What followed was agonizing, because it was no simple matter to depart the Throneworld of the Chatcaava. Qora could not pay for passage on a civilian liner because none of them offered service to the Alliance, and certainly not to Qufiil… which was, after all, the homeworld of aliens unaffiliated with the Chatcaava. The closest a civilian dragon ship could bring him was a border world, from which he would be obliged to find a vessel willing to take him into the Alliance. Only from there could he depart for Qufiil.
“No,” the Queen said when the waiting grew unbearable and he brought the plan to her. “No, Qora, we cannot allow it. You are important to too many people to send on a journey without guarantees and guards. Even if you weren’t, we as a nation have too much to prove to the rest of the galaxy about how we’ve changed. Our new allies expect us to conveniently lose the species we used to keep as slaves in transit, because in the past we gave such as excuses for why aliens disappeared in our space. We must not allow it to happen again, especially with a sovereign alien race.”
The sensation that he was where he should be lingered despite his agitation. The revelation of the impending messiah should have triggered some change in how his gifts worked. Shouldn’t it? How could it be right that he remained marooned here when it was urgent that he report to the WorldDancer and OverDancer? Which was another matter that consumed him. Would the leaders of Qufiil believe his news? How could they? An Other Voice? An Other Voice! Surely not!
The days passed. He barely slept, and wished he could dare the Dance. He’d told Sediryl the truth when he’d offered to teach her as distraction from her fears and griefs; he’d neglected solely to tell her that it wasn’t only her fear and grief he’d been assuaging, for his anguish over the Willseeker’s crew had been an enormous ball in his chest. But with the revelation of the Emperor’s prophecy, the Dance had become a terrifying stranger, dangerous and wild, a tool of the God rather than a means of communication. One remembered the oldest scrolls, where the God adjured His children to be Dancers, like fire, the weapon their First-Mother had secured for their defense.
No, Qora couldn’t Dance, not without fearing that the God would use it as a direct conduit to his spirit. He wasn’t ready to confront the God that incontrovertibly. Instead, he spent his agitation by walking the city, and this time he did not see the Others through a lens of comfortable detachment. He felt the intimacy of the shapechange in a way he hadn’t before. Were shifted Chatcaava actually Faulfenzair while wearing the shape? Did Faulza see them as His children?
The only solace he found, strangely enough, was in the dark, cramped temple, where the priest dipped his head to him and left him in a silence that welcomed gods other than his own. There his darting thoughts slowed, and he traced the reliefs with his eyes until his breathing slowed and the incense no longer dizzied him.
“A temple?” the Queen said when he asked what she thought of it. “Yes, I have been told there are shrines in the city. Smaller than the ones the priests wish to establish, now that the old ways are no longer suppressed.”
“Suppressed?”
“It did not please the powerful males of the court to allow a religion to curb their behavior.”
“And yet,” Qora said, “they maintained as a treasure house a planet devoted to your old ways. Yes? While you were learning to be the Breath, I wandered the Vault of the Twelveworld’s temple. It was no minor establishment. And the Twelveworld was said to be important.”
Her gaze was thoughtful. “You go many places where you are not seen.”
He grinned, and tried with the expression to recapture some of the caprice for which he’d been known before an Other had Danced prophecy and shattered his composure. “It is the way of an Eye.”
“I think it is the way of all your people. To self-efface without losing a sense of your own value. It is something I think we need to learn from you.”
That startled him. “Do you believe it? That you have things to learn from us?”
“Don’t you agree?”
How swiftly he would have answered in the past. Of course the Others had much to learn from the Faulfenza, who did not war, did not fight, who lived in harmony with one another and their God. “I think,” he chose to say, “that it is a waste not to learn from anyone who can teach. Will you go to one of these shrines?”
She stared past him, thinking. “Perhaps I should.” Looking at him, now. “Perhaps you should show me.”
* * *
As a distraction from his inner tumult, Qora could have asked for little better than the descent of the female co-ruler of the Chatcaavan Empire into the meanest of streets in her capital city to visit a shrine forgotten by all but the most devalued of Others. She could not go as a lone Faulfenzair had, no matter how important she insisted he was… but rather escorted by guards and other priests and priestesses and overflown by military, in a procession that disrupted the city magnificently. Had she come to raug vararik before? He couldn’t tell from the reactions of those who parted to allow her column way on the narrow street. Perhaps she would always create shock, no matter how often she walked among them. How she’d changed, in even the short amount of time he’d known her! But then, he’d met her as the slave of a pirate and watched her transform into the agent of restoration of an intergalactic religion.
“Here,” Qora said. “This is the place.”
The Queen raised her head and studied the grimy portal with solemn eyes, then stepped inside, her silks fluttering around her body. Qora entered behind her and grinned at the sight of the priest, held fast in astonishment. Then the dragon was bowing to his queen, wings dipped to show their outer surfaces… an interesting display, because their patterns—one side angular, the other arabesques—seemed designed to be viewed from that perspective.
