The surrounding Kesprey's earnest debates about Akir's will and compassion began to strike her as silly. Akir was not an entity—He was a force, a matrix of truths. She knew this, because she had seen His face. Increasingly, she found herself thinking about how she had come to the Church in the first place: stolen from her father, betrayed by her grandfather. She was hardly the first initiate to come to the Church that way, and most of them spent their lives in service regardless. She had resolved herself to do the same, but was that because she had wanted to, or because the Church would never have let her leave? Things were different now. Angbar would let her go, if she wanted to. She was sure of it.
But his need for her grew with each passing day, and she didn't want to abandon him. Lyseira had been gone for two months now, and should have been back already; rumors had begun to swirl that she wasn't returning, that Shaviid and Elthur had each begun maneuvering to take her place if it came to that. Takra had told Angbar about the rumors, but he either didn't grasp their importance or didn't care. That meant he needed someone on his side now more than ever. The political tumult, on top of everything else, should have captivated her every waking thought, but it didn't. Nothing could compare to the infinite glory and power of the cosmos.
It took her nearly a month, but eventually she realized Harth was right. She didn't belong here.
She caught Angbar one afternoon in the Majesta chapel, her heart heavy in her chest. He had gathered three people who had been cured of the blood fever and wanted to know more about chanting—he was about to walk them across town to Harth's fledgling chanter school. "Angbar," she said. "I can take them."
He started, at first. Then realization came into his eyes. "M'sai. Will you be coming back?"
She felt her gaze trying to flick to the floor. She had been brutally shy growing up—always glancing away, terrified of eye contact. Something had changed when she'd stabbed her former Keeper, though. When those bashful instincts rose now, she smothered them.
She met his eyes and steeled herself. "No." But it was Angbar. Gentle and earnest, a fish out of water. So she followed this with, "I'm sorry."
"Don't be. I knew you'd be leaving since that first day with Harth."
Takra shook her head. "I hadn't planned to. I'm still not sure it's the right thing to do."
"For you it is. For you, it's perfect."
His generosity threatened to undo her. She set her jaw, holding the tears from her eyes with sheer willpower. "Thank you. And be careful. All right? I'm serious about Shaviid and Elthur—there's something going on. Neither of them would ever hurt you, but either of them could shove you out of the way."
He sighed. "Takra, that would be a relief. I'm not made for this. I don't know why Lyseira thought I was."
"That's exactly why you're the best for it."
He waved her encouragement away. "No. You think I wasn't listening to you, but I was. I've talked to them both. If it comes to it, we'll take a vote. But I'm still not convinced Lyseira won't be back."
That was a relief. A vote, she marveled. What a bizarre idea. She liked it. "I'll still be in the city. I can be here in an hour if you need me."
He laughed as if the city wasn't starving, as if the newborn institution responsible for King Isaic's crown wasn't teetering on the edge of total chaos. "All right. Go. We'll be fine."
She wanted to hug him, but she hated being touched. So she squeezed his shoulder, instead, and led the three other would-be chanters outside.
The sky was clear today, the air crisp and clean. Her first steps down Majesta's sprawling entry stairs felt as if they dragged a ball and chain behind them, heavy with doubt and guilt.
But as she left the square, the weight lessened. Guilt melted into disbelief, then awe. A vise that had been locked around her heart—a clamp she hadn't even realized had been there—dissolved. She drew a breath that tasted like joy.
When she reached Redding Lane and Harth opened the door, recognition sparked in his eyes. "You're finally here," he said with a knowing smile. "Welcome."
Seated at a table with a sheaf of papers in front of her and the infinite Pulse laid bare, she turned her attention to the plaster bust of Archbishop Ryaldo sitting on the fireplace mantel across the room. Harth had said this spell would be harder than the first, but it wasn't—it flitted across her tongue and seized the heart of the sculpture exactly as she ordered it to.
