Naamah's Blessing

“Only to establish the chain of events. One of these spirits gave each of you a gift, I believe. Can you tell us what form that gift took?”
    Lianne lifted one hand unconsciously to rub at her nose. “The spirit Caim taught us the language of ants.”
    A faint titter of laughter ran through the salon.
    Thierry waited for it to subside. “I would laugh, too, if I knew only the ants of Terre d’Ange,” he said mildly. “And not the black rivers of ravenous death that inhabit the jungles of Terra Nova. But I am getting ahead of the tale. It is also true that one of the fallen spirits, a powerful one, freed himself from your binding and sought to take possession of Raphael de Mereliot, is it not?”
    “Yes, your highness,” Lianne said. “Focalor, a Grand Duke of the Fallen.” She glanced sidelong at me. “But Moirin, along with Messire Bao and his mentor, succeeded in banishing him.”
    “Not entirely, it seems.” Thierry took a deep breath. “That is the backdrop to the tale I would have you hear today.”
    It took hours to spin out the tale in its entirety, hours in which our audience sat entranced and horrified, journeying with Thierry and his companions to the blood-soaked and disease-racked Nahuatl Empire where Raphael de Mereliot intervened with his physician’s skills, and then deep into the wilds of Terra Nova in search of the empire of Tawantinsuyo, where Raphael fell prey to madness and learned to summon and control the black river.
    When it came time for our second expedition to pick up the thread of the tale, Balthasar spoke on our behalf, his voice unwontedly candid and matter-of-fact as he chronicled our journey following in the footsteps of Thierry’s party, all the way from the betrayal aboard the
Naamah’s Dove
to the Emperor’s patronage to the shock of our arrival in Vilcabamba, and Raphael’s cold-blooded murder of Denis de Toluard.
    Lianne Tremaine, scribbling notes to aid her prodigious memory, shuddered. “I take your meaning,” she said to me in a low tone.
    It was impossible to convey the profound strangeness of our captivity in that jungle city, surrounded by Raphael’s army of ants and hostage to his mad ambitions, but Balthasar and Thierry between them did their best. Still, there were parts of the tale they could not tell.
    “Moirin, will you tell of the Maidens of the Sun and the prophecy they guarded?” Thierry asked me.
    I glanced at Bao.
    His face was shuttered and unreadable, and I thought that his role in this story was one that no one who had not lived through it could ever possibly understand.
    “Aye, your highness,” I said to Thierry. “As much as I understand it myself, and deem fitting to tell.”
    A look of understanding crossed Thierry’s features. “Of course.”
    And so I told the tale of the Quechua’s prophecy of the ancestors; but I left out Bao’s role, telling only of my quickening the fruit tree and the liana vine as the signs that convinced the Maidens of the Sun that the time of prophecy was upon them, and of how the maiden Cusi knew herself chosen for the sacrifice.
    At that, there were many soft, indrawn breaths of horror.
    “And you agreed to this?” Lianne Tremaine asked in shock, her pen poised forgotten in her hand. “
All
of you?”
    “I thought as you did, my lady poetess,” Thierry answered her gravely. “We all did, every one of us. But with the fate of the entire Quechua folk hanging in the balance, it was not our place to gainsay their faith. And I tell you this. I was one of a dozen men who escorted the maiden Cusi to the Temple of the Ancestors in the conquered city of Qusqu the night before Raphael’s coronation. There is no doubt in my mind, not even the slightest, that she
knew
herself to be chosen for this fate, and went to it gladly.”
    “Nor mine,” Bao murmured.
    “Nor mine,” Balthasar echoed. “She looked… sanctified. Holy.” He nodded to himself. “Yes, holy.”
    I rubbed the faint scar on my palm. “She was.”
    There was a moment of utter silence in the salon before Lianne gathered herself with a shiver, dipping her pen in the inkwell. “You have gotten ahead of yourself again, your highness. Tell us of the conquest of Qusqu.”
    Prince Thierry obliged, for which I was grateful; but he could notrelate the events that had transpired in the Temple of the Ancestors, only those that led up to them. Alone among our company, only Bao and I had actually witnessed Cusi’s sacrifice, the