Chapter Seven

7.

    “The linens all are from the Ippen monastery at Aurochs Rock,” Thambol Collins boasted, sweeping his hairy fingers across the bedding.  “Ten thousand stitches per quartermark, all hand-sewn by the acolytes.  If you have need you’ll find more candles in the wardrobe as well as ink and parchment--”

“Enough,” said Matha, irritated by the fat little man’s prattle.  “Leave us and fetch water.   Wine as well, if you have anything that won’t turn my stomach.”

“I have just the thing,” he bowed obsequiously.  “A robust summer red from the Vellan Delta, it’s exquisite I assure you.  I’ll have a flagon sent up immediately.  And would you care for anything to eat?”

“No,” said Matha.  “The wine will do.  Go.”  The mayor’s dismay was obvious by the way he tugged on his revolting grey beard.  

“Very well,” he bowed again.  “Should you have need of anything else there is a bell pull in the hall.  The cook does make a succulent dish of rabbit--”

“Out!” 

“Of course, of course.”  The man hastened from the room pulling a heavy door shut behind him.  Matha collapsed into an overly ornamental wooden chair with a bright red cushion.  By Altarian standards the fabric was offensively gaudy, as was the rest of the suite, which took up the entire top floor of the inn.  Though the mayor had informed her repeatedly that it was The Grand Cortigan’s finest, the Dreanalai saw nothing about the accommodation that pleased her eye.  A mottled blue and gold fabric patterned with valecats covered the walls, drooping in spots where the rank damp that clung to the air had gotten behind it, and the scarred planks of the floor looked like they hadn’t suffered a cleaning in a dozen moons.  The bed was a travesty, its headboard cracked down the middle and repaired with bands of iron, the linens that the mayor had been so proud of yellowed and stinking of mold.  

“This place has the look of a Carthan brothel,” Syros muttered.  He stood by one of six tall windows that lined the back wall, idly fingering a tassel that trailed from a shabby wool curtain.  By the moonlight he looked almost handsome, a pillar of bronze muscle with a smooth, well-shaped skull.  The shadows softened the harshness of his brow and hid the teardrop scars on his cheek.  “And it smells like a soldier ditch.”  

He was right about the stink.  Matha had complained of the heat  when they’d first entered the room since the fire had been banked too high, so the mayor had opened the doors to the balcony, admitting the babble of the river as well its reek of refuse and a fishy stink wafting up from the inn’s kitchen.        

“I’m glad of it,” she lied.  “It means Selthena’s tax is accomplishing its purpose.  Bleed the wealth from a country and you break the spine of its ability to make war.”

“Still,” Syros said, “it fills my throat with bile.”  The Dreanalai frowned.  She knew her Altarman well, perhaps better than any other that had served her at this point.  There had been another in her past that had been with her longer, but he had been duller and more difficult to read.  Or perhaps she had simply been less interested in reading him.  Either way it was not the stink of fish that was bothering the High Captain.  

“It was not your fault, Syros,” she said.  “I took a risk with mostly pride for purpose and the result was what it should have been.  I was rash.  You did not fail me.”  Syros shrugged, shifting his gaze to the moon which hovered low outside the glass.

“It is my vow to see that my death takes the place of your own, Dreanalai.  If the blade had found your heart you might not have survived it.  I did fail.  Whether you were foolish or not makes no difference.  When we return to Altaria I will report to the Crescent.”   Matha closed her eyes a moment, fighting a wave of exhaustion.  With the dreana all but gone from her blood she could feel her true body underneath its effects, the dryness of her ancient bones and the weariness of too many decades with little sleep.    

“Do what you must,” she said, “that is your decision.  But for now you are still the head of my legion and I need you to clear your head of such distractions.  What word have you had from your lieutenants?”  Syros turned to face her, one hand resting on the pommel of his broadsword, the other reaching into a pouch on his belt for a wad of blackleaf.

“All is well.”  He stuffed the blackleaf into his cheek and chewed.  “Sulla and the others have settled outside the cave mouth awaiting orders.  Orelion holds the northern perimeter of the town without incident.  Bruntus holds the southern perimeter and reports that a father with an infant girl attempted to slip past one of his roadblocks and escape through the woods. The man was killed and the babe sent to Sulla to with the other two we took from the Triton lord.”

“Good,” Matha approved.  “Have the body of the father staked in the plaza for all to see.”

