Children of Chaos

four

THE ELDEST

awoke and saw that she was dying. Death was all through her, like ivy in a forest, spreading fast. Whatever the common folk might think, the Witnesses of Mayn did not prophesy; the word was a joke among them, a reminder that the gods could not be bound. The seers' blessing was knowledge, and the Eldest knew that she would not rise from her bed. That was not prophecy, it was accomplished fact. Already her feet and hands were cold, no longer hers or part of her. She lay still, composing herself, calming that faltering, frail heart. Reproaching herself for feeling fear. Chiding herself for her sorrow. Many, many things she had wanted to finish, but death was no respecter of agendas. She should be grateful for these few last moments, a grace from holy Mayn. Always the Eldest of the Witnesses was granted a farewell, so that she might name her successor. Some were also permitted to pass on some special insight from the goddess.

She had been given so many years! She was Eldest of this, the mother lodge in the Ivory Cloisters at Bergashamm, and thus Eldest to all the Witnesses on the Vigaelian Face, and although "eldest" was her title, it was close to literal truth in her case. She had been already old when she was appointed vicar of the goddess, so many years ago. Her name then had been Raven, but she had not heard it used in all those years. Her reign had not been an easy one, perhaps the hardest ever, and she still could not be sure that she had made the right choice. She, who should be the wisest of all the gods' children must withhold judgment on her own life's work. But she need not worry about that now. Very soon the goddess would reveal the answers, solve all mysteries.

Sunlight on the wall showed that it was still very early. Taking her last farewell of the worn old stones and silvered beams, of the threadbare rugs she had knotted herself long years ago, the Eldest was reminded that she was blind. It had happened gradually as she aged, and she had barely noticed, still seeing the world with the goddess's eyes, which worked much better than her own ever had. Here on her deathbed, the Eldest saw into kitchens and laundry and larders; the refectory where novices were laying out bowls for the morning meal; the great weaving hall where the goddess's work was done. The fields beyond the walls she could no longer reach; her sight was dwindling.

Urgently she needed the members of her hand, but the blessings Mayn granted did not include summoning. Not that the Maynists' abilities were limited to sight. Their other senses were also blessed. The Witnesses took the sacred number to extremes: five edges of each Face of the world, five senses, five blessings, five fingers to a hand. The sisters themselves were grouped in hands—five reported directly to the Eldest, five to each of them, and so on. All five of the Eldest's hand were in residence at the moment. They would see her. The range of seeing depended on the importance of what was to be seen, and her passing would matter greatly to them.

Meanwhile she must consider her successor, because the name she spoke would control the course of the cult for years. Werists did not live to be old men. Even if they did not die at the hands of their own kind in battle or brawl, the gross demands their god's blessing made upon their bodies led to early death. They professed to glory in their choice of fame over long life, but they made that decision while still too young to comprehend the cost. Stralg would die; the evil would pass.

She needed to cough away pain, but the effort was unthinkable.

Stralg, Stralg! So the monster would outlive her? By one of holy Cienu's divine jests, the Witnesses of Mayn and the Heroes of Weru in Vigaelia had each received a new leader on the same day. She had been named in the dying words of her predecessor. How Weru revealed His choice was a secret of His mysteries, but the death toll suggested that mortal combat would be a reasonable guess.

About twenty sixdays later, Stralg had come calling at Bergashamm. It had been done on a whim, certainly, or else the seers would have felt his intention. Leading a host through the neighborhood, he had suddenly detoured and thrown a cordon around the Cloisters. He had entered alone—over a locked gate, ripping a door from its sockets, and marching into the innermost sanctum, the great hall, where none but Witnesses might come.

The vault was high and dim, for the Witnesses had no need of light and large windows would pass drafts to disturb the webs. From Bergashamm the seers went out into the world to Witness. When they returned, it was to the hall they brought the truths they had garnered, the threads they had spun, there to be woven into the great webs that were their records of the world and its ways. They sang as they worked among the high looms, weaving melody as they wove happenings, glorifying their goddess.

The Eldest was there when Stralg intruded. His coming had been seen by then, of course. The singing had faltered into cries of terror and the others had all fled. She stood alone, still and white-draped in the gloom, forcing herself not to shrink from the stench of evil.

He was still young then, powerful—wickedly handsome and arrogant to the point of insanity, daring to violate this house of peace. The scars on his limbs were visible to all. Her sight told her of worse hidden under his all-black pall, and traces of wound fever still lingered in his too-bright eyes, but his many jousts with death had given him no humility. He reeked of both cruelty and ruthlessness, but so much cruelty that the other hardly mattered. If he so chose, he could wield the fearsome blessing of his god to destroy everyone in the abbey single-handedly.

"You are in charge of this brothel?" He had a magnificent voice, she recalled, probably the most melodious male voice she had ever heard.

"I am the Eldest of the Witnesses, yes. You are the light of Weru on Vigaelia."