The Archbishop's aloof grey face trembled. A web of fractures shot through it. Then it collapsed to dust.
She released the Pulse and Descended to whooping applause from a few of the students. She gasped and put a hand on the table to steady herself, dizzy from her Descent—but it passed quickly, and she couldn't help a self-conscious smile. She recognized a couple of the people cheering—Carren, a girl her age with auburn hair and bright eyes who had walked over with her from the temple, and Ben, an old man who had helped out at Majesta since the riots—but most of them just seemed genuinely excited to see what she could do.
"All right, all right," Harth said. "Others have managed that one, too, but I'll bet you can go one better." He gathered up the papers and replaced them. Then he gestured at a chair and pressed his palm downward. The chair lifted off the floor, hovering. "Make it stop," he said.
"I couldn't do this one," Carren muttered to a young man next to her. "I tried, but I couldn't figure it out."
"I almost had it," the other man said. He was meticulously groomed, disarmingly handsome. Takra didn't like him. There was something too slick about him.
She cast the thought out of her head, Ascended, and looked at the page.
She didn't understand the crawling words there, but just as the other chants had, this one wormed its way into her mind. She didn't need to understand it. She only had to give it what it wanted—and that was Harth's spell, the one making the chair hover.
She felt the chant rattle off her tongue. The Pulse realigned at her command. Harth's spell disappeared; the chair clattered back to the floor.
This time all the students cheered. Carren clapped her on the shoulder.
"Nicely done," Harth said. "No one else has managed that one, except Ben." Again, he put down a new sheaf of papers. "And he couldn't manage this one."
An excited hush fell over the other students.
"If you cast this one, you'll be as capable as I am. Or as Syn is, for that matter."
"Be careful," Ben said. "Don't do anything you're not sure you can do. You've got nothing to prove; we're all here to learn."
But she had felt more pride in the last ten minutes than she had in the last ten years. Every spell, every success, made her head swim with exhilaration. "It's all right," she assured him. "I'm a'fin."
"You're sure?"
As she nodded, Harth went on. "I won't tell you what the spell does—learning that is part of the test. But I will tell you this much: you'll want to stand up."
A murmur of excitement rippled through the group. Takra got to her feet and Ascended.
Up until now, each spell had been more complex than the last—the gestures and the chants themselves had grown longer and more involved. Not so with this one. It was a single word and no gestures, but she still nearly tripped over it, simply due to the meaning packed into that single syllable. Inflection, pitch, and speed; each component of it had a precise meaning. She trusted to the spell, gave it what it wanted—and felt herself tear in half.
Her vision split, as if one of her eyes was suddenly facing out the back of her head. Her arms tore out of their sockets. Each vertebra in her spine separated from the ones around it. The Pulse dissected her, live, as she looked on with horror.
The room around her, too, dissolved: every color grew suddenly, garishly brilliant before separating like streaks of paint. She screamed as reality tore at the seams.
Then she felt the floor beneath her feet once more. The room slammed back together. She saw the empty table where she'd been seated just a moment before. Harth and the students were casting
about, looking for her. For one delirious instant she thought she had died; that she was now an invisible apparition chained to this place for eternity.
Vertigo shoved her backward, stumbling, into the wall. Off balance, with her muscles still howling in pain, she sank to the floor. Finally, though, Carren saw her—and screamed in delight.
Everyone gasped or cheered. They charged across the room, laughing and roaring.
"That was incredible!"
"How did you do that?"
"You have to teach me that one!"
Harth reached her last, extending a hand to help her up. "I told you you belonged with us," he said with a smile. "Sorry about the pain—I thought it might be easier if you didn't know about it ahead of time. It goes away fast."
She let him pull her to her feet, keeping a hand to the wall for balance, and resisted the urge to run her hands over herself to confirm she was in one piece. "What . . ." She looked around, trying to understand. "What happened?"
"You vanished," Carren said excitedly, "and reappeared over here!"
