There were much more important things for them to focus on, too, Cinzia realized.
Seeing the fall of the Eye, the collapse of the tower and the falling debris and raging cloud of destruction and choking horror, a single image had come to Cinzia’s mind.
Herself, on a rooftop in Roden, snow falling gently all around her, as she looked up at the sky and suddenly, unbidden, without requirement or prerequisite, had felt love.
She did not know what that experience meant anymore, not in the grand scheme of things. She was no longer even sure the love she had felt that day had come from a conscious being at all, let alone a goddess named Canta.
But she had felt it. The cause now blurred in her mind, but the feeling rang out clear like a morning bell.
She had felt love when she did not think she deserved it— when she needed it most, though she did not even know of that need at the time. It had been a tender mercy, a tiny salvation.
What if the disciples of Canta’s Church could provide that, even to the smallest extent, now?
“We have to go back,” Cinzia said. The rain fell faster, the drops increasing in size, pattering loudly into the city around them.
The other disciples, already engaged in a discussion on how best to get out of the city, all turned to look at Cinzia, dumbfounded.
“We have to go back and help,” Cinzia repeated, this time with more confidence. The more she spoke, the more she felt the truth and power behind her words. “Many of us have healed others before.”
You’ve only done it once, though, haven’t you? a voice whispered in Cinzia’s ear. For a brief moment Cinzia felt a very different sense of panic that threatened to overwhelm her. The voice, while Cinzia was mostly sure came from her own mind, had just the faintest echo of Luceraf’s low, soothing tones.
“Many of us have healed,” Cinzia repeated, shutting her eyes tightly, trying to focus her thoughts. Another roll of thunder in the distance, and Cinzia’s eyes snapped open, fear enveloping her once more.
“And there is no more important time than now to offer that healing.” Cinzia put a hand on Jane’s arm. “We must go back.”
As if Cinzia’s touch awakened something in her, Jane looked up. “We must go back,” she said.
A spark of hope awakened within Cinzia. The other disciples, who had been skeptical at Cinzia’s words, now looked at Jane. Then, one by one, they all began to nod.
Eward looked at her, eyes widening in exasperation. We cannot afford to go back, Cinzia imagined him saying.
Cinzia moved to her brother, her head close to his. “We must do this, Eward,” Cinzia said. She could not tell him to have faith; she was not even sure she knew what that was anymore. She could not tell him to trust in Canta; she did not know what that meant herself. “It is the right thing to do,” Cinzia finally said. It was not eloquent, it was not complicated, but it was a truth Cinzia knew in her heart.
Eward looked like he was about to protest, but Jane and the other disciples were already backtracking toward the center of the catastrophe. With a helpless shrug, Eward gave in.
“Very well,” he said. “I hope you are right, Cinzia.”
* * *
If there was a place worse than Oblivion, Cinzia witnessed it on the trek back to the site of the tower’s destruction. The malicious mass of dust and dirt stained everything. Black, muddy sludge covered the streets, beginning to run with the rainfall; the walls were an ugly gray. The air itself blurred brown everywhere Cinzia looked, and worst of all were the people, limping or crawling or prostrate or unmoving, covered in muck.
Corpses appeared far earlier than Cinzia expected, but among the dead were the wounded, too, and the able-bodied fleeing, or mourning, or wandering as they stared up or down or all around them with eyes incompatible with the chaos, death, and horror around them.
They came upon a young woman choking in the mud. She was struggling to stand, but her leg was broken. Elessa stopped at her side and laid her hands on the woman’s broken leg. Her fingers crackled with energy and light. Cinzia felt the energy of it, the passing of something from Elessa to the woman, the gift of life and hope in the midst of death and tragedy, a gift not understood in a moment but understood in a lifetime. And with that first gift, a portion of Cinzia changed into something it was not before, the smallest parting of a curtain to allow entry for a streak of sunlight, stirring up dust, piercing through darkness.
