queen of blood and blasphemy (preview)
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the story so far:
(Daughter of Flood and Fury) After escaping a death sentence put on her for her gender and her father’s heritage, Aletheia discovers the identity of her father’s killer—Nerimes—and how he managed to usurp her father’s position in the temple. Along the way she meets (and falls for) Gaxna, a one-eyed thief who teaches her to survive in the streets, and has a prophetic vision of the coming floods. Her attempt to retake the temple fails—though it encourages groups of monks and theracants to form a splinter temple and guildhouse—and she narrowly escapes with her life, leaving Gaxna in Nerimes’ hands.
(Witch of Wealth and Ruin) Desperate to rescue Gaxna and stop the floods, Aletheia travels to the distant city of Dahran seeking her father’s ally, Hiana, who has his notes on the immersion chronicles, thought to have a solution to the floods. Hiana turns out to be a member of Nerimes’ cabal and has Aletheia thrown into the city’s gladiator pits. Rather than cooperate with Hiana to get free, Aletheia battles her way through the rigged gladiator system, earning allies and learning the secret behind Nerimes and Hiana’s powers—a form of social magic called hierarchism. In the end, she exposes Hiana and escapes with her new allies, carrying a copy of her father’s chronicles.
(Rebel of Riddle and Woe) With the help of her new ally (and lover) Isang, Aletheia studies the chronicles and learns of an ancient artifact—a monocle—that can control the floods. They set off to find it, running into Gaxna, who has miraculously escaped Nerimes’ prison. Around that time overseer attacks increase, though they are traveling in secret overland. The group divides over whether Gaxna is the source of the increasing attacks, a conflict heightened by the appearance of Estrija, Gaxna’s former lover and representative of the rebel guildhouse.
Aletheia makes the difficult decision to leave Gaxna behind, and travels with the rest of her allies to the Serantei Isles, seeking the location of the monocle, and to parley with the rebel temple and guildhouse. The talks go poorly—Aletheia seeking to unite them, as the chronicles call for—but Aletheia learns the monocle is likely in Serei. Before she can leave to find it, Seilam Deul ships lay siege to the island, sent by Nerimes’ wife (and heirarchist ally) Ieolat. Fighting a losing battle, Aletheia strikes a deal with Miyara, heirarchist and head of the Seriean guildhouse, who turns out to have been magically controlling Gaxna the whole time.
With Miyara’s help, and Aletheia’s deepening powers, they escape the siege on a stolen Deul ship. The motley crew sails for Serei, rebel monks and theracants in an uneasy alliance with their enemy, Miyara, all determined to find the monocle there—and end Miyara’s blood control of Gaxna—before the floods take them all.
(Witch of Wealth and Ruin) Desperate to rescue Gaxna and stop the floods, Aletheia travels to the distant city of Dahran seeking her father’s ally, Hiana, who has his notes on the immersion chronicles, thought to have a solution to the floods. Hiana turns out to be a member of Nerimes’ cabal and has Aletheia thrown into the city’s gladiator pits. Rather than cooperate with Hiana to get free, Aletheia battles her way through the rigged gladiator system, earning allies and learning the secret behind Nerimes and Hiana’s powers—a form of social magic called hierarchism. In the end, she exposes Hiana and escapes with her new allies, carrying a copy of her father’s chronicles.
(Rebel of Riddle and Woe) With the help of her new ally (and lover) Isang, Aletheia studies the chronicles and learns of an ancient artifact—a monocle—that can control the floods. They set off to find it, running into Gaxna, who has miraculously escaped Nerimes’ prison. Around that time overseer attacks increase, though they are traveling in secret overland. The group divides over whether Gaxna is the source of the increasing attacks, a conflict heightened by the appearance of Estrija, Gaxna’s former lover and representative of the rebel guildhouse.