"I did?" It had all been so painful, had happened so fast, that she hadn't been able to recognize it. My God, she thought. That's incredible.
"We call it Farstep," Harth said, still smiling. "You all right?"
She took a second to think about it, then nodded.
"All right," Harth called, turning to the exuberant students. "We've got all the newcomers sorted out. Get to your tables and pick up where you left off."
They did as he asked, but several clapped her on the shoulder or congratulated her before moving away. She didn't like the touching, but she did her best not to flinch. "What about me?" she asked Harth, gesturing at the tables. There were four—one for students of each Seal, she assumed. The first one had the most students, while the last had spots for only Harth and Ben.
"You'll start by the door," he said, pointing at the widest table with the most seats, and turned to another student who had a question.
The beginner's table? After all that? The confusion must have been evident on her face, because the meticulously-groomed man saw it.
"He starts everyone over there," he said, and extended his hand. "Kirkus Donoval."
She gave him a quick handshake, hardly more than a touch of the palms. "Takra Thorn."
"You were really impressive. Got everyone talking. Don't worry about your table—I was easily into the second Seal, but he started me there, too." He pointed back at the table where Takra had cast her spells. "Those were just tests of your potential. Obviously you've got a lot, but you still need to learn the basics."
"What, the mantras? I don't even use those."
He smiled condescendingly. "The mantras are just a crutch. I'm talking about anchors and medium. The channel. The things that let you learn what a spell does without just blindly chanting it. And I assume you don't want to be chanting off a piece of paper every time, either?"
He was upstaging her, and she didn't like it. The words made a certain intuitive sense, though. She suspected she wouldn't be at the beginner table for long.
"You're at my table?" Carren said, grabbing her hand. "Wow!" She broke into an awed smile. "Come on!"
iii. Cort
The Kesprey had found a cure for blood fever. It was great news, or should have been: finally, they had come up with an answer to one of the plagues visited on the city since it had forced the old Church out. In the weeks since, slowly at first and then in larger groups, the fever victims had visited the new Kespran temples and received their treatments.
But as far as Cort could tell, everything continued to worsen.
Rumors swirled about the cured—that they had been brainwashed, or deceived. Some whispers said they'd been forced to learn witchcraft. Others, the darkest, insisted the new church had traded their illness for demonic possession. Truth was in precious short supply, and all the while, the city's rations tightened.
Benson's silo ran empty, then Corrigan's. Blackboots found the first corpse in the frozen streets: an elderly woman in Temple district, her eyes sunken and her skin stretched against her ruined frame. Some rumors said the new church, despite its apparent charity, was hoarding far more food than it was giving out—using its position to decide who lived and who died, letting those who disliked the Kesprey starve. Others said families were the ones making hard decisions, determining which of their children would survive the winter. The worst of these claimed in bitter whispers that a few had even been driven to cannibalism.
Cort didn't believe half of it, but that still left the other half. He had never missed Melakai so much; he tried to emulate the man's gruff denials and relentless pragmatism, but it didn't come naturally to him. And he didn't need the rumors in order to understand the dread that shrouded the city. The reality was bad enough.
At the walls, the poorest peasants from Broadside screamed to be let out. Outside those same walls, starving subjects from the outlying villages begged to be let in. While Cort had attended the last king's congress—a dubious privilege that Kai had foisted on him in his absence with no small measure of relish—Logan Lesant had dared to suggest sending a bird to Tal'aden, requesting a suspension of hostilities and pleading for aid. By the look on his face, King Isaic had barely restrained himself from ordering the man's head off.
There has to be a way, the King had snarled at Cort after the meeting ended. I've a city full of witch-clerics who can make food rain from the sky, for the love of summer. He'd ordered Cort to Majesta, to summon Angbar, Elthur, and whoever else was in charge there. Since Lyseira still hadn't returned, he was throwing a broader net: anyone he could find that had any connection to the new church or its efforts to feed the city. I will have answers, he demanded. I'm not going to stand here and watch my city starve.
