IN NORTHERN OSHAAR, in winter, the light thins. There is a pallid dawn, a fading dusk, and then darkness wraps itself again around the temple. Snow chokes the roads. The black cathedrals of the forest are lethal to a traveller. The Followers of the Unspoken Name expect no pilgrims until spring.
And all the same, one midwinter night, a pilgrim came to the House of Silence, like a dead thing returning.
Prioress Cweren was sitting up late in her study, with her eyeglasses pushed up her nose, gazing into her scrying-bowl. Her nightly indulgence of hot whisky and cloves sat beside her on her desk, its scent masking the bloody steam from the scrying-bowl.
The image in the bowl flickered in the lamplight, and she saw the pilgrim.
She was dragging her way through the snow, hauling her own body like a bag of rocks. She crawled at the foot of the road of white stones. She had dressed for a winter journey, but all the layers of heavy dark wool were now wet and ragged. Her black hair was not only threaded with grey but flecked with frost. Cweren could not see her face.
Cweren was foremost among the faithful of the Unspoken, and she knew the feeling of a true vision, the iron taste of it, like blood in her mouth.
She got up from her desk, thinking somewhat at random that she could consult The Key of Waking Vision or even The Dream of Fly Agaric for precedent.
The scrying-bowl flashed, startling her, and she fell heavily, cracking her elbow on the edge of the table. The glass of whisky was flung sideways and smashed. Cweren didn’t hear it shatter, didn’t feel the impact. She was only aware of the vision. It left all her senses ringing, pulsing, red and bright.
The crawling woman had fallen in the hollow her body had made in the snow, but she was alive. She was calling to Cweren by name.
Cweren, by the twelve thousand unspeakable names, help me.
It was a mortal voice, and one that Cweren recognised. And yet—behind it, somehow, or beneath it, she heard the voice of her god, rolling up like cold still air from an open grave.
Come to me, said the Unspoken One. It is willed.
In thirty-nine years of life, Cweren had heard the voice of the Unspoken in the mouth of three Chosen Brides—Ejarwa, Csorwe, and Tsurai—but it had never spoken to her directly. It knew her. It recognised her personally, and with that recognition came a searing clarity. There was something she had to do. A new and greater sacrifice, a purpose beyond any she had yet known.
Still, the House of Silence has ever taught practicality. Cweren wrapped herself in a heavy coat and strapped on her snowshoes before going out into the night. Swathed in wool and fur, with only a small gap between scarf and hood, she still felt the cold as a blow when she opened the door.
She crossed the courtyard garden. Her keys clanged like bells as she unlocked the boathouse. She dragged an oilskin down off the little cutter they used in summer to transport bales of lotus-straw. It might have been wiser to waken one of her seconds, to summon the librarian or one of the other high officers of the House, but she feared that explaining her vision to someone else would cloud that extraordinary clarity.
No, the Unspoken did not look kindly upon tongues that wagged. The vision in the scrying-bowl had been for her alone. Besides, if she was right about the identity of the pilgrim waiting on the hillside, she did not particularly want the librarian or the Keeper of Black Lotus to witness this exchange.
She hauled the cutter out and climbed in. As the engine warmed up, she glanced back up at the House. There were no lights in the windows. Cweren’s home vanished behind her, its great bulk sinking into the greater darkness. She could see nothing but what lay within the circle of her own lantern, but she knew she was going the right way: toward the road of white stones, the beginning of the path to the shrine. That was where the pilgrim lay, half buried.
Cweren landed the cutter, set down her lantern, squatted in the snow beside her, and shook her by the shoulders, not gently.
The pilgrim choked awake, raising her head with what looked like an immense mechanical effort.
“Cweren,” said the pilgrim. “I knew you’d come.”
“Oranna,” said Cweren. “I’m astonished you’re not dead.”
Oranna laughed, a wet rattle that sounded more as if she was choking.
“You’re not the only one,” she said, eventually. She certainly looked enough like a corpse. Her skin was mottled with broken veins, and her yellow eyes were grey with blood.
Under ordinary circumstances, Cweren would not have offered Oranna an arm. The former librarian of the House of Silence was an apostate and a schismatic, and she had betrayed Cweren in every possible manner over the years. At every step, Oranna had made it clear how easily Cweren could be put aside. And yet in all that time, Oranna had never once asked her for help. Cweren held out her hand.
Oranna did not get up. She was hunched over, clasping a kind of woven basket to her chest as if hiding a wound there. There came a sound Cweren had not heard for many years, a thin wail like a cat wanting to be fed. It was not very loud, but it pierced the heavy silence of the forest like a flash of red light, and it came from the basket.
