Silver Masks

Sister Hester had been taught, as a girl, that the holiest place in the world was the room beneath the Cathedral where the light was made.

She had not been allowed into it until her thirtieth year. Now she was thirty-six, and she walked down the spiral stair toward it behind the Pontiff's white robe with her hands folded in her sleeves and her eyes lowered, exactly as she had been trained, and she kept her mind perfectly blank. It was the only mercy left to her. When one had seen what she had seen at the banquet, one learned to think very quietly.

The stair was long. It had no windows, and no lamps, because none were needed. The walls glowed. A pale gold shimmer lay along the stone like honey, thickening as they went down, and the air thrummed, softly, steadily, a note too low for a human ear and too persistent for a human body to ignore.

Thum. Thum.

She had always taken it for the sound of the Divine. She was beginning to wonder.

"You are very quiet, daughter," said the Pontiff.

"I am listening, Holy Father."

"Good. It is the first duty of a servant." The silver mask turned, just slightly, and caught the glow. It was an unadorned mask, smooth as a bowl, with no mouth and two narrow slits for eyes. In thirty years she had never seen what lay behind it. Nobody had. "Tell me again what you saw."

She had told him three times already. She told him a fourth, evenly, in order: the cask, the cold, the Emperor's hand rising, the black. The way it ran. The way the court fell like wheat. The woman in the gray gown who had walked into the middle of it and laid both palms against his chest.

"And the darkness?"

"It stopped, Holy Father."

"Entirely?"

"It bowed," Hester said, before she could stop herself.

The silver mask was silent.

She felt the sweat start between her shoulder blades. She had meant to say withdrew, or dissolved, or any of the careful words that kept a woman safe. But she had been awake for two nights with that picture behind her eyes, a vast black tide coming to heel at the touch of a thin girl's hands, and the true word had simply come out.

"Interesting," said the Pontiff mildly. "Go on."

They reached the bottom of the stair.

It was a round chamber, perhaps forty paces across, with a domed ceiling that vanished into a haze of white. In the center, set in a wide ring of silver, stood a great tank of glass. Within it, held in a lattice of black iron rods, burned a living flame.

She had seen it before. It was the Holy Light, the blessed fire of the Cathedral, the thing that sealed the Soul-Chains and burned the unclean and had once, so the sermons said, struck down the Demon-Queen herself. It was perfectly white. It filled the tank to the brim. It pulsed, slowly, once every three heartbeats, with a soft deep rhythm she felt in her own chest.

And tonight, for the first time, she looked at the iron rods that held it, and saw what shape they were.

They were ribs.

Not literally. They were forged, cold, black, and the work was fine. But the curve was unmistakable. Twenty or thirty great bars, bending in and in toward a hollow center, the way the bones of a vast creature bend around a heart.

Hester stopped breathing.

"It is beautiful, is it not?" said the Pontiff, beside her. His voice was almost tender. "The source of all our power. The thing that has kept this world safe for five thousand years. Do you know how it is fed?"

"By... by faith, Holy Father."

"By the Collars."

The word went through her like a needle.

"Every Soul-Chain in the realm draws a thread, daughter. A little flame from the beast's blood, taken at each pulse and carried here along the silver. A drop, from ten thousand veins. It is how we pay for the peace." The mask turned toward her. "Do you object?"

A drop from ten thousand veins. She thought of the Blood-Reds in the Aerie, lying in their straw. Of the old male with the white-rimmed eyes. Of a hatchling, three weeks old, marked for the cull because it was gray and would not take a collar.

Because it would not give fire.

Because it had none to give.

"No, Holy Father," said Hester.

"Good." He sounded pleased. "Faith is a kind of fuel, child. But a flame burns brighter with more than one wick."

…

The council met in the antechamber above, in a room of white marble and polished silver, where seven masked figures sat at a round table and a bored servant poured wine.

Hester knelt behind the Pontiff's chair with her eyes on the floor. She was not a member of the council. She was a witness, called to be questioned, and then forgotten. It was, she had long known, the safest thing to be.

Cardinal Vessarian had been speaking for some time.

"It is a fraud," he said. He had left his mask on his knee, and his sleek fleshy face was flushed with port and indignation. "A well-staged one. The girl is a plant. I have said so from the beginning. The Emperor has found himself a clever little actress, and the Stone is a trick she learned in a theater. Pale blue! In my forty years of ministry I have never seen a Measuring Stone give a result so conveniently ordinary."

"You wanted her to burn," said another voice, dryly. It was Inquisitor Verre, seated at the far end with his notebook closed on the table. "I seem to recall that being your whole objection."

"I wanted honesty."

"Then I congratulate you. The Stone was honest. It did what Stones do."

"Stones can be fooled."

"Not by an amnesiac with a bad temper," said Verre. "And not at that depth. I examined it myself. There was no tampering, Your Eminence. Either she is exactly what the Stone says, or the Stone is wrong, and if the Stone is wrong, we have a much larger problem than a girl."

There was a small silence.

Hester kept her eyes down. She watched a thread in the carpet, a loop of silver in the white. She had known Lucan Verre for ten years and had never once seen him contradict a cardinal. He looked tired. He looked, she thought, like a man who has taken his first step off a cliff and is surprised to find it does not hurt.

"And the banquet?" the Pontiff said.

"A matter of poison," Vessarian said at once. "I have already filed my report."

"Hester?"

She felt the room turn to her.

"I saw no poison, Holy Father."

"What did you see?"

"I saw the Emperor," she said, "carry a very great power. And I saw it answer to her."

"The word answer," said Vessarian, "is a heresy."

"It is the only word I have." Her voice shook, a little. She steadied it. "I do not say what she is. I say what happened. She walked in, and the darkness knew her."

