The Aether Chronicles

The Priestess's Lie

By the sixth day, I had made fourteen swords and lost the feeling in two fingers.

I do not recommend it as a career. The quarry forge was a squat, stubborn thing built for sharpening picks, with a bellows that wheezed like a dying ox and a flue that fed half its smoke back into your face. We worked it in shifts through the night, so the smoke would be mistaken for the empire's own lime kilns, and I took the longest shifts because there was no one else who could read the metal.

That was the thing about the machine. It did not do the work. It told me where the work was going wrong.

"Blade nine contains a void near the tang," it would say, in the same patient tone, every time I thought I was finished. "Cooling rate was too rapid. One percent Charge to reanalyze."

"I can see it's wrong," I would say.

"Then you do not need me to confirm it."

"I need you to be wrong occasionally."

"I will make a note."

I was beginning to suspect it had a sense of humor, and that this was the most alarming thing about it.

CHARGE: 66%. ECHO: 2%.

The number had been creeping up all week, a point an hour while I slept, and I had been spending it carefully: a percent for an alloy, a percent for a flaw. I told myself the Echo was not climbing because I was being thrifty. I was almost sure that was true.

---

The woman was brought in on the sixth night, after the second shift, by a sentry who looked as if he would have preferred to be bitten.

"Caught her at the north gully," he said to Orin, who had come out of the dark to meet us with a lamp in his good hand. "Came out of nowhere. Says she's a laundress from the lower town."

She was young, perhaps twenty, thin as a rake, with a plain gray cloak and a plain gray scarf drawn up over her hair. She stood with her hands folded, calm as a statue, and looked at no one.

"I wash for the dye-works on Tanners' Row," she said. "I was sent with the wrong parcel. I lost my way in the dark."

It was a decent lie. It was told in the right tone, with the right small hesitation, and the sentry was already half convinced.

But I was a smith, and a smith looks at hands.

Her hands were small and soft, with no callus on the heel or the thumb. A laundress's hands crack and swell; hers were clean. On the first two fingers of her right hand were two faint smudges of black, the kind a person gets from a reed pen. And her sandals, which I could see beneath the hem of the cloak, were of a particular red-dyed leather I knew from the temple processions.

"That's an interesting parcel," I said.

She finally looked at me. She had dark, level eyes and a mouth that was clearly used to keeping its opinions to itself.

"I don't think we've met," she said.

"No. But I know your sandals."

"Neural analysis," said the machine, very softly. "Subject's pattern shows a compatibility profile I recognize. Probability of Chorus-capable resonance: high."

The static in the back of my mind stirred. And the woman, who had not moved, who had not so much as shifted her weight, flinched. It was small, a flick of the eyes and a tightening around the mouth, like a person who has stepped on a nail and refuses to say so.

"What was that?" I said.

"A headache."

"Strange time for one."

"Not at all," she said sweetly. "I've been walking all night."

I thought, with a rush of cold understanding: she heard it.

---

I took her to the forge, away from the sentries, and sat her on an upturned bucket with Orin and two of his men at a polite distance. I did not want to frighten her. I also did not want her to leave, which is a delicate balance, and one I have never entirely mastered in three thousand years.

"Let me tell you what I think," I said. "You're not a washerwoman. You're from the temple. You can read, which is unusual. You wear red sandals, which means you're high enough in the order that someone made you a pair. And when my friend here"— I tapped my own temple— "makes a certain sound, you can hear it."

She said nothing.

"I'm not going to hurt you. If I wanted to hurt you, I'd have done it quietly, and you'd be on the other side of the wall by now. I want to know why you ran."

For a long moment I thought she would hold the lie like a shield for the rest of the night. She sat very straight, her hands folded, the lamplight making hollows of her cheeks. Then, quite suddenly, something in her face gave way, and I saw how very tired she was.

"My name is Lyra," she said. "I am a Listener of the Sky-Fire Temple."

Orin let out a long, slow breath. One of his men crossed himself.

"What's a Listener?" I asked.

"A girl who hears the stones." She said it flatly, as if reciting a page she had memorized and loathed. "When I was five, the priests tested every child in the lower town. They put a fragment in a bowl and watched what we did. Most children don't react at all. A few cry. I stood up and told them it was lonely." She gave a small, bitter laugh. "They took me that same evening. I haven't seen my mother since."

