Spiderwork by L. K. Rigel

delegate from Versailles knocked Char aside and tried to grab the priest. With a nod from Khai, two Luxor guards lifted the Versailles delegate off his feet. As they took him away, he shouted, "I'll wager that infant has no soul."
    Lydia didn't hide her contempt, and she didn't answer the shibdab . "I'll take Durga and Maribel with me to the ashram. We will maintain a constant vigil of meditation and invite their spirits to return."
    "That is not acceptable," Prince Khai said. "Do what you will with the other. The Emissary must remain in the citadel."
    Durga's head rested on Khai's chest. She didn't look psychically damaged. She looked like a young woman in the arms of a man who cherished her. A twinge of pain pricked Char's heart. The prominent spider on Durga's shoulder told all. The Emissary could never be a young woman in the arms of a man who cherished her.
    "I agree," Jake said. "We can't let the Emissary go. Maribel should stay in the citadel too."
    Lydia said, "It might be better to separate them. Let Captain Gordon bring Maribel to my sisters, and I will visit the Emissary here."
    "Wait." Prince Garrick stepped forward. "Isn't everybody forgetting something? If Lord Ardri has no soul, then he is no longer lord sheriff. A soulless human being can't be put above humans with souls. Certainly not as lord or king. His offspring must also be soulless. There is no dynasty. His coronation would be a sacrilege."
    Magda's face had gone white, and she said nothing. Char didn't know what to say either, but she took hold of Jake's hand. It didn't matter if he had a soul or not. He was still her Jake.
    He kissed the top of her head and squeezed her hand.
    "There is a way," Lydia said. "That is, there may be a way." She looked shibbing tentative. "We would have to do it at the ashram. In the citadel there are too many people. Too many competing psychic signals."
    "It's dangerous," Char said. Of course it was.
    "Very," Lydia said. "You see Durga and Maribel. The risk is ending up like them. In our meditations on the soul, my sisters and I have been able to induce a phenomenon we call the liminal gauntlet. A metaphysical tunnel. One of my acolytes calls it a wormhole between the sacred and profane worlds. I think that's right."
    Acolytes? Char had met Lydia once. Unimpressive and unimportant. Jake's settlement priest of Asherah. Char had clearly read Lydia wrong.
    "Why are you here?" Char said. "It can't be a coincidence."
    "It could be." That beatific smile was irritating, actually. This was a crisis. Serenity was not the appropriate response. "It could be that Asherah told us to establish our ashram here. Or it could be that one of us knew about Lord Ardri's condition and came to study him. When she discovered his tolerance for all religions, we decided this was the place to do our work."
    "Tell me about the wormhole," Jake said.
    "The liminal gauntlet is a direct connection between the mundane and the divine. We can open the gauntlet to allow a human in deep meditation to enter the liminal space. The presence of a soulless human within that space attracts a shard of the All—a soul. That's the theory."
    "No one has made it through the gauntlet yet?" Jake said.
    "No one has tried."
    "What about children? My daughter is only a year old, and my son is yet to be born."
    "Your daughter will have to enter the gauntlet when she is older, but you can easily give your son a soul before he is born. Once you have a soul, you can perform the hieros gamos with your chalice."
    Char was a petty, petty person. Whatever this hieros gamos was, it sounded like something she definitely did not want Jake doing with Faina.
    "As Matriarch of Sanguibahd, I speak in the Emissary's absence."
    Magda had found her voice. Confident and commanding, she drew every eye her way, demonstrating why an Emperor had been fascinated by her. Too bad for Jake the fascination hadn't gone both ways.
    "The liminal gauntlet wouldn't exist if the gods didn't intend us to use