Mother of All

by Jenna Glass

  Delnamal raised an eyebrow. “Even knowing what I can do?” he inquired. “I know you received my letters.”

  Khalvin’s gaze slid to Draios, and Draios could see his father’s quick mind putting everything together.

  Draios couldn’t help another little smile, one that carried no small amount of malice. “I gather you understand now why I made that trip out to the manor house,” he said. “If you’re going to burn your correspondence, you should make sure the flames have finished their job before you walk away.”

  Khalvin rose to his feet, rage practically oozing from his pores. He was not one to shout—shouting was undignified, especially in a sovereign—but his furious voice carried all the weight of a roar.

  “I will not tolerate disrespect! Not even from you, my son. Have a care with your words, or this audience will end right now.”

  All four guards in the room came to full attention, ready to leap to their king’s command. Draios wondered if his father would actually go so far as to have him bodily thrown out of the room. Their relationship had always been prickly, although before it had been overtly cordial.

  “Prince Draios did not know it at the time,” Delnamal said, “but he was merely acting upon the wishes of the Creator.”

  Draios crossed his arms over his chest. “I do not need you to defend my honor, Cousin,” he grumbled, though in truth it was something of a relief to have Khalvin’s fearsome glare directed elsewhere.

  “Do not speak blasphemy in my presence, Delnamal,” Khalvin said. “That I will not tolerate from anyone.”

  Delnamal’s eyes narrowed. In other circumstances, the use of his name might be considered unremarkable and perfectly proper between an uncle and his nephew, but there was no doubting that in this instance it was meant to be belittling.

  While Draios had not expected this audience to go smoothly, he had never intended it to be so overtly hostile from the very beginning. What chance had they of convincing his father of the importance of their mission if he was incandescent with anger from the start?

  Draios had to acknowledge that he bore most of the responsibility for the tone, and he vowed to find some way to de-escalate. Unfortunately, Delnamal did not seem especially interested in de-escalating.

  “It is not blasphemy,” Delnamal replied calmly. “It is nothing but the truth. The Creator has made me into His instrument, and it is His will that you make use of me. When you showed yourself unwilling to heed His call, He ensured my letter survived the flames to find its way into Draios’s hands.”

  One of the guards behind the king was looking at Delnamal with open shock and horror, forgetting all semblance of detached professionalism. Draios cleared his throat ever so softly—just enough to draw the man’s attention—then glared at him in a way that convinced him to school his expression.

  The king was not so easily quelled, and his face was turning an alarming shade of red. Draios had warned Delnamal that he should ease into the topic gently, but the man had clearly only pretended to accept his advice. Draios supposed it was up to him to gain control of the situation.

  “I have seen his power, Father,” he said, “and it is fearsome to behold.”

  He would have preferred to make this admission without a quartet of guards overhearing, but it was clear to him that the king had no intention of dismissing them.

  Khalvin’s eyes fixed on Draios in a way that would have unnerved him if he didn’t feel assured of the righteousness of his cause.

  “I cannot believe you, of all people, would be swayed by this heresy,” the king growled, his lips twisted into a sneer of distaste. “You are in training to be a priest! It will one day be your job to root out heretics and bring them to purity in the flames. And yet you dare—”

  Draios took a step closer, a fire he had thought he’d long ago quenched burning in his breast. He had never enjoyed the luxury of a father’s love and approval. Surely it shouldn’t hurt so much to see that contempt so blatantly displayed for all to see. But he could practically feel the guards staring at him, absorbing every detail of the conversation and the tone. It was one thing for Draios to know his father did not love or respect him, but quite another for that fact to be revealed to a bunch of nobodies.

  “I am a faithful servant of the Creator,” Draios interrupted, no doubt giving the guards even more gossip to spread. It was a horrendous breach of protocol to interrupt the king. “He has shown me the path we must take to reverse the Curse and set the world back to rights. I am destined for greater things than mere priesthood. Would you have me ignore His call simply because you have been too wrapped up in your worldly duties to hear it?”

