by Kelley Grant
“The larger group will stay in the wooded areas surrounding the town while you go to the temple,” Evan said. “Do you want an escort?”
Tori shook her head, glancing at her feli, Zara, who was yawning at her horse’s side. “I’ll be fine. I’ll return with the twins as soon as I can.”
A voice from the side of the road startled both of them.
“But what if the twins don’t want to come with you?” Sandy melted out of his surroundings in his green robe of Aryn as Evan drew his sword. “What if we’re sick of being pushed around by the One like pawns and want to run off to the ocean and travel the far seas?”
“Put that down,” Tori told Evan. “This is one of the men we were sent to find.” She addressed Sandy. “Seems a little late for that now. You’re as stuck as I am, feli-chosen and all. Where’s your other half?”
“Right here,” Shane said from behind Sandy. His cloak was still the blue of a Parasu acolyte.
“Where were you hiding?” Tori asked. “And how did you know I was coming?”
Sandy grinned and walked up to Tori. He ruffled Zara’s striped neck and scratched under her chin until she leaned against him, her eyes half-glazed. “We’ve run wild in these parts since we could walk,” he told Tori. “This was the most likely place you’d stop and regroup so we thought we’d meet you here and play escort.”
“I saw in a vision you would be here today,” Shane said quietly. “My connection to the One grows.”
Sandy sighed. “I should have realized that with a mother who was a Vrishni, one of us would start having visions. Just glad it isn’t me.”
“I’ll be glad of the escort,” Tori told them. “Evan, find a place to camp. I don’t know how long this will take. C’mon, boys, let’s go shake up the temple.”
Sulis watched Ava skirt around Dani, trying to pretend he wasn’t beside the practice area. Ava was using her energy to draw patterns in the sand, creating a mandala for Clay. He’d asked Dani to attend as they focused on the task, but Dani flinched anytime Ava glared at him, and Ava kept smudging the design.
They were practicing behind the main buildings, working in an area of sand the Chosen had raked, cleared of thorn plants, and scattered with herbs to keep the scorpions out.
Sulis shook her head. If Ava didn’t smudge the design trying to avoid Dani, Sanuri smudged it as she wandered around the ground they’d raked to practice in, muttering to herself. Ava giggled every time Sanuri stepped on a line, and Sanuri laughed back—the two had some sort of private connection and world they were sharing. It was baffling the way they had bonded without a word of sense between them.
They especially baffled Clay, who was desperate to draw the group together. Sulis worried that he was going to start tearing out clumps of hair, the way he clutched it when Sanuri did something particularly inexplicable. Like now, as she plunked her butt down right in the center of the mandala Ava was creating and sang tunelessly. Ava giggled and drew new patterns around the girl.
“No,” Clay corrected. “That isn’t the pattern for this mandala.”
Ava shrugged. “I can’t do it with her sitting in the center, so I have to create new patterns,” she said. Clay clutched his hair and breathed deeply.
“This isn’t going to work,” Sulis told Ashraf. “I thought it was bad before, trying to tame a deity by dancing. But now we’ve added an insane Weaver, a newly unhinged Loom, and a frightened Guardian. How do we work with that?”
“You don’t,” a strange male voice said from behind them.
Sulis whirled with a gasp, hands up to send an energy blast, and Ashraf drew his curved sword and pushed Sulis behind him. Dani stepped to Sulis’s other side, straight sword drawn.
A man with the pale skin of a Northerner stood at the edge of their clearing, looking amused. Sulis was astonished to see Alannah standing few paces behind him in her golden robes, arms crossed over her chest, looking irritated and rumpled.
“Who are you?” Clay asked. “How did you come here without being seen and challenged by our warriors of the One?”
As though a spell had been broken, a shout went up at the front of the building.
“Looks like they discovered our horses,” the man drawled, looking at Alannah. She frowned at him as warriors of the One ran around the building, following their footsteps. Grandmother, Master Anchee, Palou, and Lasha followed the warriors as the man was surrounded. He held his hands out in a gesture of surrender.