“It is being done as we speak, Dreanalai.”  She nodded.  The exhaustion was growing so heavy now that she’d sat down she was dizzy with it, her vision speckling on the edges.  She could wait no longer.     

“Syros,” she waved for him to come over.  “My wasps, please.”

The captain did as she commanded, producing the Dreanalai’s treasured ebony box from a pouch tucked in his cloak.  Matha took it from him and opened it on the bed.  With her dagger she slit her thumb, in the same spot that had been rent and healed more times than she could number.

“Such a waste,” she said, withdrawing one of the wasps from within its bed of black silk and eyeing the blue liquid swirling inside the glass.  “Truly Syros.  I cannot recall doing anything so impetuous since the day I took my cloak.  It must be true that in old age we become children once more.”  Syros grunted.

“My last Dreanalai died at twice your age, Matha.”  She laughed.

“She must have been a mewling babe by then.”  Syros tilted his head and a dimple appeared on one side of his mouth.  Matha knew that was as close as he would come to laughter while he was still punishing himself for allowing her to be wounded.  

“She did have a habit of soiling her small clothes,” he said.  

“Gods.”  Matha lowered the stinger of the wasp to her bleeding thumb.  “I find the desire to still the aging in me grown twice as fierce.”  She pressed on the device and forced three drops of dreana into the cut.  As the substance began to take effect, crawling under her skin and a compelling a ragged moan from her throat, there was a knock at the door.  Syros went to answer and returned with a tray of water and wine.  Matha coughed and straightened her posture.  

“That looks wretched,” she told him.  For the second time that day she had transformed back into a younger woman’s body.  The color had returned to her hair, her voice was stronger and her eyes were reinvigorated.  Syros held the flagon of wine up in the lamplight.  Its color was more pink than red.   

“Cut to death with water.  Shall I pour it anyhow?” The captain asked.

“Yes,” said Matha.  “The taste will be no joy I’m sure but it will help me take to the Spirit.  I’ll drink it on the balcony.”

She stood and let herself out through the double doors with grace returned to her step.  

Absent the sun’s warmth for many hours now the night had turned bitter.  The dreana coursing Matha’s blood however made it seem luxuriously cool to her.  She walked to the balusters and laid her hands down on the iron rail, her senses so keen that she could discern each individual bubble of rust beneath her palms and separate all the smells that made up the stink of the river.  Rancid meat and rotting lettuce, rendered fat, and of course, privy waste.  Her vision had sharpened as well, making the night vista laid out before her almost rapturously vivid.  Out on the horizon the bald mountain Suratha had shown her before she’d ever heard its name stood forlorn beneath a field of stars like shards of glass, its crown wreathed in moonstruck clouds.  Thimblemont, the Triton simplefolk called it.  A silly name, but apt.  The thing was indeed shaped something like an upturned thimble.  At its base lay a dark cloak of forest that rolled all the way back to the edge of the town, her view of it broken only by the soaring towers of the stone bridge a little ways to the South.  At one point halfway between the mountain and the river the trees gave way to a rolling swath of pastureland.  The Downs part of Thimbledowns, she surmised.  A few tiny pinpoints of light dotted those bare hills, most likely hearth fires warming the windows of simple cottages.  

There were undoubtedly children sleeping in many of those cottages, children that on the morrow would stand before her to be tested.  Would any more of them bear signs in the blood?  The odds were slim.  Returning to Altaria with even the one marked boy she’d found that day, Wyeth Trawn, would be a victory but she doubted it would restore her to the Avetar’s good graces.  To accomplish that she’d need to find others, five or ten even, enough to earn her praise and stature sufficient to live out the remainder of her days in the comforts of the Altars, without fear ever finding another black envelope on her chair.  She was weary of dust and tents and foreign backwaters, endlessly ranging the continent with a legion of soldiers at her back.  Warmaking and Seeking were tasks for younger Dreanalai, those that had not yet made their contributions to the empire.  After all that she had done for Selthena and her father before her Matha should have been entitled to a cozy chamber with a stout fire, a place to hatch plans and issue orders rather than carry them out.  Alas, that was not her fate just yet. . .     

