Afterward he scarcely remembered what she had said. There had been something in it of love and something of righteousness. She had spoken of being misled. Of a conspiracy to keep the Protector of Man unmindful of the evil that flew upon the winds of the world. She spoke of the worker pits and of the great lie of Sorting Out. She told them truth, that the true Sorting took place in another realm, beyond the world, and what happened in this world was a blasphemy. She called the fliers Servants, not of Abricor, but of their own pride. She said all that, over and over, in different words, making them laugh and weep and cry out. Someone called to her, asking how she knew these things, and she said her voices had told her to stand before them and tell the truth, at which many had shouted out they would follow her in the telling.
“Crusade,” she cried. “Let all who can, join me in crusade. We will carry the word of this injustice around the world. And when we go to free the Protector of Man from those who hold him in ignorance, we will be many, a multitude, a great tide to sweep away the evil of the world.” Lila lay in her arms as she said this, looking out at the crowd with great, wide eyes, reaching out her baby arms toward them all.
The strange little man who had first hailed her called out again, “The Mother of Truth,” and others echoed these words. His face and theirs were shining with devotion.
Thrasne thrilled to her voice, as did everyone within sound of it. He could not stop himself. His flesh responded even when he told himself it was all foolishness. There were others there, Awakeners among them. They, too, looking at her with an expression of alert surprise and wonderment, nodding their heads as though she had been Viranel herself.
Not Viranel. No. Viranel’s face carved on the wall behind Pamra was only an image, crude and somehow horribly inhuman. One could not worship a god that was a stranger. Not Viranel. Something finer than that. Holier than that.
And even then, he wanted her still. The impossibility of that wanting struck him like a blow, and he leaned forward on his knees and wept as Medoor Babji regarded him thoughtfully, fingering in her deep pocket the message she had received.
And Peasimy crouched at Pamra’s feet as she went on teaching, lit from within as though by flame. He crouched there, cheeks red with the fire of her talk, eyes burning also, all of him lit up as if from within by that hot, plasmic vapor, as though he were liquid, without form except as her words gave him form and meaning, shaped by her with that shape crystallizing in every instant to something more refined, simpler, with keener edges and corners to it. “Light comes,” he murmured to himself, a litany, an obligatto to her speech. “Light comes, light comes.”
But then, his eyes lighting upon the tall, dark-cloaked Jondantes, who made a shadowy enclosure about the sanctuary, unable in their uncommanded state either to attend to what Pamra was saying or prevent her from speaking, held in abeyance as the dammed River holds itself, full of force and power that-is for the moment unused, not out of conviction but out of simple inability to act-seeing these, their high-plumed helmets nodding as they craned their necks to observe all who came into that throng, Peasimy spoke again.
“But first, night comes. Night comes.”
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The story of Pamra Don, Thrasne, and Medoor Babji is concluded in South shore: The Awakeners, Volume II.
*SIGNIFICANT INDIVIDUAL PEOPLE
Binna: One of the Treeci on Strinder’s Isle. Blint: Owner of the Riverboat the Gift of Potipur.
Bormas Tyle Chancery official, Deputy Enforcer to Tharius Don, conspirator with Shavian Bossit.
Delia: Nanny to Pamra Don, called Saint Delia by the townsfolk of Baris.
Drowned Woman, the: The drowned wife of Fulder Don, taken from the River in a blighted state and kept by Thrasne.
Ezasper Jorn: Ambassador to the Thraish; member of the Council of Seven in the Chancery. Conspirator with Koma Nepor.