Author’s note: with Gena’s permission, I have transcribed this message selected from our recent correspondence and included it here, unedited.
My dear Horwendell of Ilianath,
I would be pleased and honored to provide an account of my endeavors leading up to the storm in Bliss. I shall enclose it separately for your convenience. The college is watching my correspondence closely—this is just the sort of thing that the censors would be looking for and which would be relayed to the inquisition and be viewed disfavorably by my peers at trial—but, as you may have noticed, I have made my reply in such a way that they will never see it.
I hope the dream courier finds you lucid and well.
Please, do not worry about me here. I knew full well what I was getting into. I am confined to my cell, but I am allowed to study and to receive news (such as your letter). I eat as well as any of us ever have here. Hester assures me that not a thousand holy soldiers of the order and inquisition combined could stop him if he learned that I was in danger and needed his aid. With assurances like that, what have I to worry about?
Is not your situation the more precarious one? I am detained, but by people like myself; devotees of the same cause. You are served, but by perfect strangers; under aegis, but by a dangerous and formidable power. I am glad to hear that your plans have unfolded auspiciously, that the city now wakes to sow new crops and the Old King has hesitated to make reprisal. I will be eager and anxious to hear more good news in the coming months and years.
Yours in the Word,
Sister Gena of the College of Apostles
Iltara’s great gamble was to teach me. She invested in me her effort and her power in the hopes that I would do as she asked and become her perfect weapon. The entire day after our meeting with her, where Hester made that headlong charge and was tackled by a half-dozen servants and a lion, Iltara and I continued our studies. One aspect of her realm is the dream-like trance she can impose, where both meaning and the mind can become malleable, changeable, shapeable from without and within. It is a dizzying and breathtaking way to learn many things—profound things—very quickly.
What she didn’t anticipate is that, when you called me to the Communion to speak of your idea, the power she had loaned me would be the last piece of the puzzle.
I had languished for weeks on the question of these realms and their reality, their immateriality, and their meaning. The Communion introduced to me yet another factor and more questions. Then, suddenly, I realized just how close these realms were to each other. The dreaming city of Bliss and the Halls seemed to have specific, limited points of entry, but not the Communion.
Or perhaps, I reasoned, the points of entry were not so limited.
And there was someone I could ask to help verify my theory.
The next moment I had alone from Iltara, I knelt for prayer. But rather than withdrawing into my own contemplations, focusing on the recital of the Word, instead I drew from Iltara’s power and transformed my prayer. I withdrew into the prayer itself, into another realm.
It was an orchard under a starry sky. The leaves glinted and ground was lit as if in full sun, but only the stars shone in the midnight sky. The Halls! They had been so close, this entire time.
There was a figure there, walking between the rows of trees, wearing a snow-white cowl. She noticed my arrival, turning to face me, but her face was shaded by the hood. She waited for me to catch up: an invitation.
I caught up quickly. “Holy Mother?” I had not done any of the prayers or the anointing rites. But I had been invited, and I was excited for the meeting. “I have many questions,” I said.
“Very good,” she said. Her voice was as clear and bright as the light reflecting from the golden leaves. “It would be dull to not have any, don’t you think? And please, the formal address is not necessary. It makes long conversations dreadfully tedious.”
“Yes, of course. These realms,” I said, walking beside her, regarding the trees. “Are they mere illusions?”
“You spoke of this with the apprentice, no? You are not born here. You shall not die here. The way you have come to this place, nothing here shall affect your corporeal body, at prayer in the sorceress’s temple.”
“I should have known,” I said. “These realms are real.”
The goddess beneath the cowl laughed. “That’s not the reaction I usually get from the method of elenchus. Nevertheless, go on. Tell me what you think.”
“I was not born in the College of Apostles and shall not die in the College of Apostles—or, at least, suppose that for the time being. But the college being real is not in dispute. Unless our notion of reality relies on all three of those points being true—birth, death, effects on the body—then we may discard the first two immediately.”
“Spoken with clarity. Improved from the last time this question was put to you, I might say. And the third?”
“I have a similar illustration. A symposium in the college is likely to have no effect on the corporeal body. And yet: indisputably real.”
“The one time Chancellor Inoch had his jaw broken by his secretary, perhaps?”
“Then we place that in a separate category. That was a fight on the college grounds. Quite sacrilegious. What about a symposium? Just a conversation. If my body experiences ill effects from the symposium, then attribute those ill effects elsewhere and refine the definition of symposium. We shall still find something at the bottom there. A pure exchange of ideas. A pure veneration of the Word. Is that thing real? I say it is. Maybe, even, more real than the rest of the college, no? Truer to the purpose, the spirit of the place.”
We walked for a few paces.
“Well argued,” she said. “Although most students give me more opportunities to ask questions.”
“You never did answer my question, though,” I observed.
“Correct.”
“You won’t, will you?”
“I cannot.”
“… Oh?”
“I mean that. I cannot tell you what is real and what is not. Suppose this realm is not real. Then what shall I say?”
I thought. “So I must find my own confidence in my answer.”
“Seems so.”
“Speaking of which…”
“Ah, the matter at hand,” she said.
“Yes. I wish to wield the power.”
The cowl shifted. I had surprised her.
I felt a tiny speck of shame. Of course she could be surprised. So much of the Word—so much of her history—did not comport with the silly college doctrine of Her Perfect Foresight. Of course the doctrine was faulty. How could I not have known?
She was surprised.
“You wish to wield the power on behalf of the desert sorceress? I did not expect this. She has wronged you.”
“She has.”
“Even now, the apprentice wizard has made a daring sacrifice to free the knight, who is on his way to meet with you. You need not study the work to become her weapon. You may come home, safe.”
I owed her a reply, but I could not ignore the question at the fore of my mind for any longer. “Was this your plan? That we be allowed to follow Iltara’s lures east to retrieve the tome?”
“That was not some specific tactic I had devised. But it was my plan, in so far as that it is always my plan that my children spread and honor my Word. Now, you know the Word. I have laid aside my weapons. The sorceress wishes to take one of them up, but I must not allow it.”
“I do not wish to be her weapon. But I wish to ask, to pray, that I be permitted to use it once. Horwendell had an idea for how I may do so before I escape with Hester, and I see the wisdom in it.”
She stopped. I stopped with her.
“Against her?” she asked.
“No. Merely to divert the river and lift the siege. Hah… ‘merely,’ as if that is a mere thing.”
She thought about this. “I see. And you need my help. Even if you could trick the sorceress into aiding you, even with her power, you have not enough time to learn and prepare. Not before the knight arrives and you must go.”
“Right.”
“You understand what you are asking to undertake, right? I cannot lighten the burden for you. I can only strengthen your back, for a short time. What you take of the law, you cannot return. You will learn things that cannot be forgotten. You must bear the weight of the power and the consequences that come from this. Are you willing?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You could leave. Why do this?”
I smiled. “The realms are real, Holy Mother. And the things I’ve seen and learned in them. From there, all I need to do is trust in the plan, that I shall spread and honor your Word.”
The cowl dipped in a slow nod. “Very good. Come,” she said. She gestured for me to come sit beside her, and her hands rose to her hood. “See me face-to-face. Know me, and understand the law.”