Courtship Rite

“Please,” said Yar, tugging at her mistress.

Kathein considered. She sighed. So it had come. Now there was no way she could receive Hoemei, bless the God of the Sky for this interference. She took herself slowly down to the kitchen, waddling, Yar helping her on the stairs. “Get Reimone. Send him for a palanquin. Have the Ivieth bring it up the Bluethorn. I’ll meet them on the road.”

“You should stay here! The midwife can come here!”

“Child,” she said with a

Yar looked at her, appalled, then rushed away. Kathein collected a sack of water, some food, some fla

“May God be overhead at the first cry of the birth!” said Yar as her mistress disappeared down the road in a light that was already dusk.

When the two Ivieth porters arrived at their destination, Geta’s brightest stars, Stgi and Toe, were rising and Kathein, gripping the poles of her decorated chair, had completed another series of contractions. Bioluminous globes glowed in the windows of the unbroken ring of buildings that surrounded the sacred hill. In some windows, lamps flickered. Trembling, she wasn’t sure she could walk, but her body, inured to obedience, followed her will. She rose from the chair and lifted the strap of her burden to her forehead and dismissed the huge Ivieth bearers with a coin.

Only when Kathein was alone again did she find strength to approach the pointed arch that was a gateway through the wall of houses circling the hill. Once she had passed through the perimeter there was no light and no life save for the stars and the odd flying glowsting. The City of Kaiel-hontokae had abruptly disappeared.

She was unafraid. She knew the catacombs of the Graves of the Losers by heart and did not quail at their evil reputation. In some way they were her life’s work for the sacred instrument that occupied her obsessively had been found sealed into these walls with the crystal that she had always believed somehow held the secret of the Voice of God.

There were four oval entrances to the catacombs themselves, and one jagged hole where a tu

God rose over the wall to the south while she moaned, and she watched Him between gasps, the sight of Him streaking across His Sky stirring her with the awe that Getans had always felt in the presence of their God. Her contractions became more prolonged, relinquishing only as He set in the west beside the dark but thinly crescented Scowlmoon.

Kathein lit her torch. She had to hurry. She forced her cumbersome body down through the macabre tu

The Chants spoke of riches here, of metal coffins, and fine machines, but looters had long since stripped away whatever the rooms had held. Later clans had etched designs upon the walls and built crude chapels. Long before written history a children’s temple had existed on the lowest level, sorting kalothi and supplying a local village with meat and bone and leather and perhaps sacred relics. No place was farther from modern man; no place was closer to God. Here the Race had failed and here the Race would rise again.

So it had been prophesied.

Eventually Kathein could bear the pain no longer and selected an arched room at a level one stairwell higher than the low dungeon she had hoped to reach. Dank water seeped from cracks in the stone. She laid out her mat upon the floor. The torch flickered, relit, and died. She screamed her long breaths in the darkness in tune with the contractions until she had taken the child from herself, holding him, Joesai’s child.

Fingers crept along the floor, patting for the knife. She cut the umbilical cord in the dark. Still in the dark, she thanked the sky-spark that was God and held the bloody infant to her breast, warming his fury, while she recovered her strength. Only following the afterbirth did her unsteady hands light another torch. Monsters carved into the walls balefully bared flickering fangs at mado

Carefully she swaddled the baby in soft long strips of fla

14

Do not force upon others your forebearance toward the weak but do speak bravely. There will be times when brave-ness is stylish and there will be times when only the brave will dare braveness.

MEN WERE OUTSIDE, guarding the modest house that stood on the highlands overlooking Sorrow’s Temple in an area of difficult streets and stairways and cobblestoned back alleys. Apparently there was no front entrance and so the boy took Teenae to Oelita via the back, down stone stairs to a room that faced the sea through leaded windowpanes of bubbly green glass. The shy guide did not know how to make introductions; he just stood by awkwardly. Oelita was standing. Her eyes met Teenae with such open clarity that Teenae feared she knew everything and that this was a trap. Those wounded wrists!

“Where did you get such a beautiful gown?” she blurted to hide her fear.

“A friend. The oz’Numae weave them in one piece. My friend tells me that the oz’Numae are a small clan who live on the islands of the Drowned Hope Sea.”

“Then it indeed comes from afar! Where Scowlmoon is on the eastern horizon! A long overland trip!”

“You are a stranger to Sorrow,” said Oelita. “You’ve come from afar yourself.”

“Who on Geta is a stranger to sorrow? Really, you’re not a stranger to me. I read your Sayings of a Rule Breaker long ago,” she lied.

“Zeilar gom-n’Orap tells me you wish to publish a small edition of that book.”

Ah, thought Teenae listening to the eagerness of her voice. I’ve chosen the right snare. She reached into a pocket and brought out a fine book on kolgame strategy printed in Kaiel-hontokae. Bait. “This is an example of our craftsmanship.”

“Beautiful,” said Oelita enviously, turning the pages, fingering the needlework of the binding. There was no paper like this among the Stgal, nor was the printing here as crisp.