The Exalting

by Dan Allen

  Dana quickly stooped to untie the pouch with the bloodstone from Omren’s waist.

  “Dana?”

  Dana turned at the sound of the familiar voice. “Grandpa!” She nearly dropped the pouch. Her hands shook from the passing rush of the confrontation.

  Togath stepped quickly into the clearing.

  “Did you send the owl?” she blurted out. “Was that you?”

  “Me? I haven’t used the Creator’s powers since I . . . since . . . Dana, you know I’m not an adept.” Togath looked down at the fallen man and gasped. “By the Creator . . . Did you kill that man?”

  Dana shook her head. “The atter owl did. It thought he was prey.”

  “Dana, what have you done?”

  “Nothing.” She moved the pouch behind her back and stood up.

  Togath’s eyes followed the motion. “What is in that bag?”

  Dana’s throat clenched. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t lie to Togath.

  “Dana?”

  Chapter 2

  Jet Naman woke to a headache hammering his skull. Lights and sounds clattered through his brain as he struggled for a grip on reality.

  His skull-splitting headache was the first indication of trouble. He wasn’t being woken from cryo under sedation.

  Must be an emergency.

  Usually that meant he was about to be tossed into an extremely dangerous situation, outgunned, pinned down, and completely isolated.

  That was the job description for a marine sniper in the Believer Security Forces. It was what he had signed up for when he left Avalon, after his mother was murdered by ASP thugs.

  From all around him came the sounds of ventilators hissing and the other marines in his unit groaning.

  What is going on?

  He blinked, and the white blur in front of his face slowly formed into the photo of his mother that he had printed and pinned to the bulkhead, just before going into cryo. The picture was now faded.

  A ship-wide broadcast began. But it wasn’t the ship’s captain. It was a spokesperson for ASP—the enemy.

  It felt like a bad dream, as if all forty of the marines packed in the dropship’s cramped cryobay had died and woken up in hell.

  “Attempts at peaceful intervention have utterly failed. Believers continue to refuse to share the location of the ninth inhabited planet. Their extremist propaganda is a threat to Ardent Secular Pragmatist operations and the interests of its shareholders.

  “At this critical stage, we have no recourse but to declare the Believers enemies of the interplanetary public.

  “By the release of this binding order, all Believers are to be treated as enemy combatants and exterminated by any means available. Any organization, body politic, or geography harboring Believers will be subject to force of submission.

  “All ASP signatories are hereby bound by the Principal Charter to execute this order, effective immediately.”

  Jet sat up, which wasn’t difficult in the zero-g hold. The faces of the other marines in the bay showed equally astonished looks.

  “They can’t do this.”

  “It’s completely illegal.”

  “ASP can do whatever they want.”

  “Are they seriously going to kill all the Believers?”

  “This is Captain Austin.” The voice coming from the speaker had an uncharacteristic tremor. “We . . . just got that message on a tightbeam from Avalon. We’re still two weeks out from the planet itself, but it looks like the ASP fleet has already arrived to enforce the extermination order.”

  A lanky Caprian across from Jet bowed his head and touched his fingers to his forehead. Jet had seen the gesture before, as a Caprian knelt over the body of a fallen comrade.

  The elves of Capria did not cry as humans did.

  “Apparently,” Captain Austin continued, “the Believer space telescope in orbit around Avalon discovered the ninth world and our High Council refused share the location. And so, ASP has just declared all-out war on us.”

  The cryobay was pin-drop silent.

  ASP forces outnumbered Believers a thousand to one.

  “The rest of our fleet is using the Avalonian sun for a high-g gravity redirect toward the new planet.”

  “The rest of our fleet?” Jet wondered. “Which means . . .”

  “Colonel Adkins has diverted a flight group consisting of six dropships, to Avalon.”

  Not only were they about to be on an interplanetary endangered species list, now they didn’t have the fleet for cover.

  A marine from Delta squad turned up his hands. “Six dropships? That’s not enough to evacuate a single village.”

