“I have not always been a priest of the mothers,” Mitul said. “Nor has the priest the empress has come to meet. I, too, am Aloran.”
Rao felt a brief sense of surprise. He had never met an Aloran priest of the mothers before. His people worshipped the nameless. But Aditya had become a priest of the nameless, leaving the mothers of flame behind; he supposed it wasn’t so impossible for the reverse to happen.
Rao was not sure what reaction the priest wanted, so he simply nodded, keeping his voice attentive, curious.
“How did an Aloran come to be a priest of the mothers?” he asked.
“The nameless guides our fates,” said Mitul. “And the nameless guided me to the service of the mothers. Here, I found others who shared my vision.” Cryptically put, but Mitul was looking at Rao with his pale eyes. “You believe in the nameless god. And you believe in the mothers of flame.”
“Of course.”
“And the yaksa?”
“It is not a matter of belief,” Rao replied. “The yaksa, the mothers of flame, the nameless god—all of them exist, do they not? I don’t disagree with your—path. But I venerate the mothers of flame, and I worship the nameless god. That was how I was raised.”
“And the yaksa?”
“I am simply glad they’re gone,” said Rao.
“Ah, Prince Rao,” Mitul said with a faint smile. “They are not gone.”
For a moment, Rao was not sure he had heard correctly.
“They are not gone,” Mitul said again. His pale eyes seemed to cut through Rao before he turned, guiding Rao deeper into the room. “Let me show you the worth of this temple, and why priests of the mothers tend to it so lovingly.”
Tension knotted its way through Rao’s body. It was a feeling somewhere between fear and anticipation. It carried him across the room. Held him silent.
The nameless. Somehow, he was sure, the nameless god had called him here.
“The fire of the mothers burned the yaksa grievously,” Mitul said, with that priestly, storytelling cadence to his voice. “But there were yaksa who, dying, laid their bodies in Ahiranya’s soil. Trees grew from their corpses, or so the Ahiranyi believe. There are many who dismiss the Ahiranyi because they worshipped monsters. But their truth is no less than ours—only darker. Only crueler.
“We kept one such yaksa here,” Mitul went on. “One dying yaksa, carried into this temple. One yaksa, laid in our temple’s soil to perish. Its body has not survived the centuries unchanged or intact. It is no more than wood—strange, and rich with heat, but nonetheless, no more than wood.” He touched his fingertips to a long box that lay on a high table. “Then, a decade ago, it began to change.”
He lifted the lid. Inside it, Rao could see soil—rich, soft earth. And upon it…
An arm.
At first Rao had thought it was human. Nameless help him, in the course of war he had seen many a severed limb. He knew the shape of one—the absolute horror of a limb flung on a battlefield, still human and freshly alive, fingers curling, knuckles scarred, garbed in some poor soldier’s broken armor.
The thing within the boxresembledan arm: It had five fingers, curling toward a palm. A wrist with jutting bones, the shadow of veins beneath thin skin, leading to the jut of an elbow, an upper arm cut ragged. But the veins, even in the dim light, were the green of sap. The skin was not skin, but wood. If a hand had carved it—and Rao was certain no hand had—then it would have been called beautiful workmanship, eerily lifelike. Roots, white and green, emerged from the stump, sinking into the soil.
It was alive.
“The priest of the mothers reared in Parijat do not know the meaning of what lies before them,” said the priest. “They see this arm and do not understand. But we who serve the mothers but also came from other branches and other faiths—we see with clearer eyes. We understand.” Mitul looked at him steadily. “This,” he said, “is yours, now.”
He raised the box and held it forward.
Rao took a reflexive step back.
“This should be shown to the empress.”
“It is yours.”
“It should be hers. She must—she needs to be told of this, immediately.”
“The empress already knows,” said Mitul. “And if she does not, my teacher will tell her. He is wise in such matters.”
“Why give this to me?” Rao demanded. “Why me, of all the men waiting beyond this temple? Why part with it at all?”
