"The Seer..."
Marshall paced a slow circle before the painted image of Our Lady, weighing his words.
"Among the seven great paths, the Seer is the sacred number one — because it is the beginning of wisdom, the seed of the spirit. It is the waymarker that guides us forward, the tutor of all growth.
"The Seer path has two branches most widely known. One is the Apocalypse-bearers; the other, the Prophets. There are said to be a third sort, the Reckoners, who chase the shape of the future through the shifting of numbers — even alter it — but we'll set those aside for now.
"Of the lot, the Prophets are the cleverest. They hold that any future they foresee is fixed and certain to come to pass, and so they never interfere with it, and certainly never spread word of it. Their Transcendent abilities work the same way — and so the price they bear is the smallest. The Apocalypse-bearers are something else entirely. They call the futures they glimpse revelations, and they lead people fervently toward bringing that future about — or away from it, to prevent it.
"For that reason their abilities are uncommonly strong, and the price uncommonly grave. And there have been more than a few among them in whom the Seer's path underwent a transmutation — Seer turning into Holy Grail. A branch of the Cup's path, that. The Oracles."
Marshall rambled his way through the whole string of it, and Thea, in truth, caught little of the detail. The gist, more or less, was this:
The Seer had two roads. One only watched the future; the other watched it and meddled. And the meddling kind could turn into something Grail-related.
"You said a moment ago," Thea asked, "that Transcendent abilities also carry a price?"
"Nothing is without its price. Alchemy lays down the law of equivalent exchange, and in the Transcendent realm it holds just as firmly — to gain one thing is, without fail, to lose another."
Thea still remembered what her own ability did: it let her shift the weighting between soul and flesh, thinning out the one to double the strength of the other.
The thinning counts as the price? she thought. But does that really qualify as equivalent exchange...
She couldn't help asking. "Only, the way it looks to me, the ability doesn't seem to cost anything."
Marshall leaned on his cane and lit three holy candles. The flames bloomed bright, throwing their glow across an image carved in relief upon the wall — two vast trees. One spread its crown upward; the other spread its crown downward; and their roots tangled together, each the mirror of the other.
Thea had never seen this image before. The Church's carvings and reliefs ran, almost without exception, to a steampunk style — and this one, here in the Cathedral of Our Lady, was a genuine oddity.
But when she looked closer, it stirred something half-familiar. The upper tree bore the carved figure of the Father of All Things the Church held in faith, and beneath the Father stood seven attendant angels, each with a sword in hand. The lower tree was wound about by a great serpent, its tongue flicking upward.
A metaphor for the nine paths?
The wavering line where the two great trees met seemed to have been deliberately carved into an ocean — and on it rode a single fishing boat.
Marshall narrowed his eyes and smiled. "A ship sails upon the sea. Ahead, angel and serpent-demon do battle, raising up great winds and waves. If the ship means to sail on — to reach the World Tree — what must it do?"
"Add lead ballast," Thea answered without hesitation.
"Yes. Quite right. That is ritual. The ship is the Transcendent; the lead is Transcendent power. Strength is what lets us weather the perils of nature and of what lies beyond nature."
"But if you add too much at once—" Thea began.
Marshall laughed. "Little Sorelle, I told you not to be so modest. You're as clever and quick as your sister — a single touch and you see the whole of it.
"Add too much, and the ship goes down. So you see — strength is itself the price. And to add still more lead, to weather still fiercer storms, there's only one way: to rebuild the ship larger, heavier, more sturdy. That is Sequence, and that is Advancement.
"But the lead can be thrown overboard. The ship, once it's been built large, can never go back to what it was. And if you knock a hole in the hull — well. Down it sinks, to the bottom of the sea.
"An irreversible change. That is the price paid for ascending the Sequences, and for the abilities that come with them."
Thea followed Bishop Marshall toward another wall.
Unlike the sweeping grandeur of the angel and the serpent-demon, this wall bore the image of a single spherical object.
She stared at it for a long moment before it came to her — a cross-section of a planet.
There was a tradition in the Arcane of likening a person to a celestial body. This cutaway, surely, carried some metaphor of its own.
Bishop Marshall pointed to the planet's outer crust. "This is the world we live in. Go downward, and you reach the Nightmare. It is the deep sea, the crust, the collective unconscious, the Final Home, the world of ideas — the gathered sum of all the information born from the beginning of history to now. History runs sideways, the historians always say. But in the Arcane, history runs downward as well. You've performed your Advancement Ritual already, haven't you?"
"Yes. Going into the Nightmare, you can feel a kind of... water pressure?"
Thea remembered the terror of that crushing weight when she'd first entered the Sanctum — the sense that she was about to be flattened into a puddle of meat.
"That, too, is a price," Marshall said. "The larger and sturdier we build ourselves, the deeper we can dive.
"And the deeper the dive, the greater the pressure. But there's nothing to fear in that — so long as you haven't sunk past your limit depth, then even if you sink, you'll rise again.
