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the door. The words were Ezarin’s cue to begin the Psalm of Thanksgiving. Where was she?
    Bahir scratched his beard and leaned sideways to peer out the cave entrance. All eyes followed his, waiting. A din of whispering voices filled the temple.
    “Excuse me,” Zadok said, and slid out to the aisle.
    “Zadok,” Rathanial said tightly. “We must talk now, this can’t wait—”
    “In just a moment,” he said apologetically, then called to Mikael’s mother, “Sarah?” His youngest daughter stood near the front of the temple. She turned and Zadok prompted: “Jubilate unto the Eternal all regions of the galaxy. Serve the Eternal in gladness …” He motioned for her to continue the Psalm. A plump young woman with a round face and black hair, she instantly picked up Ezarin’s part, “Come into his presence with joyous song. Know that the Eternal is God …”
    Zadok strolled out of the temple. Above the peaks, the third moon rose through a layer of mist, casting a milky light on the tall pines. “Ezarin?” he called softly. “Ezarin?”
    When no answer came, he walked farther out into the darkness. A bitter chill rode the wind, each gust like a knife through his thin suit. Where could she have gone? It wasn’t like her to miss any part of a major ceremony. Even when sick, she’d pull herself out of bed just long enough to say or sing her part. She was a good girl, more like her mother than Sarah, with those slanting brown eyes and crooked smile.
    Zadok stopped. A dark patch marred the dirt trail, glowing blackly in the moonlight. For one short instant it was as though the moon had ducked behind a cloud, leaving the world in pitch blackness. The fresh green grass looked sickly, the new leaves of spring dotting the trees like autumn’s final fading remnants.
    He knelt to touch it. His fingers came back warm and red.
    “Ezarin!”
    He clamped hands over his eyes as images of another Sighet day overwhelmed him—his mother’s funeral. He stood once more at the graveside, fingers twined securely with his father’s. The old man’s tears dripped in a steady silent stream down his chin to trickle coolly onto Zadok’s arm. “Blessed art thou the Eternal,” he kept sobbing.
    Yosef, Zadok’s brother, pushed closer to him, whispering, “Aunt Selah says Grandmother died the same way.” But Zadok had been too young to understand. Though he’d gone with the search party, he’d been too far back to see his mother when they’d found her. And no one had told him how she’d died, only that she had and he needed to lay out his finest suit and fast. He’d spent three agonizing days learning the Mourner’s Kedis. The words were difficult for him: “Magnified and sanctified be his great name in the world.”
    A night bird cawed in the forest. He jerked to look and saw a gray weabit hop beneath a bush, fur shimmering in the ghostly light. He stood starkly still for a moment, then the muscles of his withered jaw quivered and he began running back down the path toward the habitation caves.
    “Ezarin? Ezarin, answer me!”
    CHAPTER 3
     
… when a widow reigns over the whole world and throws gold and silver into the wondrous brine and casts the bronze and iron of ephemeral men into the sea, then all the elements of the universe will be bereft. When God who dwells in the sky rolls up the heaven as a scroll… an undying cataract of raging fire will flow, and burn earth, burn sea, and melt the heavenly vault…
    The Sibylline Oracles: Book III
    Date: 163 B.C. Old Earth Standard
    Rachel leaned her head tiredly against the stone wall and stared vacantly at a bird soaring on the wind currents overhead. Beneath her drawn up knees, hidden and shaded by her sweat-stained blue robe, Sybil lay in a deep sleep. Rachel let her leaden arm drop to gently pat the little girl’s exposed toes. The furnace temperatures of the afternoon, rather than lessening with the coming of evening, changed to a stagnant smothering heat that sapped