Crown of Shadows - C. S. Friedman [64]
She wondered if she should try again. In theory she could. In theory she had the strength and the knowledge, so why not make another attempt? But she lacked the emotional stamina she had once had, she was drained from an eternity of wasted efforts. She had cast out her hopes into the world countless times before and so few of her children had come back to her, so few of them tried to communicate, so very few understood their own nature, or why she had created them in the first place. So what was the point? Her first children were long gone now, and she could no longer remember what it was like to bond with them. These new children, the seeds of her desperation, would never know such intimacy. Why go on creating them as if that formula would change? As if somehow, magically, the same forces which killed her first family could be made to nurture these, the offspring of her despair?
These new children were restless. She knew that. She sensed it. They were testing the boundaries she had set for them, and soon she would have to decide their fate. Should she endure their rebellion, or wipe the slate clean and start over? With her first children—her proper children—the question would never have arisen. But with these strange creatures, in whom the bonds of family were so weak as to be virtually nonex istent, how was she to judge?
She would give them time, she decided. She would see where their restlessness led them. If it proved that their transgressions were serious, then their lives might be put to better use as fodder for a new generation. For there must be children. There must always be children. Living and learning, dreaming and needing, playing their parts without knowing they did so, in the hope that one of them might some day glimpse the greater game that controlled them all.
And then, she thought, then at last—
Dreams of the first family. Union. Hope.
She waited.
The Dark Within
Fourteen
The main temple of Saris was at the edge of town, just beyond one of Jaggonath’s better neighborhoods. Though the goddess had other temples elsewhere in the city—one on the Street of Gods, even one in the slums of the south side—this was by far her most prosperous, and the best attended. Little wonder. The worship of Beauty is a luxury for most, and is ill attended to in areas where such basic needs as food, shelter, and safety are still at issue.
Narilka walked to the temple. It was a good five-mile hike from where she lived, but she thought of the walk as part of her worship. It gave her time to relax her mind, to focus it on the issue she wished to address. Normally that was some artistic project for which she hoped to gain special inspiration, Saris’ most precious gift. Sometimes it was an offering, the joy of a project completed or a moment of aesthetic inspiration realized. But today ...
I shouldn’t be going here. This isn’t right.
Today she was far from calm, and far from certain that she was doing the right thing. She had discovered Saris in her youth, when she was still working on her parents’ farm; it was the goddess who had made her acknowledge the spark of an artist in her soul, and who had helped her to see that her restlessness was the result of stifling that inner fire. It was Saris who had granted her the courage to confront her parents, and to demand a situation that would give outlet to her innate talent. Thus, after much teary-eyed debate, her apprenticeship with Gresham had been arranged. And she had learned the joy of molding liquid silver into forms so beautiful that they might have graced this very temple.
But today it was not art that drove her here, but need; need for the kind of reassurance that only a god could offer. Would Saris respond?