"In the Church schools, and the schools of the King's District and the Clocktower District, there are no few children who dive in secret — because the Nightmare is so resplendent, so full of color.
"Only, their ships are small and light, and so they can dive no deeper than three hundred meters down. As long as they don't dabble too freely in those Transcendent rituals, even if they sink, they'll float back up sooner or later. Some of them, on the odd night, will even dive a hundred or two hundred meters down in their sleep, all unknowing. But we are not like them."
Three hundred meters... how shallow, Thea thought. The first time I went into the Inverted Sanctum I dove thirty thousand...
"If the water pressure — the pollution, that is — reaches an unbearable degree, then we sink wholly into the Nightmare. We become a part of it. Or else we are polluted into another kind of creature altogether — a spirit-creature."
So a spirit-creature is what a Transcendent becomes when they dive too deep and are polluted into it?
Thea thought of the colossal thing she'd seen drifting through the deep waters when she first entered the Inverted Sanctum — and of that revolting ball of meat she'd summoned herself.
The old bishop asked, abruptly, "At what depth was your Advancement Ritual?"
Thea answered honestly. "Around twenty-six hundred meters, I think."
The old bishop went blank. "How much?"
"Ah... maybe it was twenty-five hundred?"
"You're certain you haven't misspoken?"
"I haven't... have I?"
"Your first Advancement Ritual reached twenty-five hundred meters?"
"Is that deep?"
Marshall held a breath tight in his chest and felt, for a moment, rather light-headed.
My Lord! This is no longer a question of deep or shallow!
A first Advancement Ritual, for someone who hadn't yet so much as set foot inside a Sequence, reached at most one thousand meters — in theory. Twenty-five hundred? A Sequence Nine, even a Sequence Eight Transcendent wouldn't dare dive so casually to such a depth.
Diving was a dangerous thing, and the most dangerous of all were the spirit-creatures that drifted through the deeps — without humanity, going about their various blind activities, no awareness in them. Cross one's path and you could only curse your luck.
The Advancement Ritual was safer only because the Seven Gods sheltered it — and for that reason it chose a Nightmare pitched at a depth fitting to the abilities of those taking part, so the difficulty never ran too high.
The old bishop remembered it clearly: fifty years ago, when he'd undertaken his own first Sequence Nine Advancement Ritual alongside a classmate, it was thanks to that classmate — a prodigy of rare gifts — that his first ritual had carried him down to twenty-four hundred meters, and the two of them alone had completed their advancement out of the whole cohort.
And that classmate now sat upon the Holy Seat at the great royal cathedral of Silverkeep — a Sequence Three, the Pope in every right and title!
So this one before him, who had reached twenty-five hundred meters on her first dive — what manner of monster would she grow into?
"Thea, have you any interest in placing your faith in the gentle and merciful Father of All Things?"
"I'm very sorry, Bishop. But not at present."
Thea declined Bishop Marshall's gracious invitation, and the old man's eyes filled with regret.
A Transcendent who reached twenty-five hundred meters on a first dive — it meant the toughness of her soul had already surpassed that of most ordinary folk, even most Transcendents! And such a talent, scooped up in advance by the Grand Constabulary, of all places.
Marshall went rambling on. "You're still at your secondary school, yes? Then might you have any interest in transferring to a Church school? I can promise you, unilaterally, that the moment you transfer you'll have a scholarship — and a guaranteed place at St. Roland's besides..."
Money! A Church scholarship! The word caught Thea instantly.
Unlike her own district school, the scholarships at Church schools were downright lavish — the highest tier ran to fifty gold pounds a year.
It was an unkind thing to say of one's own alma mater, but it had to be admitted: the North Harbor district secondary school was so shabby it couldn't even pay out its scholarships, and had kept its students waiting two whole semesters with nothing to show for it.
That was because the North Harbor district secondary was a school for the common crowd — godless, teaching basic trades, its bar to entry low. The tuition came to a mere fifteen gold pounds.
Which meant investors wouldn't put money into it, and even the municipal took a slapdash attitude toward it — keep it running, and that's enough.
Thea kept herself as restrained as she could manage. Only her voice trembled, faintly, as she squeezed out a smile. "I'll... give it some thought..."
"Ah, you child. The university, then? I've heard your marks are very good."
Marshall let out a small sigh, and then heard Thea say, "Bishop — the truth is, I'm close to securing a letter of recommendation from Professor Horner, of St. Roland's Department of Steam and Mechanical Power."
The old bishop nodded, satisfied. "A wise move."
"No, Bishop. It's actually rather a gamble. I have one professor to vouch for me. If I were a believer of the Church — say, like my friend, the Mercurie earl's daughter, Annelise — getting in would be no trouble at all. But I'm an atheist, and passing the interview will likely be difficult. By comparison, the National University's terms of admission are a little more lenient, and my sister works there as a teaching assistant besides. I've been giving it some thought these past few days, er..."