  Khalvin looked like he might have an apoplexy any moment, his eyes practically bugging out of his head. “Don’t think that because you are my son you are immune to the consequences of your words and deeds!”

  Draios was shocked when he felt a pair of rock-hard hands fasten on his shoulders. He’d been so focused on his father’s face that he had not noticed the guard approaching, nor had he seen whatever signal his father must have given the man.

  Draios tried to jerk out of the man’s grip, but the guard held on with the ease of long practice and superior size.

  With a groan, Delnamal rose from his own seat. Draios noticed that Khalvin had not bothered to have a guard put hands on him—probably because he looked too frail to be of any danger.

  “Forgive me, Uncle,” Delnamal said, reaching up to rub his eyes as if they hurt him and taking a couple of placating steps closer to where the king still stood frozen behind his desk. “I clearly have done an imperfect job of explaining the situation. Please do not be angry with Draios. He has seen and heard things that you have not.”

  “This audience is over,” Khalvin said, not bothering to acknowledge Delnamal with even the briefest glance, his entire focus on Draios. “I advise you both to leave quietly. And, Draios, since you seem to admire your cousin so greatly, perhaps you would care to spend some time as his guest out in the countryside. Clearly, you are not fit to return to the Temple of the Creator at the moment.”

  In his wildest fantasies, Draios had not imagined that his father would go so far as to exile him, even for bringing him news he did not want to hear. Once again, he tried to jerk away from the guard who held him, and once again, he failed. He turned his attention to Delnamal, who was still rubbing his eyes and was now directly across the desk from the king.

  Draios’s heart was slamming against his breastbone, his breath coming short. He would not allow himself to be dismissed like this.

  “I think it’s time we show the king what you can do, Cousin,” he said to Delnamal. “If you would be so kind as to get this lout off me…”

  Draios allowed himself only the briefest moment of regret that the guard would die simply because he had followed his king’s orders. Palace guards, too, were required by the Devotional to put the Creator above all else, and the fool should have heard the righteousness of Draios’s cause and disobeyed.

  Delnamal chuckled and let his hand fall from his eyes, revealing that they were milky white. He hadn’t been rubbing them at all—he’d merely been hiding the opening of his Mindseye.

  Draios’s stomach gave a sickening lurch, and the fight went out of him as he stared at his cousin and realized his own foolish error. He’d assumed the guard who held him would be the target of Delnamal’s demonstration, and though he hadn’t thought things through that far, it seemed to him possible that the demonstration would change the king’s mind. But his cousin was no longer interested in changing the king’s mind. If he ever had been.

  “Delnamal, wait!” Draios cried, renewing his frantic efforts to shake off his guard, but Delnamal was already holding his hand out toward the king’s chest.

  * * *

  —

  Delnamal nearly moaned in ecstasy as the king’s Rhokai flowed into him.
Although he’d come to this audience hunched and feeble-looking, he’d still had a lingering store of strength from having killed Bandar two days ago, and when he added Khalvin’s Rhokai to the mix, he felt stronger and more powerful than he’d ever felt in his life.

  The king’s lifeless body fell to the floor, everyone in the room staring in undisguised horror.

  Things had never been destined to go according to Draios’s plan, but Delnamal was disappointed that they hadn’t gone according to his own, either. If Crown Prince Parlommir had attended the audience as he should, then both the king and his heir would now be dead, with Draios ready to take the throne uncontested. And the room would likely not be full of guards.

  Delnamal did not like his odds against four well-trained men, especially when Draios seemed unlikely to be any use to him. But the intemperate young prince had been about to get them kicked out, and Delnamal had known he’d never get another chance. Now, he would simply have to make the best of a bad situation.

  He plucked the Rhokai from one of the guards before anyone had regained enough sense to stop him.

