New Alhira, Demaria: 3005 CE
She woke colder than she could ever remember waking.
Darkness still hung like a drape upon the cots and bedrolls strewn around the makeshift barracks, but the dust motes dancing in the slivers of light told her that day had come. She would not rise to greet it for another five minutes, could not rise, and when she did, the chill of the floor beneath her footpaws did nothing to reassure her.
Feeding the corpse fires was more important than catering to her personal comfort, she knew. Wearing the blanket like a cloak, she crossed the cold stones to the window. The shutters were still latched; though the six vacant cots and the imprint of the last occupant in the unmade bedroll told her that she had not been the first to wake, only the first to wake to the light of day. Others were still asleep, but the time for rest had come and gone. She threw open the window and saw that Father Brakir, in all his mercy, had shown his children another sunrise.
With the morning's light came the smell of death.
It did not come as a surprise, though its strength and nearness clouded the Faithwalker's heart as blackly as the columns of smoke which rose from the piles of dead. Two suns hung above the Demarian homeworld, set in place by the Father himself as he prowled the night sky countless ages ago, as red and bright as the priestess who was named for them. Sunfire could not see them now, drowned as they were in the bleak miasma of soot and looming storms. Determined rays played peek-a-boo in an angry and uninviting sky, only to be chased from the world by thunder's low growl and windborne ash.
It seemed much the same below, she could not help but think, when eye and ear turned to the sandstone streets. Some gleamings ago, when she first set foot in the underclasser settlement, she had been stricken dumb by its vibrance: the melody of laughing kits gamboling down this or that alley, the glamor of the women in fashionable jade and rare ivory, the sweet allure of tea and spice and incense beckoning from every doorway, the rich flood of marrow from the bones of a freshly-fried kill. The whole city is a palace, she had thought, a child of nine and an acolyte, trailworn and taxed from traversing the unforgiving sands. She had counted the days until their return, only to find that her beloved palace had become a crypt, haunted by warriors and outsiders whose hate simmered beneath stone masks and whose teeth begged to be shown - not to the grotesqueries destroying the People but to one another.
She had longed for that palace, dreamed of that palace. A Faithwalker goes where she is needed, a voice inside her reminded, even as another said, you should have stayed in the sands.
The water was tepid and did nothing to chase the cold from her aching bones when she washed, and the grim light from the window offered little in the way of aid to the lamp's flickering fluorescence, but clumsy fingers and considerable effort saw her through the sleepy haze that dogged her dressing. She was smoothing the furry ruff of her shoulder cape when she descended the stairs, toward the kitchens' enticing warmth, when the felinesque murmur of those within climbed the stairs to greet her.
"My mother whelped three kits off the teat in the time it's taken these teatippers to cough up a cure," said vexation's voice, frustration made manifest in the rough and unschooled rumble of an underclasser's get, as granite and unyielding as the speaker. Bluewisp's name was mismatched to his person, she believed; her designated Duneshadow large not only in build but in character, in presence, his own wardrum when set upon by the beasts and raiders of the Sand Mother. Her steps had carried her no further than the spiral's first bend, but she could see him pacing in her mind's eye: a slab of slate-blue quaking restlessly, yearning to buck and bend and flip the furniture.
Patience answered him, water and windchimes. "The situation is not made easier by the unrest in the city," replied the unseeing Lighteyes, whose natural sight the Great Father had taken at birth in exchange for her gift for potioncraft and otherworldly visions. Faith had led her to the temple doors in the days before the People raced across star-plains to escape the fires of war, and faith had led her into the desert with the Sand Sisters, when many whispered outside of hearing that it could not be done. They said the same about me, Sunfire knew. When the gods take one strength, they leave another.
"The unrest isn't made any easier when everyone can see the outsiders coming and going whenever they damn well please," Bluewisp argued. "Stargazer's guts are going to be spread from here to the Stubtooth inside a week, and hells only know what's waiting for that wife of his. Outsiders don't need to see this. Give us what we need and get out."
Sunfire chose to ignore the discussion when toes finally touched the landing, and was convinced her arrival had gone entirely unnoticed until an ear twitched her way. She acknowledged the wordless greeting with a dip of her snout and let her feet guide her to the ovens, where she found that all appetite had fled. It was not a happy realization. Her stomach was small on the very best of days, as befit her stature and frailty, but here and now - with the vulture of plague perched at every doorstep - friends and foes alike noted a missed meal or a sick belly. "This problem is larger than Demaria. Waldheim is lost, Sol is threatened," Lighteyes was saying, as Sunny ladelled a generous helping of stewed bumbler into a hollowed heel of rye. The smell of it had her insides roiling. "Should the disease continue to spread, many more lands will hurt as we do."
