“So you gave up our country to a sadistic zealot?” Hassan demanded, fury raising his voice to a shout.
“You may call him a zealot, but the Hierophant is much more than that,” Lethia said. “One of his many gifts is that he sees things as they should be. He saw that in a just world, I would be Queen of Herat. And he made it so. He understands that the rules of our world are not immutable, and he dares to change them.”
“He will destroy this city,” Hassan hissed. “And you will watch it happen.”
“He will change this city,” Lethia replied. “We will create a new age for a broken world. Finally, people like us will be able to wield our own power. And don’t worry—you’ll have a role to play, too.”
Before Hassan could reply, the massive doors of the throne room let out a tremendous groan as they were pushed open again. Two women dressed in the uniform of the palace watch entered. If they were surprised to see Hassan there, they didn’t show it.
“Queen Lethia,” said the first, an older woman, sweeping down to one knee.
The other followed suit.
“Rise,” Lethia commanded. “What is it?”
Hassan watched Lethia carefully but could not read the expression on her face.
“You told us to alert you if any ships were spotted from shore.”
Ships? Hope bloomed in his chest.
Lethia’s expression hadn’t changed. “How many?”
“At last count, six frigates and three smaller vessels coming from the northwest,” the watchwoman replied. “All of them have silver sails.”
The Order of the Last Light was here. There was still hope. There was still a chance.
But when Hassan looked back at Lethia, hope faded. Her expression was far from grim. She looked nearly smug.
“It looks as though your friends have arrived,” she said to him. “Right on schedule.”
“They’ll destroy you,” Hassan said between clenched teeth. “And the Witnesses. The Order will take this city back from their clutches, just like we planned.”
“Oh, I don’t think they will,” Lethia said lightly, dismissing the watchwomen with a wave. “After all, they would never risk launching an attack when it would endanger the thing they care about the most.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What do you think?” Lethia asked. “You.”
“But I’m—” Hassan swallowed the thought. Not the Prophet, he was about to say. Of course, he knew that, and Lethia knew that.
But the Order of the Last Light did not.
“I couldn’t stop you or the Guard from sending word to the rest of the Order,” Lethia said. “But once again, I knew how to turn it to my advantage. As I said, you have a role to play, too. Just not the one you thought.”
It was a setup. He’d been used as bait to draw the Order of the Last Light away from their fortress in the mountains and into the Witnesses’ clutches.
He’d thought he was Nazirah’s salvation. Instead, he was its ruin.
“Come now,” Lethia said, rising from the throne and descending the stairs. “It’s time you met the man who started all this. The Day of Reckoning is here, and the Hierophant is waiting.”
52
ANTON
Darkness made the towers of the royal palace look like the shadows of gods. The smell of earth and a hint of the sea beyond surrounded them as Illya led Anton into the lush outer courtyard. Anton’s heart beat in time with the steady susurration of waves washing in and out.
“Nazirah is really quite an impressive city,” Illya said as they trekked along the edge of the outer wall of the palace grounds, guards at their backs. “The very first rulers had the Grace of Mind, and they used their abilities to build their capital city into a technological marvel. It was the first city to apply artificery to infrastructure, and, of course, the construction of the lighthouse itself was one of the most impressive feats of its day.”
Anton stared at his brother. “I thought you were supposed to hate the Graced.”
Illya laughed. “Should I discount the ingenuity of my enemies simply because I seek to best them?”
At Anton’s answering silence, Illya took up his original topic with gusto. “But the most impressive thing about Nazirah is not its lighthouse, its roads, or even the Great Library. It’s something no one even sees. Beneath our very feet, under the streets and houses, lies a complex of ancient wells and cisterns, almost a city unto itself. During the annual floods, water flows from the Herat River through a series of underground canals and into these wells and cisterns. This is how the city keeps its supply of fresh water during the dry months.”
