the truth in Kurrik’s voice, the gift of the goddess, the certainty she brought. If he felt a bit sad to think of Jorey as no longer being his baby brother, it was a matter of language more than truth. “But you know what I mean,” he said, gesturing with a sleeve-swallowed hand.
“Thanks be to her,” Kurrik said. “All hidden things come to light through her.”
They stepped into the wide, empty plaza that had once been the Grand Market, past the gouged-out socket that had once been a cafe where Cithrin bel Sarcour had held her unclean court. It was strange to think that she’d been here. She’d walked the same streets, eaten the cousins of these almonds, looked out over the endlessly changing bay. It rankled to have come so near to capturing her.
Nor was that precisely the only thing that rankled. From the burned stones of the square for almost two more close streets, he kept his peace. “You know, the use of the word brother really has changed since the goddess led you to the desert. You’re right, of course, that the blessed of the goddess are my brothers since I took the vows, but Jorey is still the child of my same parents.”
“That you misuse your voices is part of the impurity of the world,” Kurrik said gently.
Vicarian grunted. Kurrik was correct, of course. If it hadn’t been for the rhetorical reflexes built by his years of disputation, Vicarian would probably have let the matter drop. Probably.
“Whole languages have risen and fallen into disuse since you’ve left,” he said. “And the goddess’s word is true in all those languages.”
“Her truth is eternal,” Kurrik said. He’d begun walking a bit faster, as if in annoyance. Vicarian stretched his stride wider to keep up.
“That’s my point, isn’t it?” he said, forcing his voice to be light and teasing. If the slightest buzz of annoyance slipped through, it wasn’t so much that it demanded acknowledgement. “Her truth is eternal, but the world isn’t. Kingdoms, cities, languages. They’re all in flux. The goddess is like a lighthouse, unchanging and unmoving, but the world is like a ship on the sea, and the angle that it sees her from changes. Every age needs to find new words to express the same truth.”
Kurrik stopped at a corner where three streets came together. A high warehouse wall rose above them both, its shadow darkening Kurrik’s face and the cobblestones around them. Across the street, one of the remaining puppeteers was yanking a gold-scaled doll through violent paroxysms that Vicarian recognized as part of a PennyPenny story. The thin crowd standing before him all seemed to be covertly watching Kurrik and himself. And the expression on Kurrik’s face sobered him. Annoyance. Vicarian told himself it was only annoyance.
“Her truth,” Kurrik said slowly, “is eternal.”
“Of course it is,” Vicarian said. “I would never dispute that. What I’m saying is that when you have something outside of change like the goddess and something that suffers constant change like the world, the relationship between them must change too. There was a court philosopher in second-age Borja—a Haaverkin named Pelemo Addadus—who wrote a book on the question. I studied it when I first joined the priesthood.”
“You did not join the priesthood until you were touched by her,” Kurrik said. There was more than annoyance in his voice. There was anger, and Vicarian, despite himself, felt its echo in his own chest. It felt like taking a breath and then taking another without exhaling in between. It enlarged him. Through his body, the spiders wriggling in his blood, whipping him on.
“Not the true priesthood, no,” he said, struggling to keep himself from shouting. “But I studied the thoughts and forms of the world. The changing world. You and your brothers from the temple did a tremendous good for us all. You kept the truth of the goddess safe for thousands of years when the dragons would have silenced it. There is nothing that can diminish how important that was.”
The rage in Kurrik’s eyes dimmed, his jaw softened. Across the corner, the puppeteer coughed and spun PennyPenny into a frenzied dance, trying to pull her audience back to herself. Vicarian rested his hand on his friend and—in the religious sense of the word—brother’s arm. The spiders grew calmer, if not quiet. “Those of us who remained in the world while the goddess was gone went through many changes,” Vicarian said. “We will bring her word to everyone. You can hear that in my voice, yes? We will spread her truth to the world and watch the world remade. And we will find the right way to do it.”
“We will,” Kurrik said. “Yes, this is true, we will.”
His agreement felt like a salve on Vicarian’s soul. But it will mean changing the words we use to reflect the changes in the world floated at the back of his throat. He was right. He knew it. And Kurrik would too if he would only listen to Vicarian’s voice long enough to hear it. The presence of their guard—Antean soldiers with swords and battle-scarred leather armor—seemed to unease the audience. The puppeteer shifted PennyPenny to face Vicarian and dropped whatever threads of story she had been weaving. The Jasuru puppet lifted a string-hoisted hand.
“You there! You! I am PennyPenny. Come and hear my story, yes? Come and hear.”
“We should keep walking,” Vicarian said. “Once that sort starts, they won’t stop until you’ve paid them.”
“Of course,” Kurrik said, turning. PennyPenny’s cries grew quieter as they strode away to the north and the palace. Overhead, seagulls screeched and whirled beneath high, thin clouds. Two dogs, one brown and the other one grey, darted out of an alley, then ran ahead of them and turned back to bark. Vicarian turned their conversation to other matters: the disturbing news from Elassae, how the presence of the goddess would solidify the traditionally fractious Free Cities, the plans for taking the word of the goddess west to Cabral and Herez and Princip C’Annaldé.
By the time they reached the wide, paved square with the governor’s palace to the left and the goddess’s newest cathedral—the blood-red banner with the pale center and the eightfold sigil of the goddess rippling in the afternoon breeze—to the right, questions of the relationship between flux and eternity had been nearly forgotten. Nearly, but not quite.
The end of their walk through the city marked the beginning of their evening duties. Kurrik took a speaker’s trumpet and the guard, and returned to the streets, his voice carrying over the street performers and the taproom conversations, penetrating into every building, pressing through every window. The enemies of the goddess have already lost. Everything they love is lost. Those who come to the goddess will be lifted up, their fortunes restored and their grief assuaged. In content it wasn’t so very different, Vicarian knew, from the religious claims of any cult. It was only that theirs had the power of truth behind it.
For himself, he remained at the cathedral, overseeing the workmen as they chiseled out the icons of the old local gods and hammered the old statues to gravel. The local dye yard, the only one old enough to have been within the city wall when everything outside it burned, delivered banners to hang over the emptied niches. And as he worked, he took little audiences. A Dartinae boy brought his girl love to the temple putatively to be blessed, though in fact he wanted Vicarian to find if she’d been sexually faithful to him. A merchant captain hauled his crew to the steps of the cathedral to ask which of them had been stealing from the company box. It was the work of a magistrate, but Vicarian did it without charging the tax and fees. All he required was that they all stay for the evening sermon. Their ears and attention to his voice was enough.