  “The High Council is in hiding on Avalon,” Captain Austin continued. “If they are still alive when we get there, our orders are to ensure they make it off the planet safely—at all costs.”

  At all costs. Despite knowing what he had signed up for, Jet couldn’t help but wonder if this mission would be his last.

  Reacting to the flaring fear of an unfinished life, Jet looked overhead to where Monique was attempting to rouse Dormit, his squad’s only Wodynian.

  Jet didn’t think of Dormit as an alien. More like a distant cousin.

  Monique, on the other hand, she was a thing truly foreign. She had even studied to be a xeno-sociologist, but never finished her degree before enlisting.

  Human, yes, but different in so many subtle ways.

  She was smart. Jet was . . . devious? She drew attention in any circle and knew how to avoid trouble. He never drew attention but could find trouble anywhere.

  Basically, a perfect match.

  Technically, Jet hadn’t seen Monique in years. But the time in cryo had passed in the blink of an eye, like general anesthesia. It seemed barely a moment had passed since he watched her fade from consciousness, and he wondered if he would ever get a chance to turn that casual squad-mate allegiance into something more.

  Monique met his eyes. “Hey Corporal, is this brick of a dwarf ever going to wake up?”

  “Might take a few days, but he’ll come around.”

  Monique continued checking his IV and EEG monitor. She already knew Wodynians took days to wake up.

  She’s in denial. It was easier to attend to Dormit than face the reality of what was about to be the greatest mass murder in the history of all eight planets.

  Jet drank from a hydration tube to clear his throat. “Do you think the High Council knew this would happen? Is that why they closed all operations on Rodor eight years ago and summoned all our forces to Avalon?”

  “How should I know, Corp? I’m just a xeno-sociologist . . . with enlistment papers that’ll get me massacred.” She covered her face with both hands, her dark umber skin a stark contrast to the white mesh sleeves of her electrostim cryosuit. She looked like she was trapped in a web. “This a nightmare.”

  Monique was two years older than Jet. He was still nineteen, since legally cryosleep didn’t count toward age. Outside of cryo, Jet had only aged a year since joining the Believer security force: one six-month tour of duty on Talaks and one on Rodor. But that didn’t begin to capture the weirdness. He had traveled a distance of more than thirty light years, which meant that Avalon had lost three decades since he had left. Jet’s cryosleeping body had only seen a third of that, thanks to time dilation.

  Last Jet had heard, his father worked for Earth’s ambassador to Avalon. He had no idea if his father was even alive.

  He didn’t want to think about it. Jet wouldn’t have a chance to save him. He only had orders to extract the High Council.

  Monique rummaged through a med kit and stuck herself with a hypodermic needle and then put a shot in Jet’s left arm. “Vitamin K, for cryojaundice.”

  “Thanks.” Jet couldn’t think of anything else to say. The extermination order and their reckless mission to sneak through the ASP fleet were probably the last things she wanted to talk about. “So,” he said, swallowing at the dryness in his throat. “Do you miss Rodor?”

  “Not ha
rdly.” Monique pulled the needle out. “The giants were becoming unmanageable.”

  Understatement of the decade.

  The amount of armor and ASP-provided weaponry Rodorians could haul was ridiculous. They were like walking tanks. “Yeah, but Avalon is one big hallucinogenic trip. Honestly, I’m not that excited about ground operations on a planet with carnivorous plants.”

  “And kid-sized pranksters that exhale medical-grade pharmaceuticals.”

  Jet never trusted himself around Avalonians—never trusted anyone around them. But Believers had found Avalon first—before ASP. Their queen supported the Believers’ quest to find the remaining four undiscovered worlds and, eventually, the Prime Star, home of the Creator of all twelve inhabited worlds.

  So he hoped.

  But first, he had to get through a planetary siege.

  The paradise of Avalon had just become a war zone.

  Chapter 3

  Dana looked into her grandfather’s imploring eyes and took a step back. She couldn’t tell him about the bloodstone.

  “So you’re robbing him?” Togath’s sifa shook with displeasure.

  Again, that was a question she couldn’t answer. “Why did you come?”