The two spoke for several exchanges, and then the priest shepherded the Queen Ransomed on the same tour of the panels he’d shown an inquisitive alien. Qora ambled in their wake, wondering why the priest felt the need to repeat the litany in such detail. Did the Queen not know her own people’s beliefs? But a faint furrow creased the narrow brow of her head, and her attention was too fixed for someone appreciating artistry. No, something about these walls was a revelation to her.
“Qora,” she said at last in Universal. “How did you find this place?”
“By poking the snoot into places that interested me, of course.” He canted his head. “Does it puzzle you?”
The Queen’s mien was contemplative now as she surveyed the entire cycle. “I assumed the Dying Air was a modern perversion created by those who no longer believed in the Living Air. But this priest tells me a story I have not heard about a dark force to counter the life-giving one.”
“The spikes there, I assume.”
She tipped her head in the Chatcaavan nod. “Yes.”
“And this surprises you?”
“Yes. Because in this story, it is the dark gods that gave us the gifts that allowed us to defend ourselves.”
Qora’s brow ridges rose.
“Yes,” she said. “I will speak more with this priest. If you grow restless, I will see you back at the palace.”
* * *
It was not until sunset that he saw her again, when she came to the rooms allotted him. “I have arranged your transport,” she said without preamble. “It will arrive in another week—”
“Another week!”
“Or so,” she finished. “It cannot be helped. Some negotiation was required between three separate nations.”
“All I need is a seat on a vessel heading into the Alliance,” Qora protested.
“You will have one.” She settled onto one of the cushioned footstools, her robes hissing against the stone floor. “Do your people have an evil god?”
“What?” He pulled his thoughts away from his dismay. “An evil god? Why would we? There is only Faulza.” He stopped himself in time from blurting that all the evil the Faulfenza had need of was supplied by the Others. He forced himself to concentrate on her, because the feeling that he was where he should be persisted. “Do you believe in a dark god? Do you believe in any? You have not said.”
“No, I haven’t, have I?” Her eyes wandered to the sky, to the ruddy light spilling over the lip of the balcony. It was truly a tremendous sunset, and the balcony was wide enough to show a great deal of it. “When I think of all I have been through… of all I have survived and done… it feels unlikely to me that a benevolent force was not interceding. Is that belief, or is belief more definitive?”
“I don’t know how belief works for Others,” Qora said. “Your gods, if you have them, don’t appear to have as personal a relationship with you.”
“Does your God, then? Make it unmistakable?”
“Yes?”
“How strange that must be,” the Queen murmured. “You say so and I believe you, and yet I cannot imagine it.” She tossed her mane, a little twitch of her head, as if to shake loose uncomfortable thoughts. “It is easier somehow to believe in a malignant force than a beneficent one.”
“The Dying Air,” Qora said.
“No. No, that is what I have heard it called on the breath of lords in the palace. But it is not what the priest called it. It is gekekim, not buutim, Qora. The Killing Wind. The Killing Wind taught us to change shape, to steal the weapons of other creatures and turn them on those creatures, and one another.”
An ugly inversion of the Faulfenzair myth, where the God gave the MindFire so that the Faulfenza could live when set upon by monsters. “Do you believe it?”
“How could I when even the priests disagree?” She sighed. “I asked those who came to me from the birthworld and the Twelveworld and they do not believe in a Dying Air or a Killing Wind. One of them told me such teachings were heresies… a story we told ourselves to excuse our worst impulses. Perhaps that is all the Chatcaavan religion is… a group of stories we use to shape our behaviors, the way we shape our bodies.”
“A grim view,” Qora couldn’t help saying.
“Maybe. But all civilizations need stories that teach them how to behave, don’t they?” She smiled at him, rueful. “To you I confess that I am the head of a religion without knowing if I believe. Not truly. Some days I do, but most days it seems very distant from the work that needs to be done. Do you find it repugnant?”
“I find it alien,” Qora said, “and since it was to embrace the alien that I came to this world, I cannot find it repugnant.”
But he wondered later, sitting on one of the dragon’s round beds and staring at the flecks of stars in the soft black sky, if he did. If the faithlessness of the Others distressed him, or worse, that they might have gods, and those gods wicked ones. Faulza had intended them to go into the galaxy and meet the Others there, to join with them to bring about the Golden Age. He remembered long conversations with Daize, when they were students on the Hearth, wondering why the God had not made that task easier or more palatable. They’d also wondered if being among the Others would make Faulza’s plan clearer.
Well, he had gone among the Others and seen their evil, and the only thing that had made it bearable was the friendship of Others who’d suffered with him. What did that mean? And why was he still exactly where he should be?
One more week. He could survive one more week.