The new initiate moved toward the soldiers, his steps unsteady. The pikemen looked at one another anxiously. The new priest tittered, stumbling toward them. One soldier reached out with his weapon gently enough to push the man back without making it an attack.
“Ovur,” the Basrahip said. “We need not come to a violent end here. Once we were brothers in her light. We can be again.”
“This is so,” Ovur said, and for an instant, his heart filled with joy at the power of the goddess. “Even now your living voice carries truth in it.”
“Does that mean we can go back to camp?” the Lord Regent said, his voice tentative but light, like that of a boy trying to joke among men. “It’s getting cold.”
“Do you renounce your apostasy?” Basrahip asked. His mount shifted, uneasy. The red-lit clouds in the heavens cooled to a sudden grey. Ovur felt a qualm, uncertain not of his faith, but of how the Basrahip who only a moment before seemed to have come to the edge of absolution from his error could now say this.
“I cannot,” Ovur said. “I am no apostate.”
The Basrahip grunted as if he’d been struck. Around in the growing darkness, the brown-robed priests held their blades at the ready. The rickety soldiers of the empire grew more solid in their ranks.
“The goddess speaks through one voice,” the Basrahip said, his tones rougher now. “And that voice is my own.”
In Ovur’s blood a strange thing happened. The spiders, gifts of the goddess, told him that the Basrahip’s words were true, even as he knew that they were not. For a moment, the world seemed to shift under him, the landscape itself heaving a great sigh beneath his feet. And then, rising up from his belly like the heat of a fire, came the rage.
“The goddess speaks through us all!” Ovur called back, his voice hard as gravel. The power of the goddess shook the words, and his throat ached with it. “No one temple holds her truth. All temples are hers, all priests are hers, and all voices are hers!”
In the pews, Ovur’s priests rose as one, their balled fists at their sides. The brown-robed priests in the shadows shifted, moving forward, outrage in their eyes. Only the third group—the Lord Regent and his awkward soldiers—appeared hesitant.
In the back of Ovur’s mind, a small, still voice told him that there was a way, that there had to be a way to reconcile. But the anger in him was like a storm breaking against cliffs. He heard the blood rushing in his ears, felt the indignation in his belly like a dragon breaking from its shell full-grown and terrible.
“You are in error!” Basrahip shouted, and Ovur’s blood filled with the spasm of a thousand spiders. Truth and not-truth ripped at him. Any thought of brotherhood, of being reconciled, was forgotten.
“No! You are apostate!” Ovur shrieked. “You are a thing of lies!”
There was no plan to the attack, not on either side. Goaded beyond his tolerance, Ovur ran forward, through his priests and toward the thick shadow of the Basrahip. His fists were clenched to the point of pain, and he felt his battle yell more than heard it. The skittering of his blood and the heat of his anger were like boiling, but without the pain; as if he himself were not the flesh and the blood but the act of boiling. Where once there had been a man, there was now only the vessel of her vengeance. With him, the others came, throwing their bodies at the apostates with abandon and faith. The Basrahip and his servants of lies would fall before them, grass before the scythe.
Frozen mud slipped under his foot, and he stumbled. The ragged pikemen fell back, their torchlit faces masks of confusion and astonishment. But the others, the brown-robed priests, leapt to battle, mouths twisted in an answering rage. Ovur lost sight of the others, enemy and friend alike, as he sprinted toward the Basrahip. He swung his knuckles at the huge man’s mount as if he might knock the horse back by brawling with it. The animal shied, fixing him with one affronted brown eye. Ovur grabbed the enemy’s great branch-thick thigh, yanking at the Basrahip. Pulling him down.
Something happened, and the noise of battle seemed to grow both more pitched and distant. He was on his knees without any recollection of falling, and a bloom of pain was coming to the back of his head. He glanced over his shoulder to see the Lord Regent of Antea staring down at him in fear and horror, a mace in his hand. The man had struck him. Ovur struggled to his feet, but the battle was past him. The gloom was a chaos of bodies. Men and horses were screaming.
She will protect us, Ovur thought. We are her chosen.
Something bit at his side, harder than teeth. Ovur fell forward, away from the blow, and twisted. The pikeman who’d stabbed him was dancing back as if the semi-prone enemy were more dangerous than snakes. Ovur slipped.
He could not see the Basrahip, but he heard the great ox-strong bellow of his voice. You cannot win! Everything you love is already lost! You have lost! You cannot win! Each word struck him, filling him with anger his body could not support. He scrabbled at the frozen mud with clawed fingers. Blood poured from his side, soaking his rude clothes. A voice he knew cried out and was cut off. A torch fell near him, smoldering in the grass and illuminating nothing beyond its own death. Ovur gasped and panted. Tiny legs flickered over the backs of his hands, the spiders spilled with his blood skittering in miniature panic. He wanted to say something to reassure them, to comfort them in the confusion and agitation that mirrored his own.
The sounds of the battle began to calm. Someone was screaming in panic nearby, but only one. Other voices moved through the night, some in the tones of conversation, others in a kind of hushed awe. The Basrahip had ceased his shouting. Ovur rested his head against his outstretched hands. In a moment, he would rise. Pull himself to his feet and carry the battle on to the end, however bitter, until his strength and his anger failed him. It would be only a moment before he gathered his strength…
Footsteps in the dead winter grass. The vicious stink of the poisoned blades. A gasp. Ovur rolled to his side, aware of the pain of his injury but unmoved by it. It was only pain.
The Lord Regent had lost his horse. In his hand, he held one of the venomous blades unsheathed. The tool of the dragons. How had Ovur lived so long knowing that the Basrahip wielded the weapons of the great enemy and not seen him for what he was? He had been blind. His strength was failing him. He felt his body growing heavier. Growing numb. Something like sleep tugged at his mind. Like sleep, but not.
“He’s here! I found him!” Palliako shouted.
Tiny black bodies skittered in the dark, moving quickly at first, but then slowing. Even before the fumes of the sword could shrivel them, the cold of the ground and of his drying blood was deadly. Palliako looked over his shoulder, the tip of the dragon’s sword wavering as his attention to it slipped. It was the opportunity. Ovur imagined himself leaping forward, wrestling the blade away and carving through the man’s throat. Using the tools of the enemy against it. He barely had the strength to smile at the thought.
“I said I found him! He’s over here!”
“Listen!” Ovur hissed, and the Lord Regent turned back to him, alarmed. “Hear me!”
“You be quiet.”
“You think that we can be stopped by swords? You think we can be stopped by slaughter?”
“Yes,” Geder Palliako said. He stepped forward, and the spiders nearest him withered. “I think there’s some pretty good evidence for that.”
Even dying, Ovur felt the great leader’s doubt. “You kill men. Only men. The truth that lifted us up will lift others too. In all the cities, in all the temples, the faithful will find the truth. All will turn against you. All.”