  Even through the haze of elements revealed by his Mindseye, Delnamal had no trouble seeing the other guard swinging a sword at him—one of the few advantages of his indifferent magical talent was that his worldly vision was not overly hindered by the opening of his Mindseye. Strangely, he felt no fear. He had become so skilled at shunting aside his emotions that he could now do so with nary a conscious thought. Instinctively, he raised one arm to shield himself, hoping that arm would stave off the death blow for just a few more moments.

  He felt the sword make contact with his arm, knocking him back a couple of steps, but there was only the slightest hint of pain. The sensation distracted him momentarily, and when he glanced at the wound, he saw several motes of Rhokai flow from it like blood. Then those motes burst, giving him the familiar rush of energy and strength. The guard was swinging his sword again, and Delnamal stretched out his hand toward the man’s Rhokai.

  It should have been well out of reach. After all, the guard was more than an arm’s-length away. But the man’s aura suddenly went still, his sword arm frozen in mid-swing. The mote of Rhokai wavered in his chest, straining toward Delnamal’s outstretched hand.

  Behind him, Delnamal was aware of shouting voices—Draios and the other two palace guards yelling over one another so that no words were discernible—but he maintained his focus on the man who had wounded him, and suddenly that mote of Rhokai came free and burst with a silent pop.

  The remains of the mote came obediently to Delnamal’s hand, the Rho sinking into him as the bright Kai took its place in his aura. Delnamal didn’t have time to think about how he had withstood the blow from the guard’s sword—nor about the Rhokai that had flowed with his blood and then burst. Not when there were other guards bent on killing him.

  The man who’d grabbed Draios had let go, and both he and his fellow had drawn swords. As far as Delnamal could tell, Draios was standing still, neither helping nor hindering the hesitating guards.

  “Put down your swords,” Delnamal said calmly, “and I swear you will live.” He reached out one hand toward each of them, and though they were far enough back that even their swords couldn’t reach him, he could practically feel those tantalizing motes of Rhokai quivering in their chests.

  Neither guard moved—whether because of fear or because Delnamal had a virtual grip on their Rhokai, he didn’t know.

  Confident that he could rip out those two motes before the guards could reach him, he turned his attention to Draios. The haze of elements was enough to hide the young man’s expression, but Delnamal could well imagine it was one of shock and grief.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” Delnamal said, lying easily, well and truly rid of the guilt that had once made his falsehoods halting and obvious, “but the Creator’s will must not be thwarted. Khalpar must be made ready for the war that is to come, and Khalvin was not worthy of leading the holy army. I hope you see that.”

  Draios said nothing, but his very silence spoke volumes.

  “Tell the guards to lower their swords,” Delnamal continued. “I believe that until Parlommir returns to Khalwell to claim the throne, you will be regent in his stead. Am I wrong?”

  He heard Draios stifle a gasp, but he didn’t for a moment believe the thought had not already entered the young man’s head. Bitter and ambitious and deluded he might be, but Draios was not stupid. As soon as his father had fallen dead, he had no doubt realized exactly what Delnamal had planned. And if Delnamal had him pegged correctly, he would quickly convince himself that all was going according to the Creator’s will.

  “You are not wrong,” Draios replied, making a good show of being reluctant.

  “This filthy beast killed the king!” one of the guards protested, and Delnamal felt him struggling against the virtual grip on his Rhokai.

  It was most satisfactory—and persuasive—that Delnamal could hold the two trained palace guards at a standstill from a distance. He wasn’t even using a spell that might wear off or be fought with a counterspell or shield spell. It was even more satisfactory that the guard had given Delnamal an excuse to further expand his understanding of the nature of Rhokai.

  “You disrespect His Highness by daring to offer an opinion,” he said. Keeping his grip on those two Rhokai motes, he bent and grabbed the sword that had sliced his arm, pulling it easily from the dead guard’s grip. Then, his Mindseye still open, he slashed the sword across the protesting guard’s throat.

