by S. D. Tower
Still gawking at the heights above, we rode through the gate into a courtyard. It was a paved oblong with stables, a vegetable garden, a small orchard, and the building that formed the sanctuary’s bottom level. This had a single door lacquered in red, with doorposts and arch carved most whimsically with birds, tortoises, and fish. Several windows looked into the courtyard, but their lattices prevented me from seeing if anyone was watching us.
We dismounted and unloaded our satchels. Our escort took our horses and the baggage animals away to the stables.
“Where is everybody?” I said.
“At their prayers, of course,” Dilara answered grumpily, although I couldn’t hear any singing. “Just like we’re going to have to do.” She glanced up at the courtyard’s outer wall. “But there should be guards, shouldn’t there? There must be somebody to keep off robbers.”
“Maybe the Moon Lady does it,” I suggested. Even in these dangerous times it was a rare bandit who would attack a shrine of the Beneficent Ones, and it was particularly foolish to offend the Moon Lady. You might find yourself facing the Moonlight Girl, whose mere touch could bring despair, madness, and self-murder.
“Maybe,” Dilara agreed doubtfully “But—”
The door opened and a woman came out. It was Tossi. She’d changed in the six years since I’d last seen her, but I’d still have known her anywhere. She’d cut her flowing brown hair short and had become leaner, but the leanness only made her huge dark eyes more striking, and it had refined her oval face into a grave loveliness. An air of authority hung about her, as if she had become used to giving orders. A life of devotion clearly suited her.
I bowed and said, “Mistress Tossi, Mother sends her greetings and hopes that you and everyone here are well.” She smiled, which she had almost never done when I knew her at Repose. “We’re very well,” she said, looking us up and down. “You’ve changed, Lale. You, too, Dilara. Not girls anymore but women. And very lovely ones.”
This was so unlike her I blinked in surprise and blinked again when she said, “Mother has given me the charge of Three Springs, but we’re all sisters here, so you must call me Tossi, or Sister Tossi. Agreed?”
“Of course,” I said, wondering if life at Three Springs might not, perhaps, be as awful as I’d feared.
“Come with me now,” she said, “and we’ll go and meet the others. They’re all expecting you.”
I settled my satchel strap more comfortably on my shoulder as Tossi led us inside. Dimness enveloped us; we were in a small bare anteroom decorated with faded murals of hunting scenes. A masonry staircase ascended at the far end.
“This is the stair to the Second Terrace,” Tossi said as we began to climb. “We keep supplies and such down on the Lower Terrace, and the kitchens and baths are on the Second. The Second is where we eat, too. The Third Terrace is where you’ll be taking your lessons. We sleep on the Fourth Terrace, by the top of the waterfall. It’s very lovely up there.” “Lessons?” I asked. Were we going to have to study theology? My spirits sagged, for I’d hoped to be done with school. I could only imagine what Dilara must be thinking.
“Oh, yes. You have much to learn. But we’ll discuss that later.”
“How many girls are here now?” Dilara asked.
“Let me see. With you, it’s eleven students, plus me.”
We reached the top of the stairs and entered a large room containing dining tables and stools. The window lattices were open and admitted a warm breeze scented with mountain camellia and cedar. Here, the wall frescoes, faded to soft pastels, portrayed men and women at a banquet, and thanks to the Arts Tutoress I recognized the paintings as dating from the later empire. Their formal simplicity and cool colors were quite different from our modem preference for lavish detail and vivid hues.
“This is the refectory,” Tossi said, as we passed through it to enter a corridor on its far side. I smelled fried peppers, hot oil, and stewed fowl, and realized I was famished. Through an archway was a long kitchen with iron pots and griddles on a tiled stove set into the wall under a chimneypiece. Nobody was there, but a door in the far wall stood open and through it I glimpsed the green of a small herb garden.
“Supper’s on its way, as you can tell,” Tossi said as we gazed hungrily at the gently steaming pots. “Neclan and Gethriya are cooking it. We all take tums.”
