by Dan Allen
Korren was either very patient, or he wasn’t a traitor at all.
Did he really want to kill me?
The idea of someone in the same room actually wanting to kill her was sickening.
Dana sat alone at the wooden table. All but two lanterns had been put out by departing acolytes. She looked around at the empty common room, considering the path her life had taken since stealing the greeder and escaping her root-bound life in Norr and finding the sanctum. There had been exactly two highlights of her journey—singing with Turigan and Jila on the river and the sunrise over the Sayathi Sea. The rest had been more or less torture.
Even the scamper she had used as a guide in the jungle had pooped on her.
Yet she was finally in Shoul Falls, along with the bloodstone she had kept with her in the days since Sindar had trusted it to her care.
And now, with the sayathi of the very same colony coursing through her blood, perhaps she could wield the power of the bloodstone.
It was possibly the worst idea that had come into her mind. And it hadn’t even been planted there by an enchanter.
The thought had been there all along.
It’s your stone. Your destiny.
Dana hadn’t even looked at the stone yet. She considered that to be an act of supreme willpower, but it was really just fear of what would happen if she was seen with it.
But if she didn’t want the stone for herself, why hadn’t she told Ryke about it? Why hadn’t she returned it to Korren, the head kazen of the sanctum?
Ambition. Her grandfather Togath had seen it in her. So had Omren.
Then why did Sindar give it to me? Perhaps she was simply his only hope for keeping the stone from the Vetas-kazen, or maybe he thought she would have had the sense to give it to Togath.
But why had Sindar brought it to Togath in the first place? That seemed very strange.
Perhaps her grandfather had once been a servant of the last ka of Shoul Falls.
But he’s not even an adept. How could he have been a kazen?
Floorboards creaked, and Dana looked up. Two girls about her age watched her from the exit through which she had been unceremoniously dragged to a failed assassination by sayathi.
One of the girls had long, straight brown hair and long eyelashes that batted the air. She wore a long, pastel blue dress that suited her tall figure—just a bit taller than Dana—and had an apron tied at her waist with a few dozen small pouches sewn on it.
Dana looked at the other girl and gasped. It was her mother—almost her mother. She was much younger, which meant she looked a great deal like Dana as well. She had a mottled complexion with similar black hair, except her sifa, which were not just silver-tipped like Dana’s but fully silvered.
Dana supposed early maturing sifa was one of the benefits of being a blood-sworn. As hosts, they protected the sayathi colony. And the colony protected the blood-sworn. It was a symbiotic relationship.
The girl’s black hair was woven into a set of iron rings in a rigid weave that came almost to her shoulders. It was a kind of ancient armor, like a primitive helmet.
Dana was a touch jealous that she hadn’t thought of the savage style.
The two girls came closer and sat down across the table.
“I’ve never seen you before today,” said the taller girl with the straight, brown hair.
“Nice to meet you, too. I’m Dana.”
The girl did not extend her sifa in greeting. “You’re not from Shoul Falls. I’ve done assistant nursing in the city for over five years, and I’ve never seen your face.”
“My father traded with Norrian mine workers,” Dana said. “I—”
“Have you even spent a week in Shoul Falls in your entire life?” The question came from the shorter girl, the one with the uncanny resemblance to her mother, down to the high cheekbones, narrow nose, and pouting lips.
“Actually, no.”
The girls’ jaws dropped.
“And I wasn’t nominated to be an acolyte of—whoever the ka is . . . or will be.”
“Then why are you here?” asked the taller girl.
“I don’t belong in Norr,” Dana said. “I’m a druid.”
The girls exchanged a confused glance.
“They hate me for having something they don’t. They fear me. They—” She stopped speaking.
“By the ka—you’re Norrian. You aren’t even blood-sworn. And you drank from the pool!”
“Unto the fourth generation,” Dana reminded. “Sayathi recognize grandchildren of blood-sworn. I’m not going to keel over.”
“It is sacrilege.”
