“To what do I owe the honor?” Temoc asked after the ceremony. The sacrifice’s friends helped him, staggering, sobbing, off to breakfast. The congregation bled out into the crowd. Elayne listened to their chatter: the word “Craftswoman” featured often.
“Can’t you guess?” Elayne said.
“You might have heard about my work here. Come to see what I’ve done with my life, or even to join us. Wishful thinking, I suppose.”
“Yes,” she said. And: “How did you convince your gods to accept a mock sacrifice?”
“With difficulty. Most refuse. The great Lords and Ladies are dead, and the hungriest of those who survive, sleep. A few lesser corn gods and household spirits join us, though to them the bloodless rite feels like drinking from a dirty sponge. But it’s this or nothing, for all of us.”
“Must be hard.”
He knelt behind the altar, and from the empty space beneath removed a towel with which he wiped himself down, and a white shirt he buttoned across his chest. “Our ways will not survive unchanged. The old sacrifice bound my people together. The celebrant whose heart we drew participated in godhood. Here, the celebrant acts out the sacrifice, and through that enters the community of gods. But he cannot stay—he must return bearing knowledge of what it is to die. Deeds once done are done forever. I’ve taught this to men and gods for twenty years. Someday they’ll listen.” The small buttons slipped under his thick fingers, and his muscles strained against the fabric. His hands did not shake. They never had, not down all the years she’d known him. Clean living, he’d said decades before, when she asked his secret. They had both been younger then.
He still looked young. And foolish, in that white shirt. Someone had tried to tailor it to his figure, and succeeded only in demonstrating the impossibility of their enterprise.
Chel remained, watching them across the grass mats. Temoc beckoned, and she approached. “Thank you,” Temoc said, “for escorting my friend.”
“She attacked you.”
“She thought I was about to kill that man. In her position, would you have done differently?”
Chel’s jaw tightened, and so did her eyes. Elayne sympathized: Chel had exposed herself to bring Elayne through the barricade, realized she had made a mistake, and was now being told her mistake was no mistake at all. She felt she’d failed on all counts. “No,” she said at last. “She says she’s from the King in Red.”
“And you brought her to me.”
“Would you rather I have brought her to the Major?”
Temoc laughed, a deep, echoing sound. “Come,” he said. “The ceremony gives me a little power, and I must use it. Walk with me.”
* * *
“So what brings you to this mob?” Elayne asked as they walked.
They moved among tents and throngs of protesters, some sleeping, some eating breakfast, some singing. A group of mostly men performed a martial exercise. Fathers cradled children. The place should have stunk but didn’t, thanks to neon-colored alchemical toilets and—Elayne was shocked to note—to her own nostalgia. Odors of charcoal and desperation, sweat and hope, dirt and canvas and fear, evoked her youth, and the Wars, and not all those memories were bad. The camps were fun, for the most part. Pranks and drugs and sex and music and black magic relieved the tension of the battlefield.
“They’re not a mob. They live here. They’re trying to protect their homes.”
“Against me.”
“I hope not,” he said. “You have to understand—Tan Batac and his partners live uptown. They want change for their own sakes. The people in this camp are fighting for their lives.”
“And for the return of the old order, with you in charge?”
“I’m a priest, not a king.”
“This city’s never seen much difference between the two.”
“But the Wars are over,” he said. “Especially in the Skittersill.”
“You’re still here, and so am I.”
“Your side won, in case you didn’t notice.” A woman waved to him and he waved back. “My king fell, and my gods are dead. I would have died with them, if not for you.”
“I’m sorry I interrupted your … show,” she said. There were other words for what she’d seen, but she could not use them. Especially not now the sun had risen and its clear morning light replaced the half-formed world in which she’d seen a man sacrificed who did not die.
“No trouble. Have you ever noticed that the followers of Glebland mystics rarely write about their teachers’ normal days? They prefer to speak of interruption. For each surviving sermon there are ten tales of blind men who thrust themselves into private conferences, leprous mothers who tackle sages in the street, cripples whose friends lower them through the skylights of houses where masters sleep. You can trace the death of a faith by its decreasing tolerance of such interruption.”
“So you’re a prophet now?”
He laughed. “I am trying to be a good man. Or at least better than I was before.”
As they walked she overheard snatches of fierce argument:
“—not as individuals, but as members of a class—”
“—a seed isn’t insignificant—”
“—Any more wine?”