The smile that formed on the young woman’s lips was like the slow spread of watercolor on paper; it broadened and deepened into an expression of pure joy. She stood with Elessa’s help, taking a few tentative steps. Her eyes widened in shock and she embraced Elessa impulsively.
The disciples were not the only witnesses to the healing. There were dozens of people in the street: the walking wounded and their rescuers, and others escaping the wreckage. But everyone slowed and stared as Elessa and the young woman embraced, as if drawn by an invisible thread.
As Cinzia took in the scene, she saw Ocrestia approach a middle-aged couple. The woman was helping the man to limp away from the disaster zone. Cinzia caught the shock on his face when he saw the tiellan disciple, with just a hint of disgust. For a moment she thought he would push Ocrestia out of the way, but the tiellan instead spoke to the woman, who indicated an area around the man’s ribs, blood darkened by gray grime.
Ocrestia placed her hands at the wound, mouth moving as she did so. When she lifted her hands, the blood remained on the clothing, but the man’s expression of thinly veiled hatred had turned to one of shock. He burst into tears, thanking Ocrestia, over and over again.
Cinzia felt a tight grip on her shoulder. “You were right, sister,” Jane whispered in her ear. “Thank you, for doing what I could not.”
Before Cinzia could respond, her sister moved to a group of people clustered statuelike around a small form on the ground, a man crying beside it. As she followed her sister, she saw it was a small boy.
One of them, a woman, held a hand up to Jane as she shook her head—the boy was dead. But Jane took the young woman’s hand in her own, and the woman’s face crumpled as she, too, began to weep, and let Jane through to the child’s body.
She knelt beside the father at the center of the group, placing a hand on his shoulder, and inspected the boy.
He is dead, Cinzia thought. We cannot heal the dead.
But Jane placed her hands on the boy’s head, whispered words rising from her ash-gray lips, up into the storm. The small crowd was perfectly still, as if they all took a collective breath and held it. Even the wind and rain faded to stillness.
When the rain resumed, and the breeze continued, once again heedless of the destruction and sorrow it passed through and around, Jane stood.
And with her, the boy.
The young father embraced his child with a sob, and the other adults stared at Jane, the whites of their eyes wide and contrasting starkly with the grimy grayness of their faces.
Who says what we can and cannot do?
Tears streamed down Jane’s face. “We will help all we can,” she said, looking at each of her disciples. Her gaze rested on Cinzia. “We will heal all we can. We are Canta’s disciples. We are Her servants, and we carry with us her power. We will be instruments in Her hands to alleviate this tragedy.”
A warm feeling blossomed in Cinzia’s chest as her sister spoke—a warmth she had not felt in a long, long time.
* * *
The next hour passed as if Cinzia walked through a dream. Each of the disciples healed in turn—broken limbs, bloody wounds, terrible hacking, choking coughs, all were made whole—and Cinzia found herself healing among them.
She did not question it, nor did she question herself. She tentatively placed her hands on the back of a man who lay broken on the ground; whether he had been broken by debris or somehow, miraculously, survived the fall from the Eye, Cinzia could not say, but his legs bent unnaturally beneath him, and when she asked if he could move, he said he could not.
> This is not right, Cinzia thought to herself with sadness, horror, and overwhelming confusion at the tragedy before her. Not just the broken man, but all of it. Such healing should not be necessary, because such tragedy should never exist in the first place.
But, if she could help, she would. She could think about the logistics of it—about whether she even believed in a Goddess anymore, and whether that should affect her ability to heal— much later. For now, there was no option but for a Goddess to exist in the face of such tragedy. If there was not a power to alleviate this pain, then there was no hope at all.
Much, much later, she would question this line of thinking. She would wonder how a Goddess could exist at all in the face of such tragedy; the polarized nature of these thoughts would not escape her, and would only compound her confusion, frustration, and doubt.
But, for now, by some miracle, Cinzia placed her hands on the next broken man before her. His eyes flickered as she touched him. She focused on his wounds, and the sudden swelling of light that poured forth from her and into him.
