A broad trench yawned before the priestesses. Forced to descend the earthen ramp in single file, they momentarily crowded the edge, flummoxed by the delicate question of precedence. Nannaferi ignored them, reached the bottom before the first of them had dared follow. A band of armed men, local caste-menials chosen for their fanatical zeal, fell to their knees as she strolled into their midst. She glanced across their sun-shining backs, nodded in approval as each murmured the ritual invocation, “Hek’neropontah …”

Gift-giver.

Gift-giver, indeed, she silently mused. A Gift they could scarce comprehend, let alone believe.

She paused before the entrance, knelt to one knee so that she might taste Goddess-earth.

Aside from excavating the ancient gate, the Cult had done nothing to undo the sacrilege wrought by the heathen. Looters had stripped the black-marble panels with the friezes depicting the Goddess in her various guises, Sowing, Tilling, and Harvesting, and they had pried off the bronze snakes that had wound about the flanking columns. They had taken little else otherwise. According to local lore, the Fanim had been loath to enter the Catacombs, especially after the Grandee charged with mapping its depths had failed to return. Apparently the Padirajah himself had ordered the place sealed, calling it in his accursed tongue Gecca’lam, or Pit of the She-Demon.

They were as wretched as madmen, the heathen, and as deserving of pity, their delusions ran so deep. But one thing, at least, they saw with admirable clarity.

The Goddess was to be feared.

Even the Elder Scriptures, the Higarata and The Chronicle of the Tusk, gave the Goddess short shrift, so drunk were the poets on masculine virtues. The reason was obvious enough: Yatwer, more than any of the Hundred, celebrated the poor and the weak, for they were the growers and the makers, the toiling multitudes who carried the caste-nobility like a foul slime upon their backs. She alone celebrated them. She alone held up her hands to grant them a second, more shadowy life. Celebrated and avenged.

Even her brother War, it was said, feared her. Even Gilgaöl shrank from Yatwer’s bloody gaze.

And well he should.

Planting her cane before her, Psatma Nannaferi strode into the shadow of the ancient sandstone lintels. She entered the worldly womb of the Ur-Mother, descended into the company of her long-dead sisters.

The subterranean cemetery wound deep beneath the ruined foundations of its namesake temple, level wheeling beneath level, making a vast drum of the earth. The lantern-light revealed an endless series of brick-vaulted recesses, each packed with urns, some so ancient the script they bore could not be read. For thousands of years, since the days of the Old Dynasty, the ashes of Yatwer’s priestesses had been brought here to slumber in holy community.

The Womb-of-the-Dead.