The Ritual Chamber was below the main sanctuary, reached by a staircase that was very different from the hidden one in the northeast tower. This staircase was broad and ceremonially lit, with oil lamps in iron brackets every two steps, and it descended in a long spiral that took longer than the distance should have required, the kind of architecture designed to produce a particular psychological state in the person descending.
Kael descended it and arrived in a state of mild technical curiosity.
The chamber itself was circular, perhaps twelve meters in diameter, with a domed ceiling that came to a point at the center. The floor was unadorned stone except for a single inlaid circle at the center, two meters across, its border carved with the Threnadic script that Kael had spent seven years studying and arguing was a constructed system rather than a divine one.
In the center of the circle: a chair.
Aldren Veth and two other senior priests waited near the chamber's edge. The preparation they performed took twenty minutes and consisted primarily of anointing, which used the same oil Kael had identified as containing something additional. He noted the smell again, filed it for later attention.
"When you are seated," Veth said, "you will open yourself to reception. Do not try to interpret what you receive. Simply receive. The understanding comes after."
"What if what I receive doesn't match the approved categories?"
Veth looked at him with the practiced patience of a man who had expected this question from this particular Translator. "Record everything. We will discuss interpretation afterward."
Kael sat in the chair.
The chamber was quiet in a way that distinguished itself from the ordinary quiet of a room, denser, more deliberate. He sat with his hands on his knees and his back straight and waited.
For the first fifteen minutes, nothing happened, except that the headache that had been sitting behind his eyes since his first night in the temple intensified slightly. He breathed. He observed the quality of the silence and the temperature of the room, which was constant in a way that suggested the chamber was designed to maintain it.
Then it started.
Not sound. He had expected sound. The approved texts described the divine language as music, as the resonance of a voice beyond comprehension. What came was not music. It was pressure. It arrived in his head the way a sudden change in elevation arrived in the ears, a physical thing, a compression that was not precisely painful but was not comfortable either, arriving not from any direction but from all of them simultaneously.
He did not interpret it. He received it.
The pressure organized itself, slowly, into something that had the quality of structure without having the quality of language. He could not say he understood it. He could say that something was reaching him. That it had dimension and intention and that it was not random.
His nose began to bleed. He noticed this distantly.
The structure came in pieces. Not words, not images, but something prior to both, the shape of meaning before it attached itself to form. He sat with it for a long time. The oil lamps on the chamber wall burned steadily. At some point he became aware that his hands had tightened on his knees.
When it stopped, it stopped completely, the way a sound stopped rather than the way a presence stopped. Present, and then not.
He became aware of Veth's voice, asking if he was well.
"Functional," Kael said. His voice sounded slightly wrong to him, slightly outside the range he was used to.
He touched his upper lip. Blood, dried. He had been in the chair for, he realized with some effort, over two hours.
"The official record," he said, in the careful language of someone operating on reduced bandwidth, "will say I received the standard confirmation of divine presence. Guidance toward harmony and the continued prosperity of the realm."
Veth wrote this down without visible reaction.
"That's not what you received," said one of the other priests, a younger man whose name Kael had not yet filed. The man's tone was not accusatory, more like someone speaking a fact.
"No," Kael said.
No one asked him what he had received. This, he thought, was itself information.
He climbed the ceremonial staircase back to the main level with his hand on the wall and the pressure in his head fading from a compression to a residue, like the aftertaste of something swallowed wrong.
In the corridor outside, he stopped at a window and looked at the ordinary daylight of the city below, the movement of carts and people, the texture of regular life happening at a normal scale.
He had spent seven years arguing that the divine language was a construction. What had reached him in that chamber was not a construction. It was something real.
This did not resolve the question of whether what he had heard had anything to do with gods.
It did complicate the paper he had written, considerably, and it made him want very badly to read more of the unnamed Translator's journal.