Retribution Falls - Chris Wooding [59]
Then, all at once, the feeling was gone. The fear left him. He stayed huddled, not daring to move, breathing hard, soaked in relief. It had passed, it had passed. He murmured desperate thanks, addressed to no one. Never again, he swore. Never again would he go through that. Those few seconds had been among the most horrible of his life.
He heard the whine of the hydraulics as the cargo ramp slid shut. Electromagnets throbbed as the aerium engines got to work. The Moment of Silence was taking off.
Frey gathered his courage and raised his head, peering out above the bracken. The Imperators were gone. All eyes were on the craft. Frey took advantage of the moment and scampered away toward the hermitage.
By damn, what did that thing do to me?
He could remember only one event vaguely comparable to the ordeal he’d just suffered. He’d been young, perhaps seventeen, and he and some friends went out to some fields where some very “special” mushrooms grew. The night had started off with hilarity and ended with Frey seized by a crushing paranoia, afraid that his heart was going to burst, and being mobbed by hallucinatory bats. That senseless, primal fear had turned a confident young man into a quivering wreck. Now he’d been brushed by it again.
His breathing had returned to normal by the time he got to the hermitage, and he had himself under control again. Shaken but unharmed. He approached the building from behind, where there were no guards to be seen, and pressed himself against the cool stone of the wall. Security was lax here. He had that to be thankful for. The guards didn’t expect any trouble. They were only here for protection against pirates and other marauders, who might find the idea of a hermitage full of nubile, sex-starved young women somewhat alluring.
Frey cheered at the thought. He’d forgotten about the nubile, sex-starved part. It made his mistake back in Aulenfay twinge a little less, although his cheeks still burned at the memory.
He’d studied the Awakeners in Olden Square and picked Crake’s brains about their faith for a purpose. His idea was to disguise himself as a Speaker, to blend in seamlessly and thereby move about the hermitage unopposed. Congratulating himself on his unusually thorough preparations, he’d surprised Crake by appearing in full Speaker dress: the high-collared white cassock with red piping, the sandals, the Cipher painted on his forehead in a passable impression of a tattoo.
“What do you think?” he asked proudly.
Crake burst out laughing, before explaining to the rather miffed captain that Awakener hermitages were always single-sex institutions. Acolytes were allowed no contact with the opposite gender. In Amalicia’s hermitage, all the tutors and students would be female. The male guards would be forbidden to go inside except under special circumstances, and even then the female acolytes would be kept to their rooms. Lust interfered with the meditation necessary to communicate with the Allsoul.
“So you’re telling me that there’s a building full of women who haven’t even seen a man in years?” Frey had demanded to know.
“What I’m telling you is that your cunning disguise is going to be pretty useless in there, since there shouldn’t be a male Speaker within twenty kloms of that hermitage,” said Crake. “However, it’s interesting that you jumped to the other conclusion first. I never pegged you as a glass-half-full kind of person.”
“Well, a man must make the best of things,” Frey replied, already envisioning a pleasant death by sexual exhaustion after being brutally abused by dozens of rampant adolescent beauties.
So Frey had discarded the uniform. Pinn found it later and had been wearing it ever since, for a joke, pretending to be an Awakener. It was funny for the first few hours, but Pinn, encouraged, had carried the joke far past its natural end and now it was just annoying. Frey wouldn’t be surprised if Malvery had beaten him up and burned the robe by the time he got back.