Domi stepped out of the way as three gallivanting children came hurrying past, laughing as they threw a weighted cloth bag back and forth among themselves. The oldest of them was perhaps nine years old, and she wore a daisy chain in her flowing black hair, in unconscious imitation of many of the adults who wandered along the street.
Domi watched as the children hurried on, wrapped up in their game of mutie-in-the-middle. Then she turned her attention back to the other people on the street, looking for patterns of behavior. The vast majority seemed to be heading in the direction of the center of town, and Domi scanned the broad street ahead until her eyes met with the cathedral that towered above everything. Its red window seemed to glow like the evening sun, a single bloodshot eye observing the populace of the ville. Even as she watched, Domi became aware of the tolling as a bell was struck, and then it came again after a few seconds’ pause, and again.
As the bell tolled, the citizenry of Luilekkerville seemed to turn as one, making their way more determinedly down the street toward the looming cathedral in the town center. Casting the flower aside in a waste receptacle at the side of the road, Domi joined the crowd, keeping her head down in that most simplistic of disguises—hiding in plain sight—as she made her way toward the cathedral.
Up close, the cathedral looked rough, its walls hewn from hard rock of a miserable brown-gray mix. Shingles covered its facade in a swirling pattern, as if washed up by crashing waves on a beach. The basso bell continued tolling from within, its single note calling the locals to worship, and Domi walked with them, furtively looking around. The locals seemed happy enough, laughing and jolly as they continued their friendly conversations. There were adults and children, old folks who needed sticks to help them walk just shuffling to the open doors of the cathedral that waited in the center of the ville. Some of the children ran or skipped along, and several of the adults skipped, too, one young couple laughing as they skipped hand in hand through the wide archway into the structure of the building. Other than the central tower, the cathedral was just two stories high, and the archway dominated its frontage, almost two stories at its apex and wide enough to drive a Sandcat assault vehicle through without touching the sides. There were no doors, Domi noted—the doorway remained open day and night, allowing free passage for those seeking entry. Perhaps that was a throwback to the days when this settlement had been Snakefishville, as the Program of Unification allowed for no locks on doors, no privacy for the individual, for privacy showed a lack of trust in one’s fellow man and lack of trust had been the overriding rationale of the Deathlands, that terrible time that had preceded this.
With one last glance behind her, Domi padded beneath the towering archway and into the body of the cathedral itself, the distinct aroma of flowers coming to her nostrils even as she stepped beneath the arch. It was darker inside, away from the morning sun, and it took a few seconds for Domi’s eyes to adjust, a blur of green sparking momentarily in front of her retinas. The sunlight drew a deliberate pattern inside the church itself, the archway of the open door cast in an elongated line across the floor, stretching two-thirds of the length of the main aisle leading to an altar that Domi estimated had been placed close to the center of the building. Some trick of the light turned that bright pattern into the roughly hewn form of a man, and Domi checked behind her once more to confirm that the arch was still an arch; it was. She realized there must be subtleties to the carved structure to generate this illusion, the towering stone man was drawn by the brightness of the sun across the floor like some giant carrying the worshippers on his broad back. She knew what it was, of course—it represented Ullikummis.
Domi made her way into the main chapel, its walls stretching two stories up to the high rafters of the building, creating a generous feeling of space. As outside, the interior walls were carved of rough rock, and they had an unfinished feel to them, their surfaces pitted and mottled like sand. The floor was flat like slate, and Domi winced as her bare feet padded from the warmth of the sun through the arch to the icy coolness where the floor had remained in shadow all morning. She peered down, seeing patterns painted on the floor, dappled in whisker-thin lines of red as if veins or arteries.
The sound of the clanging bell was loud within the cathedral, its droning note echoing from the hard surfaces of the walls and floor. Behind the altar, Domi saw a towering structure made of glass, hexagonal with a diameter of twelve feet or so, stretching up into the highest reaches of this tower that dominated Luilekkerville’s skyline. The glass tower looked like something medical and it contained the chiming bell, its heavy cone swaying back and forth like a lily in the wind, its petals just beginning to open for the spring. High up in the bell tower, the single circle of stained glass glowed a fearsome red where the sun struck it, turning the sides of hexagonal glass red where the panes met, like lines of blood dripping down from the heavens—the blood of the gods.
The wide aisle stretched up toward the central altar, abutted by two broad columns of chairs, simple things carved of wood. The people of Luilekkerville were filing into these, the chairs filling up like a theatrical audience. As they sat, Domi saw other aisles leading up to the altar from all sides, ten spokes converging on it with lines of chairs dividing them, each one containing the same sunlit illusion of the fallen man-god for the communion to walk upon. She estimated that the cathedral could seat eight hundred or more at any one time, and it seemed to be almost full even now. Domi slowed for a moment, eyes roving over the crowd, halting here and there as she spotted that familiar shade of vibrant red hair she was hoping for. A woman sat just a few rows away, her back to Domi, a cascade of red-gold curls tumbling freely down her back. Domi watched for a moment as the woman sat there, then saw her turn to talk to a child tugging at her arm, revealing the hard planes of her face more clearly to Domi. For a moment Domi’s breath caught—but no, it wasn’t who she had hoped, not Brigid Baptiste, just a stranger with hair the color of the setting sun.
Her long skirt brushing at her ankles, Domi took an aisle seat two-thirds from the back. She pulled her legs in to allow others to shuffle past, take the empty seats in the row—she was an interloper here and she wanted to keep a clear path for herself to the exit. Instinctively, Domi’s hand reached forward, brushing at her skirt for just a moment, feeling the blade sheathed just above her left ankle.
Domi sat and watched, listening to the loud chimes of the single bell as it swung to and fro. High in the rafters, Domi saw more garlands of flowers had been stretched, lining the walls and twirling like creeping vines down the rough stone pillars that held the structure up. It was strangely simple, beautiful in a naive way. It reminded her of some of the more simplistic outlander rituals she had witnessed.
The cathedral was abuzz with voices, no one person’s standing out but all of them together generating a low blanket of muffled words that seem to fill the theater with a sense of camaraderie, of joy. It was a celebration, an expression of the love of life by the living. Domi sat dour-faced, letting the noise wash over her.
A couple of rows ahead of Domi, a fresh-faced couple laughed, their hands intertwining as they gazed into one another’s eyes. The lad was perhaps nineteen or twenty, a thin blond beard barely tracing over his chin, while his girl looked a little younger, a circlet of flowers weaved in her lustrous black hair, shining pips of metal hanging from her earlobes. Their faces came close, noses brushing for a moment, and they laughed once more before kissing. Domi looked away, only to spy more couples—young and old—in similar joyful states.
At the meeting point of the aisles, just in front of the glass tube that held the swinging bell, a figure in a hooded robe strode to the altar area, rising up a small flight of steps to stand before the congregation. His hood was up over his features, his robe a creamy white with red braiding like lines of trickling blood.
In silence, the hooded figure on the podium held up his right hand, spreading the fingers like rays from a stylized sun, and the bell ringer stopped pulling