Dana gestured at the empty room. “We don’t even have a supreme to offend at the moment. I think we’re okay.”
“My ka! Have you no respect? You are in the hold of the sanctum itself.”
“I’m learning,” Dana said. “I’ll probably be way less blasphemous given a few days . . . or years.”
The brown-haired girl folded her arms and glared.
Dana tried another tactic. “What sort of adepts are you?”
The shorter girl gestured to her friend. “Kaia does alchemy.”
“No wonder she’s in demand as a nurse.”
“And Mirris is an enchanter,” Kaia added. “She can read you like a book if she touches you.”
Dana offered her hand. “Then read me.”
The shorter girl, Mirris, looked at Kaia, who nodded. “Go ahead.”
Dana fixed her mind on the experience at the pool. She couldn’t risk any errant thoughts of the thing in her pouch slipping through the veil into her mind.
Mirris reached out and held Dana’s hand between hers. The webbing between Mirris’s fingers was tattooed with a pattern of skulls and daggers.
“Your fingers are freezing,” Dana said. The chill ran all the way through her.
“Hold still.”
Dana focused on the pool, the glow, the sensation of drinking.
“Knew it,” Mirris dropped Dana’s hand. “She was thinking about not thinking about something. And then she tossed out a bunch of stray thoughts from the trial by water.”
“I was just trying to be polite.”
“Oh sure.” Mirris stood up and walked away. “Now I trust you implicitly.”
“Not all secrets are bad.”
Mirris didn’t reply as she passed through the threshold to the inner sanctum.
Kaia, who appeared to be the more senior of the two, sat forward. “Enough games. Why are you here?”
There was no sense trying to hide everything. That would only make them suspicious. The best thing she could do was give them something to latch on to. Maybe they would stop trying to find reasons to distrust her. “I’m in trouble with the law.” Dana hoped the answer sounded compelling enough to get Kaia off her case. “Ask Korr, he—”
“Korren,” Kaia corrected.
“As I was saying, he knows all about it. I stole a greeder to escape from Norr.”
“Why did you have to leave in the first place?”
“One of my friends suggested I come to Shoul Falls and join the sanctum. She thought I might fit in bet—”
“Pfff.”
“Well it’s better than Norr,” Dana said. “Adepts are proof that Xahnans aren’t all equal. It goes against everything they preach.”
Kaia stared across the room at the head table, curiosity obviously eating at her. “How did you find the sanctum? Even people from Shoul Falls don’t know where the entrances are.”
“I was climbing a cliff,” Dana said plainly. “Ryke caught my hand as I fell.”
Kaia nodded. “So you batted your eyelashes and got him to show you the entrance?”
If anyone was going to bat eyelashes around the sanctum it was Kaia. Hers looked almost like sifa.
“It’s kind of hard to flirt when there’s a posse of men trying to kill you.”
“Who was?” Kaia asked.
“Torsicans. Followers of Vetas-ka.”
“Why would they attack yo
u?”
At least Dana had a story for that. “I got in the way.” She lowered her voice and checked to make sure no one was listening at the doors. “A Vetas-kazen warlock named Omren was chasing after Sindar west of Norr.”
“Sindaren?” Kaia’s eyes widened. “He’s been missing for—”
“He’s dead. I was with him when he passed.” Dana swallowed. “. . . And I killed his attacker.”
Kaia’s hands covered her mouth. She looked like she was about to scream or be sick.
Dana leaned forward and grabbed the alchemist’s wrists. “Quiet. Kaia, please. I have to ask you something.”
Kaia’s tear-filled eyes met Dana’s, her grief at the loss of Sindar, a devoted mentor, causing her a kind of pain Dana could only imagine.
“Was Korren angry when Sindar—Sindaren—left?”
Kaia didn’t register the question. Her expression broke into a tortured sob so pitiful it nearly wrung tears from Dana’s eyes.
“Kaia, I know Sindaren was trustworthy—greeders can tell things like that. And I speak fluent greeder. I think he was doing the right thing.”