"An atheist? And what of it, that you're an atheist?"
"Er... what I mean is, I've never so much as read a proper scripture from cover to cover..."
This was, for Thea, rather difficult to confess.
She had, in fact, collected a whole great heap of religious pamphlets — every last one of which she'd put to use as a doodle-pad, as kindling, as toilet paper...
She hadn't even wanted the pamphlets to begin with, but the Church's free bread and milk were simply too good to pass up — so good that every Sunday Thea would carve out half an hour and transform herself into a devout believer...
Bishop Marshall patted the arm of his chair. "What of it! At the very least you've read a few of the scriptures, haven't you?
"Child, hear me first. We pray often to the Lord — yet the Father of All Things does not dwell in the holy image alone. He is in every single thing your eyes can see. The Lord never exists, and the Lord is everywhere — because He is the Father of all things. Your thoughts, your sights, your hearings — all of them bear His trace. Even if you do not believe in Him, His trace is there still.
"We say: the Lord is gentle and merciful. If, because one man does not believe in Him, the Lord should cast that man aside — then the Lord's mercy is a false thing.
"We are believers in the Lord. If, because one man does not believe in Him, we should despise that man — then our faith in the Lord is a false thing.
"We have faith in Him because we have need of that faith — not because He has need of ours. You need not have faith in Him, because you have no need of it — and He, in turn, has no need of yours.
"And so, to believe or not to believe, atheism or theism — here in the Church, these are equal. For this is precisely the teaching of the Lord, and it is the way of those who bear the Cup."
The old bishop's speech turned suddenly nimble, the earlier dullness swept away all at once.
He said the whole of it in one breath, and then, still not done, added:
"I hold the title of honorary vice-rector at the seminary as well — I can vouch for you. Tomorrow I'll have Isabella deliver the recommendation letters in duplicate, one to your home and one to Silverkeep.
"And don't, whatever you do, go to the National University. Their scholarships aren't as generous as ours, and their dormitories aren't as good either."
Thea asked, cautious and careful, "St. Roland's has scholarships as well?"
"A hundred and fifty gold pounds — and with that cleverness of yours, securing one is a sure thing, nailed down tight."
"That's all of it?"
Marshall smiled, eyes crinkling. "That's the lowest tier."
The girl drew a deep breath and at once planted her feet, declaring, "Bishop! There is but one sun in my heart, and it is the Church!"
"Three suns in your heart, four suns, however many suns you please — that's all well and good. The Church's doors stand forever open to everyone. But the Church's strength still falls short of the Lord's mercy, and so all we can manage is to hand out a little bread and milk each Sunday.
"We are striving toward it. That the Holy Church of Avengarde holds to both the way of the Forge-Hammer and the way of the Cup at once is for precisely this reason. The Forge-Hammer is the furnace, the flame, industry, manufacture. Knowledge brings technique; technique brings steam; steam brings industry; and industry brings prosperity. Sooner or later the day will come when even a child in the most barren mountain country will want for neither food nor clothing — will receive a better education, will gain the power to decide their own future. And that is precisely what needs the striving of us, and of you."
Bishop Marshall settled his gaze on Thea, and Thea felt, inexplicably, a certain weight to it. But the old man laughed a moment later. "Don't be so tense. Back to the matter at hand — weren't you off to find that Quickhand Pete fellow, or whatever his name is?"
"Yes. And I was also meaning to get some holy wood from the Church. I've a few rituals it's needed for."
"Holy wood?" Bishop Marshall blinked. "How much do you want to buy?"
Thea hadn't expected the old bishop to reach for the word buy first. Before she could give it much thought, he went on: "Seventy-five gold pounds the kilogram — and if you're buying in bulk, I can do it for seventy."
The generosity and compassion of a moment ago vanished in an instant; Thea could even read a flicker of penny-pinching shrewdness on the old bishop's face.
Marshall caught the awkwardness in her expression and affirmed, "The Church has to make its money too, you know — else what would we buy the bread and milk with? Child, don't grumble that the price is too steep. The raw materials needed to cure holy wood, the auxiliary herbs, the steeping tinctures, all the odds and ends besides — nearly all of it has to be imported from abroad. In point of fact, if you went to Silverkeep, or anywhere else, a kilogram of holy wood could run you a hundred, even a hundred and twenty gold pounds. That's why holy wood is also called gold-wood. Did Roman not tell you?"
Thea found this rather hard to take. She'd been counting on using holy wood in place of gold and gold pounds to replenish her Light in the Blood — and now it turned out the holy wood was priced sky-high too, scarcely cheaper than gold itself!
Mother of mercy! The entire fortune she'd stripped off Canaan Ogre wouldn't buy more than a few kilograms of the stuff.
She refused to give it up, and asked, "Could you do any sort of discount?"
Marshall smiled and chuckled. "No haggling whatsoever."
"One kilogram, then!"