“My word, a baby,” said Cweren, and for a moment she might have been sixteen years old again, listening in scandalised horror to something her interesting friend had invented.
“Well done, Cweren, this must be the sharp logical mind which so impressed our schoolmistresses,” said Oranna. Her mouth twitched into its habitual sardonic curve, then slackened again, weak with exhaustion.
When they were junior priestesses, Cweren and Oranna had officiated at the naming of hundreds of infants, and back then they had thought of them as props brought to the House for this purpose: to be pricked with pins, anointed with lotus, presented to the notice of the Unspoken One, and taken away again to be transformed into real people. How things changed.
“Let me help you up,” said Cweren. Oranna shook her head. “Forgive me, but you can’t walk, and if you don’t already have frostbite, I’m sure it is imminent. And the baby—”
“That’s a lot of assumptions this early in the morning,” said Oranna. She held out the baby, who snuffled and started wailing again. “Go on. I can handle myself.”
Cweren considered dispensing some sharp words regarding the fact that she was the Prioress of the House of Silence and Oranna was a murderous turncoat who had no authority over her, but that seemed rather childish under the circumstances.
The baby weighed almost nothing, the size and weight of a loaf of bread. Inside the basket, it was wrapped in a thick woollen shawl. Cweren twitched the shawl aside, trying to find where the baby’s face was. It didn’t even have its milk-tusks yet, and its mouth was stretched into a wide grimace of hunger.
“Is it yours?” said Cweren.
“What self-respecting necromancer would bear live offspring, I ask you?” said Oranna.
“I suppose you never could give a straight answer,” said Cweren. She shrugged on the straps of the basket, bringing the infant close to her body. She could feel its little limbs twitching with hungry rage.
“So this is your triumphant return,” said Cweren.
Many years ago, enraged by Cweren’s accession as Prioress, Oranna had stolen as much as she could carry from the House of Silence and gone on the run with her own gang of followers. As far as Cweren had been able to discover, all the candlesticks had been sold, and all the runaway acolytes were dead.
“Not at all,” said Oranna. She lurched to her feet and followed Cweren toward the cutter. Even the effort of rising seemed to strain her breath. “I have no intention to return. But the child—”
“Ah,” said Cweren. “Yes, I see. We are to be left holding the baby, this time quite literally. This is new, even for you.”
“This is willed by the Unspoken, I assure you,” said Oranna. “And you can be sure the child is one of the faithful. I carried out the naming myself. Always was difficult to prick them with the pin. This one is a very enthusiastic kicker.”
Cweren was being enthusiastically kicked herself. “You have always known so much about what the Unspoken wills,” said Cweren.
“This is a matter of life and death, and not only yours and mine,” said Oranna.
“Well,” said Cweren. “The House of Silence is accustomed to receiving foundlings, I suppose.” She took some comfort from the knowledge that Oranna apparently planned to go away again.
Oranna reached stiffly into the basket and touched the baby’s cheek. It turned toward her, quieting for a moment.
“Come on, then,” said Oranna to the child. “Back to the House of Silence, for our sins, to explain ourselves—oh, damn.”
Cweren’s own magic had always been weak, but it prickled at her then, a sharp jolt like cold metal.
A flash of movement had caught Oranna’s eye far above.
Suspended in the sky above the sacred mountain, serene and deadly, was a warship. By a trick of the eye, it looked bigger than the mountain itself, speckled with lights as if the night sky had folded itself into the shape of a carrion bird about to drop.
Oranna cursed again. “And I thought we might have an hour or two.”
The ship drifted out from the cover of the mountain and down toward them, all chill majesty. Then there was a flash of brighter light from somewhere in its underbelly. The baby was still crying, the sharp keening of a wild animal in distress.
“By the Unspoken, they’re firing on us,” hissed Oranna, more in aggravation than in terror. “Move!”
Cweren ran, shielding the baby as best she could. She skidded into the shadow of the cutter, and Oranna landed beside her, winded and gasping. The spot where they had been standing erupted in blue fire, with a vicious hiss like water on hot oil. The heat of the flames was so near, and their glistening blue light made everything else murky. The baby was still screaming, somehow louder than the fire.
There was another hiss and crackle behind them, and Cweren heard the snow sizzle from impact.
“Quickly!” said Oranna, and they climbed into the cutter. It was ungainly in a horrible way, trying to scramble in at speed without hurting the baby, like the recurring nightmare in which Cweren was being chased and had forgotten how to run.
Cweren automatically seated herself at the tiller, but Oranna gestured her into the back.
