"Are you sure you should be straining yourself?" I asked. I eyed the stimulant. "You should not allow a drug to give you a false sense of strength."
Kor chuckled softly. "Farren, I have worked this body harder than you perhaps realize for all the years I have been Shame, and several before. I know how far I can push it. I have been bed-bound for days now, and my entire body is sore. I must stretch it before I lie down again."
That I could accept, so I repaired to the shabati without doing either of us the disservice of protesting his suggestion. He knew I needed to work through my thoughts, and he knew how I did it; well and again, I suspect his stretching was his way of doing so. I cut a page from the block with sure fingers and set it on my workspace, pulling myself onto the stool; from that vantage, I looked into the bedchamber and watched him begin his exercises. Having seen Ajan at work, I could tell the motions were akin; some Guardian-taught protocol, then, and even weakened by his illness Shame executed them with the neatness of long repetition.
His grace, unlike Ajan's, was all patience. Patience, and inevitability. That foot would land there; that hand end up thus. Even hobbled by weakness, even trembling with it, there was no question in my mind that he would do exactly what he planned.
There was something of Shame-the-virtue in that implacability. His body reflected his mind reflected his ishas reflected his position. I adored it: I adored the wholeness of him. It is not that we are not normally whole in that way; we are put in place specifically so that we may be whole, and devote ourselves to a life that suits our talents and our spirits. But certain works in Kherishdar require far more of an individual, and one does not expect that wholeness to be so easy in those Ai-Naidar. And yet, Kor was that easy in being Shame. It became him.
I had spoken truly. Thirukedi had chosen well. It made the mystery of Kor's sin all the more compelling.
I looked down at the paper and stroked it with light fingertips, barely brushing the surface. And this became me, and I became it. So what would I paint to reflect the evening I had passed through?
I had wondered once, long ago in House Elikim, what it would be like to be Corrected by Shame. And now I knew.
As I petted the paper, my thoughts returned to the lady, to my Correction only partially completed... to the lord's flight. To the distress of Qenain. I felt it piercingly, that distress. And setting my jaw, I took up my vial of black ink and spilled it on the page, letting it bloom in the tooth, spreading in unexpected patterns. As it glistered, I took up my pen and drew the ink down out of the clot it had formed on the page, and used it to form the letters of the word henej. Henej: to reject, as the body does poison, violently, powerless to stop it. As all Qenain now struggled to vomit up the taint, so the ink ran into what space it could, escaped from the vial, beyond my control save to make of it what I could when it finished.
There was a kind of peace in this making, aunera, despite how little I was involved in it. I enshrined in it not just Qenain's agonies, but my own at the half-finished Correction. Staring at it, some premonition moved me to add one more motif: again, pulling a touch of ink from its spill, I suggested a petal of the black blossom.
Shame was still at his exercises when I had finished, so I poured myself a second cup of tea and allowed it to give me some peace while I waited. Naturally, my reverie grew so profound that Kor had to chuckle before I saw that he was leaning on the door into the bedchamber, and probably had been for some time.
"The artist at work," he said.
I huffed and set my cup down. "Mockery does not suit you."
"It is not mockery," Shame said. "It is observation. You never cease to work, Farren. Especially when you are away from your table. Otherwise, you would not be so sure with the brush when you sit at it."
I looked up at him, then smiled ruefully. "I should know better by now."
"Yes," Kor said gravely. "Come, then, and prepare for bed, and you may ask the questions that have been consuming you."
I followed him into the bedchamber. There he sat on the edge of the bed and watched me as I drew my stole of office from my shoulders and folded it with hands that were far steadier than I expected.
"You must not blame Ajan," he said. "The servant becomes like the master."
"And you expect me to believe that the priest of Shame is irreverent?" I said.
He declined to respond to that, his mouth quirking in a partial smile. "Just remember," he said. "You and I no less than Ajan become more like our own master."
I turned and held his eyes at that, but he did not back down, and it was my turn to let the comment go. Instead, I asked, quiet, "What did the lord of Qenain say to you?"
"He said he was in love," Shame answered, and did not look away. "That it was glorious and full of pain, and there was no course he could find that did not cause grief to someone, but that he could not turn his back on it either. That he did not have the wisdom to love so deeply, and did not know what to do."
Oh, that silence. Tense with the words that he was waiting for me to speak. His eyes seemed to be pulling them out of me, demanding. He had begun the confession, and now he waited for me to make plain to us both what it implied. And I, I was unable to resist. The precipice before me was too vertiginous.
"Do you have a lover?" I asked, my mouth dry.
"No," Shame answered.
"Ajan said there is a Decoration in your shrine," I said. "Do you make use of him?"
"No," Shame said.
The enormity of it overwhelmed me. I sat abruptly on my bed because I could no longer hold myself up. "Oh... Kor."
He closed his eyes, his smile a tender thing touched with self-mockery. Gods and ancestors, such a man! In the dim light of the room I perceived him as I would paint him: dark planes and latent strength, all ink and contrasts, and deep hollows now in his abdomen, beneath the ribcage and above where his low pants pooled in shadow. Such a man would have to work to keep others apart from him, for he drew them just by being. And so I said the inevitable, and the true.
"You cannot," I said.
"You know, then, what I love," he said without opening his eyes. "You see."
"Of course," I said. "You love us. You love all of us. But you are not Thirukedi, Kor. You are but a man, and a man cannot hold such a love in the frail shell of his body. You will not live thousands of years, to learn to contain such a thing."
"I know," Kor said, voice rough. "But I cannot help it, Farren. I love past wisdom's counsel. What do I do? To stop hurts us all. To continue hurts us all." He looked at me then with those fierce, uncanny eyes, and the pale irises hemmed by the black ring seemed to burn like the coronal fire they were named for. "As you can imagine, I have nothing but sympathy for the lord of Qenain. Nothing but sympathy, because I can give him nothing else."
I resumed undressing in preparation for bed, if only to free my mind to its thoughts while occupying my body in something familiar. As I drew off my over-robe, I said, "What surprises me, at the last, is that you didn't see it. That was why you fled, yes? The shock of it."
"Yes," Kor said, behind me. I could hear that self-deprecating smile without looking at his face. "We all have our blind spots."
"Yes," I said. "Which is why we are not supposed to push away those around us, who serve to compensate for them with their love and attention. Your penokedi would die for you, as no doubt would the others he mentioned serve you in the temple. You have a fathrikedi of your own. Why, Kor? Why do you hold them apart?"
His silence this time was long enough for me to complete my preparations, and it was in my sleeping robe that I sat again, facing him. Now he looked merely tired, an unlikely vessel for the magnitude of the passions to which he had confessed. "You don't know the history of my priesthood, Farren... no, I wouldn't expect it. It's not something we share. But the office of Shame is relatively new, as the empire counts such things. And not all its priests were created equal."
I tilted my head, curious.
He continued, "We can only perform those Corrections we have endured in our trials. If we have not borne them, we can advise others on their use, but we cannot ourselves enact them. And for most of the history of our office, the priests of Shame have had incomplete arsenals of tools. More of us have been... consultants... than actors."
"I see," I said slowly. "So you are unusual. Because you can be involved."
