“I know,” Bennek replied, taking the mask and balancing it in his hands before raising it up to his chest in a gesture of benediction. “You may remain if you wish, gentlemen. I would ask only that you stay silent until the rite is concluded.”

Pa’Dar’s stout face quirked in the beginning of a sneer. “I have more important things to do, I believe.” He made no attempt to hide a derisive snort and walked away, leaving Dukat and the priest at the foot of the drop-ramp.

Bennek whispered something under his breath and raised the mask slowly to his face, taking loops of metal from inside it to hook over his ears. Dukat found himself fascinated by the odd ritualistic motions of the young man. It was like some strange form of theater, a dance or a mime. It was quite unreal. “Why do you do this?” he demanded, ignoring the priest’s request for silence. “Why do you care about the bodies of aliens? They don’t follow your creed.”

“Oralius asks us to find paths for all the life we encounter on our journeys.” Bennek’s words had an odd hushed quality to them as they came from behind the mask. “Even if that life is not born of the same earth and sun as we are.” He bowed and began to speak in a slow, rhythmic chant.

“The power that moves through me, animates my life, animates the mask of Oralius. To speak her words with my voice, to think her thoughts with my mind, to feel her love with my heart. It is the song of morning, opening up to life, bringing the truth of her wisdom to those who live in the shadow of the night.” The phrases that fell from the mask’s unmoving lips had the steady pace of a reading performed hundreds of times, words known so well to the priest that he could speak them with perfect recall.

“It is this selfsame power, turned against creation, turned against my friend, that can destroy his body with my hand, reduce his spirit with my hate, separate his presence from my home.” The static aspect bobbed as Bennek nodded to himself. “To live without Oralius, lighting our way to the source, connecting us to the mystery, is to live without the tendrils of love.” He made a gesture across his face. “Let the Way guide these souls to the place of their birth, and know her touch and her friendship.” After a long moment, Bennek bowed to the ship and let the mask fall into his waiting hands.

And this is the Oralian Way?Dukat asked himself. Is this all that they are, speakers of chants and rituals?He studied Bennek and could not help but wonder why Central Command was so set against these religious throwbacks. If this boy was an example of them, then they were nothing to be concerned about. Dukat found it hard to reconcile the man who stood before him with the stories he had been taught in the academy, of Cardassia’s harsh prehistory beneath the twin hammers of religious oppression and savage climate change. Was this open-faced cleric really the last remnant of a creed that had pushed his people to the brink of extinction? Dukat was almost amused by the idea. He studied the youth’s skinny neck and the ridges of cartilage there, far thinner than Dukat’s, without the muscles and ropelike strength born from hard training in the officer corps. He knew with utter certainty he could crush Bennek’s life from him in a heartbeat.

The priest returned his precious mask to its bag, utterly unaware of Dukat’s train of thought. “You have never seen a recitation before?”

“It was quite…diverting.”

For the first time, Dukat saw something like intelligence behind the cleric’s eyes. “I fear you may be patronizing me, Dalin.”

“A fool is condescending to something he does not understand. I belittle only those whom I know to deserve it.”

“And what do you know of the Oralian Way?”

Dukat folded his arms, countering the question with one of his own. “What was the purpose of that ritual? Do you think the Bajorans will thank you for it? Perhaps they may even be angered by your actions, if their dogma calls for some other pattern of behavior.” He nodded to the bodies. “If this were a Bajoran ship and those were Cardassian dead, you would be dishonoring the deceased by speaking over their remains.”

“Oralius sees only life,” Bennek insisted. “Where it came from has no bearing on that fact. Oralius exists above us all. Those who find the path are welcome to walk it, regardless of their origin.”

“That’s no answer,” Dukat replied. “Come, Bennek, I ask you. What value is there to what you have just done? What good are your words, your ‘Way,’ to these alien dead?” He was goading the youth now, interested in seeing what kind of reaction he would engender.

And there in Bennek’s gaze was a flash of anger, a hardening of the jaw. “They are a doorway to the truth, Dalin Dukat. A manner in which we may all better ourselves and seek the common good. The words of Oralius, of the Way, they are a catalyst for the evolution of the living soul!”

At once Dukat saw the passion behind the words. Such a bearing he had often seen before, on the faces of his own men as they went into battle, in the eyes of the heartless tools of the Obsidian Order as they went about their grisly business; and there, in Bennek, was his answer. That’s why Central Command wants these people eradicated. It is their belief that makes them strong.And belief in anything other than the supremacy of the Cardassian Union was not something the masters of Dukat’s world would tolerate.

“I see,” he said carefully.

“Do you?” Bennek said tightly. “I wonder.”

Dukat raised an eyebrow at the temerity in the priest’s tone; but any rejoinder he might have given was forgotten as Kornaire’s shipboard communications channel chimed into life.

“All division leaders and senior officers to operational alert stations,”said the terse female voice of the ship’s computer.

“Arrival in the Bajor system in eleven metrics, mark.”

Lonnic Tomo balled her fist and began slamming it on the door of her patron’s chambers, fast and firm, over and over.

From inside she heard an annoyed grunt. “Enter! Enter!”The voice was clipped. “I know it’s you, Tomo! Get in here!”

She ran an ebony hand over her scalp, the close-cut fuzz of her hair tickling her palm, and then she pushed open the heavy nyawood door and went inside.

Jas Holza was shrugging on a jacket and trying to hold on to a glass of water with his free hand. The minister’s prematurely lined face was flushed with effort, his thinning hair unkempt. He had ordered Lonnic to let him rest until the afternoon, and this was barely the midday. His arrival back from Batal in the early hours of the morning had been a bad sign. The rain still coming down hard from the storm, his flyer had touched down in the courtyard of the Naghai Keep, engine noise echoing against the fusionstone walls of the ancient citadel. But Jas hadn’t debriefed his aide on his return as he usually did after such journeys, just barked at her to go away, telling her to come back the next day.

“What do you want?” he spat, and she knew it was bad. It took a lot to push Jas Holza into a bad mood, but when it did the storm that came after lasted for days. Lonnic wanted to ask about the events of the Batal trip, and she was sure that Jas thought that was why she had roused him; but those matters were of secondary importance now. The minister went to the window and turned the slats, letting in the air as he opened the doors to the balcony outside.

Beyond the narrow, tall windows of his chambers, the citadel gave him an unparalleled view of Korto’s cityscape on the river plain below. The keep had been the ancestral home of the Jas clan since Bajor’s Age of Enlightenment, and the minister’s D’jarraensured that it was his family who had held on to the reins of one of the most fertile and productive districts in all of Kendra Province. But owning land was not the same as managing land, and Jas had less of the required skill that his forefathers had shown.