Aletheia makes the difficult decision to leave Gaxna behind, and travels with the rest of her allies to the Serantei Isles, seeking the location of the monocle, and to parley with the rebel temple and guildhouse. The talks go poorly—Aletheia seeking to unite them, as the chronicles call for—but Aletheia learns the monocle is likely in Serei. Before she can leave to find it, Seilam Deul ships lay siege to the island, sent by Nerimes’ wife (and heirarchist ally) Ieolat. Fighting a losing battle, Aletheia strikes a deal with Miyara, heirarchist and head of the Seriean guildhouse, who turns out to have been magically controlling Gaxna the whole time.
With Miyara’s help, and Aletheia’s deepening powers, they escape the siege on a stolen Deul ship. The motley crew sails for Serei, rebel monks and theracants in an uneasy alliance with their enemy, Miyara, all determined to find the monocle there—and end Miyara’s blood control of Gaxna—before the floods take them all.
chapter one
The sea is dark today. I lean against the iron rail of the Deul clipper, feeling its strange craftology thrum beneath the hull, and watch the gray headlands pass. I have always found comfort in the waters, in the sharp scent of brine and constant slosh of waves, but this morning I see only a reflection of my own thoughts: choppy, disturbed, opaque.
In my hands I clutch a worn roll of parchment, slack with the damp in the air, as my father must have held it, and as I know Hiana once did. And only in that last moment, choking and dying, did I see: all the wisdom I had gained was but lies—and those lies pointed to a deeper truth. A line from entry 213 of the chronicles, the one that seemed like nonsense because my father recorded it in code. We deciphered it our first day out of Serantei, using my name as the key, and I have been reading it ever since. Not to puzzle out its meaning—for once, the words feel pretty easy to interpret. Not to remind myself, either—I have it memorized by now, like I memorized so many of the other passages on the journey from Dahran.
I read it to find that “deeper truth.” I watch a sodden gray shirt float past in the waters, half-submerged, refuse of the society I grew up in. I feel a kinship with the monk who wrote this passage, whoever he was—so much of what I knew, before I escaped the temple, has turned out to be lies. And I’ve gotten a taste of those deeper truths, too: the secret abilities of heirarchists like Nerimes, the hidden unity of the male and female faiths I was taught were enemies, and the power that comes from uniting their magics.
I reach out again, focusing my concentration, seeking a particular stream of blood inside. And if I could just dig deep enough, the passage reads, I might gain power over even the highest and mightiest among us. The meaning is clear: if I unlearn everything I’m supposed to, if I gain the muscles the author says he doesn’t have, I should be more powerful even than my enemies and their hierarchism.
I find the stream I’m looking for and push my awareness down it, across an ocean and through two bodies, seeking the blood I first tasted while battling for my life across the highest balcony of the Ujeian Temple. The blood of Nerimes.
I find only blankness, where in every other connection there is now a richness of sight: the constant stream of thoughts from watersight, the deeper current of feelings from bloodsight, and the unity of these two in the intuitive knowing of the heart. This is the fullness of our unified sight, something I usually struggle to not get overwhelmed by. But with Nerimes—and I know this is him, know the tang of his blood—there is only blankness, like the slate gray ocean over the rail.
I press harder, look deeper, pushing myself to grow stronger, to see the unity of all things. I squint against the backdrop of overcast sky. Nerimes’ blood isn’t blank, exactly—I feel a texture there, like plaster spread on a wall, slightly rough and uneven. It’s not the perfect absence of a bloodborn, but a manmade block put up against intrusion. A waterblind, and a bloodblind too, blocking all possible sight. I shove my awareness at it, scrabble for edges, try to sharpen my focus and slice through.
Nothing. I can break through water- and bloodblinds now, when the person holding them loses concentration. This blind never slips.
Heirarchism. It has to be—even Nerimes couldn’t keep his concentration this perfect all the time. It feels as solid as his blind that first day he came to spar with me in the temple, when I was still caught between seeking a House and proving myself stronger than anyone else. I laugh, the sound lost in the chill breeze blowing off the headlands. I feel like that novice some days, still full of anger and suspicion.