“Doesn’t sound that impressive,” Anton muttered. He couldn’t stand Illya’s cheerful chattering, playing tour guide in the city where he’d brought Anton as his captive.
“No? Well, perhaps when you see it for yourself you’ll change your mind.”
They had stopped in front of the entrance to a watchtower, one of several they’d passed along the walls of the palace. A torchlight burned at its entrance, which struck Anton as strange until he realized that the Witnesses wouldn’t use incandescent lights. They wouldn’t use anything that had been made by the Graced.
The guards lit their own torches and led the way inside the tower. Shadows flickered against cut stone walls as they passed a set of stairs that led up to the watchtower itself, and entered another chamber. The low ceiling sloped toward another set of stairs that led down into darkness.
Anton’s dread turned cold as they began their descent, footsteps echoing against stone. The air grew damp and chilly, smelling of mildew and wet earth.
Once, when they were children, Illya had locked Anton inside a wooden chest. He’d refused to let him out even when Anton sobbed and begged, pounding his tiny fists against the lid over and over and over.
He felt now like Illya was leading him into a tomb, and once Anton was inside, he would seal it off, brick by brick by brick, until no one could hear him beg.
But when they reached the bottom of the stairs, Anton saw that it wasn’t a tomb. They were let out into an enormous chamber, with a high, vaulted ceiling, reinforced by thin arches like the ribs of some ancient subterranean creature. Columns rose from the depths of mirror-dark water. Marble walkways lined with torches crisscrossed their way between them, some raised high on arches and some hovering just above the water like ice floes.
The sound of trickling water echoed through the chamber as Illya led Anton down crumbling marble stairs to a walkway and then brought them to a halt.
“What am I doing here, Illya?” he asked.
Illya turned back to him. “In Pallas Athos, you said that I once tried to drown you in the frozen lake where we grew up.”
Anton rasped out breath. The lake wasn’t a far-off memory. It was here, beneath the dark water of the cistern.
“Do you want to know the truth about that day?” Illya said.
Anton knew the truth. But there was something in his brother’s voice, something beyond cruelty and malice, that prickled at Anton’s skin like the chill of ice.
Illya drew his brows together. “I never tried to drown you.” He looked nothing like the cruel, smirking beast of Anton’s nightmares. Nothing like the creature who’d held him, thrashing, beneath the water. “I found you outside during the last snow of the season.”
Anton closed his eyes, as though blocking out the light would somehow mute the sound of Illya’s lies, but his brother’s voice washed over him in the dark. The cistern faded away and he was back in the snow, by the lake. But it was not the dream-dark chaos of his nightmares. This was a memory, rendered to him now as though he were watching from afar.
The sky hung heavy and gray above, early morning flurries falling lightly, ice crystals catching in Anton’s fine fair hair. He was a figure in monochrome—dark eyes, pale hair, pale skin. The frozen-over lake was an unmarred oval of white, the trees beyond it just dark shapes in the distance. Only the tracks of his bare feet
broke the surface of the new snow.
A voice called to him, hesitant. Anton?
He stepped out onto the lake. The thin ice creaked beneath his weight. He kept going.
Footsteps behind him.
Stop! Anton!
Arms around him, dragging him back as he kicked and clawed. Snow bit his skin as he fell forward.
He crawled to his feet, away from his brother, farther onto the lake, and ran. Wind stung his face, his limbs aflame with some sickness that carried him on and on, until he was in the center of the lake, ice splintering beneath his feet.
He plunged into icy darkness. All became silent and still and frozen.
“I saved you from the lake.”
His brother’s face above him, fearful, crying, reaching down to grab at him before he slipped away. Anton thrashed against his hold, but Illya’s grip was fierce and he did not let go. He hauled him up and onto the melting ice.
“You grabbed my arm and you looked at me.”
Anton opened his eyes and stared at his brother’s face now, and in the flamelight of the cavern it looked like it was flickering, features shifting until Anton felt like he was looking at his own reflection.
“You begged me to let you drown.”
