“Because the anguish that makes mud of all your thoughts, because the fear that stains your days, because all your regret and anger and loneliness …” A haloed hand cupped her cheek. Blue eyes sounded her to the bottommost fathoms.

“All this makes you pure.”

Iothiah …

“Cursed!” Nannaferi cried. “Cursed be he who misleads the blind man on the road!”

All old voices failed in some manner; they cracked or they quavered, or they dwindled with the loss of the wind that once empowered them. But for Psatma Nannaferi, the breaking of her voice, which had once made her family weep for its melodic purity, seemed to reveal more than it marred, as though it were but paint, hoary and moulted, covering something furious and elemental. It struck over the surrounding clamour, reached deep into the packed recesses of the Catacombs.

Hundreds had gathered, filling the Charnal Hall with sweat and exertion, crowding the adjacent tunnels, stamping the detritus across the floors. Torches bobbed like buoys at sea, casting ovals of illumination across the bowed ceilings, revealing pockets of expression in the shadowy masses: smiles and howls, mouths fixed about wonder—disbelieving wonder. Smoke pooled in the dark gaps between the lintels. Fingers of light probed the niche-pocked walls and the innumerable urns packed within, cracked and leaning, limned in ages of dust.

“Cursed be the thief!” Nannaferi shrieked. “For he who dines on the fortune of others is a bringer of famine!”

She stood naked before them, wearing her skin like a beggar’s rags. White-painted sigils sheathed her arms to the pit and her legs to the crotch, but her torso and genitals gleamed, adorned only in sweat. She stood withered and diminutive before them, and yet she towered, so that it seemed that her blood-soaked hair should brush the low ceilings.

And he sat before her, naked and immobile on a beaten chair. A slave’s chair.

The White-Luck Warrior.

“Cursed be the homicide, the murderer, he who lies in wait to slay his brother!”

She parted her hairless legs, paused so that all could see slick lines of blood running from her shining pudenda. And she grinned a proud and vicious grin, as though to say, Yes! Witness the strength that is my womb! The Great Giver, the Son Bearer, the gluttonous Phallus Eater!

Yes! The Blood of my Fertility flows still!

The ecstatics immediately before her wept at the miracle, stared with the eyes of the strangled, tore their hair and gnashed their teeth. And their rapture became grounds for the rapture of the cohort behind them, and so on, through tunnel after forking tunnel, until a thousand voices roared through the closeted deeps.

“Cursed be whore!” she cried, not needing to read the text, the Sinyatwa, on the scuffed stone at her feet. “Cursed be she who lies with men for gold over seed, for power over obedience, for lust over love!”