A dark-skinned Erallu man came into the kitchen from die herb garden. I assumed he was a servant, but then Tossi said, “Sisters, be pleased to greet the head instmctor at Three Springs. His name is Master Aa. Master Aa, these are our new students, Lale and Dilara.”
Less and less of this made sense, including Master Aa himself. I’d never heard such a name, and a closer look told me why. He was not an Erallu as I’d thought, but a real foreigner, clean shaven, with a flat bony face and very small ears. His tunic left his arms bare; they were as thin as the rest of him, but whips of muscle glided under the dark skin. And his eyes were sky blue, like Nilang’s.
He presented us with the half bow of a teacher to a pupil.
In retum Dilara and I gave him a full bow, and I said, “We’re very honored to meet you. Master Aa.”
“I look forward to our useful relationship,” he answered. “It will be a labor of privilege to instruct you.” He had a very strong accent and a quirk of using Durdana words in a way that was almost, but not quite, exact. Still, I found him easy enough to understand.
But instruct us in what? I asked myself.
Tossi didn’t explain but led us onward past an archway closed by a heavy door. She gestured at it and said, “The baths are in there. All our water comes from the falls—there are pipes from the old days and they still work, so we’ve got it on all four levels and we don’t have to carry it.”
Running water! Even in Repose we hadn’t had such luxury. There were basins and pipes in the palace, but they hadn’t worked since the Year of the Five Emperors, when somebody’s army wrecked the aqueduct that brought water to Chiran. No one had ever rebuilt the aqueduct, so Repose used wells and the townspeople purchased water from water carts, or lugged it up from the river if they were poor. And as in most other cities, the public baths of Chiran had been closed for a long time.
But life seemed better organized at Three Springs. My spirits rose a little, then sank again as I remembered I was going back to school. But what under heaven would someone like Master Aa teach us?
“Up, again,” Tossi said and we began to climb another staircase. From above I heard a sudden burst of women’s voices and felt a stab of anticipation.
The staircase took us up to a pillared porch. We emerged into it like the three daughters of the Water Lord rising from the ocean, and before us was the Third Terrace. It was grass covered, but in patches the grass had been wom to bare earth, as if by the passage of many feet.
And there our sisters waited for us. The instant we emerged from the porch they cheered, and a moment later were all around us: Kidrin, Temile, Merrin, Tulay, Neclan and Gethriya who had deserted the kitchen, along with all the others I'd never expected to see again. I almost wept for happiness.
After a while the excitement died down and Temile, who had left Repose only three months before, said, “Well, I bet you never thought you’d find yourself up here.”
“No,” I said, “we didn’t.” I saw now how lean and fit they all were. They wore loose shirts of plain unbleached linen and equally loose calf-length trousers of the same material. Everybody had bare feet, and everybody’s hair was cut to shoulder length or shorter. Kidrin and a few others wore headbands to keep stray locks from their faces. If these were devotees of the Moon Lady, they didn’t resemble any I'd ever seen.
Dilara looked equally puzzled. Finally she said, as they all stood and smirked at us, “Well, how much time every day do you have to spend at prayers?”
Everyone burst into laughter. Dilara flushed angrily, but I thought: This doesn't look like what Mother said it was.
Kidrin said, “We go turn and turn about
at it, both to please the Lady and because Mother likes her. But it’s only a couple of days a month. The rest of the time we’re studying.”
“Studying what?” I burst out. “For pity’s sake, what’s going on at this place?”
“You mean you haven’t guessed?” Kidrin asked, her pretty face full of mischief.
Merrin grinned. “We do this to everybody who’s new,” she said, “and nobody ever guesses right. Can you?”
“No,” I answered in frustration.
Dilara, never one for banter, demanded, “Tell us, then.”
“We can’t,” Kidrin said. “You have one more step to take. Then you can know everything. But that step has to come first.”
“What is it, Tossi?” I asked. I was dying of curiosity.
