“A special diet?” He thought about this before answering. “When we’re through with the workers, we drop them in the bone pits and the Servants of Abricor eat them. We all know that. No one cares. What do the Talkers eat?”
“Our flesh is poisonous to the flier people, Ilze. In time you would have studied our history, how we came to this world to find the Servants already here; how they grew monstrously in number until the world could not feed them, until the herds of thrassil and weehar were gone; how they hunted us, only to find us poisonous. You would have read of Thoulia, one of their Talkers. Thoulia the Marvelous. It was Thoulia, who showed them how to soften our flesh with the Tears of Viranel, and it was then the wars began in earnest between our two races. We killed them by the hundreds, Ilze, and they killed us, until there were few of them left and not many more of us. Until the treaty was made at last which allowed them to take our dead …
“Our dead are what they eat. Do you see why they fear the Rivermen so?”
He did not see. He could not see because of his anger. He did not realize she had not answered his question.
She went on, voice calm, willing him to listen and understand. “If the cult of the Rivermen were to prevail, the fliers would die. All the Talkers. All the Servants. They would starve. There would be nothing for them to eat.”
Gradually he perceived the implications of this, implications so enormous he could not face them. All the philosophy, the theology, all his studies oh, one knew there were evasions, one knew there were euphemisms employed, but still. Basically, one believed. Every senior Awakener knew that all the dead go into the worker pits except the Awakeners themselves. Even knowing this, still, still one believed. One understood the need for a pious mythology to keep the ordinary people quiet, but that did not nullify the essential truth. Senior Awakeners knew that truth. They had been accepted as the elect of Potipur. Common people, common people had to be led, instructed, used, then purified through that final agony. It was not Holy Sorters who put the sainted dead in Potipur’s arms, it was the Servants of Abricor who carried their souls to Potipur. The common folk could not expect a fleshy resurrection, but that did not affect the spiritual one. But for Awakeners-for Awakeners it was a real immortality. In the body. It was the Servants of Abricor who carried the bodies of dead Awakeners directly to …
The thought stopped, blocked, destroyed by what she had been saying. Obviously this was not true. Obviously.
“What happens to us, to the Awakeners?” he snarled at her, his fingers digging deeply into her arm. “If the Servants don’t carry our bodies directly to Potipur, what really happens to us?” He hated himself for asking the question, sure she was laughing at him as he had always laughed at Pamra.
“If we are not clever and if our colleagues detest us sufficiently to take vengeance, we go into the pits with common folk,” she said haughtily, ignoring his grasp. “With our hair rebraided to make us look like merchants or carpenters. In this way the myth is kept alive that no dead Awakener is ever seen in a worker pit.
“If we are more clever, or less disliked, we are burned to ashes at one of the crematories of the order. There is one here, at Highstone Lees. And if we are very clever, if we do our jobs well and cause no trouble to the Chancery or the Talkers, we are given the Sacred Payment. We are given what the treaty requires we be given, the elixir. If we receive that gift, we live a long, long time. Hundreds and hundreds of years. So be clever, Dze. Let go of me.”
He let go of her, let go of her entirely, left her, did not try to speak with her after that. He had seen angry laughter in her face, bitter amusement. It was not unlike the amusement he had hidden so often from Pamra. The lady Kesseret thought him funny. Because he had believed. He burned with savage, humiliated shame at this. Because he had believed!