Suratha will guide me, she consoled herself.  The goddess had not led her astray so far, urging her to this place with visions of the Thimblemont and gifting her with the handsome blond child marked by Diedra.  And what of the other boy?  Wilhem.  She felt the goddess churning within her when she pictured his grey-eyed young face, an array of chaotic feelings that was as difficult to sort out as the fragments of a dream, but was strong nonetheless and getting stronger.  Though he was not touched by any of the gods the boy was unique in some way that eluded her.  Suratha had never before recalled her attention to someone so forcibly.  It had been many years since she’d felt the presence of the goddess intruding so regularly into her mind.  Perhaps Suratha had decided it was finally time to reward her for her devotion, perhaps there really were more gifts waiting for her here, be it the boy or another tied to him that would bring her great glory when she at last returned home to Altaria. . .

The Dreanalai stopped herself.  It was dangerous to let her expectations soar so high, a conceit she thought she’d outgrown.  Something was indeed shifting in her, causing her to revisit all the madness and desires of her youth.  It was the mood of the goddess, she supposed, rekindling old ambitions.  Also, she realized, it was at least partly the surge of the dreana, which was always strongest as it first took to the blood, setting the mind afire with a thousand thoughts and an unquenchable thirst.  The Dreanalai’s Thirst it was called, as it was similar for all Dreanalai regardless of which god they served, making them want to drink in the whole world and to taste fruit from every tree, to see what lay behind every door, to disrobe every man or woman and either couple with them or consume them.  Above all though there was always the excruciating urge to stab their wasps deep into their veins and let the dreana run freely until the flood of it tore them from their bodies and carried them completely into the spirit world. . .a temptation that had sent many marked children to the catacombs beneath the Altars long before their time.  When they first came to the Altars to be awakened the marked ones spent the entire first year just learning how to resist the thirst.  Many did not survive it, and still more lost hold of the discipline years or even decades later, indulging themselves in the dreana to the point of madness and death.  Matha herself had come very close once, only finding her salvation in a visit from Suratha.  The goddess had not been pleased with her then, nor had the Avetar or the Queen.  It was all so long ago now. . .would they never let it be forgotten?

“Dreanalai,” Syros spoke behind her.  She glanced over her shoulder and saw him standing in the doorway with the tray of wine and a lit candle.    

“Leave them on the table,” she said.  He set the tray down and began to withdraw.  “Syros, wait--” she stopped him.  “This may take some time.  I do not know if Suratha will speak with me tonight but I think she will at least show me something about the boy.  I intend to wait a while if she does not come straight away.  An hour, even.  Be sure that I have quiet.”  Syros nodded.

“On my blood you will not be disturbed Matha, by myself or any other.”  He left her then, pulling shut the balcony doors as he went.

Matha poured herself a glass of the weakened wine and drank it down in one tilt.  Then she poured again and knelt directly on the hard wooden planks of the balcony.  She consumed the second glass slowly, waiting for the effect of the first to soothe her nerves and mute the roar of the dreana.  By the time she had drained the goblet she felt something, not much but it was enough.  Truthfully she did not need the wine at all to take to the Spirit but the ritual was helpful, sipping at the goblet in the moonlight with the steady hiss of the river lulled her into the focus that was required.  When she felt she was ready she rested her palms on her thighs and closed her eyes, plunging herself into darkness.  She took a breath.

The darkness pulsed, alive with her heartbeat and the energy of the dreana.  Memories came, flashes of the day that beckoned for her to chase them off into oblivion.  She resisted, willing the darkness to become empty and still.  It took concentration to drive the images away, the face of Lord Jandegar and the Blood Thief in the cage, Lyna, nagged at her like gnats until they were certain she was not going to give in.  When they relented and the Spirit realm had opened to her she sought the door to her Spirit Chamber, starting with a simple slab of dark Kingswood set in a wall of blank stone.  Next she added the swirling grain of the wood and three heavy black hinges, from each protruding a triangle of iron banding, affixed horizontally to the door with diamond rivets.  Lastly she envisioned the handle, a slender hoop dangling from the mouth of a snarling mongoose, also wrought in iron.  

With the door set firmly in her mind, she imagined her own hand, reaching out to take hold of the handle.  Matha Dal’sara Nador, she spoke, in voice that none but her and Suratha would ever hear, with her finger stroking the snout of the mongoose.  The animal’s face came alive, its eyes opening.  When it saw Matha its snarl relaxed, permitting her to pull the iron hoop free of its mouth and turn it sideways.  The latch released with a soft creak.  Matha set the hoop back in the grip of the mongoose’s teeth and pushed the door open.