"I need your wisdom."

She could smell the bloodlust on him and fully expected to die. "The only wisdom I will give you, Fist, is that the best warriors never need to fight. Use your strength to keep peace, not make war. Holy Demern enjoins us that the weak should be protected, not oppressed."

"Demern? Weru is my god!" Stralg grabbed up a folded, completed web and ripped it in a fearsome demonstration of physical strength. "I came for wisdom, Eldest! Not platitudes. The Heroes of Weru are divided. They squabble over dogma, over personal ambition—even over political trivia, for when the merchants of a city covet the trade of another, they send their Werists to rend other Werists. I will unify the cult."

The Eldest remained silent, praying for courage to bear whatever might happen. There were very few men in Bergashamm, none of them fighters, and Stralg had sealed the abbey.

"All Werists will be loyal to me," he said. "I will appoint governors to rule the cities, and I will set my brothers as satraps over them. They will rule all Vigaelia in my name. Then we shall have peace, not war. You must approve. You will assist."

She spoke what she expected to be her epitaph. "Never. The world does not concern us. We renounce it, personally and collectively, to pursue knowledge for its own sake. We may neither meddle in events nor share our wisdom with others, and this has been our creed for more lifetimes than even we can number. Many a sister has perished in torment for refusing to advise a tyrant, knowing her death will be a sign to the people that their ruler is unworthy."

He met this defiance with a winsome, almost boyish smile. "And have not those same tyrants frequently discovered their enemies coming against them armed with perfect knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses?"

"Such has been recorded."

" 'Such has been recorded'! Is that the closest you can come to lying? You regularly testify for the Speakers."

"They are the only exception. Wisdom cannot flourish without peace and order. In criminal matters we provide evidence for those who judge in the name and by the laws of holy Demern."

"From now on, you and your seers will serve me instead."

"No." Fear swelled in her heart, for his mind was clotted blood and he planned worse than just her death.

Stralg smiled and departed.

Shortly thereafter he sent in some of his brutes and they took away five.

♦

The mangled bodies were returned the following morning, but of course every seer had seen what was being done in his camp during the night. He took away ten more. The Eldest knew by then that Stralg Hragson would wipe out the cult before he would yield.

Her only hope sprang from the blessing of her goddess, for she could feel the revulsion seething in the Werists who came each morning to return the corpses and drag away more victims. Twenty, then forty ... None of the bloodlord's men was as ruthless as he was, but the mutiny she prayed for failed to appear. Their rage was directed against her, for forcing them to perform such atrocities, and their loyalty to Stralg grew stronger, not weaker. On the fifth day they drove away eighty victims, but they also broke into the storerooms and took bales of priceless weavings, which they burned. Next morning, when most of the Witnesses remaining had collapsed in shock, the Eldest went out to him.

They met in a rainstorm in a field of mud stinking with blood and death, while his sullen host watched from the distance. The corpses of the eighty were being loaded into carts.

"So you value cloth more than life?" he mocked. "I must try burning buildings, too."

"We shall yield," she said, "partway."

His laughter was not pretense. "You will yield utterly, or die. Do you think I cannot double eighty, or burn your abbey around your ears?"

"Then you destroy us, for we shall lack the numbers to gather the knowledge you require."

He showed her his wolfish teeth. "If I cannot have it, no one shall. I will torch your storerooms today. Yield or die, old woman."

"Hear my terms. We shall answer your questions, but yours only. You do not want every warrior to be omnipotent."

His eyes narrowed as the evil mind behind them calculated. "That is true wisdom. But it takes many sixdays to send a message across the Face. So you will answer my hostleaders also. I promote only whom I trust. Them and myself."

"You and no more than four hostleaders." She felt his surge of triumph.

"And no one else!"

"No one else," she agreed. "And we keep our anonymity, our habits and veils. Our persons will not be harmed."

He shrugged his indifference, well pleased with what he had won. "Where is Hostleader Snirson and how many Werists does he have with him?"

"Snirson died of wounds a sixday ago. His host has scattered."

Stralg laughed again; he had known that.

"One other thing," the Eldest said. "We shall never volunteer information. We give true answers and nothing more."

He liked that less, for he was a clever man. The balance of his mind swung back toward death and horror. "Then you can aid my foes."

"I have said we shall not."

"By remaining silent you can aid them."

"To tell everything that may be relevant would take forever. Do you want sixty-sixty sisters babbling in your ears all day long? Ask if a man is a traitor and we shall tell you, but we shall not warn. Only holy Mayn knows all. Those are my terms. Accept them or slay us."

Stralg had hesitated, angrily weighing compromise against massacre. Then, impatient and flushed with victory, he had accepted her terms. He had never gotten around to imposing others, and while the concessions she had won were almost meaningless, she was probably the only person who had ever made that monster back up even a hairsbreadth.

