Trembling, but unable to resist the need, he risked a hasty glance. The Keeper was a tall, spare shape, muffled in a dark cloak and hood. She seemed to be leaning on a staff, but he could make out nothing more. He looked down again quickly, at the dusty, uneven pavement, so comfortingly solid and prosaic. Tonight he would tell Jool that he had met the Keeper!
She spoke again. “Raim, you are junior. Can you advise your older brothers and sisters how they blundered?”
“No, Holy Lady.” Raim’s voice was much less arrogant than it had been earlier. “Enlighten us.”
“You trespassed beyond the limits the Gods set for Keef, my children,” said the Keeper’s sad whisper. “You broke her word. You offended grievously against the Good.”
“There are many precedents!” Raim protested, his voice quavering.
The Keeper sighed. “Not thus. Analyst Jain, when you instructed the candidate to come to the College, did you specifically warn her that she must not fall in love?”
Jain did try to answer. The answer roared in his head: Not specifically. His tongue was paralyzed, no sound emerged—but that would not matter.
“Archivist Mearn,” the Keeper persisted, “you slew the man.”
Mearn screamed. “There are precedents!”
“But the babe? There are no precedents for that! Why did you not find a haven for the babe?”
“I was obeying orders!”
“The fault was mine, Holy One,” said a new voice, a woman’s. One of the cowls sank forward to touch the floor. “I feared the Chosen One’s future power, thinking she would be able to seek out the child wherever it might be hid. I was overzealous. Destroy me.”
“It will not suffice, Sheef. If you seek to accept the guilt of ten, you must offer more.”
Somebody whimpered, but it did not seem to be the Sheef woman.
After a moment, Sheef spoke again. “Pronounce anathema upon me, as Deel did upon Theur. Expel me to the Outside, to wander there a hundred years among the demons, without power and without speech, in the guise of a gnome.”
“That may still not be enough.”
The woman moaned. “It is too much!”
“Does my suffering mean nothing to you?” the Keeper asked. ”Will you bring destruction upon us all?”
Sheef screamed. “Then two hundred years, and let me also be cursed with all manner of ill fortune and fated to a foul and painful death!”
After a moment the Keeper said softly, “It may serve. So be it.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Jain registered that there were now but seven archons. The gap where the eighth had knelt was marked by an empty cloak. He clenched his teeth and tensed his limbs, yet still he shivered. He, too, had only obeyed orders! He had not known of the killings!
The Keeper paused as if to give the others time to reflect on the fate of their missing sister. At last the insectile voice began again, dripping words into the silence as water might drip into an ocean of dust.
“You sinned against an innocent girl, against her lover and newborn child. You will be fortunate indeed if Sheef’s penalty assuages the anger of the Gods. In Their pity They gave the girl a hint of what she has lost. Do you understand what she did with that hint?”
After a moment Raim’s voice spoke uncertainly. “She did nothing except go to the young man Mist and copulate with him.”
“She made sacrifice!” the Keeper snapped, shattering the stillness. Suddenly the Chapel seemed to come alive, as if starting awake from its sleep of centuries. The dread voice rolled around the great building. ”She sacrificed herself to the God of Love! She gave her body to a man for the love of another! Fools! Now do you understand?” Her words echoed and echoed in the shadows, finally whispering back faintly from the roof as they died away.
All the cowls tipped forward to touch the floor. Mearn doubled herself over, also, but Jain remained as he was, sitting back on his heels, paralyzed. He stared in rank despair at the edge of the age-old ice over the tomb of Keef. The magnitude of the danger appalled him. Thume’s whole existence depended on the Gods’ sufferance, the concessions that Keef had won when she sacrificed her lover. He had seen the Thaile girl as foolish and ignorant and of no importance, and she had won a God to her side. She had given her body to a man for the love of another, and the gods had accepted that offering!
He was ruined! They all were!
The Keeper’s voice returned to its resigned whisper, sounding as ancient as the Chapel itself, crushed with an unbearable burden of care. “It was the God of Love who restored her memory. Be grateful They have yet done no more! Hope They will not! It is the millennium prophesied. The Promised One has come and you have blundered.”
In the long silence that followed, Jain heard some of the archons weeping. He knew nothing of millennia or Promised Ones, which must be lore restricted to the archons, but he could see that he had perhaps been guilty of some errors of judgment, due to his inexperience. He would certainly try harder in future. He would promise faithfully.
At last one of the archons said, “Holy One, what must we do?”
Again the heartbreaking sigh, the hopeless whisper. “Do nothing. If the child suffers more she may yet be taken from us, and she is your only hope. She must give up the man voluntarily, or you are all as doomed as I. Let her be, return to your posts. I shall go and plead with her myself.”
The audience seemed to be over. Jain relaxed with a gasp of relief.
The archons had gone. He and Mearn were alone with the Keeper.
“As for you two!” The Keeper’s voice burned with contempt and was terrifyingly closer. “You are a disgrace to your training. Look what you have wrought!”
Again Mearn screamed. “Did not Archon Sheef accept our guilt?”
“In the killings, yes. But you have abused your powers and betrayed my trust. You seek to compel what can only be earned, you apply contempt in lieu of affection. Mankin, did you truly expect to win the child’s loyalty by torturing her father, or bribing her with things she did not want or even understand? Woman, do you expect your sneers to inspire endeavor? I strip you both of all occult power and banish you from the College forever. Live henceforth as the animals you are! Begone!”
5
Late in the afternoon, Thaile awoke from a doze feeling restored and strengthened. Her hunger pangs had gone. She was familiar enough with sorcery now to recognize its effects and could guess at the meaning. She did not believe she had won. More likely her rebellion was just not going to be tolerated any longer.
She peered out a window. The forest glade was bright with thin sunshine and apparently deserted, but common sense suggested she would have visitors shortly. She treated herself to a hasty dip in the magical hot water of the bathtub, then dressed in a soft green gown and brushed her hair. She took a chair out to the porch and sat down to wait.
Shadows lay long upon the grass and the western clouds were flushing. In a few minutes she observed a tall figure coming through the trees, walking slowly along the Way. It was the apparition she had met on the mountain path. It bore a long staff, although its gait seemed steady enough. Measuring its approach by her own rising fear, she watched until it came to a halt before the steps. Even then, nothing of the person within the dark cloak was visible—the cowl cast an unnaturally dark shadow over the face, and the hand holding the staff was concealed by the edge of the sleeveyet somehow she knew it to be a very old woman.
Thaile could remember strangers calling at the Gaib Place. The visitor would speak first, giving his name and home, then her father would bid him welcome and offer hospitality. But this was no ordinary visitor, and the cottage was the Thaile Place only because it had been given to her by the College—and thus by this very visitor, if it was who she thought it was. And she had no food to offer.
She slid off the chair to her knees and bowed her head. The stranger made a little sighing noise, as if approving. A board creaked as she stepped up on the porch. She dragged the chair back a couple of paces and sat down.
For about a dozen heartbeats there was silence, and then the visitor spoke in that same ancient whisper Thaile had heard in the night. “What lies Outside?”
It was the start of the catechism, and it flooded Thaile’s mind with innumerable memories of childhood, of herself standing before her father with Feen and Sheel, learning and repeating the sacred words. She responded automatically. “Death and torture and slavery.”