Kaia seemed to break from her trance of grief. “Korren was furious. I’ve never seen him so angry.”
“That’s because Sindaren took the bloodstone,” Dana said.
“No—he’d never. Korren had it hidden for safekeep—”
“Sindaren was trying to take the bloodstone to my grandfather Togath in the foothills of Norr—do you know why he would take the stone to my grandfather?”
“Togath?” Kaia asked.
“Yes.”
Kaia’s face went white. “You mean Togata-ka.”
“What are you talking about?” Then Dana’s heart froze. Togata-ka was the exalted form of her grandfather’s name.
Kaia looked her in the eye. “Togath was our last ka.”
“But my grandfather isn’t even an adept,” Dana said. “How could he have—”
“Togata-ka fell in love and gave up the bloodstone to have a family,” Kaia said. Her voice was soft in a kind of reverence. “He risked his own life to part with it. It’s the most famous story in Shoul Falls. Dana, people write songs about it—plays even.”
Dana gave a laugh. “My grandfather was your last ka?”
Kaia’s broken expression seemed to mend in an instant. Her wrists, held by Dana, drew her closer. “Where is the bloodstone? Do you have it?”
Dana spoke very quietly and deliberately. “Not here. I don’t trust . . . well, I don’t trust Korren.”
Kaia’s lip quivered. “Why . . . why did Sindaren take the stone to your grandfather?”
“He must have had no other choice.”
“This is incredibly disturbing. I don’t even know what to think.”
“We just have to wait until we know for sure whom to trust,” Dana said.
Kaia stood up. “Well it’s time for meditation. Are you coming, or are you going to stay and do dishes?”
“I’m coming!” Dana walked beside Kaia to the door to the inner sanctum and followed after Kaia’s footsteps along a dark corridor. It was lined with glow candles that made light without any heat or smoke.
More alchemy.
Dana was grateful that at least she was able to plant some doubt in Kaia’s mind about Korren. She needed an ally, and Kaia was obviously the most senior of the girl acolytes and deeply thoughtful.
Kaia turned into a side doorway. As Dana followed, the leather door flap closed in front of Dana’s face, and the weight stone tied to the bottom smacked into Dana’s foot.
“Ow!”
“Quiet. It’s meditation,” hissed a young girl’s voice.
Dana pushed the door open and limped into the room.
Inside were gathered about eight acolytes, all girls sitting cross-legged in front of a single glow candle.
Most of them were younger than her, except Kaia.
Dana shut the door behind her and wedged herself between Kaia and the girl next to her, who was forced to shift to the side, and so on, until everyone around the circle had been bumped or jostled.
So much for peaceful meditation.
“You didn’t just come for the free food?” said a familiar voice. It was Mirris. “You’re really going to do this?”
“Of course,” Dana said.
“Or did you just come so you could stare at Ryke all day?”
“Shut up, Mirris,” Dana snapped. “. . . And stay out of my head.”
“Stay out of my sanctum.”
Dana had a mind to put her in a headlock and rub some of the sandy cave clay into her face, but the thought that they didn’t want her here was like getting the breath knocked out of her.
Was she just going to be as much an outsider here as she was in Norr?
And with Korren running the place, she was possibly in more danger inside the sanctum than out.
“Fine. Maybe I will.” Dana started to get to her feet, but Kaia’s hand caught Dana’s wrist.
“We will all find peace,” Kaia said gently, her voice carrying to everyone in the group, “when we lose what we seek and seek the lost. That is your mantra tonight. Meditate in silence . . . or you can write an essay on the topic.”
Dana settled into the silence, before a touch of heat flowed through her as if she were somehow coming nearer to the candle.
A chorus of the eight voices touched her mind, repeating the mantra in a distant, tiny echo.
“We will all find peace when we lose what we seek and seek the lost.”
Her breathing slowed as the idea caught on her mind. But Dana refused to think about what she sought—he had already caused her enough embarrassment—or what was lost—the stone she had in a coin purse tied to her waist.