Anton’s voice was barely a croak. “You’re lying.”
But now that the floodgates of memory had been forced open, Anton knew that he wasn’t.
This was the truth. Something more sinister than his brother had brought him to the middle of the lake that day. Had pushed him beneath the ice and held him under. Had made him run away from home, never to return. Had kept him running ever since.
Something that, even now, he could not bear to face.
“You saw something that day, Anton.”
The water lapped up at him. He gasped, choking, an icy cold gripping his lungs.
“It was only later that I realized what it meant,” Illya went on. “That you’re not just the Graced son of a cursed line.”
Anton closed his eyes, heart thumping.
“You saw something no one has seen in a hundred years,” Illya said. “You saw the future.”
Illya’s words echoed through him, reverberating like the thrum of his Grace.
As impossible as they were, Illya’s words were the truth. Anton knew it, in some deep, hidden part of himself. A part of his mind he had tried to wall away so he wouldn’t have to face it. So he could pretend that he was just what he appeared to be—some boy on the street, a wayward son with loose morals and a quick tongue.
But now the truth rang out, deafening, cracking through the fragile walls that he’d built. He had seen something that day. Something impossible.
“That’s what really happened that day,” Illya said. The guards advanced around them. “What you were too afraid to admit to yourself. Now I want to know something. I want to know what you saw.”
Anton shook and shook and shook until he felt as though he might crack in two.
“Illya, please, please don’t do this,” he begged as the guards dragged him to the edge of the water and forced him to his knees. “Please don’t do this to me.”
“I wish I didn’t have to. You’ve been through enough, haven’t you?”
Liar. Anton didn’t believe his contrition for a moment. But as he watched Illya’s gaze soften, he wondered for the first time if Illya believed it. If, like Anton, he had managed to hide what he was so well he’d even deceived himself.
“Illya,” he said, and he hated the way his voice sounded—high, panicked, desperate. A lamb pleading for a wolf to take pity.
“You can’t tell me, can you?”
Anton had buried the memory of the vision so thoroughly it was no longer somewhere he could access by will. Even now, faced with torture and maybe worse, he did not know if he wanted to. In the pit of his gut, he knew that the vision, whatever it was, would be worse than anything Illya could do to him.
“The memory of the lake is the gateway,” Illya went on. “I figured it out when I saw you in Pallas Athos. The way you reacted when you spoke of it. You went back there. I saw it in your eyes. You were there, drowning—”
“Stop.”
“—drowning like you did five years ago, trying to escape what you saw in your vision—”
“I said stop.”
“I remember what you were like that day.” Illya’s voice went distant and soft. “You were in a trance. I couldn’t reach you, no matter how hard I tried. The vision had a hold on you, and I couldn’t break you out of it.”
The guard pushed his head down so his face hovered just above the surface of the water. Anton sucked in breath on a whimper. He was so close to that memory now. A thin sheet of ice was all that separated his past from the future. The black depths of the water gaped up at him, ready to consume him.
“What did you see, Anton?” Illya’s voice was a whisper in his ear, so close that he couldn’t be sure it was truly his brother’s voice at all. “What did you see that made you want to die rather than live with it in your head?”
53
JUDE
The chains around Jude’s wrists and throat burned as two Witnesses led him up a twisting stair of dark rock. The cell he had occupied since arriving in Nazirah was a narrow, windowless vault in the base of the city’s lighthouse. They’d fed him chunks of stale flatbread and a few mouthfuls of water, and fitted him with new chains forged in Godfire that bound him, wrists to ankles to neck.
Before that, it had been three grueling days of sea travel, trapped in a cold, dark space that offered little room for movement. At least on the ship, he’d had the solace of another voice to drown out the one inside his head. The one that wouldn’t stop counting all the ways in which he’d failed.
But Jude didn’t know what had become of Anton after they’d left the ship. Maybe he was in another cold, damp cell. Or maybe Anton was already dead.
