Fevered Star (Between Earth and Sky, #2)(45)
The room was round. Along its walls ran bookshelves populated with ancient texts. In the center stood a waist-high wooden table. On the table was a single document, written on bark paper and bound in book form. It was the original Treaty of Hokaia, the most sacred document on the continent. Naranpa approached it with reverence, her hands suddenly trembling. She knew what was in it; it was one of the first things all dedicants had to learn before they were divided into their respective orders. But she had never seen it, had only heard secondhand what it contained, and for a moment, she doubted. What if she had been lied to? What if they all had been lied to? What if the Order of the Historical Society had kept things from the other orders, concocted stories that favored themselves or distorted their sacred mandate? What if it was all a fabrication?
She flushed, feeling foolish. She sounded like Denaochi, paranoid and seeing trickery at every turn. The Watchers were not built upon a falsehood. And yet, as she looked upon the leather cover of the book embossed with the four seals of the great powers that fought in the war—the sun of Tova, the jaguar prince of Cuecola, the mermaid tail of the Teek, and the spear fortress of Hokaia—dread made her stomach clench.
She opened the book. It was divided into four sections, each section’s edges stained with a different dye. The first part of the manuscript was a series of recitations laying out the terms of the Treaty. It was dry and rote, and Naranpa recognized the words that established borders and responsibilities and proscriptions against a formal military and the like. The second part of the book was short but devastating and called for the execution of dreamwalkers, the banishment of all spearmaidens who had supported the insurrection, and the prohibition of magic and worship of the old gods in all the realms of the Meridian. There was also a sentence barring travel to the Graveyard of the Gods and a penalty of death for any who broke the edict. She thought of Zataya and her strange powders and wondered, again, if they were fakes.
The next section of the book set out the parameters for the establishment of the war college at Hokaia, as no longer a school to train the elite spearmaidens but a place open to all within the Meridian, so one culture could not master war the way the spearmaidens had and use their knowledge against the others. And it demanded that ways of peace be taught, too. Alternatives to slaughter and violence with an emphasis on diplomacy and compromise. She skimmed through these pages, too.
But she slowed to read the last section, titled “On the Establishment of the Watchers.” It was further divided into four sections that explained the overall responsibilities of the Watchers, the individual responsibilities of each order, and the methods of replenishing their number. But the part she was most interested in was the section on the rites of investiture.
She had been thinking about it ever since she’d had the vision of the firebird losing her scales in battle, and on the heels of that, the woman who had brought back the sacks of golden scales to be forged into something worth dying for, and the spill of human blood mixed into the mask mold. The rest of the visions fit the pattern, too, right up to the one of the man on top of a tower in the rain, mask in hand.
She wasn’t sure of the mechanics of it all, but she was convinced there was something more than theater in the wearing of the Sun Priest’s mask. She had always loved the mask, felt a strange connection to it, even though it had not been in her possession long. She had thought herself simply attached to a symbol of her station, but now she wondered. If the vision had been true, and the mask was not forged gold but instead was wrought from the very essence of the god, what did that mean? And if the teeth and sweat of a god were used in southern sorcery to attempt to resurrect the dead, what might be done with a god’s golden scales? And what did it mean to wear it? Might wearing the mask infuse the wearer with power? She wasn’t sure, but she hoped to find the answers in the book.
She read it through carefully, and while it confirmed her suspicions about the origin of the mask, it said nothing about it granting the wearer any powers. She turned to the pages describing the other priests’ masks, hoping to find something there, but there was even less written for those, only that the priests were meant to be anonymous to guard against any one individual rising in popularity. The priesthood was meant to be a selfless vocation and not one that allowed any single priest to develop leadership based on the strength of personality. It was something that had become less important in her time, but the signers of the Treaty had railed against individual charismatic leaders at length, no doubt a reaction to the spearmaiden who had started the war.
Tired, and disappointed that she had come so far and found so little, she read through the final page. She skimmed it so quickly and the ritual seemed so mundane that she almost missed it.
She had experienced the ritual herself, and yet she had not recognized it for what it was. The blood-marred scales that made the mask, the invocation of the sun god, the will of the raised dedicant, and the declaration of desire. It was all there, plainly written.
Anyone who knew what to look for would have seen it immediately. In fact, she had no doubt that those who established the Watchers three hundred years ago knew exactly what they were doing. But she had never thought to see it, because she had been told a thousand times that the Watchers did not practice magic. That they did not worship the old gods. That there was nothing mystical in their rites, only reason and order.
And they had been sorcerers all along.
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