Lucky Keogh (Temporary Title)

Chapter Three

White Lily

 “I know they are deadly.”

The hallway to the sanctum was strangely emptied. No celebrants but the floral scent of the candles and censers, the crackle of scorching coals, and the oil they smeared over their bodies. No footsteps, no murmurs, no hums. Even on the shrine’s ground and uppermost floors. The reddish rays of light were just about to perish over the horizon yet the celebrants strangely went and disappeared. Shrill chants led by Old Mili and her priests and priestesses were customarily expected to be reverberating until the first hour of the evening―loud chants and mantras welcoming the nightfall. Only crickets in the deafening silence. Balaccun’s life-size golden idol suspended above Old Mili’s dais was left all alone, eyeing no prostrating worshipper beneath him.

“Where is everyone?” under her breath, a shrine caretaker asked another who just shook her head. The whisper seemed to resound across the hallway.

Even the caretakers of the shrine had no idea. This midday, they could still hear Old Mili leading the chant through the doors of their gathering chamber. Then, found all of this silence when they had to perform their tasks after the midday shift. The hallways were never emptied unless it was bedtime. Hallways might be emptied but the chants were still distinct through the main altar’s heavy gilded doors. Bu the three levels of the shrine were all left unoccupied. It made them all ponder and clueless. Then, they heard a gong. Against the silence, it was nearly earsplitting. It was the signaling call coming from the caretakers’ chamber.

As soon as all of them were collected inside the small room of empty spaces, the overseer, without further ado, made an announcement.

“I understand that you, including myself, are all questioning. The nightfall shift is shelved until the next. Dame Mili is out of the shrine to do sanctification unto a group of culpable unbelievers. Two of them are caretakers. And the other two—forgive me, I can’t verbalize.”

Everyone was startled with the revelation. They scanned around, trying to figure out who were missing among them.

“Another dispatch?” an older caretaker questioned with a shaky voice.

“It is the practice,” riposted the overseer.

The caretakers shifted their faces from baffled to dread. None of them wanted to see the dispatching ritual for a transgressor once again.

“You may watch the ritual if you can stand,” the overseer said. “Be back for the daybreak shift.”

And he stepped out of the chamber.

The last sanctification for the same misdemeanor was several years ago. Older caretakers could tell how unbearable that was while the young ones were naïve.

Jad Hen was Onil’s worship capital. Encircling the shrine were homes of celebrants and the shrine’s caretakers. It was also the sanctuary where lost travelers and tramps were embraced and sustained. In return, tireless loyalty in the shrine should be devoted. It was a fort for wounded warriors, as well. Pilgrims from in and out the continent were always welcome. “Devotion to Balaccun” was the primary and only rule that every one of them should enliven. While in its bounds, the inhabitants’ loyalty valued more than their lives and they would be living as holy as its clergy. Anyone who would contravene the rule corresponded to a sentence of death for they merely believed that sinners should perish.

Not every resident watched Old Mili and the rest of the clergy perform the ritual for the ascertained unbelievers but the courtyard was packed. Among, early sorrows from the sinners’ kin were wailing. There were four of them, kneeling on the bare ground before the stairs of the shrine where an idol of Balaccun was cemented over the expansive entryway. On either side of the top tread were poles of torches. Two of them were parents of two who were embraced by Balaccun for once being vagrants. And the other two were caretakers, familiar friends of the couple, no other kin. All of them with trembling shoulders, sniffling. Their hands were tied behind them and their heads were covered with gauzy white veil. A woman in a plain white robe was behind them, holding a tattered gilded tome. Old age was evident in her wrinkled face and sagging ears. And her grey hair, which she barely cut as a part of her exclusive devotion, was draping at her feet. Standing behind her in half-circle were five men and two women of varied ages, clad in the same garment as the old woman’s, embracing the same book but in smaller sizes, and torches in their free hands.