Still too weak to do anything about it.
I let go, panting, after another few seconds of trying to break through. The strength I’m seeking is different now, but I need it even more now than I did back then. I need it to kill Nerimes, to break through his blind and stop his heart, but that’s not even the main reason. I need this strength to stop the floods. To control the monocle, like the chronicles talk about—and to stop my enemies, if they try to trigger the floods early.
I want to believe, even if Nerimes or Miyara or Ieolat has found the monocle, that they’re not as close to uniting the ways as I am. That politics or craftology or whatever else they try is never going to give them as deep a unity as the one I’m seeking. As the kind Yemlaw told me we needed, before he died.
My heart clutches at the thought of him, slumped over the side of a boat in Serantei, Deul arrow through his neck. Another ally dead. And for what?
Calm swells through one of my blood bonds, and I hear gentle steps behind me—Teiwo. The peace I feel in him is a welcome antidote to my own churn.
“The waters are strange today,” he says, gazing past me to the sea.
I nod, spotting a broken chair bobbing in the water. There is something off about the ocean, but it takes me a moment to find it.
“Calm,” I say, “even though there’s a breeze.” We had to engage the ship’s craftology to get close to shore, or lose a whole day trying to tack against the breeze.
“Perhaps the Mother is offering us a lesson,” he says, still looking out.
I see what he’s getting at a second later, and am grateful that Teiwo’s not the kind of person to spell it out for me. That would be Dashan, or maybe Anan. I sigh anyway, because I know he’s right. “I wish I could be calm. There’s just so much riding on me figuring this out.”
“On us figuring it out,” he says, laying a hand on my shoulder. “And anyway, it is not actually up to us. It is up to the Mother, to guide us. We just have to stay in touch, to notice when She does.”
I bite my lip, rather than speak my doubts. At this point the Mother—or Uje, or whatever you want to call it—seems as likely to wash us all away as help us stop the floods. And so we must be drowned, 213 reads. For I was not strong enough to see through its reflections, and neither will be this world.
If I’m to believe Ujeism, those words came from god.
“Thank you, Teiwo,” I say at last. “I wish staying in touch felt as easy as it used to.”
“It will,” he says, so confident, so faithful, that I can’t decide if he’s deluded, or I am.
“We should reach port in fifteen,” Isang says, coming to the rail with one of the Deul’s strange instruments in his hand. “Have them slow the drive by half.”
“Okay,” I say, finding my connection with a sailor named Neshma and guiding him to manipulate the ship’s controls. With unified sight, I can also catch Neshma’s thoughts on the matter—wondering where we are going, what we’re going to do with him when we get there. I send him reassuring thoughts—I’ve gotten to know all ten Deul sailors on board, pushing them like this. Neshma’s one of my favorites.
The thrum weakens beneath us, though the ship glides on, its sleek lines cutting the water like no Sereian vessel could.
Begdil clears his throat from behind me. “If you don’t mind, Aletheia, I’ll make my way to the riverpost once we’re docked. I’m eager to hear how the temple received our delegation.”
I hold back a reminder that Estrija has been getting updates through code all along. The delegations we sent back to the rebel temple and guildhouse were of mixed genders, on my insistence, so we’ve been able to stay in touch at the instant speed of bloodcode. Begdil’s listened to the updates with more than a bit of mistrust—he’s still an old monk at heart, even if he decided to follow me, which is one of the reasons I didn’t want him in either delegation.
The other reason is that, if we do end up going to Serei, he’s exactly the kind of monk the Sereian temple might listen to. I haven’t given up hope that I can unite the monks and theracants in Serei, too. According to Yemlaw, I need to unite as many people as I can.
I’m about to ask Begdil to check the riverpost for news from the Sereian temple—one place the sisters don’t have access to—when Ekifte calls from the crow’s nest, where he’s taken to spending long hours.
