‘Tell us, Damisa,’ she murmured as the other girl drank. ‘Was someone hurt? Has something gone wrong?’
‘Wrong!’ Damisa closed her eyes for a moment, then straightened and looked around the circle. ‘Haven’t you heard the rumors that have been going around the city?’
‘Of course we have. But where were you?’ asked little Iriel.
‘At an equinox ritual, attending my lady,’ Damisa replied.
‘Those rituals are usually held in the Great Temple of Manoah,’ observed Elis, who was also a native of the city. ‘It wouldn’t take you this long to get back from there!’
‘We weren’t at the Temple of Light,’ Damisa said tightly. ‘We went to another place, a sanctuary built into the cliffs at the eastern edge of the city. The portico looks ordinary enough, but the actual Temple is deep underground. Or at least I suppose so. I was told to wait in the alcove at the head of the passage.’
‘Banur’s bones!’ Elara exclaimed, ‘That’s the Temple of – I don’t know what it is – no one ever goes there!’
‘I don’t know what it is, either,’ Damisa responded with a return of her usual arrogance, ‘but some Power is down there. I could see odd flashes of light all the way up the passageway.’
‘It’s the Sinking…’ said Kalaran in a dull voice. ‘My own island is gone and now this one is going to go, too. My parents migrated to Alkonath, but I was chosen for the Temple. They thought it was an honor for me to come here…’
The acolytes looked at one another, shaken.
‘We don’t know that the ritual failed,’ Elara said bracingly. ‘We must wait – we will be told—’
‘They had to carry the seeress out of that chamber,’ Damisa interrupted. ‘She looked half dead. They’ve taken her to Liala and the healers at the House of Ni-Terat.’
‘I should go there,’ said Elara. ‘Liala may need my assistance.’
‘Why bother?’ glowered Lanath. ‘We’re all going to die.’
‘Be still!’ Elara rounded on him, wondering what had possessed the astrologers to betroth her to a boy who would run from his own shadow if it barked at him. ‘All of you – calm down. We are the Chosen Twelve, not a pack of backcountry peasants. Do you think our elders have not foreseen this disaster and made some kind of plan? Our duty is to help them however we can.’ She pushed her dark hair back again, hoping that what she had said was true.
‘And if they haven’t?’ asked Damisa’s betrothed, a rather stodgy, brown-haired lad called Kalhan.
‘Then we will die,’ Damisa recovered herself enough to scowl at him.
‘Well, if we do,’ said little Iriel, with her irrepressible smile, ‘I am going to have a few strong words to say to the gods!’
When Micail and Tiriki returned to the palace they found a blue-robed priestess waiting at the gate, bearing news from Mesira. Alyssa had awakened and was expected to make a good recovery.
If only, Tiriki thought darkly, we could do so well at healing her prophecy…
Yet she kept a smile on her lips as she accompanied Micail upstairs to the suite of rooms they shared on the upper floor. The veil before the alcove that held the shrine to the goddess, and the hangings that curtained the doors to the balcony stirred in the night wind from the sea. The whitewashed walls were frescoed with a frieze of golden falcons above a bed of crimson lilies. In the flickering light of the hanging lamps, the birds soared and the flowers seemed to bend in an invisible breeze.
When he had changed into a fresh robe, Micail went off to confer with Reio-ta. Left alone, Tiriki ordered soft-footed servants to fill her bath with cool, scented water. When she had bathed, they waited to pat her dry. When they had gone, she walked out onto the balcony and gazed at the city below. To the east, the Star Mountain loomed against the crisp night sky. Groves of cypress covered the lower slopes, but the cone rose sharply above. The perpetual flame in the Temple at its summit appeared as a faint, pyramidal glow. Scattered points of light marked outlying farmsteads on the lower slopes, dimming one by one as the inhabitants sought their beds. In the city, folk stayed up later. Bobbing torches moved along the streets in the entertainment quarter.
As the air cooled, the land gave up scents of drying grass and freshly turned earth like a rich perfume. She gazed out upon the peace of the night and in her heart, the words of the evening hymn became a prayer—
Oh Source of Stars in splendor
Against the darkness showing,
Grant us restful slumber
This night, Thy blessing knowing.
How could such peace, such beauty, be destroyed?
Her bed was hung with gauze draperies and covered with linen so fine it felt like silk against the skin. No comfort that Ahtarrath could provide was denied her, but despite her prayer, Tiriki could not sleep. By the time Micail came to bed, it was midnight. She could feel him gazing down at her and tried to make her breathing slow and even. Just because she was wakeful was no reason he should be deprived of sleep as well. But the bond between them went beyond the senses of the flesh.
‘What is wrong, beloved?’ His voice was soft in the darkness.
She let out her breath in a long sigh. ‘I am afraid.’
‘But we have known ever since we were born that doom might come to Ahtarrath.’
‘Yes – at some time in the distant future. But Alyssa’s warning makes it immediate!’
‘Perhaps…perhaps…’ The bed creaked as he sat down and reached to caress her hair. ‘Still, you know how hard it is to know the timing of a prophecy.’
Tiriki sat up, facing him. ‘Do you truly believe that?’
‘Beloved…none of us can know what our knowing may change. All we can do is to use what powers we have to face the future when it comes.’ He sighed, and Tiriki thought she heard an echo of thunder, although the night was cloudless.
‘Ah, yes, your powers,’ she whispered bitterly, for what use were they now? ‘You can invoke the wind and the lightning, but what of the earth beneath? And how will that be passed on, if all else falls? Reio-ta has only a daughter –and I – I am unable to bear you a child!’
Sensing her tears, he clasped her closer to him. ‘You have not done so – but we are still young!’
Tiriki let her head rest against his shoulder and relaxed into the strength of his arms, drawing in the faint spicy scent of his body mixed with the oils of his own bath.
‘Two babes have I laid upon the funeral pyre,’ she whispered, ‘and three more I lost before they could be born. The priestesses of Caratra have no more help for me, Micail.’ She felt her hot tears welling up as his arms tightened around her. ‘Our mothers were sisters – perhaps we are too close kin. You must take another wife, my beloved, one who can give you a child.’
She felt him shake his head in the darkness.
‘The law of Ahtarrath allows it,’ she whispered.
‘And the law of love?’ he asked. He grasped her shoulders, looking down at her. She felt, rather than saw, the intensity in his gaze. ‘To beget a son worthy to bear my powers, I must give not