When she stepped across the threshold, all awareness of her body on the balcony of The Grand Cortigan faded away.  The stink of the river and the croaking of frogs disappeared, as did the pressure on her knees and the chill of the air.  In their place she smelled rose hips and felt her body in Sucartha become as tangible as the one she had left behind, her skin prickling as it awoke.  She wore nothing now but a plain violet robe that was open down the front, exposing her navel and a sliver of flesh between her breasts.  The air was so warm it would soon raise droplets of sweat there.  Her feet were bare, resting on hot, damp stone.  Around her the chamber was dark.  Delin, she spoke, an ancient word for light.

A dozen orange flames burst into existence, licking up from sconces mounted on the walls around her.  Each pair framed another door, making six in total. The chamber was a perfect circle with a domed roof, built of fist-sized cobbles.   At the center of the floor a black pool of water had been cut into rock, forming another circle around a looming statue carved in polished white hearthstone.  Steam rose from the pool, rising to the ceiling where it made the cobbles weep.  

Matha approached the pool.  The statue rising from it was of a young woman, very petite yet enviably shaped, dressed as Matha herself was in a simple robe that opened down the middle.  With one hand she held the halves of the garment shut, covering her breasts demurely as though she was unaware that the pose bared one of her thighs nearly to her sex.  Her eyes were cast down modestly and mostly closed, yet on her sly lips she wore a sultry smile.  A pair of mongooses played at her feet, lazily intertwined with one another and her ankles. 

It was an irresistible statue, its perfection evoking awe and lust in all who gazed upon it, man or woman alike.  The persona of the goddess was embodied perfectly in the girl’s expression and its contradictions.  Suratha was guile touched by innocence, or she was innocence touched by guile.  It was impossible to know which.  Like the vapors rising from the surface of the pool to hide her, the goddess was something that could never be fixed in the mind, her true nature a mystery even to herself.  

When she’d first learned she’d been marked many decades before, Matha had not understood why Suratha had selected her.  She had never been beautiful enough to be a seductress, or at least, she was not beautiful enough in that way, and even as a child she had always been direct rather than coy, her ambitions and desires displayed nakedly in the brashness of her actions.  At the Altars the Dreanalai that had trained her had explained that the gods did not always choose those that reflected their own personas, on rare occasion they marked an opposite to walk for them in the world, usually out of some dire necessity to counter their own shortcomings.  When the goddess Bertra for example, who was the Mother, the embodiment of love and loyalty, hospitality and kindness, saw that the Tritons were going to be wiped out, she had chosen Ganther to bear her mark and stand for her, though he was from the womb a man built for war.  It had not been easy for Bertra to maintain such a pairing however; when a god chose a man or woman who was not of a similar disposition the bond was unnatural and strained, requiring a great deal more of the god’s energy.  To hold Ganther to her and give him his power Bertra had eventually been forced to abandon all her other marked ones and fixate on him alone.  Still, it could be done.  That was the lesson Matha had taken from the tale.  

For much of her life therefore, she had believed she was like Bertra’s Ganther, chosen by Suratha to be blunt and singleminded for her wherever the goddess had need of such a personality.  Not until she had been given Syros as her Altarman had she begun to understand that she had been mistaken.  She and Suratha had always been very much alike.  It was Syros that had finally shown her the truth of it, or at least her unexpected feelings for the Altarman had, since they’d forced her to at last confront the contradiction of who she really was.  On the one hand she was Matha Dal’sara Nador, hard, calculating, and bold, a Dreanalai to be feared who had never shied from bloodshed, but on the other she had always been another woman as well, a hidden, nameless woman who felt intense loneliness and overwhelming horror at the things she had done to rise through the Altars, a woman who knew that her boldness and ruthlessness had always been a deception, a mask to hide her fear and her childhood longing to be sheltered in the arms of a father and mother she had never known.  That woman still lived within her breast, fighting every moment to guide her hand, though Matha would never allow her to show through her choices.  Though the Dreanalai lacked some of Suratha’s sensuality, the paradox within her mirrored the goddess’s closely.

“Goddess,” she said, “I must speak with you.” 

She set one foot in the steaming waters of the pool and let the robe slip from her shoulders.  It puddled on the stone behind her.  There were four steps cut into the rock.  She took them one at a time, giving herself a few moments on each to adjust.  The water was painfully hot.  By the time she reached the last step she was submerged to her naval with sweat streaming down her spine and between her breasts, waves of her hair clinging to her to her shoulders and the nape of her neck.  She laid her palms down on the surface of the pool and gazed up at the statue, waiting to sense that Suratha’s presence had graced the stone.

