Quest Read Online Free Page B

stop them?'
    When he spoke, his voice was bitter. 'I can't stop them, Herra. I'm too far away. Can your Sisters help?'
    She rocked to and fro in anguish. 'We can't get there in time. Both High Ladies are dying now!'
    'The babies, then? Couldn't you try to save them?'
    She sat motionless for a moment, then nodded. 'Perhaps. I must use the farspeaker, though.' Unlike some of her Sisters, Herra didn’t flinch from the use of machinery. The God's Wonders were there for just such an emergency as this, though not to be used in their everyday life. He had explained this to her the previous year, when he first manifested himself and placed farspeakers in all the temples.
    She stood up and moved the little stick on the side of the box. With the faint hissing sound echoing around the chamber, she spoke to her Sisters on watch in the great temples of Setherak and Penerak. Before the echo of her voice had faded, her faraway Sisters were running through the streets of those cities, using the Disciplines to speed their footsteps. Those Sisters would give their lives, if necessary, to do the bidding of the God their Brother.
    Herra continued to watch the pictures and pray for a peaceful next life for the two beautiful women who lay dying, in spite of their great wealth, in spite of their high rank. Their beauty seemed to fade before her eyes as the attendants worked their evil.

    QUEST Shannah Jay 11
    When it was over and the two women lay dead in pools of blood, the attendants turned their attention to the babies, strong, healthy little creatures, who lay kicking by their dead mothers. Their faint wailing cries tore at Herra's heart. As the attendants started to smother the royal infants, working carefully so as not to mark the tender flesh, Herra thought for a moment that her Sisters had failed. But no! While the babes were still squirming, the draperies moved and her Sisters entered each birth chamber.
    Herra watched as they stilled those who mocked the art of healing. The attendants stood there frozen, unable to move, while her Sisters wrapped the infants in soft cloths and carried them away to safety. She sighed in relief, but stayed on in front of the screen to keep watch.
    As the farspeaker showed first one, then another of the birth chambers, Herra saw both sets of attendants recover the use of their bodies and discover that the babies were missing. She smiled grimly as they panicked and conferred frantically. Such was their fear of their secret masters that each group sent one of their number to buy a newly-dead baby from the Shambles. You could buy anything in the Shambles and babies died there every day. The poorfolk lived close to desperation in these hard times, with the Serpent gaining power in the slums that had begun to fester like sores on the flanks of every great city of the world.
    Later she saw dead babies with the same colouring as those recently borne by the High Ladies smuggled in, washed and dressed in embroidered silk. They would be presented to the two grieving Lords Claimant as the stillborn children of their wives, though to Herra it showed in their faces that these were the ill-fed offspring of the poor. Strange to see identical responses from murderers separated by days of travel. How fear controlled those who served the Serpent!
    To fear for one's life is to lose it a hundred times.
    Herra had often paused at those words in the Book of Sayings of the God. Fear paralysed people, made them forget what they knew, led them to act foolishly. Sisters were taught not to give way to it. Yet that was the least of the things they learned. The Disciplines trained the Sisters to use the Gifts born in them and made them strong beyond other people's wildest dreams - strong enough, it was to be hoped, to survive this Age of Discord.
    Such Gifts were mainly bestowed on those born of the bloodlines nurtured by the Sisterhood, and had been passed down the generations by careful marriages. They ripened at puberty, at which time