“Yes,” said Rao, just as swift. “My father has joined this cause. My sister died for it. Your own sister is imprisoned or dead also, for the sake of removing him from the throne. And Prem…” Rao stopped. “Yes. Chandra must be removed. You know it, no matter how priestly you may be now.”
All the imperial siblings had the same eyes, Rao thought, as Aditya looked at him—deep and dark, with a gaze that could pin a body and hold it, by sheer force of charisma alone.
“Will you tell me your name, Rao? Your true name?”
“As a priest of the nameless, you should know better than to ask me that.”
“I don’t ask you as a priest,” Aditya’s said quietly. “I ask you as your friend.”
“No,” said Rao. “You ask me as the prince named emperor. You ask me because you gained a revelation when you entered the garden of the nameless all those years ago with—with me. I expect you’ve had many other revelations since, as a priest. But still, the picture is incomplete, isn’t it? The future is a shadow thrown by a great beast, or light seen through shifting water. You just need a little more. A clue, a word, and you’ll be sure that what you think is to come is true.” Rao swallowed, and looked away, out at the gardens. He saw blue birds. Gold. “The whole of fate isn’t for mortals like us. So no, I won’t tell you my name. It isn’t for you.”
“One would think you were the priest, not I,” Aditya said mildly.
“I’ve been a faithful of the nameless far longer than you’ve been a devotee, Aditya.”
Aditya had never been quick to anger, and that hadn’t changed. He inclined his head wordlessly. The only sign that he was at all perturbed or wounded was a slight thinness to his mouth.
“Come,” he said. “I have a vision to show you. Something the nameless god revealed to me.”
Aditya led the way to a quiet segment of the garden, surrounded by a protective wall of spindly lacquered trees laden with heavy red leaves. At its center stood a pool of water upon a plinth.
“We feed it with water drawn from the reservoir that lies beneath the gardens.” He gestured at the channels on the ground. Walked over to the plinth. “Do you remember,” Aditya continued, “the night you took me to the gardens in Parijat?”
Of course Rao did. “We were drunk,” he said. “If we’d been sober I never would have taken you.”
But they had been drinking, and Aditya had been asking about his name again, in that way he always did: insistently, steadily, but charming, a grin on his mouth.
“You don’t tell a prophecy just like that,” Rao had said with a grin of his own. “No matter what it is. You know, my great-aunt’s name was a prophecy three pages long? And all about how fields would be irrigated in fifteen years, in eastern Alor.”
“Truly?”
Rao had nodded. “Well, at least she made the farmers very happy. Increased our crop yield.”
“And what will your name change, Rao?”
Rao had shaken his head, a queasy feeling in his stomach that wasn’t from the drink alone.
“If you’re so interested in the faith of the nameless,” Rao had replied, not knowing what his words would result in, “then get up—leave your wine—and I’ll show you the future.”
They had entered the gardens of the nameless, laughing and stumbling, and found themselves at a plinth just like the one before them now.
Now, Aditya took the role that Rao had taken so long ago. He placed his hands on the edges of the basin in quiet reverence. He traced the edges. Back. Forth. Began to murmur a prayer in archaic Aloran.
Rao steeled himself—approached the plinth—and mirrored Aditya’s stance. Lowered his head to stare at the water.
Around them the leaves of lacquer clicked and rustled, and then fell eerily silent.
When you commune with the nameless—when a priest or a drunken Aloran prince lays hands on a seeing basin and sings the ancient prayer—you seek the voice of the universe.
There was a door in the water. A door in his mind. Rao looked once at Aditya, then walked through it.
There is a void that holds the world.
Some countries, some peoples, some faiths think it resembles water or rivers. But Rao knew better. As a boy, before he’d been fostered to Parijat, he’d been taught by the family priest, in the garden of the nameless that bordered the Aloran royal mahal.
Before there was life, there was the void. And in the void—in its lightless unknowability—lay the truth of the nameless god.
He gazed into it now. Hung in its black nothing and waited as the voice of the nameless unfurled around him, opening like stars.