Isaic had signed a missive carrying out his instructions, and sent Cort out to deliver it. Now Cort rode into the temple square, shivering beneath his creaking leather—and the sight there stunned him.
The square teemed with starving people. Young and old, rich and poor, frothing about the steps like the sea before a storm. A handful of Blackboots stood nervous guard, far too few to contain a new riot should one erupt, and a smattering of clerics handed out bread at the head of the line—somehow, impossibly, keeping the crowd placated.
The frozen air reeked of desperation. And this is Temple district, Cort reminded himself. He could only imagine how bad things had gotten in Broadside.
He pushed his mount through the throng. "King's emissary," he called. The words brought him little pride. "Make way."
Faces in the crowd glanced at him with awe or suspicion. The icy breeze carried him snatches of their muttered rumors.
—keeping it all for themselves—
—wants us all to starve—
—God's vengeance for our sins—
It's worse than the King knows, he realized. Worse than we suspected. This didn't feel like a tense gathering of people with some concerns. It felt like the crowd had on the day of Isaic's scheduled execution: a mob on the verge of violence.
Get out of here, a little voice told him. Get out of this sehking city while you still can.
Angbar Shed'dei—a young nog with darting, haunted eyes—emerged from the temple and whispered something to one of the clerics. A haggard young mother, in line with her three children, must have overheard him. She shouted, "What do you mean, 'gone'?"
Angbar looked up like a spooked cat. "We, ah―" He cleared his throat and raised his voice to be heard over the crowd, whose murmur had suddenly grown to a rumble. "We're out of manna for today," he called. "They ran out in Quietus faster than yesterday," he tried to explain, "and we had to―"
"Sehk on Quietus!" someone roared. Angbar flinched as if he'd been struck. "My kids are starving!"
"We're doing all we can!" called another of the clerics, also a nog. He tried to keep his tone civil, but the necessity of raising his voice twisted it into something defensive.
"You're starving us!" someone el
se threw back.
To his credit, Angbar recovered his nerve and raised a hand. "No! Of course not! Listen. We have a plan."
This quieted the crowd somewhat; but at the edge of the square, Cort saw two people break into a scuffle over manna. A pair of Blackboots moved to intervene.
"Anyone who didn't get manna today will be the first to receive it tomorrow!" Angbar's voice took on an unfortunate, nasally whine when he raised it. You need someone else delivering this message, Cort thought. "After the Kesprey have recovered―"
The crowd's moment of goodwill evaporated.
"How will you know?" someone shouted.
"People will lie!"
"My kids are starving now!"
A ripple ran through the crowd toward its edges, where those who had already received their bread formed a pair of lines exiting the square. A couple boys there grabbed hold of an elderwoman and wrested her manna away from her. Cort dropped his hand to his sword hilt, heart thundering, as the crowd's thin veneer of civility blurred toward madness.
"Stop!"
The scuffles halted. The crowd fell silent. All eyes turned to the south end of the square.
Lyseira Rulano had finally returned to Keswick.
She hurried up the stairs, where she turned to face the mob. She didn't greet them. She didn't give them a chance to welcome them home. Instead she shouted, "Have you so little faith?
"Do you really believe Akir brought us through the fire—brought us through the Hel of those riots, all the pain of that vile Church—just to leave us to starve in the cold?"
They met the questions with silence, their eyes boring into her.
"I can't speak for God. I can't know His mind. But I know that He loves us. I know that He brought us here. Do you hear me? He will not let us starve!"
She threw the words like spears, like a shout of naked defiance against the grey heavens.
"Under Baltazar's Church, we'd have nothing! In Tal'aden, they hoard Akir's bread while the people starve! Have you already forgotten? Last winter they'd have watched the whole city die of redwarts!
Of Dark Things Waking (The Redemption Chronicle Book 3) Page 9