“Ahead! Do you people see that?”
I look back to the water, straining to see anything different. It’s hard, without much sunshine, but--
Isang lets out a low whistle, just as I catch something too big to be regular trash floating in the waters ahead of us.
“Is that—an ox cart?” Begdil asks. “How did it get out here?”
“Too big,” Isang says, leaning against the rail and straining his eyes. “Aletheia. Have Neshma turn us two degrees port. Whatever it is, we don’t want to hit it.”
I do, and let Estrija know we are getting close, carefully ignoring the sensations our blood connection brings. She and Anan have been spending a lot of time belowdecks this last week.
She appears a minute later, along with a disheveled-looking Anan, smirking around a lit clove. They get to the rail just as the thing in the water rolls, like the whales that breach off the western coast, revealing a sloped edge covered in shingles.
“A house,” I say, my chest tightening. Carts occasionally fall off seaside roads, or off barges crossing the strait from Bamani. But houses?
“What in coffers,” Anan says slowly, “is a house doing out here?”
There’s only one thing it can be, but before I can force the words out of my mouth, Ekifte calls again.
“More ahead! A whole river of them!”
All eyes turn to the water, where I can just make out what he’s talking about, a current of lumps spilling out from Jetoh bay, too big to be refuse or ox carts. Each one tightens the strap of worry across my chest. One by one my allies turn to me, varying degrees of distress and doubt in their eyes. Wondering what this means.
I, for once, don’t have any doubt. I wish I did. I take a steadying breath.
“A flood,” I say. “It’s the only thing that could do this.”
“Impossible,” Begdil says, shaking his head as we glide past the gutted house, clothes and chairs and beeswax candles drifting from its gaping doorway.
“Could have been a landslide. Jetoh is built on a bay, like Serei. They might have had heavy rains.”
“We would have seen the clouds,” I answer, watching as we cut closer to the river of debris. The corpse of a pig floats next to the spreading ruin, skin only starting to discolor. “We’ve stayed in sight of land. Any storm big enough to do this, and this recently, we would have seen.”
Anan blows smoke. “Then what was it?” There’s only a slight tremble in his voice.
“Our enemies,” I say quietly, turning back to the waves. “Our enemies or our god. Those are the only options.”
“More importantly, at the moment,” Isang says, practical and unshaken as ever, “do we continue on, or turn around?”
“On,” I say, feeling the tightness in my chest settle into determination. “The ship can handle it. And we need to see.”
In my hands I clutch a worn roll of parchment, slack with the damp in the air, as my father must have held it, and as I know Hiana once did. And only in that last moment, choking and dying, did I see: all the wisdom I had gained was but lies—and those lies pointed to a deeper truth. A line from entry 213 of the chronicles, the one that seemed like nonsense because my father recorded it in code. We deciphered it our first day out of Serantei, using my name as the key, and I have been reading it ever since. Not to puzzle out its meaning—for once, the words feel pretty easy to interpret. Not to remind myself, either—I have it memorized by now, like I memorized so many of the other passages on the journey from Dahran.
I read it to find that “deeper truth.” I watch a sodden gray shirt float past in the waters, half-submerged, refuse of the society I grew up in. I feel a kinship with the monk who wrote this passage, whoever he was—so much of what I knew, before I escaped the temple, has turned out to be lies. And I’ve gotten a taste of those deeper truths, too: the secret abilities of heirarchists like Nerimes, the hidden unity of the male and female faiths I was taught were enemies, and the power that comes from uniting their magics.
I reach out again, focusing my concentration, seeking a particular stream of blood inside. And if I could just dig deep enough, the passage reads, I might gain power over even the highest and mightiest among us. The meaning is clear: if I unlearn everything I’m supposed to, if I gain the muscles the author says he doesn’t have, I should be more powerful even than my enemies and their hierarchism.