“I am Amon, a Descendant of the Prophet!” he declared, unfortunately in the Northern tongue, so none of the warriors of the One understood him. “The Descendants have risen and the second Great War has begun.”
Silence followed this announcement as the warriors of the One looked at the Chosen for translation and the Chosen looked at one another.
“Are we supposed to be impressed?” Sulis said into the silence.
Alannah snorted and Lasha hid a grin behind her hand. The man looked nonplussed.
“I mean, it was good delivery,” Sulis continued. “Dramatic. But most of these people don’t understand your language. And those of us who do, well, we’re already Chosen by the One and have a prophecy of our own. We don’t really need a new one.”
Ashraf snickered, and Amon sighed and shook his head.
“It looks like you are as uninformed as we feared,” he said arrogantly. “Come, we will go inside and I will relieve you of your ignorance.” He turned and walked through the crowd, which parted before him. The Chosen stared at one another, and then Master Anchee shrugged and followed, cuing the others to do the same. Sulis came up to Alannah and embraced her.
“Arrogant little rooster, isn’t he?” Sulis said. “But it’s great to see you again, Alannah!”
“You have no idea. It feels like I’ve been traveling with him for years, not days,” Alannah said, shaking her head. “I’ve wanted to set Yaslin on him at least a dozen times a day. Unfortunately, I really do believe the One sent him.” She turned as Sanuri tugged at her robes. “Hello, little one. I’ve come, sooner than I expected.”
“It is right that you are here,” Sanuri said, grabbing her hand. “Come, come.”
Amon insisted that the Chosen hear what he had to say, but not the other warriors of the One.
“I don’t know all the people here,” he insisted. “There are many spies for the deities—as you learned at the Obsidian Temple.”
Clay choked on the sip of tash he’d just taken, obviously unhappy with this man knowing about the Obsidian Temple.
“Of course I know about the temple,” Amon said. “I am a Descendant of the Prophet! We have long kept the secrets of the South.”
Sulis could see her grandmother mustering her patience.
“Perhaps you could explain to us exactly what that means,” Grandmother said. “Rather than chastising us because we do not know what your Northern secrets are.”
“You believe you are the Chosen of a prophecy given hundreds of years ago,” Amon told them. “But the prophecy was a fake, a distraction for the deities. The prophet who came to the desert gave her own children her true prophecy. We Descendants alone know the rituals to help the One become whole once again.”
Clay laughed shortly. “So you are saying that my visions are fake because your great-grandmother had a vision. You believe that all the Looms and Shuttles and Guardians who have been called up through the ages were delusional.”
Alannah leaned forward. “Amon isn’t explaining this correctly,” she said, with an irritated look at the man. “The Chosen are an important piece of the joining between the deities and the One. Their roles are not false, and the training you have gone through is necessary for the rejoining. But without the guidance of the Descendants, the prophecy will fail.”
“Have you known about this since you became a Counselor?” Sulis demanded.
Alann
ah shook her head. “Elida knew about a group of people in the North who worshipped the One directly. They were considered heretics but had shielded themselves so well the deities never found them. Tori told me only a few months ago about their role in the prophecy.”
Amon nodded. “Toriaran disobeyed our elders by seeking out a Temple feli. She felt that her translation of the scriptures passed down from our ancestors showed a feli was needed to follow the bidding of the One. It seems she was correct.”
“You have your own scriptures?” Lasha asked.
“Yes. The blood of the prophet runs in our family,” Amon said. “We have had many true seers, and they have recorded their visions through the centuries. Scholars like myself, Toriaran, and her cousin Evan have made it our life’s work to study and interpret what our roles must be in creating this new world.”
“So we really cannot just dance the deities into submission,” Ashraf mused, looking over at Sulis. “There is another step.”
