Chapter 71: Chapter 71 – An Audience is a Form of Diplomacy

Lady Sheid, glorious and beautiful, a dazzling titan of power in all of its many forms, garbed in a floor-length dress that glimmers of flame and sparkles and shines. Magelord James, weak and yet strong, a cataclysm in slow motion as he… my thoughts trail off, and I manage to turn the laugh at my own ridiculous internal narration into a small smile.

It’s been long enough. I’m here not to give offense, but to make a point, so I wait one more beat to let the total hit five and then bow, back straight, to the precise degree I’d practiced. I almost lose my focus when she matches me perfectly, starting her own bow at the exact millisecond that I start mine and hitting the exact same depth of bow, somehow perfectly poised despite, or maybe with, the long tail wrapped around her hand and the asymmetry of it all.

“Rise.” My voice is low, pitched not to carry. I try to put as much command as I can into my voice without putting any mana into it; there’s something like a little metaphysical muscle that I know I could use to infuse the command with command, and I barely manage to avoid doing so.

They follow my lead. My heart hammers in my chest with incredulity at it all, at the four of us straightening in perfect unison to stand in that odd formation they adopted around me in the midst of this opulence and magnificence. In front of these hundreds of people, whom I am deliberately not noticing.

To my total lack of surprise, this time around, Lady Sheid straightens in perfect synchronicity with me, and sits with perfect grace.

I’m moderately, well, at least mildly, confident about what that says. She’s declaring us not exactly equals but peers, which is exactly the tone I was going for myself. I’m still the junior peer, I guess, and I give it one more beat and then my voice rings out across the hall. “The Lady is gracious.”

“The Magelord’s party grants the respect due, and I return it in kind.” Her voice carries with a sort of sublime, perfect casualness that leaves me momentarily in awe. “What brings the Walker In Void to my halls?”

“The Temple of the Godsforsaken Wanderers makes its choices, Lady, and you know more about them than I do.” I do my best to match her tone. It’s my halls from her mouth instead of our halls, so it’s than I do from mine; her phrasing is intimate, and I jettison a whole lot of crammed instruction from Zidanya and Amber about how to address rulers and nobility. “I rise on the path the Worldspirit charts me.”

“You have traveled a long path to join us in our times and in this place; so bless us, Magelord, Outsider, and your party too. Let us rise.”

Silence, like a glass shattering. She stands again, and every single person in the audience hall drops to a knee or to a floor-deep curtsy, with four exceptions. The pressure of her presence rests on our shoulders, lighter than it did before, and it lightens still further as she turns towards me and looks at me, all calm expectation and certainty.

I had prepared, mentally, for a lot of things. I hadn’t prepared for this even in the slightest. Still, it’s not the first time I’ve been asked to offer a blessing, and it’s not even the first time I’ve had to bullshit doing exactly that. I have no style guide and no reference material, so I go with what feels natural to me.

Besides, if she didn’t want off the cuff from me, she shoulda warned me.

“Void Between, that will in time take us; Void, that is the unmaker of all things.” The silence in the audience hall deepens and I can practically feel the horror in the tension. There’s a couple hundred people hanging on my every syllable, but it’s a departure from my old norms having them do so while wondering if my next word is going to result in their deaths.

It could, too. I can feel it thrumming in the air, I can feel it humming inside me. The Temple permits no Gods, but the Void is everywhere; it’s the past and it’s the future of every thing that is.

“That it be with grace, when next we see you.” The formal forms are a little stilted on my tongue. “That it be in a world made better.”

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It’s a tremendously awkward bit of phrasing, in my opinion, but it seems to land okay. Lady Sheid smiles at me, and it’s predictably like the sunlamps turning on; it warms me through and makes me shiver at the same time, and I feel both like I’m floating out of my body and like I can intimately feel every millimeter of my skin prickle.

So, you know, your average run-of-the-mill smile from her. Good to know I did good.

“That we make our choices in knowledge; Safaran who dwells in all tomes, Safaran whose eyes see these truths.” Sara’s voice rings out, and I have to concentrate not to show my surprise at the strength of her voice and at its very presence. She fills the hall with her benediction, and there’s an audible murmur of approval, which Amber cuts across.

“That all may grow, in strength and of strength; Kazir of the fields, Kazir of the joys of plenty.”

Zidanya waits for a couple of beats, for a silence that grows and blooms before she plucks it, smiling. “That we need not fear the cold nor the blaze, the fang nor the claw; Teiwa, totality of the wilds.”

There’s another audible murmur, this one more astonished. I can feel the weight of Zidanya’s invocation in a way that I couldn’t Sara’s or Amber’s, so I’m a little astonished myself; how is Zidanya calling down the attention of a God into this of all places, where supposedly no God has sight nor can they tread? If that’s even what’s happening, but it does feel that way.

There isn’t time for me to think about it. There’s a succession of other people intoning a series of blessings; they all follow the same form, the one that felt weirdly stilted to me, each to a different God. An orc invokes the blessing of Shamaya for fair weather when traveling; a three-meter titan of a fellow with green skin like ancient, long-oxidized copper asks Mikha for something that I can’t quite follow, along the lines of that all betrayals may rebound but garbled, and I realize it’s the first time I’ve had Omniglot fail to successfully translate something. I get lost in wondering why for a second and miss a couple of blessings, and tune back in for another as the metaphorical baton passes around the room.

There’s a dozen and more of them. That all may be healthy, may take their future in their own hands, may strive with every gram of their Self, may find their own perfection; it’s a dizzying array and I entirely lose track of the litany. I’d probably be able to focus better if I weren’t almost as much the center of everyone’s attention as whoever is talking at any given moment; it takes a constant act of will to keep my back straight, my hands still, my heart only moderately racing. I’m not unused to holding court, in some respects, but the sheer number of people and the sheer intensity is new.

The not-at-all-quiet commentary from seemingly all corners about my appearance is pretty new, too, but there’s at least some decorum tempering the speculation, and I manage to keep my reactions under control.

It helps that my being able to hear any of that at all, or to see everyone in such clear detail, is itself something of a puzzle and mystery. I’m not so crass as to spin up my Visor during the litany’s procession around the room, I have some tact, but the itch is still there to look at the threads of whatever spells are manipulating perception. Hearing comes through perfectly, with even a murmur from across the room audible, and vision is much the same; I can pick out the stitching on the dress of a woman fifty meters away as though it were under a magnifying glass right in front of me, though I almost lose my composure flushing when she notices and shifts to show off the way the dress clings to her curves more brazenly, smiling hungrily at me.

Sound coming through so perfectly suggests that everyone heard me command my companions to rise, and that’s a bit chilling and lets me recover and move my eyes along. What other missteps am I making out of ignorance?

I can tell that my attention is wandering and that it shouldn’t be, but I can’t really stop myself. Worse, everyone I’m listening to seems to be able to tell that I am, and everyone I look at seems to know. Nobody’s apathetic about it; it’s a wide range of reactions, but it’s definitely weighted at the… instrumentalist end. Smiles that don’t seem to extend across all of the right facial muscles and body language that’s inviting in a somehow artificial way leaves my eyes hurrying along faster than the more honest hunger from the first woman I’d been… whose dress I’d been staring at, and I linger on the purple-on-green vest embroidery of a broad-shouldered Tazi who returns my appraisal with an honest glower.

The voice that I recognize breaks me out of my circling thoughts.

“That our endeavors may prosper; Khasaf who is wealth and who is the movement of wealth, Khasaf who matches need with supplier,” Rei says, and his eyes bore into mine as he smiles.

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