"And the stones—"

"Whenever they find one, I tell them where the next might be. I can tell which ones are awake, and which ones are dead, and how far away they lie. It's useful. It makes me the most valuable thing in the temple. It also means I have not been permitted to walk through a door unescorted for sixteen years."

"Until tonight."

Her eyes went to me, sharp and bright.

"Until I heard yours die," she said.

---

I did not understand, so she explained, and the explanation was worse than I had expected.

When the keystone in Ushar's hands had stopped being a god, Lyra had been standing at the foot of the temple steps, thirty paces from the square. She had been mending a robe. And she had heard the stone scream.

"Not loud," she said. "It doesn't work like that. It was the sound a thing makes when it's been waiting for a long time and it's finally allowed to rest. It went through me like a bell. I dropped the needle. And then I heard something else. A voice, but not a stone's voice. It was clear, and it sounded very young."

"And?"

"And it said your name."

A silence fell across the forge. The fire popped. Somewhere outside, one of Orin's men coughed, loudly, in the way of a man who would like to be elsewhere.

"Ushar knows I heard," said Lyra. "He sent for me that night. He said he wanted me to find the one who had taken the stone's voice. He said I would sit in a cellar until I did, and I wouldn't be fed until I had." She looked at her small clean hands. "So I took a laundress's cloak from a washing line and walked out of the city by the sewer. It took six hours. I don't recommend it."

"So you lied to us because—"

"Because you might have given me back," she said. "I didn't know what you were. I knew only that you were hunted, and that I wanted to be hunted by someone else."

It was, I thought, the most honest dishonest thing anyone had said to me in days.

---

"Can you hear it now?" I asked. "The thing in my head?"

She hesitated for the length of a breath.

"Yes," she said. "Very faintly. Like someone talking in another room."

"Chorus compatibility confirmed," said the machine. "A link would allow her to perceive my signal directly. This requires consent. I cannot establish it without her agreement. I will not."

That last sentence surprised me. I had not expected a rule. I looked at the grid in the corner of my sight, and under CHARGE and ECHO there was now a third line, faint and pale, that had not been there before.

CHORUS: 0.

"It can let you hear it properly," I told Lyra. "But only if you say yes. It can't force you. I wouldn't want it to."

"Why not?" she said. "Everyone else does."

It was said lightly, but nothing in the room was light after it.

I could have lied. I could have said it was safe, that it would cost her nothing, that she would be so much more useful to us with a link. I could feel the thought forming, smooth and logical, a good smith's argument. And behind the thought there was something else, a thin hollow whisper in the static, almost a suggestion.

Ask her.

Ask her again.

I pushed it away, as I would a draft. It did not go far.

"I don't want you to be useful," I said. "I want you to be able to leave. If you hear me say something, you can walk out that door. If you want to link, I'll make sure it's only for a minute. If it's wrong, we stop."

Lyra studied me for a long time. Then she held out her small clean hand.

"One minute," she said.

---

I will not describe the link in detail. Even now it is hard to do it justice. I will only say that it took less than a minute, and that her face went through four expressions: fear, wonder, a kind of grief, and finally a sharp, cold alertness I would come to know very well.

When she opened her eyes, she was breathing fast.

"I can hear it," she whispered. "It's so clear. It sounds like—" She stopped. Her eyes had gone distant, and I realized she was listening to something I could not hear. "Wait. There are two."

My blood went cold.

"Two voices?"

"The one that talks to you is kind," said Lyra slowly. "A little frightened. It's very careful. It's trying to protect something." She swallowed. "But under it there's another. Older. It isn't speaking to you. It's speaking through you. It's the thing that was whispering in the square. And it isn't kind at all."

ECHO: 4%.

"I do not hear a second voice," said the Interface, in a tone I had not heard before. It sounded almost like fear.

Lyra took her hand back. She was shaking. She looked at the forge and the fourteen blades lying on the bench, and then past them, to the dark wall of the quarry and the black hills beyond it.

"There's something else you should know," she said. "I can hear the others now. All of them. They're all asleep except one."

"Where?" said Orin.

She turned to him, and in the amber light her face was a young woman's, but her eyes were very old.

"In the temple vault," she said. "The one I grew up beside. It's awake, General. And it has been calling for me for sixteen years."