“Why are you even listening to this madman?” Clay burst out. “He has no proof of who he is. Everything he says goes against centuries of learning and study at Kabandha!”
He gestured to Master Anchee and Palou, the two Kabandha scholars in the room, asking them to intercede.
Master Anchee was sitting on his cushion, looking thoughtful.
“I’m not certain what to think,” he said. “I hope our new friend thought to bring some of these scriptures for us to study.”
Amon nodded. “We have brought transcripts of the original scrolls and their translation into modern language as well as the pertinent prophecies that came after.”
“Then we should look at them,” Anchee told the Chosen. “Sulis is not the only person who was alarmed by our brush with failure when meeting only one deity at the Obsidian Temple.”
Clay stood angrily. “I will go by no false prophets,” he said. “I was already given a prophecy, and I will not dishonor the One by abandoning it to follow another.” He brushed past Amon and stalked out the door.
Grandmother gave Amon her best glare. “We’ll go over your documents,” she said. “But we expect you to study ours as well, so you know how you fit in with the Chosen.”
Amon bowed his head submissively, but he was smirking and Sulis thought that was what he had wanted. “Of course,” he said. “Trust that the One knows what he is doing.”
“I trust in the One,” Lasha said. “I don’t trust you.”
“You will,” Amon predicted. “Just wait until your scholars read what I have brought. You will believe then.”
The Chosen met again the next day. Amon was in attendance but Clay had refused. There was a pile of papers and scrolls on the table in front of Palou and Master Anchee.
“It’s real,” Palou said, gesturing to the scrolls. “Their prophecies, the visions passed down through the ages don’t contradict ours. They complete them and fill in several gaps. And ours fill in gaps in their histories as well.”
“I see no gaps,” Amon said with a frown.
“We’ll get to that,” Master Anchee said. “Their prophecies say the Descendants of the Prophet will go to Illian. They will put up some sort of shield to block the deities from sucking energy from their acolytes to feed their powers in the desert. I guess the Descendants have been trained in this, and most are powerful energy users.”
Palou nodded. “And here in the desert, we are to prepare the statues, the empty stone shells of the deities captured in the Obsidian Temple. When the statues in the temple are empty of the deities, they have a kind of vacuum that wants to be refilled. Supposedly, we can weave patterns that will suck the deities into the shells they vacated five hundred years ago and trap them, so we can weave them and the One into a whole.” Palou looked around expectantly as his words sank in.
“Whoa,” Sulis protested. “Empty shells? What empty shells? The stone figures at the Obsidian Temple aren’t empty. They still contain bits of the deities, specifically their ability to channel magic on their own. Does that matter?”
Master Anchee chuckled softly at the look of consternation on Amon’s face. “That is where we see gaps in their histories. According to the Descendants, the statues are empty. They believe that when the battle was over, the One reabsorbed the deities’ ability to channel without the feli. They don’t realize that those abilities are instead trapped in those statues. Hence, no vacuum to suck the deities into. I believe that, as things stand, what the Descendants propose would make the deities more powerful because they would regain their lost abilities rather than being trapped.”
Amon sputtered a moment. “What? You must be mistaken,” he said. “Perhaps it feels like the deity is still in the statue. But it should be a void inside.”
“Then why did Voras fight us to try to reclaim his powers?” Sulis asked. “You said you knew about that. Why would he bother, if they were empty and he couldn’t reclaim his powers?”
“He must have been just trying to destroy the statues,” Amon said. “You can’t reclaim powers from an empty statue.”
Ava spoke up for the first time. “Aryn showed me how to do blood magic, through her statue. I needed it to defeat Voras, and when I touched her statue, I knew how to do things with my blood. I heard her voice guiding me. If her statue was empty, how would I learn to do that?”
Amon was speechless as he gazed around at the Chosen, then at the scrolls in front of him.
“Your people did nothing to send those powers to the One?” he asked. “Why would you let the statues remain full, waiting for the deities to reclaim what they lost? Are you mad?”