So the vile bargain had been made. So an organization made up mostly of nosy old women had become the despot's sharpest weapon. Until Stralg, the Fist of Weru had been a figurehead with no practical authority over Werists outside his own city or district, and any previous bloodlord who had tried to widen his rule had died young. The seers had helped Stralg win supreme power over the whole Face, and they had helped him keep it, betraying countless rebels to his awful vengeance. Always the rationalization had been that they were biding their time until he could be overthrown, but that time had never come and never would until Stralg's black heart stopped beating.

The Eldest had made her decision long ago and to change it now would be to admit failure. She knew that mutiny smoldered under the ancient crust of obedience, but she must choose a successor who would follow the course she had mapped out, who would write the same story upon the next tablet. LeAmber, she decided, was the one. LeAmber was young, true, not even fifty yet, but she would do nothing foolish. She would wait out the bloodlord's death.

The alternative to LeAmber was Tranquility. Tranquility was older, but rash; she would raise up the Witnesses to defy Stralg and so risk everything. Tranquility's faction maintained that the evil was more than Stralg, that chthonic powers more dreadful than even Weru stood behind him, and the terrible thing he had built would live on even after he died. The Eldest had refused to accept that argument, for there was no evidence that the man's sister was a Chosen of Xaran. There never could be real evidence, and Maynists must deal in facts, not theories or pseudoprophecy.

The sunlight had moved. Her hand must come soon or be too late. The refectory was a blur now, as the shadows closed in. Most of her was dead already.

And yet... when there were no facts? If the gods refused certainty, then must not mortals sometimes act on partial knowledge, weighing possibilities and calculating uncertainties? If the Witnesses were ever to renege on their pact, then now was the time, for Stralg was aging, he was far away on the Florengian Face, still striving to conquer it as he had conquered Vigaelia. After fifteen years, success was souring into defeat. If LeAmber was wrong and Tranquility right, then now was the time to abrogate the treaty. Was this an eldest's legendary dying insight, or only the maundering of a dying crone? Had she been wrong all these years? Must humanity ever be stretched upon the same rack, with a succession of different sandals on the levers?

Softly the five of her hand had come. They gathered around in silence, kneeling by the bed, hands joined with hers for comfort, and she knew them: Rose, Indigo, Carillon, Cinnamon, and Willowbark. Two of them were almost as old as herself, while Willowbark was barely forty. They were united in their grief. Sorrow poured through their union until the Eldest's blind old eyes filled with tears. They shared the pain, knowing that her essence now was death.

"Can you speak, Mother?" Rose whispered. "Have you some special word for us? Will the lady of Wisdom speak with your final breath?"

Of course she would! The Eldest wondered how she could not have realized sooner that she had a message to pass on. "A weft," she said, "tonight, a weft!" She felt their dismay when they could not see what was so plain to her.

In any attempt to explain to extrinsics how they sensed the world, Maynists were forced to speak in metaphor. They spoke of weaving, of mosaics, of patterns. They talked of nodes, of cusps, of subtle touches on the tiller by which the gods steered the world—the single snowflake that could launch an avalanche, the sensual moment when a husband turned to his wife in the quiet of the night and sired a great teacher or a monster, while on some other night she might have conceived a different child for him. They took special delight in identifying what they termed a weft, by which they meant an important event, action, or decision that ultimately produced results contrary to its original intent. The analogy, of course, was to the weft thread in a weaving, which turns at the edge and goes back in the opposite direction to make the pattern.

Rose said, "Tonight? What is its nature?"

"She is leaving!" The Eldest struggled and found enough breath to whisper, "His sister... going to ... Tryfors ..."

"Sister? But where did this weft occur, Mother? Tell us!"

Why could they not see for themselves? "Skjar."

Ripples of content... No matter how important this weft, Skjar was too distant for any Witness here in Bergashamm to scent it. But the local chapter would send in its report and the data would be woven into the history so that all could know. The incident must be great indeed if the lady of wisdom Herself deemed it worthy of mention.

The Eldest sensed another presence. The Ancient One had come for her, and it was time to go.

"We are humbled and will record it, Mother." That was Cinnamon, pushing herself forward as usual. "But who will be Her voice to us from now on? Say the name, Mother! Who will be our new Eldest?"

LeAmber, and keep the covenant? Wait for the tyrant to fall?

Or Tranquility? Warn them of the greater darkness behind Stralg? Tranquility's faction would provoke the tyrant's wrath. Must the Eldest admit that she had been wrong all her life? No, not that. That weft tonight would' save her from that shame.

"LeAmber," she whispered.

She felt their anger and dismay like physical blows.

How dare they question her and delay her here when she must be gone? How could they not sense that the Old One was standing over them, waiting for her?

"Did you say 'LeAmber,' Mother?"

Yes. They would feel her insistence. Of course it must be LeAmber! The compact must be preserved.

Now she could go. Now she had done. Relieved at last of her burdens, Witness Raven, the Eldest, sank into the gentle arms of the mother.