Heart's tale

Chapter 5 part 1

On the full-wall tapestry in the office of the Chief of His Eminence's Special Assignments Department was a story that could hardly be read in quasi-cultist literature or in order libraries. It was the well-known "Story of the Maiden Godricia, Who Experienced Fear for the First Time," but it had some deviations from the canonical image and in the eyes of the Inquisition Department might look so strange that an ordinary man would surely be led to the stake. But not Albert Sept. Cleric Sept was fond of such monuments of the age. It always reminded him how easy it is to fall into heresy at the sight of artfully performed "proof," and for many people nothing more is needed than beauty. According to them, beauty hides the truth and therefore cannot lie.

In the tapestry, Godricia was walking in the mountains around the Living Valley. In the canonical story, she witnessed a rockfall that reached from the top all the way to the Heart and inflicted its first "wound." Thereafter, the woman experienced the "holy fright," which gave rise to the construction of the "wall," and beyond that, to the birth of the City. In the tapestry, however, Godricia is simply leaning on a large boulder, threatening to roll down the valley, and then clumsily trying to climb on it, which caused the rockfall that inflicted the "wound." Such a small detail and such a philosophical gap ran through the minds of the people who had the misfortune to encounter it.

Albert kept many such artifacts seized from this or that amateur of alternative history. And it he was a zealous supporter of the official point of view held by the Cult. He was smart enough to know that the truth could not be found in the writings of the Last Poet, nor in the Cult library, nor even in this tapestry given to him by the Supreme Head himself as a token of the highest confidence with, as he put it, ironic overtones.

So Sept preferred to do his job and not think about politics. Albert believed in those who were in power, because if they came to power, it meant there were reasons and qualities of their character that allowed them to achieve it. He liked mysteries. And all these objects of heresy were little mysteries left by him for his visitors, who fell first into a slight and then into the deepest bewilderment even from the paper compactor, where the first airsledges were depicted with particular finesse – they were carried by several chained hovering octopuses.

And so his current visitor, the handmaid of the Duchess Amun, sat staring at the tapestry in utter confusion.

"All right, Dagma. Let's go over it again," Albert drawled. "From the very beginning."

With these words, Sept turned away from the window and looked at the girl. There was something serpentine in his trusting smile. She stared at him with unblinking eyes and in a monotone voice began to repeat her story, already retold many times:

"I have already told you, kind sir, I woke up at 4 in the morning, as our schedule requires, and after the morning toilet I began to clean the Duchess' dining room. I was assigned to her that day. Then the junior cook and I went down to the cellar, from where we got a smoked seedly, cereals, wafflings, cheeses, hookthorn tincture, mint, and tyr. With the help of the students on duty, we moved the supplies to the service floor and from there to the kitchen. Then I remembered that I had forgotten green stuff, so I had to go down to the cellar again, where I had been locked up by mistake. I sat there till the afternoon, when the head cook began to worry that there were no preparations for the first courses, so the dining-room orderly went down to the cellar and unlocked me.

Before dinner, as punishment, I was sent to scrub the floors of the student washrooms in the Faculty of Preventing Bad Health. But by dinner time my hands were needed in the kitchen, and I was again sent to clean the dining room. I was wiping down the very unpleasant table legs, made in the shape of people with bird heads, as if holding the table on their shoulders, when there was a loud pop and glass flew out the north dining room window and the adjoining windows flew open. A pungent, glowing purple smoke billowed from above, and I ran away and hid in the closet next to the stairs that led to the Duchess' chamber. I was so scared that for a while I was afraid to come out of it. But then I heard the Duchess's voice and came out. She treated me very well, reassured me, and told me to go to her chambers and not to go out. And so I did.