“Systems are like magicians, when they claim to be honest with you’s when you need to watch them—”
“How’s Food Com? Any word on stock after the fire, that’s all, need to know if I should run out and get my own—”
“Where’d you find that coffee?”
“—Sleight of hand, that’s all, sleight of—”
“—More to a city than just lying to people—”
But as they approached, the speakers saw Temoc and fell silent. The tremors of the priest’s footfalls shook them from one record groove to the next. As a Craftswoman, as a partner in a large firm, Elayne was used to spreading fear. This was different. Fear was only a piece of it.
Wherever he went, Temoc bore a piece of his sunrise sacrament.
A young couple approached Temoc, cautious, escorting their five-year-old son. The boy’s chest rattled when he breathed; when he saw Temoc he curled into a ball and began to cry and cough. The cough started last night, his mother said.
Temoc touched the child over his heart. The scars on his arm glowed green. A piece of the power he’d gathered at sunrise, the strength the godlings gave him, flowed into the boy and made him whole.
Simple trick. Medical Craft could accomplish as much with as little trouble. But there was no doctor here, and Elayne doubted a doctor would have received such tearful thanks.
“Chel mentioned a Major,” she said when they left the couple and their laughing boy behind. “A rival leader?”
“I am not a leader, and so I have no rivals. But not everyone in this camp thinks peaceful protest is the best road. Some feel this crowd should be the core of a new army. Most of those have never fought a war, you understand.”
“What about you? Do you want peace?”
“I want to help people,” he said.
“So do I.”
But before he could respond, a group of camo-clad men and women had a question about the distribution of supplies. After came a young man with a broken arm. Temoc ran his hand over the wound, smoothing the bone whole. Elayne watched. What the others made of her presence, she could guess: outsider who did not comprehend their ways, servant of the dark powers arrayed against them.
Fair.
Temoc slowed. He gave more thought to the decisions put before him, and grew more careful with the healing he offered. The power of the morning ceremony ebbed. Mock sacrifices, it seemed, did not impart as much glory to Temoc’s gods as the blood-gushing kind.
A cluster of youths dressed in dust and ripped denim bore a stretcher to Temoc, and upon the stretcher lay a girl. Fallen in a dance, they said. She breathed, her heart beat, but she could not speak, or even move save when convulsions wracked her.
They set her at Temoc’s feet, and Temoc looked down. Elayne recognized his fear only because she’d seen it before, in battle. He doubted he could heal this girl, and he did not want to try and fail. Beneath that doubt she saw anger, too: at his own hesitation, at her friends for not bringing her earlier, at the girl for falling, at Elayne for standing witness.
So it may have been sympathy that made her say, “I’ll do it.”
Elayne approached, but the dancers clustered around their fallen friend like dogs at bay. They said nothing, but she saw witch in the set of that young woman’s jaw, and that boy’s white-knuckled grip on the fallen girl’s arm. Of course she seemed an enemy, briefcase-bearing, pinstripe-clad, shod in patent leather: portrait of a monster in her early fifties.
The girl trembled.
“Please,” Elayne said. “I can help.”
The dancers did not move.
“Let her,” Temoc said.
They drew back, a knotted muscle unclenching.
Elayne knelt by the stretcher. Lines of time clung to her as spiderwebs—the moment thick with hagiography, each observer trapping Elayne and Temoc and the girl in a tale. Forget history, though. Forget politics, and focus on the patient.
Elayne closed her eyes.
A good doctor could describe the girl’s ailment with a glance at the tangle of her being. A good doctor could fix her problem permanently, or recommend preventative drugs and exercises.
All Elayne could do was reach inside the girl’s head with fingers finer than the edge of broken glass, grasp the snarled threads within, and restore them to their proper course.
Which looked impressive enough.
She opened her eyes. The sun had gained the high ground against the earth. The girl breathed deep. Her pupils dilated. She squinted against the light, and spoke. “I see.” She did not say what she saw. Her friends embraced her.
Elayne shook with the cold her Craft left behind. Temoc offered her a hand up. For the second time that day she accepted, and for the first she did not begrudge the offer.
“Thank you,” he said when they found a private space in the crowd. “For her.”
She didn’t reply at first. She’d come here to find evidence of inconsistence, weaknesses to exploit. She remembered the dancers’ fear, and the sacrifice weeping, and sour breath through a reed and the tarry stink of hunters’ torch-smoke. She wasn’t sure how to say, you’re welcome.
A cry interrupted her search for the proper words. “Temoc!” Chel’s voice: the woman came running. “There’s trouble.”