  “I heard the dogs,” Togath said. “I assumed the hunter you were interfering with was lost in the forest, and I came to help him find his way.” He gestured to the fallen man. “Dana, this does not look good.”

  “You don’t know what happened,” Dana said. “He tried to kill me!”

  Togath let his arms fall placidly to his sides. “I want to believe you, but I don’t understand why a hunter would try to kill you. And why would an atter owl attack him? Do you know what this looks like? Murder.”

  “Accidents happen,” Dana blurted out.

  “I just pretended to be a murdering cannibal to scare off those trappers. Those men are going to tell every ranger they see that I’m crazy and you’re out of control.” It was as though Togath was pulling back curtains at edge of a painting that just kept getting more disturbing. “When the rangers find this . . .”

  He was right. It looked like Togath had killed Omren, perhaps with help from a druid who could control owls.

  Me. “Maybe they won’t find him.”

  “Somebody will be expecting him to return,” Togath gestured to the body. “A friend, a colleague, family. They’ll send out a search party and get the rangers involved. It isn’t hard to find a body when the carrion crows are circling a carcass. And my cabin is the only home for miles. They’ll come with questions—and suspicions, no thanks to the stunt I pulled to get you out of trouble. Never mind the fact that I should report a dead body on my property.”

  Dana swallowed, difficult given the tightness in her throat. To make matters worse, Sindar’s body lay at the base of the cliff, his greeder slain by an arrow. The two bodies were less than a half mile from Togath’s cabin, on either side.

  Norr’s provincial forests were a valuable asset, and its rangers patrolled the wilds with the same strict eye with which the civic guard watched the city proper. But that wasn’t even the real problem.

  The kazen of Vetas-ka were coming. Omren had said there were six in the forest—five now. They would execute her grandfather if they thought he had interfered.

  “If you killed him,” Togath said, “we have to go to the authorities.”

  “No,” Dana whimpered as tears leaked into her eyes. Self-control was at a low point, having pushed so much of her will in so short a time. “. . . I didn’t kill him.” She closed her eyes, wincing at the thought that the owl had hunted the man at her suggestion, just as it did marmar monkeys.

  “Dana?” His voice was firm.

  She shook her head as tears spilled down her burning cheeks. Dana looked down. A patch of spilt blood next to Omren’s head glistened in the starlight, a silent accuser.

  Dana clutched the pouch in her hand, squeezing it until the shape of the stone within made an impression in her palm. “Togath, you have to leave. Pack your things quickly and go away for a long time.”

  Togath’s eyes widened.

  “I don’t want them to find you!” Dana cried. “Togath, please. You must go.”

  A flash of recognition passed over her grandfather. His eyes grew wide so that she could see the white of them gleaming. He raised a quivering finger and pointed to the pouch. “What is that?”

  Dana shook with fear and the passing adrenaline of the fight. “I can’t tell you.”

  But her grandfather’s expression told her he already knew. “No. It can’t be—is that a bloodstone?”

  Dana shook her head.

  “Don’t lie to me. Where did that come from?”

  She had no reason to lie to her own grandfather. “It was a greeder.”

  “The injured animal?”

  Dana nodded. “It was carrying someone named Sindar. He came from the south. He died with the greeder.”

  Togath ran his hands though his wispy hair. “Sindaren? Why would he take the stone from Shoul Falls?”

  “You knew him?” She blinked away her tears and then glanced down at the pouch in her hand as she put together the pieces. “He was bringing this to you.” She looked up to meet her grandfather’s pallid expression. “Why would he bring a bloodstone to you?”

  “For safekeeping, I imagine.” In a heavy voice he added, “But I will not take it. Leave it alone, Dana. It will only bring you suffering.”

  “Leave it where? On the ground? You said you wouldn’t take it,” Dana cried. “And even if you did, Vetas-ka is coming for it.”

  “Flames of the Morning Star,” Togath whispered. “This is beyond all of us.”

  “No, Sindar said we couldn’t—”

  Togath’s voice rang out with an energy Dana hadn’t seen before. “Vetas-ka is lord of a vast empire spanning the Kalman Desert in Torsica and the far coast.”

