Seven hours she had knelt alone in the hot room halfway up Tiltspire. Her stomach ached from fasting.
She was rarely truly alone, it had been that way all her life. Even when she was not surrounded by others she was always aware they were there for her to call on. As Skua-Rai of Zorir she had been surrounded by acolytes, and when she had been an acolyte herself she had been with her siblings under the god. All living together in the dormitories, like a great family of first, second, third and fourth wives and husbands. The hardship of life under a god allayed a little by the softness of shared bodies.
That small comfort vanished when she started to rise in the ranks. The monastery wanted those who were hard, so she pushed others away to prove she was. With her commitment had come a wall within that she allowed none over – they stood at the bottom of it or they broke against it but none passed it. When she had craved silence she found it within herself and it was in that silence where she first heard the voice of Zorir-Who-Walks-In-Fire, though voice was not the right explanation for it then. It was more a feeling, a memory or compulsion. A knowledge of their presence that made her furious with those around her who were monks only because it was expected of them.
She had heard others say that with power you became more alone but it was not true. You became more isolated, but you were never truly alone. There was always someone who wanted something, who would use you for their own purposes. Even now, as powerful as she had ever been, she must answer to the Cowl-Rai, but that was a rod of her own making – one she fully intended to break. For now, being unable to relax because of the Cowl-Rai’s moods was a small price, compared to others she had paid. She would be called to her and find a woman who wanted to die, or a woman who raged at the world or a woman overcome with energy, desperate to talk through a long list of plans that verged between cunning and insane. She had found that the focus of battle and campaign planning seemed to reign in the Cowl-Rai’s worst attributes, gave her mind something to focus on.
Without her Saradis would not have taken Crua.
Though lately, the Cowl-Rai had become more focused on Tilt, and the trion, and her obsession with doing what a thousand Cowl-Rai had done before. Somewhere along the way Nahac Du-Nahere had forgotten that she was a lie, that she was a construct as much as her imaginary god, Tarl-an-Gig, was. That the stone in her skull gave her power, but not the power of a Cowl-Rai. The Tilt, where the land shifted and brought heat back to the north, and cold to the south was not something she could ever do. It had to be delayed and delayed and delayed again until Saradis’s great work was finished. Then the Cowl-Rai would cease to matter, and she, Saradis, would stand before the great taffistone and the fire would come and the land would be cleansed. All born again in the Paradise at the end of the Star Path. Zorir would look down on her and know she had done its bidding.
She took a deep breath.
Time alone. No. She was never alone, her task was too great. The pressure too much and the nearest she knew to peace was this, kneeling naked before Zorir’s taffistone. Not as big as the huge one before the Spire, but larger than the ones she sent out to the Spiretowns. This one though, it was hers, it was peculiar to her. It had been in the monastery where she had made her greatest mistake, though it had not fulfilled its true potential until many years later. After she had journeyed to the north and found them, Cahan and Nahac, playing in the dirt of some filthy clanless farm. There she had chosen the wrong one. She had felt so sure, even felt the seed of strength within the boy, the simmering of power the stones had attuned her to. Nothing from the sister.
Nothing.
Yet here she was.
The boy had been weak.
The sister had been strong.
She had found out too late, blinded by her surety. Zorir had punished her for it and she had learned not to fail.
Saradis leant forward from the waist, the heels of her feet digging into the tops of her thighs, sweat beading her skin. The stone before her was warm and it, not the heat from outside, gave the room its warmth. Her stone was not warm like fire, not warm like the Light Above, but warm like when the gaze of another fell upon you. A feeling, the prickle across her flesh that she knew was the eye of Zorir. She felt it now, Zorir was finally looking upon their servant and she felt a flush akin to arousal. Years ago she had been able to stay knelt like this for days if needed. Now her back burned after only a few hours and she was forced to sit upright to ease it. But as Zorir was here she would not move until she felt they allowed it. So she knelt and she waited as the awareness grew in increments. She could hear the rasp of creatures moving across the wall, the sound of the people of Tiltspire far below, going about their business unaware that a god manifested above them, not just a Cowl-Rai, an actual god of their land. Shadows lengthened as the Light Above moved across the sky and as it moved the sound of the people below was replaced by a slow and gradual hum that filled her mind with a deep, deep blue, almost purple. A vast field of flowers blooming in her mind, a thousand tiny flying littercrawlers buzzing in her ears. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the blue glow around the stone brighten.
Now was the time. She sat straight, wanted to stretch to rid herself of the cramps in her muscles but did not. To do anything but pay full attention to Zorir when they manifested was to risk losing the attention of the god.
Hands on the top of her thighs, she let the tension flow out of her body with her breath. Then reached out and placed her hands on the stone. Cold against her skin, despite the heat radiating from it.
Sometimes there was no contact and she was left disappointed, unfulfilled. Sometimes she thought there was no contact and then later, in her daily tasks, or in her dreams she would get a gradual feeling, a desire to do something.
It had been like that with Cahan and Nahac, a slowly growing desire to go north, to take a train of her people and travel until she found the Cowl-Rai of Zorir. Every monastery searched for the Cowl-Rai, but she had felt no need to until that point. That was before she had purified the stone, or even knew she needed to, when she had taken sweat baths, heating a room up until water ran from her skin like the geysers outside of Tilt in full flow. Filling her stomach with teas made from flycaps and visionhoods in search of her god.