“You always flew like an old man,” said Oranna. “Sit there and hold the baby.”
The baby cried on and on, the sound like a red ribbon winding behind them. Oranna took them low, down through the trees, zigzagging between the trunks and branches and grinning to herself with a maniacal delight that would have been terrifying if Cweren hadn’t already been at peak terror, coasting along on a kind of delirium.
“There, there,” said Cweren, rocking the baby ineffectually.
Oranna’s grin made her look like a young girl again, as though she had once again bullied Cweren into some scheme to steal whisky from the priestesses’ stores. At the same time, her breath misted in the air like puffs of steam from a furnace that was running down. Cweren smelled flowers and metal in the air, blood and lilies, and knew that Oranna was dying. The mage-blight was not a gentle death. Among the Followers of the Unspoken, it was common to seal yourself into the crypt as an offering of starvation rather than face the blight in its full flowering. Of course, that would not be Oranna’s way.
The cutter’s old engine coughed and its timbers complained as they battered their way through the forest’s understorey, and all the while Cweren was waiting for the fireball that would kill all three of them.
“Oh, here we go,” said Oranna, her teeth clenched. “Really, Cweren, did you pick the clunkiest haycart you could—ah!”
But when the crisis came, it was pure accident, the same even-handed entropy Cweren had worshipped every day of her life. The engine of the old cutter choked, sending them careening sharply to one side. They struck a tree and spun out of control. Oranna cursed in a low furious hiss as she tried to regain steering, but it was no good.
“Have to land, if I can,” she muttered. “Cweren, be ready to jump if you have to.”
“With the baby?” said Cweren in disbelief.
“Of course with the baby, what kind of imbecile—”
Oranna swore again, and their cutter skimmed low over the snowy earth, the engine coughing up smoke. They leapt free just as it caught fire. Oranna screamed. The baby stopped crying abruptly, and Cweren thought for a horrible moment that it might have been crushed by the impact—but no, there it was, glaring out of the wrapper at Cweren with eyes of a dark inscrutable gold.
In her relief, it took Cweren a moment to realise that Oranna had fallen behind. She was sitting in the snow, back straight against a tree, face buried in one hand.
“What’s wrong?” said Cweren, anxious to be moving, certain that at any second there would be another fireball.
“My leg,” said Oranna. There was a matter-of-fact resignation in her voice. “It’s broken, I think.”
There was a hiss and a crash and the slithering of dislodged snow as something burst through the trees, a few hundred yards ahead. Not another fireball. Something much larger, a sharp black silhouette slicing down through the trees like a blade. Another ship, not much bigger than the cutter but obviously made for war.
“Cweren, take Tsereg and run,” said Oranna.
“I can’t—”
“You can. You’ll have to,” said Oranna. Her voice, which had always been the sweetest thing about her, sounded as though she had ground glass on her tongue. “Warn them at the House, for all the good it will do them, but there is nothing more important than keeping the child safe.”
Oranna fumbled in her robes and produced a flat square object, thrusting it toward Cweren. It was wrapped in an oilskin, but Cweren knew a book when she held one. “This is for Tsereg. If anybody else opens it, they will die a most unpleasant death, so don’t get too curious.”
“You could lean on my shoulder,” said Cweren.
“No, this is it, I think,” said Oranna. “A pity not to make it back, but so it goes. Nothing is to be preserved for all time.”
“What is saved can be saved only for a moment,” answered Cweren automatically, and felt a wave of fury that Oranna thought she could leverage scripture against her. How dare she die before Cweren had a chance to set the record straight?
“I had longer than I deserved,” said Oranna. “You would be the first to tell me that. And nobody understands better than I do the value of a willing sacrifice.”
Oranna reached out and touched Cweren’s forehead. At first her hand just felt cold, the wool glove scratching her brow. Then Cweren felt the power in that touch, cold and vast and hollow as a subterranean lake, and yet familiar, too, familiar as the crypts, familiar as the veins of her fingertips backlit by a lantern.
Oranna brushed her fingertips across the baby’s forehead too, and drew them back. Her face was lit up by something brighter than the distant flames, though a trickle of blood ran from the corner of her mouth.
“Thus shall we know thee,” said Oranna. “Go.”
Figures spilled out of the ship up ahead, and the light of the burning trees gleamed on metal visors.
The acrid smell of the burning cutter mingled with another sharp waft of blood and lilies. There was a strange high colour in Oranna’s cheeks. She made the Sign of Sealed Lips to Cweren: three fingertips pressed to the lips, between the tusks, an ancient gesture of honour and reverence to the Unspoken.