“Soon,” Tossi said, and led us away.
She assigned Dilara and me to a room in the students’ residence, two buildings that snuggled against the cliff on the Fourth Terrace, with a courtyard garden between them. The garden had not only flowers and a pair of big mist trees, but also a small fountain. In our room were two sleeping platforms and two cedar storage chests, and Dilara and I each had an oil lamp. The residence was the old servants’ quarters, delightftilly cool in summer but so cold in winter, as I came to find out, that it made one’s bones ache.
When we had unpacked our few belongings, Tossi said, “Before I can tell you anything of what we do here, there is the step that Kidrin spoke of.”
‘Tell us what it is,” Dilara pleaded. I hoped it might keep until after supper, whatever it might be, because I was famished.
“Come with me,” Tossi said.
Mystified, we followed her down to the Second Terrace and into a tall building that clung to the cliff face. Within was a big room, three walls of which bore landscape paintings in the Late Northern style. On the fourth wall, facing the high windows, was a marvel: a huge mosaic map of the whole breadth of our empire as it was before the Partition, including the major cities, roads, rivers, canals, and mountain ranges. Even at Repose I had seen nothing to compare with it.
“This was the imperial prefect’s banquet hall,” Tossi explained, as we stared at the mosaic. “We use it now as our classroom.”
Indeed, there were benches and writing tables arranged near the stone dais where the prefect’s chair of state must once have stood. Near the dais was a door into another, shadowy chamber, and out of its dimness came a girl who wore iridescent gossamin of crimson and blue.
It was not a girl. It was Nilang. My heart skipped a beat, and Dilara gave a soft exclamation of surprise.
The sorceress halted and studied us. No one spoke. I could hear a bellbird somewhere in the forest, singing his soft, chiming song.
Nilang said, “This is to be your initiation into the Three Springs School. If you refuse it or fail it, you cannot enter the service of the sanctuary and must leave.”
“Could we go back to Repose then?” Dilara asked, a little hopefully.
“No. You will be sent far away and given a trade. But you will never see Three Springs or Tamurin or the Despotana again. Is that clear?”
Painfully so. “Yes, Mistress Nilang,” I said for both of us.
“You accept the initiation?”
What else could we do? She was giving us no time to think it over anyway. But what kind of service to the Moon Lady could demand such rigors as this?
“We do. Mistress Nilang,” I answered.
“Sit at the table, then.”
We obeyed. Tossi came with us, and, standing by our bench, she said, “Dilara and Lale, there is a hard road ahead for all the sisters of Three Springs, and soon it will be ahead of you. That road will take you to places you have never seen, and on it you will do things you never imagined you would do. Danger will breathe on the back of your neck, and much of the time you will not know who is your friend and who is not. Your only allies will be your skills and wits.
“But the merit will be great. You’ll help Mother keep Tamurin safe, and so ensure the safety of the school and of your sisters. There’s no greater achievement than that, and no higher loyalty.”
I reflected fleetingly that wealth would be an ideal companion for such merit. But before I could pursue the thought, Tossi tumed to Nilang and said, “Begin when you wish.”
She left us, and I heard the hall doors close behind her. Nilang drew an incense bumer from her robes. At first it didn’t seem to be alight, but as soon as she set it on the table, it began to smoke. I smelled the same odd, incense-like fragrance that had hung in the palace sickroom years ago when she’d opened the Quiet World to me, and I felt a stab of unease.
She said, “Fix your gaze on the smoke.”
I did so. It wafted gently from the burner, like a small, unquiet ghost.
Nilang tilted her head forward and breathed it in. I wondered how she could do that without coughing or sneezing. The scent was making me oddly light-headed.
“Soon,” Nilang said, “you will be learning things that the Despotana wishes to keep secret. You must never talk of these things except to your sisters in arms, those who have also undergone this initiation. Even if an enemy torments you to make you speak, you must refuse. Even if it means you must die, you must still refuse. Do you understand?”