Bluewisp's tail lashed behind him, his only outward display of annoyance besides a condescending chuff. "This isn't some mystery bug that snuck up out a dung pile left by a magic grithu that only appears to albinos beneath a full moon. It's TRV dolled up for her bonding. There's a guy in space, right now, trying to decide where to dump whole buckets of it. And they're worried we might sneeze wrong somewhere in alien-hating Sol?"
"It's not as simple as you suggest," said the blind woman.
The bumbler had been cooked down in grapes and cloves, so cloyingly sweet and fragrant that Sunny's gorge rose before she could swallow the first mouthful. Half, eat half, she told herself, and the full of her concentration for the next quarter-hour was devoted to exactly that, one excruciating bite after another. She reached to pour a cup of tea and found her pawtips still numb from the persistent cold that followed her all the way from the bed. A short hallway was all that separated the kitchens from the theater-become-infirmary, where the infected writhed and moaned in sweat and ichor as the ghastly mutations overtook them. Her heart bled with sympathy. If it is this cold a tail's length from the oven, how warm could they be?
She flexed each digit one by one, extending and retracting each claw, then stretched her paws to their full span until the blood began to move. After a second try for the tea - this one successful - she rose from her seat, and with cup cradled in her palm started for the door to begin her ministry among the sickbeds.
Lighteyes' pale namesakes had seen nothing but empty, colorless void from the day they first opened, but sure as sunrise, they saw Sunny begin to take her leave. "Sister," she called, but the word meant stop. Three paces from the narrow corridor, the adolescent sensed the directive, and complied.
"You will not be performing the Grace of Morning's Star. This task will be for Spottycoat," Lighteyes went on to instruct, and her tone brooked no argument.
Sunny did not understand. "Spottycoat is a cupbearer. She has not been anointed," she reminded, glancing uncertainly to Bluewisp, as if his rough-hewn features might hint at the reason. They did not.
"She will serve. We do what we must. The Great Father understands."
It had been Lighteyes whose cup Sunfire had borne during the Seven Summers. Sunny had seen four gleamings when the Faith had chosen her from among half a hundred motherless wards to undergo the trials which would elevate her from orphan and underclasser to sister and priestess, and she did not doubt that her mentor played some role in that decision. The sightless Sand Sister was fond of all children, but she showed an unprecedented tenderness toward the dumb and disfigured - and while her appointed charge may have taken Twinblade as a rite name, both teacher and student remembered the sickly orange-furred kit whose feeble bones simply would not grow. That kit was older now; stronger, if not strong, and stood here now shifting from one too-stiff leg to the other to regard her elder from beneath uneasily submissive ears. "What is to be my task, then?"
Lighteyes broke a honeycomb over a plate of hot bread and sliced apples, as she did every morning. When the dish was empty, she would blot the crumbs away with the sticky, uneaten chunk and pop it into her mouth. "You are to begin moving your things from the sleeping area and into the space I have prepared for you in the rear of the reading room," she replied. "You will begin transcribing the collected works of Reshal Raindrinker, beginning with the Slaying of Stormrider."
When shock stole Sunny's tongue, Bluewisp's disbelief filled the silence. "Altheor's teeth, sister. The books can wait until the crisis has passed, don't you think?"
"We know the dangers of the disease. One mutates into a demon or is killed in the process. Deformity or death. It has destroyed the people of New Alhira," Lighteyes answered. "I would not see it destroy the faithful. We are too few already."
"What happened to being armored in faith?" Her sworn shield's temper had been touched off again, Sunny saw, signaled by the flare of his ears and the bristled fur at the head of his spine. In the waning days of her seventh summer, she awoke feverish and trembling on the rocky face of Brakir's Claw, and it was Bluewisp who stood sentinel over her helpless figure, her Duneshadow from the moment he had found her dreaming in the desert. Never had a creature been as handsome as he'd been at that moment, battered and exhausted, those silky blue strands shaggy and matted with salt and blood. "You're just not going to pray with them?"
"Of course we are going to pray with them," Lighteyes corrected, faintly irritated by the presumption, and in that moment Sunfire understood. The rest will pray. Not me.
"Then let her go pray," Bluewisp batted back, his giant shoulders rising and falling, his ears deaf to her mentor's meaning.
The aging Faithwalker rocked her head toward the sound of his voice. "We do what we must. She is sick." I have always been sick, Sunny wanted to protest, but found her tongue as useless as her frozen extremities. Her pulse very nearly became the next casualty when it dawned on her that neither of her companions shivered from the seemingly unshakable cold.
Lighteyes was still speaking, but panic was blooming in the younger female's heart and ringing in her ears. Bluewisp was savvy to it; he saw fear walk its frigid fingers up her spine and hike up her hackles, saw her attempt to remove herself from the truth and its consequences with a single step's retreat. He was savvy to it - but for the first time in their history together, did not try to save her from it.
He spoke a moment later, or maybe it was an hour. "So, what? You expect her to copy books until the cure arrives?"
No, Sunfire thought. She expects me to die.