I find the stream I’m looking for and push my awareness down it, across an ocean and through two bodies, seeking the blood I first tasted while battling for my life across the highest balcony of the Ujeian Temple. The blood of Nerimes.
I find only blankness, where in every other connection there is now a richness of sight: the constant stream of thoughts from watersight, the deeper current of feelings from bloodsight, and the unity of these two in the intuitive knowing of the heart. This is the fullness of our unified sight, something I usually struggle to not get overwhelmed by. But with Nerimes—and I know this is him, know the tang of his blood—there is only blankness, like the slate gray ocean over the rail.
I press harder, look deeper, pushing myself to grow stronger, to see the unity of all things. I squint against the backdrop of overcast sky. Nerimes’ blood isn’t blank, exactly—I feel a texture there, like plaster spread on a wall, slightly rough and uneven. It’s not the perfect absence of a bloodborn, but a manmade block put up against intrusion. A waterblind, and a bloodblind too, blocking all possible sight. I shove my awareness at it, scrabble for edges, try to sharpen my focus and slice through.
Nothing. I can break through water- and bloodblinds now, when the person holding them loses concentration. This blind never slips.
Heirarchism. It has to be—even Nerimes couldn’t keep his concentration this perfect all the time. It feels as solid as his blind that first day he came to spar with me in the temple, when I was still caught between seeking a House and proving myself stronger than anyone else. I laugh, the sound lost in the chill breeze blowing off the headlands. I feel like that novice some days, still full of anger and suspicion.
Still too weak to do anything about it.
I let go, panting, after another few seconds of trying to break through. The strength I’m seeking is different now, but I need it even more now than I did back then. I need it to kill Nerimes, to break through his blind and stop his heart, but that’s not even the main reason. I need this strength to stop the floods. To control the monocle, like the chronicles talk about—and to stop my enemies, if they try to trigger the floods early.
I want to believe, even if Nerimes or Miyara or Ieolat has found the monocle, that they’re not as close to uniting the ways as I am. That politics or craftology or whatever else they try is never going to give them as deep a unity as the one I’m seeking. As the kind Yemlaw told me we needed, before he died.
My heart clutches at the thought of him, slumped over the side of a boat in Serantei, Deul arrow through his neck. Another ally dead. And for what?
Calm swells through one of my blood bonds, and I hear gentle steps behind me—Teiwo. The peace I feel in him is a welcome antidote to my own churn.
“The waters are strange today,” he says, gazing past me to the sea.
I nod, spotting a broken chair bobbing in the water. There is something off about the ocean, but it takes me a moment to find it.
“Calm,” I say, “even though there’s a breeze.” We had to engage the ship’s craftology to get close to shore, or lose a whole day trying to tack against the breeze.
“Perhaps the Mother is offering us a lesson,” he says, still looking out.
I see what he’s getting at a second later, and am grateful that Teiwo’s not the kind of person to spell it out for me. That would be Dashan, or maybe Anan. I sigh anyway, because I know he’s right. “I wish I could be calm. There’s just so much riding on me figuring this out.”
“On us figuring it out,” he says, laying a hand on my shoulder. “And anyway, it is not actually up to us. It is up to the Mother, to guide us. We just have to stay in touch, to notice when She does.”
I bite my lip, rather than speak my doubts. At this point the Mother—or Uje, or whatever you want to call it—seems as likely to wash us all away as help us stop the floods. And so we must be drowned, 213 reads. For I was not strong enough to see through its reflections, and neither will be this world.
If I’m to believe Ujeism, those words came from god.
“Thank you, Teiwo,” I say at last. “I wish staying in touch felt as easy as it used to.”
“It will,” he says, so confident, so faithful, that I can’t decide if he’s deluded, or I am.
“We should reach port in fifteen,” Isang says, coming to the rail with one of the Deul’s strange instruments in his hand. “Have them slow the drive by half.”
