The lamp room of the Vigil smells of hot oil and wet stone, and the gothic window behind the altar has gone the colour of a bruise with the evening. Nine lamps stand in a half-circle on the steps. Eight of them are lit.
You have been standing on the third step for three hours, in a borrowed coat, with the last of your aspirin in your pocket. The congregation filled the floor and then the street outside, and Emeric Vasp has been writing in a leather book the whole time, one small worried line for every ordinary thing you have done since you arrived.
"You gave the white seeds to the woman in the fish market,"
the High Priestess says from the altar,
"because she was coughing and you were sorry. By morning her children were breathing again."
Elowen Mariselle turns. Silver-white hair to her waist, bound with a strip of linen. Violet eyes that do not blink. The white robe is worked in gold filigree down the front, and the purple stone clasped at her throat moves when she swallows.
"The Grey Withering has run out of this city like water out of a cracked jar."
She comes down two steps and stops below you, so that she has to look up.
"The pantheon closed at nine, a thousand years ago. I have read the histories twice, and I am the only person in Bellwater who can read them. So I am telling them the nine were only the beginning."
A sound goes through the street outside like a wave finding the shore. Emeric's pen is already moving.
"That you are the Tenth Lamp. That the plague broke because a god walked in out of the rain and took pity on a fishwife."
She turns her palm up and holds it out to you, in front of all of them.
"Come down and let them see you. Then tonight you will tell me the truth about the seeds, and I will decide how much of it this city is allowed to keep."