The cousins, though nettled at her manner, were rather intrigued by the request. The girl confronting them was bristling with anger, every tangle on end, like a burr-bit cat, puffed up out of all good sense. Very well, the Hags thought, sharing a knowing glance. Let her peruse the directory of Hagions. She would soon weary of it.
They went into the Temple proper. The seating area sloped down to an oval dais with a curved back wall against which stood the three effigies of the Hagions, marmoreal images four times the height of a woman, each the likeness of robes draped around a female figure, but with only an emptiness inside. The robe to the left shaped a slender form, the robe to the center a stouter one, the robe to the right was somewhat slumped, as though the one who wore it was aged. Where the faces might have shown beneath the hoods or where hands might have protruded from sleeves were only vacancies. Before each image were cushions to kneel upon, and at the center, as though at the focus of a dozen pairs of invisible eyes, stood a low lectern with a kneeling bench. Upon the lectern lay the directory of Hagions, the names of all the female deities ever worshipped by mankind, each with an account of her characteristics and rites.
Marool ignored the tabs that would have led to one of the more healthful, “normal” deities. Instead, she knelt at the directory and began to turn its pages, leaf by leaf. The Hags left her there. At noon, she went away, returning some time later to continue her perusal. When it grew too dark to see in the Temple, she left it, only to return on the following morning, and thus two days passed. Late afternoon on the second day, she left the lectern and went to kneel before the center image.
D’Jevier, who had become interested in this process, was watching from the back of the Temple. She saw the hollow robe waver, as though something inside it moved. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them it was to see a fiery presence peering out of the hood, not at her, but at the kneeling girl, and a fiery hand held out, as though in welcome. She closed her eyes again, disbelieving, and when she opened them for a second time, she saw Marool rising from before the empty effigy. Though D’Jevier told herself she had imagined it, for a moment she was sure she saw that the carved marble around the opening of the hood had been blackened by fire.
As Marool passed her, going up the aisle, D’Jevier kept her eyes slightly averted, though not so far averted that she did not see the terrible and triumphant smile which lent a horrid allure to the girl’s features.
“A smile,” she said to her sister Onsofruct, “such as a demon in hell might wear. The smile of a fiend.”
“What Hagion did she pray to?”
D’Jevier shook her head. “I didn’t look.”
“Is the book still open?”
“I think so.”
They went to look. The name at the top of the page was not familiar to them: Morrigan. They read what was written below and turned toward one another with horrified expressions.
“Oh, by all the Hagions of life,” whispered Onsofruct. “Why would a child of that age choose to worship the patroness of sexual torture and death? Which image?”
D’Jevier indicated the center one, noticing there was, in fact, no blackening around the hood. “The strong one,” she said. “The being in its greatest physical strength.”
They closed the book. D’Jevier thought of cutting out the page. She could not, of course. Everything she had learned as a Hag instructed her that dark pages of death and destruction were part of the book, along with bright pages of pleasure and health. Still, she resolved to take the earliest opportunity to speak to Stella Rikajor g’Mantelby about her daughter.
Any speaking would have come too late, for Marool had left the Temple with Morrigan’s name dissolving on her tongue like a poisonous candy, sweetly fatal, and she did not return home. Instead, she stalked down the stony stairs to the walkway beside the Giles and along it until she encountered a small group of those supernumes, losers and layabouts who lived beneath the bridges and viaducts of Sendoph and called themselves, unimaginatively enough, the Wasters. Though she had not met them before, she went to them unerringly and