The goddess did not come.  Matha stood patiently, opening her thoughts and reaching out with them, calling out to her, pleading with her to make herself known.  She could feel the goddess but only very faintly, as though across a great distance.  Still she waited, staying motionless and silent until she was no longer aware of the heat, until the skin of her fingers had shriveled like grapes left in the sun.  The dome over her head wept ceaselessly, raining down drops that were shockingly cold, and the sconces around her burned steadily, their glow never fading since the tallow that fed them could never be exhausted here.  An hour passed before she began to doubt.  Suratha rarely ever came when she was bid, few gods did, but this was important.  The goddess herself had impressed the significance of the boy Wilhem upon her, and though Matha had told the child there was nowhere in the world for him to hide from her, that had been an exaggeration of her talents.  She could not find him without Suratha’s aid.  Even if she stumbled upon him by chance, she’d have no idea what his purpose was or what to do with him if the goddess would give her no indication of his worth.  Frustration crept into her calm, and after another hour, anger.                                                        

“Goddess,” she broke the silence, testily.  “I can wait no longer this night.  If you would have me seek out the boy, Wilhem of Ashfall, I must know where to find him.  If you will not come now I shall return to Encartha to attend my orders from the Queen.”  She gave Suratha a moment longer, but felt no stirring of her senses.  “As you will, then,” she said hotly, turning her back on the statue and rising up the steps from the pool.  She donned her robe and was wringing the moisture from her hair when the torches suddenly flickered, nearly guttering out.

“It is too late,” said a voice, all around her.  It’s tone was soft and rich and feminine, suited to throaty laughter and the bedroom.  But tonight it was also laced with venom, a serpentine threat Matha had heard in it only once before, many years ago.  “Too late because you did not listen.  Turn and face me Matha Dal’sara.”

Matha felt the presence of the goddess swell into the room, its usual carnal magnetism black with a crackling, barely-constrained violence.  Suratha was furious.  Matha’s anger cooled like reddened steel plunged into a water bucket.  She turned around.

The eyes of the statue had opened, radiating a blue glow into the mists rising up before them.  Like Matha’s gaze the statue’s was the same shade as the dreana that gave her power, but unlike Matha’s the goddess’s eyes were completely consumed by the glow, leaving no irises.

“Suratha--,” Matha began, her voice faltering.  “I--”

“Be silent.  Listen now.  Listen as you have never listened in all the years that I have tried to show you the river stones to set your feet upon.  You serve me, not I you.  When and where I choose to speak with you is for me to decide.  If you think that I have need to converse with you, you will wait patiently and if I do not come you will be grateful merely to have stood before this statue a while looking upon my image.  What do you imagine I am doing while you are here barking for my attention?  Am I lounging in a Cauldron Bath, feasting on berries and summerwine?  Am I watching the games in the Queen’s parapet whilst her Speechless Ones weave flowers into my hair?  You are not my only face in the world, Matha Dal’sara Nador,  and there are never less than a dozen places I am called to at once.”  

Matha bowed her head, staring humbly at the mongooses at the statue’s feet.

“Yes, Goddess.  I understand.  But please, hear me, I forgot myself only because I could sense that the boy Wilhem is important.   I am eager to find him for you.”

“You are eager only to correct the mistake of letting the boy slip from your grasp!” Suratha snapped.  “A Phaeon child from Ashfall. . .do you expect me to believe you are truly so daft as to think I’d have steered the boy into your hands just to help you find your way to a blessed Forger’s cave?  Have I nothing more to urgent to do?  The boy is the son of Arexes, Matha!  Your infatuation with that captain of yours is making you blind and soft!”

Matha gasped, stunned twice over.  Suratha had never spoken to her so fiercely and she’d never imagined the goddess could see so deeply into the corners of her heart.  Was it true?  Had she known all along that Wilhem was more than a simple boy and hid the knowledge from herself to spare his life?  She’d had no trouble plunging a dagger into the Triton lord, Jandegar, or half a hundred others before him, why would she have balked at killing the child?  Because he risked himself to free the Blood Thief, Lyna.  Because he’d been so fierce and unafraid for a boy his age.  Because his courage and obstinacy had reminded her no small way of. . .Syros.  Her throat tightened with shame.  Suratha was right, she was losing herself to her weakness for the man.  