“Okay,” I say, finding my connection with a sailor named Neshma and guiding him to manipulate the ship’s controls. With unified sight, I can also catch Neshma’s thoughts on the matter—wondering where we are going, what we’re going to do with him when we get there. I send him reassuring thoughts—I’ve gotten to know all ten Deul sailors on board, pushing them like this. Neshma’s one of my favorites.
The thrum weakens beneath us, though the ship glides on, its sleek lines cutting the water like no Sereian vessel could.
Begdil clears his throat from behind me. “If you don’t mind, Aletheia, I’ll make my way to the riverpost once we’re docked. I’m eager to hear how the temple received our delegation.”
I hold back a reminder that Estrija has been getting updates through code all along. The delegations we sent back to the rebel temple and guildhouse were of mixed genders, on my insistence, so we’ve been able to stay in touch at the instant speed of bloodcode. Begdil’s listened to the updates with more than a bit of mistrust—he’s still an old monk at heart, even if he decided to follow me, which is one of the reasons I didn’t want him in either delegation.
The other reason is that, if we do end up going to Serei, he’s exactly the kind of monk the Sereian temple might listen to. I haven’t given up hope that I can unite the monks and theracants in Serei, too. According to Yemlaw, I need to unite as many people as I can.
I’m about to ask Begdil to check the riverpost for news from the Sereian temple—one place the sisters don’t have access to—when Ekifte calls from the crow’s nest, where he’s taken to spending long hours.
“Ahead! Do you people see that?”
I look back to the water, straining to see anything different. It’s hard, without much sunshine, but--
Isang lets out a low whistle, just as I catch something too big to be regular trash floating in the waters ahead of us.
“Is that—an ox cart?” Begdil asks. “How did it get out here?”
“Too big,” Isang says, leaning against the rail and straining his eyes. “Aletheia. Have Neshma turn us two degrees port. Whatever it is, we don’t want to hit it.”
I do, and let Estrija know we are getting close, carefully ignoring the sensations our blood connection brings. She and Anan have been spending a lot of time belowdecks this last week.
She appears a minute later, along with a disheveled-looking Anan, smirking around a lit clove. They get to the rail just as the thing in the water rolls, like the whales that breach off the western coast, revealing a sloped edge covered in shingles.
“A house,” I say, my chest tightening. Carts occasionally fall off seaside roads, or off barges crossing the strait from Bamani. But houses?
“What in coffers,” Anan says slowly, “is a house doing out here?”
There’s only one thing it can be, but before I can force the words out of my mouth, Ekifte calls again.
“More ahead! A whole river of them!”
All eyes turn to the water, where I can just make out what he’s talking about, a current of lumps spilling out from Jetoh bay, too big to be refuse or ox carts. Each one tightens the strap of worry across my chest. One by one my allies turn to me, varying degrees of distress and doubt in their eyes. Wondering what this means.
I, for once, don’t have any doubt. I wish I did. I take a steadying breath.
“A flood,” I say. “It’s the only thing that could do this.”
“Impossible,” Begdil says, shaking his head as we glide past the gutted house, clothes and chairs and beeswax candles drifting from its gaping doorway.
“Could have been a landslide. Jetoh is built on a bay, like Serei. They might have had heavy rains.”
“We would have seen the clouds,” I answer, watching as we cut closer to the river of debris. The corpse of a pig floats next to the spreading ruin, skin only starting to discolor. “We’ve stayed in sight of land. Any storm big enough to do this, and this recently, we would have seen.”
Anan blows smoke. “Then what was it?” There’s only a slight tremble in his voice.
“Our enemies,” I say quietly, turning back to the waves. “Our enemies or our god. Those are the only options.”
“More importantly, at the moment,” Isang says, practical and unshaken as ever, “do we continue on, or turn around?”
“On,” I say, feeling the tightness in my chest settle into determination. “The ship can handle it. And we need to see.”