“Go, Cweren,” she said. “I’ll hold them back.”
It was hard to run in snowshoes, and harder still with the baby in the basket, but Cweren went as fast as she could. The burden grew heavier with every step, as if she were dragging a boulder behind her. After a while the pain and the fear were just more weights to drag along. She was a person who liked her comforts, liked her evening drink and her log fire and her lambskin slippers, but she was also the Prioress of the House of Silence, and this was her domain.
“Come on, Tsereg,” she said, under her breath. The baby was no longer crying, at least.
If she could get through the forest, it wouldn’t be far to the gate in the wall, and to the safety of the House of Silence and its ancient battlements.
Once she looked back, and saw Oranna in the clearing of pines. All around her, dark circles shimmered in the snow, black as blood but gleaming like wax.
The soldiers advanced upon the circle, as eyeless and single-minded as beetles, closing in with unhurried ease. The curved blades of their swords glittered like arcs of ice.
Cweren was too far away by now to really be seeing this. It was another vision. Oranna must have sent it to her. At the very last, perhaps even she did not want to die alone.
“Tell your mistress she will not find what she seeks,” said Oranna.
“Witch of a false god,” said one of them, laughing. “Take comfort. You will not live to see her triumph.”
“No, you’re right,” said Oranna. “But neither will you.”
Oranna raised a hand, her black robe flapping in the wind. You could have taken this for an idle gesture. Perhaps only Cweren saw what it really meant, the extent of the power she called upon. The depths of the mountain were in it, and the vastness of the night sky. All winter’s cold, and the cold of the outer void, the implacability of stone and the implacability of time.
Oranna’s lips were moving, this time silent in the silent forest, but Cweren heard what she said as if her old friend whispered it in her ear.
If Oranna was telling the truth, then there really was nothing more important than keeping this infant alive, whatever might follow.
Tsereg is the last to be Chosen.
Tsereg. It was a good old-fashioned House of Silence name: that which is without end. Even in peril of her life, Cweren knew her etymology.
“All worlds float upon the void,” Oranna went on, her lips still moving silently. This was the first of the mysteries of the Unspoken, the words that each of them had spoken at their initiation, and which Cweren heard repeated every year by the latest class of acolytes. One could not fail to answer.
“And the hour of their fading is inevitable,” Cweren replied, though the cold air burnt in her lungs and she could scarcely form words.
At once the first rank of soldiers faltered, as though some invisible barrier had risen up in front of them. That wasn’t it, though. Oranna was not interested in postponing the inevitable, Cweren saw. She only wanted to do as much damage as she could. The soldiers seemed to crumple in on themselves, as though their uniforms had been sucked dry of flesh and bone, and then even leather and metal flaked away, leaving a ring of drifted black rust in the snow where they had been.
Cweren ran on through the snow as this nightmare unspooled across her mind’s eye. There were more of the soldiers than she could have imagined. As fast as Oranna could fight them off, there were more of them, and the magic itself was taking a toll on her body.
“All form takes shape in emptiness,” said Oranna, and the nearest soldier simply disintegrated, turning to a pillar of greyish smoke.
By unmaking is emptiness perfected, thought Cweren, though it was absurd to imagine Oranna could hear her.
Cweren stumbled on, and at last the walls of the House of Silence loomed up ahead, a dark bulk superimposed on the greater darkness. Cweren was too exhausted even to feel relief, but she was home, and both she and the baby unharmed. If the soldiers were still pursuing her, they were far behind. She stepped across the threshold, clinging to the basket. Behind her the gates swung shut.
Cweren and the baby were halfway back across the courtyard when Oranna was shot. Cweren almost felt the arrow herself, or at least the shock of it. A sharp thump in the middle of the chest, more like being punched than being punctured.
The vision blurred, and when it cleared, Oranna was looking down at the arrow, mildly, as though someone had tugged at her sleeve for attention.
Oranna smiled. She brushed a hand over the arrow and then let go, as if deciding against something. Her dark hair veiled her face.
The vision fuzzed and darkened and cleared over and over again, as if someone was rapidly blinking. Cweren badly wished it would end, that she would not be forced to see what happened next. One of the soldiers trampled through the circle toward Oranna’s slumped body, and raised a shining sword.
“All voices sound in silence,” said Oranna, and this was for Cweren alone.
And silence relieves them at last.
At the moment of Oranna’s death, the vision snapped apart. Cweren cupped the baby’s head in her hand and stepped into the great hall.
High above, the bells of the House of Silence ended their long sleep and began to ring.