Very rarely she was gifted with a definite – not vision, vision was not the right word, a compulsion. That was how she had found the first stone. When she was in the wilderness, when her monastery was lost, sacked by the woman she now served and her furious army. In her misery and her failure she had found a grove of visionhoods and taken enough to kill ten people. Yet she had not died. She had felt death, felt its creeping tendrils around her, felt it touch upon her skin, move into her body, but it had not taken her.
She had woken desperately thirsty and with a mania upon her, a madness. To go back to the north, to Harn, through Harnwood and into Wyrdwood. She was barely lucid, a filthy madwoman marching half-alive and hoping only for a release from the failure that was her life.
She remembered digging, clawed hands pushing through the layers of brown, dead cloudtree leaves. She saw none of the magnificence around her. Only felt the sting of the sharp, dry leaves breaking her skin. The coolness of the dead earth as she broke through a thousand season’s worth of fall. Bluevein thick in the ground. Barely hearing her own ragged breathing, the strange, animal noises she made as she dug.
Until she found the stone. Disappointment at first, an old taffistone buried in the dirt. Like so many others.
Until she touched it. Until it touched her.
All that mattered then was getting it out of the ground.
Days of work and increasing frustration as it seemed immovable. Laha appeared. He must have been following her, watching, staying close enough to protect her. Unsure whether to show himself or not until she tried and failed and tried and failed to move the stone from where it lay beneath earth thick with blue threads. The most loyal of her subjects spoke no words, only added his strength to hers so they could lift the stone.
It did not glow, not at first. Not until they had righted it, so it stood as a taffistone should, the rounded point facing up towards the sky. Then she saw the faint blue glow around it. Laha too. He reached out before she could say anything, put his hand on the stone.
He felt nothing when he touched it.
But when she touched it?
She was overwhelmed.
That was the first, the only time she saw what she had come to think of as Zorir’s loom. In the briefest moment she understood some of what it must be to be Cowl-Rai. The whole of Skua stretched out below her, Wyrdwood to north and south, Slowlands to east and west. Below it all a pulsing, spinning web of bright white and with it came a feeling, a visceral, awful hatred that radiated from her bones, though at the same time she knew it was not of her. It was from the stone. It was from something else. Within that hatred were other feelings: a deep loneliness, a raging fury and a pure and true purpose that put hers to shame. Within the mass of white was, not a web, but a framework of something that was slowly growing, that could be but was not quite yet. This was the loom of Zorir in icy blue, the colour she had always associated with her god. It was weak, built of something long dead and broken, little more than thin threads beneath the blinding, painful whiteness. But she found enough in it, enough to know it must grow for her god to prosper. That this loom was the key to the great fire, and she was the key to it growing. All this in a single searing flash. Burning away all her doubt and her pride. Shame covering her like a shroud. She had given up, run away, doubted when strength was required. Zorir was waiting. Zorir needed her.
She was within the stone for a moment, with Zorir for a moment, she suffered with them. A million seasons of confinement. Panic rising, that she was stuck, would never escape.
Then she let go.
The stone cracked and eight shards fell to the floor, each little more than the length of her middle finger. Each heavy with purpose she did not yet know, though she felt sure she would one day. Pins for the web. Around the eight shards, more tiny pieces of the stone, hundreds and hundreds of them. Behind her Laha was touching his face, blood running down it. Shards of rock embedded in his skin.
Saradis groaned.
The memories were so strong. She looked at her hands, confused as to why there was no dirt beneath her fingernails before remembering she was not there. She was here. The shards had been used to create more blue taffistones, the first one used on this stone before her. Each new stone breaking off its own shards and some of those shards were hidden within the headdress she wore, jewels more precious than any knew. Laha had changed after the stone joined with him, subtly but importantly. And some of the small stones, in a night of blood and screams, had been slowly driven into the skull of the Cowl-Rai.
“Saradis.”
Her name, said over aeons. Whispered in a voice she had rarely heard before but one she knew better than her own body. Zorir. The god spoke. They knew her name.
“I am here.” An echo, her own voice magnified eight thousand times. Surrounding her, suffusing the air with sound.
Vision. Bursting in her mind. The same as all those years ago. But now Zorir’s loom, the blue framework growing beneath the bright white one, was much stronger, and somehow fixed to the web of light in a way it had not been before.
“Close.” A flash. A figure. The boy, Cahan? With him came a desperate sense of need. Why? Then it was swept away.
The voice. So ancient and wise, full of longing.
The two frameworks and the web merged fully. The brightness increasing until she knew that if she had she seen it with anything but her mind she would have been blinded. A wave of heat, the fire burning Crua. All light becoming a single point in the darkness, a concentration of energy and from it leapt a line, out and through the darkness, reaching along the Star Path, touching it and linking two bright points. One Crua, one the new paradise of the Cowl Star. She saw again, two figures, standing at the start of the path.
“Soon.”
Was she even breathing? She did not know. This was a direct communication. A prophecy from her god. Following it came a wave of pleasure, a pool of darkness she fell into. Every nerve in her body lit up, something beyond the physical. She could not speak, moan, do anything. It was all. It was everything. A reward for her good work.
And the darkness swallowed her.