A quiet ran around the table. Seven silver masks. Seven pairs of eyeholes, all slowly turning.

The Pontiff made a small sound that might have been a laugh.

"Know her," he said softly. "Yes. I believe it did."

He laid both hands on the table. They were old hands, long and white, with the knuckles swollen like knots in a rope. They did not tremble.

"I will tell you what we will do," said the Pontiff. "We will do nothing about the girl."

Vessarian started up. "Holy Father—"

"Nothing yet." The slits of the mask did not move. "I have spent a very long time looking for something, my children. I did not expect to find it in a beggar from the border. But I am not a man who ignores a gift." He leaned back. "Let her stay with her emperor. Let her grow comfortable. And in the meantime, let us teach her what it is to lose something."

"Lose?" said Verre.

"The beast."

For a moment, nobody spoke.

"The Blood-Red is bound to the Emperor, of course," the Pontiff went on, in the tone of a man discussing the weather. "But I understand she has formed an attachment. A sentimental one. She stood between them in the Aerie, and she laid her hand on his collar, and for three heartbeats the Chain went cold." The mask turned toward Verre. "You noticed it, Inquisitor. I trust."

"I... did note a reading, Holy Father."

"Good. You are an honest man." The old voice was mild. "In nine days, the Lantern Festival begins. The whole city in the streets. The Emperor at the Cathedral steps with his court, and the Blood-Red crouched in the square in his chains, as it is every year, to remind the people of what protects them." He spread his hands. "I propose we give the beast a restless night."

"The Covenant Rod," Vessarian breathed.

"The Covenant Rod."

Hester felt her stomach drop.

She had only heard of it. A rumor, among the inner order. A staff of black silver, kept in a locked chamber beneath the Sanctum, that could do what no collar could: reach through the thread, and pull. Not a punishment. A hook. It drove a bonded creature mad with pain, and held it there, and did not let go.

"Every Blood-Red alive will feel it," Verre said, slowly. "Gron more than any."

"Gron will lose his reason," said the Pontiff. "In the middle of the city, before a hundred thousand witnesses. It will be a great tragedy. The beast will break its chains and slaughter the innocent, and the Emperor, who cannot hold it, will be shown to be a ruler who cannot protect his people." A pause. "And the girl who stood between them will be seen, by all, to have been standing very close."

"And if the beast kills her?" Vessarian said, with a greedy gleam.

"Then the Church will mourn." Under the mask, the voice was almost gentle. "And the Emperor will be broken, which is the true purpose. A man who has lost his dragon and his woman and his crown in a single night is a man who will be very grateful for a gift."

Hester's hands were clenched so hard in her sleeves that her nails drew blood.

"Holy Father," she heard herself say. "Forgive me. The people. There will be a hundred thousand in the square. If the beast—"

"Yes?"

"It will kill them. Hundreds. Perhaps thousands."

"It is regrettable."

"They are children, Holy Father. It is the Lantern Festival."

The silver slits turned on her. And she felt, for the first time in six years of service, the full weight of the thing behind the mask. It was not anger. Anger would have been human. It was a vast, still, patient attention, like the attention of a mountain, regarding an ant.

"Daughter," said the Pontiff, "do you know why I chose you to attend me?"

"No, Holy Father."

"Because you were the only one in the hall who did not fall." His voice was very kind. "A woman who can stand in the dark is a woman who can stand in the light. I am glad you have such a conscience. It will serve you well in the years to come. But I would ask you to remember one thing."

"Yes, Holy Father?"

"The Church does not kill children. The Dragon does."

The ice in her blood did not melt. But she bowed her head, and said, "As you say," in a voice that did not belong to her. When she looked up again, the Pontiff had turned away, and Vessarian was pouring the wine, and Verre was looking at his closed notebook with an expression she could not read.

…

She went up into the night afterward, alone, by the long public stair.

It was a clear night, bitterly cold, with a thin crescent moon above the Cathedral spires. Below, the city lay in its frosted rooftops. Already, early, a few paper lanterns had been strung across the lanes in readiness for the festival, little rounds of red and gold, rocking on their cords. A child's voice was singing somewhere. A cart rattled over the cobbles.

Hester stopped at the top of the steps and put her hand on the cold stone rail.

Behind her, soft footfalls. She did not turn.

"You were brave in there," said Lucan Verre.

"I was a coward in there."

"You said children." He came to stand beside her, a small gray figure with his hands in his sleeves. "No one else did. I counted." A breath of white left his mouth. "I said nothing. I am ashamed."

She looked at him.

"You wrote nothing down," she said. "At the banquet. I watched you. Every other inquisitor was scribbling, and you stood there with your book shut."

"I am an unreliable witness."

"Lucan."

"I examined the dragon's collar yesterday." His voice was very low. "It was clean. Not cold, not hot. Clean. As if the sickness in it had been drawn out and the fire left whole. Do you know what that means?"

"No."

"It means that someone has found a way to touch the thread without being burned by it. Someone who is not a priest." He swallowed. "The Holy Light is not holy, Hester. It cannot be. If it were a gift from heaven, it would not need to be fed."

The wind was cold. She stood with her hand on the rail and the paper lanterns rocking below and listened, for the first time in her life, to the sound of a man saying out loud what she had only dared to think in the dark.

"Nine days," she said.

"Yes."

"They will kill the girl, and the Emperor, and a hundred thousand people for a lantern festival."

"Probably."

"And if we warn them?"

"They will know it was us." Verre's smile was bleak. "And we will be put in a cell under the Sanctum and used to feed the light."

She was silent a long while.

Then she took her hand off the rail, and wiped it, absently, on her robe, as if it had touched something unclean.

"Then we had better not be seen," said Sister Hester.