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Kalliarkos kneels, gently taking her chin in his hand. “Doma, quiet your tears. Be at peace. I will let no harm come to you.”

Her sobs quiet. “You look something like him, he who was my rose bower love.” Her wistful tone peels away the years until the old woman becomes a young maiden caught up in the first sweet tremblings of desire. Yet her words turn sour. “But he fled away over the sea and they sealed me into the temple and told me that if I ever spoke of him again, the gods would smite him with a lance of thunder and a knife of lightning.”Advertisement

Ro-emnu looks like a merchant calculating an unanticipated bargain. “Who are you, Doma?”

The priests have begun to sing the morning descant in praise of the Sun of Justice. As they climb the path I can pick out words: “… righteous light… pure judgment…”

“Put the gag back on, you fool,” I whisper. “They’re almost here.”

Startlingly loud and right up against the oracle’s alcove, a stentorian voice intones a prayer. “Oracle, awake! I who am High Priest in His Most Glorious Raiment and with the Holy Presence of the Gods’ Sweet Breath and Joyous Favor attend your sanctuary.”

Ro-emnu claps a hand over the oracle’s mouth. I am afraid to move and almost too scared to breathe. How did the High Priest arrive so quietly?

“I, the humble living, beg you, the separated who is dead, to speak into this world through your hidden mouth. Speak the words whispered to you by the gods from their high thrones of Seeing. Speak the words which you are gloried and sanctified and required to utter.”

The fragrance of the priests’ holy incense wafts through the slit in the wall. The harsh scent tickles right up my nose. Ro-emnu sneezes and his hand slips off the oracle’s mouth. She wails, an ululation of grief, before he slaps his hand back. Too late. Now they know someone is alive inside.

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The oracle must always speak if she is summoned by the proper ritual words. If she does not, there is a longer ritual to coax her voice awake. I need them to go away quickly so no one notices the rope looped around the air shaft on the roof.

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I run into the oracle’s chamber and sit on the stool before the “mouth,” the slit through which worshippers can hear her whispered prophecies. No priest would look directly through the slit so all I see are the robes they wear, dyed in colors that represent the god each priest serves: blue for Lady Hayiyin of the Sea, yellow for Lord Seon the Sun of Justice, and red for Lord Judge Inkos who rules the afterlife. The High Priest wears purple to mark his descent from royal ancestors, since only palace-born men can serve as High Priest. Whether or not he is in on Lord Gargaron’s plot, I have to convince him to leave.

My pulse pounds in my ears so loudly I am dizzy with it. If the words she spoke leave my mouth, do I become the oracle?

“The tale begins with a death.” I pitch my voice low to disguise it. “Where will it end? There could be a victory, a birth, a kiss, or another death. There might fall fire upon the City of the Dead, upon the tombs of the oracles. A smile might slay an unsuspecting adversary. Poison might kill the flower that bloomed brightest. A living heart might be buried. Death might be a mercy.”

Silence pools like fate as a scribe writes my words down. It takes all my willpower not to bolt for the bier’s shaft, but at length, singing a hymn, the priests walk away to complete a circuit of the tombs. The instant it is safe to move, Kalliarkos grabs the rope at the bottom of the air shaft.

“What are you doing?” I whisper.

“I have to climb up and cut the rope free. It’ll be tricky coming down but it’s nothing more than a very tight blind shaft.”

“What if they see you?”

He shrugs. “If they arrest me, I won’t have to go into the army, will I?”

I kiss his cheek for luck.

He rests his fingers briefly against my cheek in answer, then climbs the rope hand over hand, the muscles tight in his arms.

“Time to go, Doma, if you can pull your eyes away from the handsome prince who’s showing off for you,” says Ro-emnu, watching me from the arch.

I see no need to answer such an impertinent comment. Pushing past him, I stop short. Lord Ottonor’s corpse has been put back into the coffin, and the oracle is gone. Only my brother remains. Ro picks up the tiny bundle and offers it to me.

“You did not tell me there were two babies, Doma. Twins are sacred.”

“Twin boys are considered a sign of good fortune, and twin girls of ill fortune, but they’re not sacred.”

“You’re speaking like a Patron. Twins are sacred to the five.” pqdm.com