She was going to have to move that to somewhere more secure.
“Join us, Dana.” The words trickled into her mind. They seemed to be coming from someone else.
No, Dana thought stubbornly.
“You’re ruining the meditation, and you’ll have to write an essay.” The thought seemed to echo from one of the younger girls.
I can’t hide forever, Dana thought. Kaia already knows I have it. If they find out, they find out. She recalled the warning of the woman at the Sayathi Sea about stealing the will of others being like murder.
It’s not mine anyway.
Dana felt her eyes roll back in her head as she fell forward into a quiet so deep and dark that she thought she had died.
“Good. You have given up that which you seek. But there is a deeper peace, when you find what was lost.”
Dana sensed the presence of the other acolytes like distant humming in her mind, reminding her of the way dragonflies and hummingbirds felt when she touched their minds, only deeper, more sonorous.
The humming grew louder and louder until Dana could hardly stand it.
“Find what was lost!”
Dana began thinking about what she might have lost. Immediately her thoughts turned to the slain greeder, then to Turigan and Jila. Colors of emotion swirled within her. At last she let her mind return to Norr, and with it came a burst of anguish at leaving her friends Brista and Forz and some guilt, at last, over the greeder’s owner’s loss.
Had he cared for it? Had he loved it?
Dana hadn’t considered that before.
And her parents. They had lost their only daughter.
Tears spilled from her eyes.
What have I done?
A moment later she heard the sounds of sniffling. With a great effort, Dana pulled herself out of the meditation. She looked around the room and to her surprise found that all the girls in the room were weeping.
One by one, they came and embraced her.
“You lost so much,” said a girl with long hair tied in thin braids that ran over her shoulders. “I’m sorry.”
Some came silently and merely mingled the wet tears on their cheeks with hers as they hugged her tightly.
Mirris merely gave Dana a smart punch to her shoulder
. “That’s for making us all cry.”
Kaia was the last to face Dana. She simply squeezed her hand. Perhaps it was meant to say, “I’m sorry I judged you.” Perhaps not quite that. But she met her eyes and there was no hatred there, no fear, and the flicker of something deeper.
Dana was an equal, an acolyte, one of them.
A second wave of emotion crowded into Dana, a feeling she was having for the very first time in her life.
They accept me.
“Kaia?” said a droll voice.
“Yes, Mirris?”
“Ryke is waiting outside . . . for Dana.”
Chapter 18
Jet tugged the button-down jacket of his dress blues and straightened his white belt and cap.
Last time I wear this thing for a while.
The sprint ship was ready. His team was ready. Jet was about to leave the fleet behind and take the future of all Believers into his hands.
One last thing to clear off his docket.
Councillor Raman, the High Seer.
Jet hadn’t seen the young woman since the rescue on Avalon when Angel had taken a trick shot from Jet’s tossed rifle and saved her life.
He never felt prepared for this sort of thing.
Jet raised his hand and knocked.
“Enter,” called a young voice from inside. The door unlocked.
Jet stepped inside a steel-floored conference room like so many others on the ship.
The High Councillor stood up from a chair on the side of the conference table. She wore a simple, loose gown.
The was nothing at all intimidating about the High Seer. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen.
How old was she? Had she even graduated high school? Why was she on the High Council?
He removed his hat and tucked it under his arm, conscious not to salute the civilian leader. “Corporal Jet Naman, Believer Marines, Advance Contingent.”
The High Councillor walked closer and looked up into his eyes. “You saved my life on Avalon, Brother Naman. You’ve done all the Believers a great service—and especially me.”
“Just doing my job.”
She gave a heroic smile and went on tiptoe, wrapped her arms around him, and laid her head against his chest. “Thank you.”
“Um, you’re welcome, Councillor Raman.” It was not the kind of thing a marine was used to. A crisp salute, the approving eye of your commanding officer, and the respect of your team was all the thanks a marine would ever expect to get. And it was all he ever wanted.