  That was more than half of the other continent on Xahna.

  “Well he doesn’t belong here,” Dana said.

  “Drop the stone, Dana,” Togath said, his voice sharp and commanding.

  Dana barely stopped her fingers as they instinctively uncurled to release the pouch. Instead of dropping it, she pulled it protectively against her chest.

  “Walk away. I can do what needs to be done,” he said.

  “You mean . . . destroy it?”

  “You can’t take it to Norr and risk all of their lives when Vetas-ka comes.” Togath’s voice rose in anger, in a way Dana had never heard. “So Sindaren was desperate and gave it to you. Do you think the people of Shoul Falls want their will in the hands of a seventeen-year-old Norrian girl?”

  Destroy the stone. Of course, that was the right thing to do. But why hadn’t Sindar done that? Togath was oversimplifying. If she destroyed the bloodstone of Shoul Falls, she would have the entire city to deal with, perhaps even the Pantheon. That was as much a death sentence as any choice.

  But there was another reason, one she couldn’t even bear to think on.

  Keep it. Use it. Become the ka.

  “Dana. Drop it. Now.”

  The bloodstone was her chance to escape Norr.

  Dana’s lateral sifa flared from the back of her head in defiance. “Don’t tell me what to do with this. That rider gave it to me. He trusted me to keep it away from Vetas-ka.”

  “Where will you go? Vetas-ka has many acolytes. You can’t hide from his kazen. Dana, you must think this through.”

  “I can at least return this to Shoul Falls.”

  “After Sindaren gave his life trying to escape from Shoul Falls with it?” Her grandfather had been adding the kazen suffix “en” to Sindar’s name. “Don’t you see? No one wants it. No one wants to fight Vetas-ka.”

  “Then they’re cowards.”

  “But not fools.”

  “I’m not a fool!” Dana cried.

  “If you hold that stone, there will come a time when you are tempted to use it. Consider this, Dana. Once you touch that stone, you will nev
er have the will to release it. It will own you. You will feel the pain of those bound to it, their fear, their sorrow, their anger—all of it. And if you try to help them, the work of it will consume you. A stone holder is the keeper of hope. Hope never sleeps. The ka of a city must answer every call.”

  Togath walked slowly toward her. “What will you do when a baby has a fever and a landslide buries a cottage and a barn burns to the ground all at the same time? Who will you help? Who will you condemn to death? Dana, you can’t even bear the pain of an animal in a trap. How will you feel when a soul bound to that stone is consumed by tumors? It never ends. You can’t tell me you could ever want that burden.”

  “I didn’t ask for it. But that doesn’t mean I’m not brave enough to accept it.”

  Togath had said he didn’t dare take the stone—he would simply destroy it. But Dana was not a coward. There was an entire city whose will was bound to this. She couldn’t just ignore that. Making a new bloodstone was impossible. Without a ka they would be defenseless, with no representation at the Pantheon. She held their entire future in her hands.

  Perhaps she was their future. Had Togath considered that?

  “Dana, that stone will only bring you misery!”

  “I’m not giving it up. And there are other Vetas-kazen in the woods. You must go. Go!” Dana turned and ran.

  “Dana!”

  The branches of pine trees whipped at her as she ran from the scene where her grandfather stood over the corpse of one of the Vetas-kazen.

  “I’ll take it back. I won’t touch the stone,” she told herself as she turned west, toward Norr.

  Why would the city of Shoul Falls send their stone to Togath? It was a several-day journey across wild country. Such a risk.

  One thing was certain, if she didn’t do something drastic, Vetas-ka would quickly find the cabin and her grandfather.

  There was only one way to ensure he didn’t.

  Destroy the evidence.

  She had to destroy the bodies—both of them, before the other kazen found her trail.

  But how?

  A bit of wind whipped past, tossing Dana’s hair and upsetting her sifa. She stopped running and fanned her sifa, feeling the breeze on the air. It came from the north. Her nose detected the faint scent of a distant campfire.