The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison Page A

as many times as he could in five minutes. “The point is to be in it,” she had said, and although he had not understood her then, he did now. He let go of all the things that were not himself and the mantra and the cold silence of the vigil chapel. Periodically, he got up to pace the circuit of the room, touching the wall gently beneath each god’s device, and to drink a handful of the water, which, cold and slightly metallic, began to taste to him like the tranquillity the Archprelate had said he should seek.
    After a time, he felt a deeper rhythm, the rhythm of the stone and water, not the rhythm of his words and heartbeat. He breathed into this deeper rhythm, let it teach him a new mantra, a wordless mantra that waxed and waned, ebbed and flowed, moon and stars and clouds, river and sun, the wordless singing of the earth beneath it all like the world’s own heartbeat. He laid his palms flat on the stone beneath him and listened in quiet rapture to the mantra of the world’s praying.
    It drained away from him gradually, until he was again aware of his body, stiff and cold and cramped and thirsty. He got up, almost falling when his numb legs would not support him. He staggered, stretched first one leg, then the other, then hobbled to the niche in the wall, where he drank another handful of water and then plunged both hands into the bowl, gasping a little with the icy shock of it. But it grounded him, cleared his head. He walked a slow circle around the chapel, then another, flexing his feet against the cold stone.
    He was on his third circuit when he realized the chapel was getting brighter. For a moment, he was simply bewildered, as if he were watching a second sun rising in the sky; then he realized the light came from the Archprelate’s candle, and the weight of stone and obligation above him all but forced him to the ground. At least the light had given him warning of their approach. He straightened his shoulders, forced his ears up, composed his face. When the Archprelate appeared beneath the lantern, Maia was standing calmly in the middle of the floor, spine straight, chin up, and the sick thud of his heartbeat audible only to himself.
    The Archprelate bowed; Maia bowed in return. Behind Tethimar he could see Beshelar and Cala, reminders that not everything that awaited him was threatening or onerous. Maia’s heart lifted, and he knew he had been right to choose his First Nohecharei as his guides.
    They returned as silently as they had come; this time Cala followed Tethimar, and Beshelar was in the rear. Maia stumbled once, near the top of the stairs, but Beshelar steadied him before he fell.
    After Tethimar had closed the pilaster, he bowed and left them to prepare for his own part in the coming ceremony. Cala and Beshelar escorted Maia up to his chambers, where the edocharei waited to take him in hand, Telimezh standing watchful behind them.
    Cala and Beshelar bowed and effaced themselves, but Maia barely noticed them leave, the edocharei clustering around him like black-liveried butterflies. They divested him of the jewelry and the keb and shepherded him in to take another bath, this one less ritual and more comforting. Maia relaxed into the hot water, which seemed both to wash away and to deepen his experience in the living rock of the vigil chapel. His time sense remained suspended, like the remission of a tertian ague, but the water was tepid when he opened his eyes and found Nemer saying apologetically, “Serenity, it is time.”
    They dried him and dressed him: snow-white linen; white stockings and white court slippers; white velvet trousers; a white silk shirt; and over it not the ordinary quilted jacket but a long white robe, quilted and brocaded and by far the most beautiful item of clothing Maia had ever worn.
    I shall grow weary of white before long, he acknowledged ruefully, but for now he was entranced.
    Avris combed his hair as before, but this time braided it into a great knot at the base of