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To Fred Saberhagen
He was right.
Prologue
The Second Apostate
The heart of the goddess, her new temple—her true temple—had neither the grandeur of the cities nor the simple dignity of the Sinir Kushku. In Camnipol, it was said that her banner hung from the great tower of the Kingspire, goddess and throne made one. In Kaltfel, the temple was ancient stone, and had been dedicated to some false god before the Basrahip had sent Ovur to remake it as the center of her truth in the new-conquered land. All through the world, the banner of the goddess flew above great pillars and windows of colored glass. And one day, they would be true temples, untainted by lies and error.
But that day had not come.
Here, in the lands to which Ovur and his priesthood had fled, the pulpit was not ancient granite adorned with gold, but a low platform of rough wood rimed with frost. Here, the pews were not carved oak upholstered with silk, but stones and logs stinking of rot and cold. For candles, they had smoking torches of wrapped grass and fat. For the altar, a mound of frozen earth. The air smelled of decay and winter, and the ruddy, early sunset bled across the wide sky.
Ovur looked out from the pulpit over the men who had come to his call. The pure. The few who had heard the truth of his voice and thrilled to the echoes of the goddess with him. At the front, the newest initiates swayed, their eyes glassy and their jaws slack, still rapt with the awe of her transformation, their blood still thickening with the mark of her favor. Three dozen men in a winter swamp at dusk, cold, shivering, and hungry. If it were not for the presence of the goddess within each of them and the glory of the purification they carried, it would have been a sad, squalid scene. Instead, it was like looking upon a rough seed and knowing the vine that grew from it would one day cover all the world.
“For years, my friends, we followed the Basrahip,” Ovur said, his hands lifted to them. “Some of you knew him of old as the voice of the goddess. Others of you saw him first as a conqueror at the side of the Severed Throne when your nation was lifted up from its corruption and ignorance.”
The men in the pews lifted their hands and their voices. Some spoke praise for the power and beauty of the goddess, some their hatred of the false priest who twisted her teachings from his glorified seat beside Antea’s throne. Ovur felt his heart warmed and reassured by both, and the spiders that dwelled in his blood shifted and thrilled. He spoke the truth to his people, and they spoke it back, and with every living voice his certainty grew.
“I stood in his shadow too, as did we all,” Ovur went on, his breath ghosting in the cold. “But even as her voice spread across the world, the Basrahip fell into darkness. As she rose in every temple, her light peeling back the ancient lies of the dragons, the Basrahip was made corrupt. He claimed that of all the temples, only his was true. As if a spider had only one true leg to which all others answered.”
Now none of the responses were of praise; all were of anger and condemnation. Ovur breathed them in, smiling and nodding as if his affirmation was also comfort to them. The threats against the Basrahip were justified by the power of the voices making them.
“Yes, once the Basrahip led straight. Once, his voice was hers. It is a tragedy that his strength was too little to withstand the lies of the world, but it is only a tragedy for him. Not for the goddess, for she is perfect and incorruptible. And we few are her true voice, welling up even in this place, as others shall all across the face of the world. Our brothers Eshau and Mikap have gone to spread our truths to the great powers of the world and shall return soon with an army that will cast down the false Basrahip and break his lies like ice upon stone. What has begun cannot be stopped, not ever, and—”
A horn blew, three rising notes. Two more answered. Ovur felt a tightening in his throat. Not fear. He was chosen of the goddess, and so protected by her power and her grace. If the quickness of his heart and breath imitated that base feeling, it was only that the man he had once been would have felt fear. Or if not that, surprise. Ovur grinned. In the rough pews, his priests looked to one another, unsure what the noises meant.
The men who came looming up from the swamp’s shadows were a sad, sorry lot. Thin and ragged. Some very old, some very young, and few enough between. They wore the armor of Imperial Antea and the eightfold sigil on their shields. Some carried swords before them, the blades catching the light of torches and fading sunlight. More had pikes braced in two hands, as if to stave off a cavalry charge. Ovur’s laughter rolled out through the wilderness, warm and delighted and thick with threat to the impure. In the pews, one of the new initiates seemed to notice for the first time that something odd was going on. He rose unsteadily to his feet, looking as astounded by the surrounding enemy as if they had woven themselves into being from the grass itself.
The mud-muted steps of horses followed. A dozen men in the saddles. They wore the brown robes that Ovur once had, before the Basrahip had fallen from grace. It was the uniform of the fallen now, and Ovur looked on them with pity. The swords they carried would have been green in the full light of day. In the red light of torches and sunset, they seemed black. The false priests drew the poisoned blades, and the fumes from them gave the air an astringent bite. The spiders in Ovur’s blood, restless, seemed to vibrate and squirm from beneath this thinnest skin down to the pit of his belly.
“I do not fear you,” Ovur said. “You cannot win against the power of the goddess!”
“We do not seek to,” a familiar voice boomed. And there, arriving last among the priests, was the Basrahip himself, his massive body astride a thin-framed pony. And at his side, another rider sat a nobler horse. This man wore a robe of thick grey wool and a hood pulled over his head against the cold. His lips were pressed thin, and his shoulders hunched.
“Prince Geder!” Ovur said. “I praise her light that you have come.”
“I’m not a prince,” Geder Palliako said, his voice high and peevish. “I’m Lord Regent. That’s better than a prince.”
“He has come to see the beginning of her reign,” Basrahip said, and his voice rolled through the growing darkness. “We have brought him to this final battle against lies that he might witness the place where the great age begins.”
In his blood, the spiders shuddered with something like delight. The truth of the Basrahip’s words was like honey on the tongue, and Ovur’s laughter grew almost gentle.
“Yes, old friend, so you have,” Ovur said.