Grandmother stared him down. “Because that is what the One asked us to do, youngster,” she said. “Every prophecy we received was clear. You can read that in our scrolls, if you choose to quell your arrogance. Our vocation was hiding and protecting what the Obsidian Temple contains. We have fulfilled our duty to the One—your people misunderstood what the One needs.”
Amon frowned at the scrolls.
“It is the time,” Clay said from the doorway. His voice was flat, his eyes blank. He was having a vision. All four of the feli were standing behind him. “The Descendant of the Prophet will show the Chosen the patterns to prepare the trap. What is filled must be emptied. You must begin. The time is now.”
Clay sagged against the frame and Ava hurried over and helped him to a cushion. His face was gray from the energy drawn out of him. Ava gave him a mug of water. The four feli sat like statues around the doorway, gazing in at the Chosen. Sulis shivered, feeling like the cats were guards, making certain none of the Chosen escaped before they understood what the One had in mind.
Amon stared at Clay, then at the Chosen, his arrogance gone. He looked panicked. “This isn’t what I was sent for,” he said. “I know the patterns to draw the deities in. I don’t know how to release what’s trapped in the statues. I thought that was already done!”
“Clearly the One believes you do know,” Master Anchee said. “Or that we’ll figure it out together.”
“I’m more worried about the urgency,” Grandmother said. “If we leave for the Obsidian Temple now, we will be traveling in the heat of summer. The spring that feeds the Obsidian Temple dries to a trickle in the summer months and can support few people, which is why most of the residents and warriors of the One leave for Kabandha before the summer heat sets in. I’m not certain the spring could support us.”
“We will have to travel at night,” Master Anchee said. “But that will make it easy to miss the waymarker of an oasis and die of thirst before we reach another.”
“The Tigus stay in the Sands year round,” Sulis reminded them.
“They have their own form of energy sensing that lets them find the closest source of water,” Grandmother told her. “They are never lost in the desert.”
“Then hire one,” Sulis said, impatiently. “We gave them humpba
cks and supplies. They can give us a guide.”
Grandmother frowned. “Most have gone east to keep the army of the deities from moving south. I hope they have a guide in this area still.”
“Does the Obsidian Temple have a farspeaker?” Alannah asked. “If we contact the temple master, the people at the temple can go to Kabandha, to make room for us.”
Master Anchee nodded. “Yes, the temple master is a farspeaker. Unfortunately, we sent Kadar with the Tigus, so we lack a farspeaker here. We have to wait until he contacts Sulis.”
Grandmother leaned forward. “We have a farspeaker here,” she said. “The Hasifel blood ran true in Tarik’s brood. Abram has been tested by the warriors of the One and shows slight farspeaking ability. With four feli amplifying his ability, he should be able to reach the Obsidian Temple.”
Amon nodded. “We will find a Tigu nomad to guide us,” he said to Grandmother. “And you will speak to the temple so they can prepare for us. I will ask the One for guidance.”
“We’ve much to do,” Palou said. “Sulis, prepare your Northern friends to travel in the desert heat, and get whatever supplies you need. I will speak with Master Tull. She will not be happy about being left behind. Pray to the One to guide us all.”
“One help us all is more like it,” Sulis muttered to Ashraf. “We’re going to need it to get through the desert heat alive.”
Abram sorted the inventory he’d brought from Tsangia and wondered if he’d made the right choice in joining the warriors. The warriors of the One didn’t want to assign him to a cohort in case Grandmother needed him. But Grandmother seemed irritated he was there. He’d been making himself useful to the quartermaster until someone decided where he would fit in. He heard his grandmother’s voice and looked up from his list. She was walking in his direction speaking to a warrior he hadn’t met.
“Abram, I want your farspeaking talent amplified before the Chosen leave,” Grandmother told him when she came abreast. “Tell Master Ursa it is a priority. Kirt will escort you to her office.”