Jude swallowed down the guilt that followed that thought. Failing to protect Anton was just one more broken promise.
“Hurry up, swordsman,” one of the Witnesses sneered.
A sharp tug at his chains sent him stumbling up the next step. Jude could barely see his feet, so dark was the stairwell. He still had not gotten used to what darkness felt like without his Grace—the koah to sharpen vision was among the first he’d ever learned. The sensation of blindness was overwhelming. The weakening of his other senses only made him feel more blind. He could smell only the pervasive salt and brine, could hear nothing past the crash of waves against a rocky shore.
At last they reached a landing. The massive sandstone walls of the lighthouse’s main atrium towered above them. Sweeping golden staircases and metalwork spiraled up in curved patterns. At the apex of the tower, like a distant star, the torch emitted a cold white light.
Jude’s stomach dropped as he realized what burned at the top.
Godfire.
The pale flame drew shadows as immense as the monoliths of the Circle of Stones in Kerameikos. The silhouette of a towering, shrouded figure, its head crowned with thin spires, flickered on the walls. For a moment, Jude thought he was seeing some kind of apparition, a ghostly creature of shadow.
But when he blinked, he saw the source of the shadows was a man. Unlike the other Witnesses, this man’s robes were pure white. On his face was a mask of dark gold, glimmering in the flamelight. A ring of black powder surrounded him. Around it, dozens of figures dressed in white robes patterned with black and gold stood stock-still, their eyes fixed on their master.
The two Witnesses led Jude forward, through the ring of black powder, and shoved him to his knees. They knelt beside him, foreheads to the ground.
“Immaculate One,” the one on Jude’s right said. “We have brought you the Keeper of the Word.”
Jude raised his eyes to the man who stood before him. The Hierophant’s mask curved sharply over the sides of his face, tapering into jagged points at his chin. A flaming black sun was carved into the forehead, its wheeling arms stretching
up above the mask like a crown. The only part of the Hierophant’s face that Jude could see clearly were his eyes—a bright, almost unnatural blue.
“You have done well, my dear disciples,” he said, his voice melodious. He placed a hand on each of the Witnesses’ heads, the touch almost reverent. The Witnesses closed their eyes. “Do not think your service has gone unnoticed.”
“T-Thank you, Immaculate One,” the first Witness stuttered. They rose together and retreated back.
Then the Hierophant’s pale blue eyes fell on Jude, and all the breath went out of Jude’s chest. A wave of fear rolled through him. Whatever hid behind that mask was something dark and twisted. The first harbinger of the Age of Darkness.
“Jude Weatherbourne,” the Hierophant mused. “I’ve been looking forward to this meeting for a long time.”
It did not seem impossible, somehow, that this man would know his name. But it was the way he said it—Jude Weatherbourne—that made him feel like the Hierophant had cracked open the vault of Jude’s self.
“Each of us has a part to play in the Reckoning. Even you, Jude Weatherbourne,” he said. “It is a gift to know one’s purpose. That’s one thing the Prophets were right about.”
“I know what my purpose is,” Jude said. He’d always known, even when he’d abandoned it.
“No, you don’t,” the Hierophant said gently. “What you think you know is a lie. You see, I was once like you. I served the legacy of the Prophets, keeping their wisdom alive. But I had questions. Questions that led to doubts. We all have doubts from time to time, don’t we? Even the Keeper of the Word must.”
The Hierophant’s tone was soft, but the words hit Jude like a blow. As if the Hierophant had plunged his hand into Jude’s chest and torn it asunder, exposing all his fears and desires to the harsh and unforgiving light. As if he knew that Jude’s doubts were the very reason he’d ended up here, a prisoner.
“My doubts led me to answers I never could have imagined,” the Hierophant went on. “You would never let the names of your Prophets pass your lips again if you knew the secrets I have learned about them. Once I opened my eyes to the truth, I saw how Grace had corrupted this world. And I saw that my purpose was to purify it.”
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