Her voice had become low and soft, and I wondered why she didn’t speak like this all the time, because it was very soothing, so soothing that my anxiety was ebbing. I had become wonderfully relaxed and very drowsy.
“I understand,” I said. My voice seemed to waft across a great distance.
Nilang inhaled the smoke again and murmured, “You are good and loyal students. But what if you were not so good, not so loyal?” Her eyes were blue and deep. I saw myself far down in them, as if I looked into a still millpond. “Do you know what would happen then?”
“No,” Dilara breathed.
“I will show you,” Nilang whispered.
She closed her eyes and her face grew lined and strained. Then her lips moved, as if she spoke silently to some unseen audience, and, despite my strangely relaxed state, my skin tumed cold. She made an odd gesture with her right hand and let it fall palm upward on the table.
I stared down at that hand. There seemed to be nothing in it, but at the same time there was, and a tiny, wakeful part of me suddenly wanted to scream and run away.
Nilang slowly closed her fingers, as though she squeezed or crushed a thing invisible. The light falling through the high windows failed, as if night approached with unnatural speed. My calm vanished as an unspeakable foreboding crept over me; it was like being gradually immersed in icy water. My limbs grew weak, as though my blood were being slowly drawn out of my veins. But I was paralyzed where I sat and could not so much as whisper.
Nilang’s fingers tightened into a fist. A soft, dull moan emanated from the air, and things like shadows began to form in the comers of the hall. I watched, horrified, as they grew into a throng that drifted toward the table, blotting out the great mosaic map, the darkened windows, the painted walls. For a few moments I dreaded that I was slipping into the Quiet World again.
But then I knew that I was not, and that what was happening was worse. For Nilang was drawing these terrible shadows from that world into our own.
They were unlike the creature that had wanted to devour me but no less ghastly. There was an eerie, nauseating luster about them, as if they were not really shadows at all but some species of diseased and disfigured light. They were shapeless, but it seemed to my appalled gaze that they might assume shape at any moment, and above all I did not want to see what might congeal out of those swirling, semi-luminescent vapors.
They crowded about the table but did not come quite within an arm’s length, and I understood that Nilang’s will held them in thrall. But furrows of tension deepened around her mouth, and even in my haze of fear it occurred to me that she might lose control of them. For I knew that she had once almost failed me, and that I had almost been devoured, and the thought tumed my bowels
to water. Worse, the things were in our world now, and the ancestor who saved me before might not be able to aid me again.
Her eyes still closed, Nilang said, “I have asked you to swear your silence. Do you so swear, that you will die rather than break it?”
My tongue would barely move but I whispered, “I will,” and Dilara made a strangled noise of assent.
“My wraiths have heard your oath,” Nilang murmured. “If you betray it, they will know and they will come for you.
You’ll see them from the comers of your eyes, you will feel their wings at your mouth, and you will feel them within your flesh. Sometimes they will leave you for a little while, and you will think you are free, but always they will retum to feed on you. And they know how to keep you alive, so that you will be a long time dying; and before you die you will have clawed out your eyes and bitten off your tongue and lips and fingers, and you will be mad.”
I tried not to look at the shadows. I imagined, or perhaps did not imagine, that I heard faint voices, sweet and merciless.
“Do you understand this?” Nilang asked.
“Yes,” I croaked.
And Dilara whimpered, “Yes, mistress.”
Nilang opened her blue eyes, made a complicated gesture before our faces, and said, “Enough.” Her sudden movement startled me, as if I’d been asleep and she’d rudely shouted me awake. Instantly the shadows faded, withdrew into the room’s comers, and seeped away. The evening light returned, and with it a soft, forest-scented breeze. I was damp with the sweat of fear, though the fear itself had fled, as if dismissed by Nilang’s word and gesture. But I knew a curse when I heard it, and I knew I’d do anything rather than bring this one down on me.
“You’ve passed your initiation,” Nilang said. Her voice had regained its usual harshness. “With it comes something else. Are you listening carefully to me?”