  The Rhokai mote in the guard’s chest seemed to waver a moment as the man gurgled and gasped and fell to his knees. Seconds later, the mote burst open, the Rho flying free while the Kai hovered at the guard’s shoulder. For a moment, Delnamal feared he had miscalculated, for when the Rhokai had burst, he’d lost his grip on the guard and could no longer hold him still. But either the shock of having his throat slit was too great, or the guard hadn’t the magical talent to see the Kai, for he made no attempt to use that free Kai mote to strike out at his killer. Instead, he just keeled over and died, his Kai fading from view until it was no more.

  Delnamal smiled in satisfaction. He had just confirmed his guess that violent deaths did indeed cause the Rhokai to shatter, and that was how the element known as battlefield Kai was “created.”

  “Stand down,” Draios ordered the final guard. “There is no reason for you to get yourself killed, too.”

  Delnamal loosened his grip on the man’s Rhokai, allowing him to move. Instead of charging toward Delnamal, the man took two hasty steps backward, putting Draios between him and Delnamal. Delnamal would have called the man a coward, except it was hard to maintain he had made the wrong choice under the circumstances.

  Delnamal blinked his Mindseye closed and surveyed the scene.

  Draios was deathly pale, his eyes wide and frightened-looking as he stared at something behind Delnamal’s back. Delnamal could only presume the boy was staring in horror at his father’s dead body; he did not look behind him to confirm his suspicion. Instead, he looked at his arm, expecting to see a terrible wound despite the complete lack of pain.

  There was a visible slice in the sleeve of his doublet, and its edges were stained red with blood. But there was no wound to speak of. It was clear to Delnamal that the Rhokai he’d absorbed from Aaltah’s Well had healed him.

  “He opened you to the bone,” Draios said, his voice hoarse. “I couldn’t even understand why the blow didn’t sever your arm, and now…”

  Delnamal nodded with satisfaction. He could tell by looking at his hand and arm that whatever magic had fueled him when he consumed the Rhokai had not in reality restored his body to its former glory. The hand was still shriveled and misshapen, the flesh still gaunt; but what did appearances matter? He was standing easily on his own two feet, the cane lying on the floor by one of the dead guards. There was enough Rhokai
in his blood that he could not readily tell if the healing had appreciably diminished it. But convinced as he was that it was only the Rhokai keeping his wasted body alive, he had no wish to use any more of it for healing purposes.

  “I am protected by the Creator,” Delnamal declared, though he did not for a moment believe an imaginary deity had anything to do with it.

  Rhokai—not Rho—was the true element of life, present in every living being. But so far, he had seen no sign of it floating around loose in the air like other elements. He had a strong suspicion that if he were to peer down into Khalpar’s Well, however, he would see motes of life-giving Rhokai in its depths.

  The most basic way to use a mote of Kai was to touch it to an enemy—a very effective form of revenge for someone who did not have a battlefield Kai spell handy. Delnamal would have to perform another test to confirm it, but he suspected that when Kai was used in this manner, it killed by breaking the Rhokai mote in the victim’s chest. He imagined that when Melcor’s Kai had fallen into Aaltah’s Well, it had met with and broken a mote of Rhokai within, starting a chain reaction. Mairahsol had clearly had some inkling what was happening and had tried to stop it. Perhaps she had been trying to purge the Kai from the Well and had ended up purging the Rhokai, as well.

  What was clear to him was that all of these events had been caused by people, not gods. Thankfully, Draios was too eager to believe to notice any lack of conviction in Delnamal’s voice.

  Delnamal held up the once-wounded arm. “This is a clear and obvious sign that I serve a holy cause. Wouldn’t you agree, Prince Draios?”

  Draios still looked shaken, his face so pale Delnamal wondered for a moment if the boy might faint. But Delnamal was offering him things he could not possibly turn down: the chance to style himself a holy warrior, and the chance to claim the throne of Khalpar for his own. The Devotional condemned patricide as one of the deadliest of sins, but Draios’s agile mind would grasp at this doctrine-based excuse for accepting his father’s murder.