Hakumei

Priest of the Ninth Gate, and the author of the blessing given at the Queen's last three investitures — a text the court has had read aloud at every ceremony since, and which, read carefully, is a warning. He has never been asked to explain it. He has said he would, if asked.

In Person

Slight, grey-furred at the muzzle, and unhurried. He receives anyone who climbs, at any hour, and answers what he is asked with a directness that visitors find disorienting — there is no mysticism in his manner at all, and pilgrims expecting oracular fog are frequently disappointed and occasionally furious.

His one habit that unnerves people is that he answers the question asked. If the question was badly framed, he answers the badly framed question, exactly, and waits.

History

Ordained at the First Gate at nineteen and at the Ninth at eighty-two, by the ordinary progression, having done nothing remarkable in between except read. His reputation rests on one document.

The investiture blessing was commissioned by the court, written in three days, and delivered in a form the heralds pronounced magnificent. It has been read aloud at every state ceremony since. It contains, in its fourth movement, a clause that says — in perfectly conventional devotional language — that a station held by grace cannot be held by right, and that whatever is ranked was ranked by somebody. Nobody at court has ever raised it. He has said, publicly and more than once, that he would gladly explain the passage to anyone who asked.

In forty years, nobody has asked.

Method

He does not preach and does not organize. He answers questions, and he has made the Ninefold's theology entirely available to anyone who wants it — which is the most effective form of suppression-proofing anyone in the Kingdom has devised, because there is no secret to seize and no cell to break.

The Blessing Trade funds the province by giving the nobility what it craves in language that indicts it. Hakumei has never been comfortable with the arrangement and has never ended it, and the Open Gate consider this the central failure of his tenure.

Household

The Nine Gates. The priesthood, ranked by gate, arguing continuously and at a volume the capital cannot hear.

The Open Gate. Younger priests who want the doctrine stated plainly and publicly. They correspond with Lumenhal's Publication Party. Hakumei has neither joined nor forbidden them, which they find increasingly hard to bear.

Rota Hall. Not his, and the real power in the province: the terrace engineers, whose maintenance archive counts every resident — Kitsune, frog, newt, and beetle — by name and without distinction of caste, because a drain does not care who cleared it. Hakumei has cited it in three sermons. Nobody at court noticed what he was citing.

Relations

Eleven years of impeccably courteous correspondence with Astronomer-Primary Vesperine, ostensibly about instruments and weather, in which neither has yet said the thing they both concluded from opposite directions.

He attends the Lowmist Chapel of the Frogs, which the Kitsune did not build, at which a devotional practice older than the Faerie arrival is maintained, and he has never described this as remarkable — which is itself the loudest thing any priest in the Kingdom has done.

Reputation

At court: indispensable, decorative, and slightly tiresome. In the province: the Ninth Gate, which is a job rather than a sanctity. Among the Kingdom's dissidents: the man who wrote the warning that has been read aloud at every royal ceremony for forty years while the court applauded.

Hooks

"He said he would explain it if asked. Everyone has agreed, without ever discussing it, not to ask."