“We are not built to be fisher wives, you and I!” the goddess reprimanded.  “You will never know a mother’s joys or fears or mend his shoes and stand behind him as he rushes off to fight battles for you.  I will not allow it, Matha Dal’sara!  You will rely on your own wits and my gifts and be beholden to no one, that is our way.  If I must take the Altarman from you to keep you on the path, so be it!”  Matha lifted her face to confront the living statue.  A tear spilled down her cheek, sprung from the well of her embarrassment.

“There is no need, Goddess,” she said.  “I will rip his heart from his chest myself before I fail you again, I swear it.”

“Oh?” Suratha retorted, cynically.  “So you say.”  But Matha sensed a slight lessening in the goddess’s fury.  “You cannot begin to know what your weakness has cost us already.  Look.”

The statue’s eyes dropped to the pool.  Matha followed her gaze.  The surface of the water darkened until it was truly black, and then shimmering specks of light emerged and brightened, like a swarm of firebugs.  Their glow revealed a silhouette beneath them, as though they were hovering over the bald head of an old man.  Stars, Matha realized, above the Thimblemont.  The moon appeared next, and in its light the landscape became as clear as if she had returned to her body on the balcony of The Grand Cortigan.

As soon as she had recognized what Suratha was showing her, the Thimblemont began to streak toward her like she’d caught the tail of a raven.  The forest rushed past beneath her in a blur, impossibly fast.  In a breath she reached the base of the mountain where the rock first broke above the woods.  There the unseen raven dove, carrying her down through the treetops into a clearing.  

She saw a crude cottage, its roof so overgrown with moss it seemed at first to be just a mound in the forest floor, leaning against the mountain.  In front of it the clearing ground was broken and churned and a horse lay unmoving, its throat torn open with the gash still steaming.  A few paces from the dead horse there was a pool of standing water, not unlike the one she was staring into, fed by a trickle leaking from the craggy stone of the Thimblemont.  The pool came toward her until it seemed she was standing on its bank.  She peered into it and made a surprised sound, startled to see the boy Wilhem curled up on his side beneath the surface with a Phaeon sword run through him.  A black cloud leaked from the wound, slowly expanding around his starkly pale face.  The boy’s mouth was wide open, as though he was shouting or trying to swallow                    

“As we speak the last of his life pours from his veins, spilled by the same fool who had his father murdered.”  

Matha swallowed, dismissing an impulse to mask her confusion.  There was no use trying to hide anything from Suratha now, the goddess must have always been able to see everything her mind concealed, even the things she kept so deeply buried that she herself hardly knew they were there. 

“I don’t understand, Goddess,” she admitted.  “Is it not fortunate that the boy’s life is at an end?  Isn’t that the fate you’d hoped I would hasten him toward?”

“By your hand!” Suratha replied.  “The boy was to die by your hand.  If you had ended his life before this other murdered his father the scales would not be so imbalanced and he would not be. . .”  She trailed off, leaving the sentence unfinished, as though the rest of it was too unpleasant for even a goddess to speak aloud.  A chilling intuition blossomed in Matha.  The boy is the son of Arexes. . .  The irony of it would be elegant, having a dark but almost beautiful symmetry. . .

“He would not be chosen to become. . .” she echoed Suratha, “Auren Damet Avetar?”

The brightness of the statue’s gaze wavered and Suratha’s weight in the chamber slackened, seeming almost to slink back into the void beyond the walls.  Fear? The Dreanalai wondered; was Suratha was showing fear?  The premonition was unsettling.

“Goddess, it cannot be,” she said.  “Are you certain?”  

“I have glimpsed only stones,” the goddess replied, hotly, but the anger in her voice seemed an afterthought, muted by her distraction.  “Still you must go to him, immediately.  You must be there if he returns to Encartha.” 

“I will seek him out the moment I leave here,” Matha assured her.  “But what would you have me do with him if he does return?  Shall I send him right back to the Spirit Realm?”

“No!” Matha felt another spike of fear in the goddess.  “You mustn’t!  If he has become Auren Damet Avetar now we must not so much as bloody his lip or pluck a lash from his eye.  If he wakes take him into your custody and bring him to the Altars, do you understand?”

“Yes, Goddess,”  Matha met the statue’s eyes with her own, intending to show Suratha that she had truly heard her and was submitting to her will.  The statue’s eyes darkened back to stone.  Matha felt the goddess’s presence slipping from the chamber. 

“I must go,” said Suratha, her voice disembodied and waning.  “Once you have the boy in hand return to me here, as soon as you are able. . .do not fail me in this Matha Dal’sara.”

“I won’t, Goddess,” Matha promised.  Suratha was already gone.