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“I know,” Be
Pa’Dar’s stout face quirked in the begi
Be
“Oralius asks us to find paths for all the life we encounter on our journeys.” Be
“The power that moves through me, animates my life, animates the mask of Oralius. To speak her words with my voice, to think her thoughts with my mind, to feel her love with my heart. It is the song of morning, opening up to life, bringing the truth of her wisdom to those who live in the shadow of the night.” The phrases that fell from the mask’s unmoving lips had the steady pace of a reading performed hundreds of times, words known so well to the priest that he could speak them with perfect recall.
“It is this selfsame power, turned against creation, turned against my friend, that can destroy his body with my hand, reduce his spirit with my hate, separate his presence from my home.” The static aspect bobbed as Be
And this is the Oralian Way?Dukat asked himself. Is this all that they are, speakers of chants and rituals?He studied Be
The priest returned his precious mask to its bag, utterly unaware of Dukat’s train of thought. “You have never seen a recitation before?”
“It was quite…diverting.”
For the first time, Dukat saw something like intelligence behind the cleric’s eyes. “I fear you may be patronizing me, Dalin.”
“A fool is condescending to something he does not understand. I belittle only those whom I know to deserve it.”
“And what do you know of the Oralian Way?”
Dukat folded his arms, countering the question with one of his own. “What was the purpose of that ritual? Do you think the Bajorans will thank you for it? Perhaps they may even be angered by your actions, if their dogma calls for some other pattern of behavior.” He nodded to the bodies. “If this were a Bajoran ship and those were Cardassian dead, you would be dishonoring the deceased by speaking over their remains.”
“Oralius sees only life,” Be
“That’s no answer,” Dukat replied. “Come, Be
And there in Be
At once Dukat saw the passion behind the words. Such a bearing he had often seen before, on the faces of his own men as they went into battle, in the eyes of the heartless tools of the Obsidian Order as they went about their grisly business; and there, in Be
“I see,” he said carefully.
“Do you?” Be
Dukat raised an eyebrow at the temerity in the priest’s tone; but any rejoinder he might have given was forgotten as Kornaire’s shipboard communications cha
“All division leaders and senior officers to operational alert stations,”said the terse female voice of the ship’s computer.
“Arrival in the Bajor system in eleven metrics, mark.”
Lo
From inside she heard an a
She ran an ebony hand over her scalp, the close-cut fuzz of her hair tickling her palm, and then she pushed open the heavy nyawood door and went inside.
Jas Holza was shrugging on a jacket and trying to hold on to a glass of water with his free hand. The minister’s prematurely lined face was flushed with effort, his thi
“What do you want?” he spat, and she knew it was bad. It took a lot to push Jas Holza into a bad mood, but when it did the storm that came after lasted for days. Lo
Beyond the narrow, tall windows of his chambers, the citadel gave him an unparalleled view of Korto’s cityscape on the river plain below. The keep had been the ancestral home of the Jas clan since Bajor’s Age of Enlightenment, and the minister’s D’jarraensured that it was his family who had held on to the reins of one of the most fertile and productive districts in all of Kendra Province. But owning land was not the same as managing land, and Jas had less of the required skill that his forefathers had shown.