The False Martyr by H. Nathan Wilcox

could not see.
    For a long moment, she
watched the monks. As one, they moved from position to position
ranging from laying prostrate to standing on a single leg with arms
spread. They hummed at different timbres to match each pose,
flowing effortlessly and in perfect harmony from one to the next.
Teth was hypnotized by the motion, by the low melodic hum, until
she found herself fighting the need to join them, to match her body
to theirs. She found her arms moving involuntarily, her legs –
somehow painless – bending, her eyes closing, her larynx
buzzing.
    And then, with a great
crash, the Weavers brought their hands together and released a
collective “Oohhh.” Teth jumped at the sudden sound and recovered
herself just in time to dodge the first of the men as they emerged
from the meditation room and walked in perfect unison to the
temple.
    Not a one of the men so
much as glanced at her as they walked past, close enough that their
robes brushed her. They stood before the benches until they were
filled. Finally, the man who had spoken to Teth the previous day,
at least she thought it was the same man – it was very hard to tell
among the multitude of hairless men in identical brown robes – took
a place standing on the dais before them. “Sit,” he commanded, and
as one, the Weavers sat.
    Only then did Teth see
that one of the seats on the benches was empty. Three rows back and
a few places in, it stood out as stark as the gap in a child’s
mouth when his first tooth falls. Teth wondered for the briefest
second if the space were meant for her. She even considered taking
it.
    Then the sun broke the
horizon. Almost magically, the window caught it and refracted the
light into two hundred shafts that fell somehow on each of the men.
The Weavers greeted the sun with a collective gasp as if receiving
tremendous pleasure from a simple ray of light. Matching the gasp,
the men stiffened, their heads fell back, their hands rose and
contorted, and they shook. And on the dais before them, their
leader took on the exact countenance of the statue to his right,
head back, arms stretched, fingers twitching. He screamed, a
horrifying mix of pleasure and pain. The Weavers joined him, voices
rising in such decibels that Teth had to cover her ears as she ran,
trembling from the temple.
    She tripped down the
stairs, fell to her knees – hands scraping on the stones of the
path – and retched. Images swam before her as the screams, the
terrible sounds of pain and loss, transported her back to the
battlefield. There was no unity in the sound, no order. It was the
sound of two hundred men releasing all their emotion as one, of
them giving up everything inside them. Only men facing death or
caught in the greatest possible rapture could scream like that.
Teth had only heard such a sound once before, and she wanted
nothing more than to never hear it again.
    She stumbled to her feet
and ran. She burst through the door of the dormitory and cried,
“Dasen!” She stopped and looked down the dim hall, panting, in a
near panic. “Dasen! Where are you? I need you! We need to go!” She
ran down the hall, throwing herself against the doors on either
side, forcing them open and searching each for the fraction of a
second needed to confirm it was empty. “Come on,” she urged under
her breath. “Where are you?”
    Door after door, she
reached the end of the hall and dashed up the steps, ignoring the
aching of her legs. “Dasen!” she yelled down the hall before
repeating her search. She was panting, soaked with sweat by the
time she reached the end of the second level. She forced herself up
the final flight, rounded the corner, and threw the first door
open. It was sliding shut before she realized that the room had
been different. There had been someone, a body covered by a
blanket, lying on the bed.
    “ Dasen!” she called as she
burst through the door. “It’s me. It’s Teth. What happened? Are you
. . . .” She threw back the blanket