The man shifted beneath Cinzia’s hands, his legs twitching and moving, and when Cinzia looked at them directly she saw they were no longer twisted and broken. He used those legs, and Cinzia’s shoulder, to help himself up, staring at his healed body in shock. Tears streamed down his face, making paths in the grime, and Cinzia realized she was crying too.
How could Canta, if She was indeed the power that caused this, use her as an instrument? Cinzia had been a Daemon’s avatar; even now, she still questioned Canta’s very existence. How could she be trusted with this power, wherever it came from?
Whatever power this is, Cinzia realized, it must be good. It cannot be anything else.
Cinzia and the others finally made it to Sky Plaza, but the location was completely unrecognizable. God’s Eye, the Four Pillars, and the entire grounds around the structures were nothing but rubble, now. The only remnant of God’s Eye was a broken ruin, pitifully small, jutting up out of the desolate mass. A gaping wound. Everything else was shattered stone, wood, and iron.
Senate apartments, housing the senators, their families and aides, had once surrounded the Eye, but entire swaths of those apartment buildings were gone, disintegrated by the tower’s collapse.
The rain fell steadily, muffling the cries of the wounded and mourning. Cinzia caught the sharp whiff of smoke and fire and burning wood and stone through the dull smell of wet stone.
She glanced behind her. Jane and the other disciples stood with her, and just behind them, Eward and his Prelates. But, to Cinzia’s surprise, behind the Prelates was another group. Cinzia recognized in it the man she had just healed, as well as the young woman Elessa had mended, and the many others the disciples had healed on the way along their trek toward the broken tower. Dozens of people, following behind them, looking up at them—looking up at Jane—expectantly.
Goddess, what can we possibly do for them? Healing the body was one thing. As someone trained in medicine at the seminary, Cinzia knew this. But healing the mind, the soul, was another thing entirely.
It did not take long for it to become clear that people were trapped beneath the rubble. Some of the shouts and moans came from within the rubble itself, and people immediately turned to Jane and the Disciples for help.
Cinzia turned to the Prelates, looking for Eward. When he met her eyes, she nodded to the group that had formed behind them.
“Organize them into groups that can start picking through and moving the debris. We must find as many of the people trapped down there as we possibly can.”
* * *
Hours passed. The Triahn City Watch showed up, helping where they could. They looked at Jane and the disciples dubiously at first, but soon recognized the good they were doing—and the miracles they performed—and did all they could to help.
Legionaries joined them, adding their strength to the people clearing wreckage and debris, making space for both healers and doctors to help the wounded.
The Denomination arrived, too, with priestesses by the dozen ready to offer medical assistance and Goddessguards and Sons of Canta ready to help move bodies, rubble, and the injured when possible.
Cinzia had never thought of Triah as particularly welcoming, let alone a place where the people actually cared about one another. But here the City Watch, the Legion, priestesses, Odenites, Goddessguards and Sons of Canta labored alongside civilians, all looking to clear the rubble and help where they could. More than one Cantic priestess gasped at the miracles wrought by the disciples.
Senators even showed up, helping where they could. They all worked long into the evening, and as the storm above passed and night began to fall, one of the senators, someone Cinzia did not recognize, gave a speech about how this would band them together, about how this was why the Parliament had been formed, because contrary to the old monarchies and empires, Khale believed every life had value, and they would work and rescue and heal all they could.
The senator did not speak of the city’s attackers, Winter and her tiellan army; Cinzia could understand why. There were many tiellan citizens in Triah. They worked alongside the humans to clear rubble at the disaster site, and their kind were also among the injured, dead, and dying.
The speech ended, but Cinzia hardly noticed. She had spent much of her energy healing another young girl, and quite suddenly a wave of exhaustion washed over her. She felt as if the muscles in her limbs had gone completely limp, and her bones themselves no longer had the strength to support her weight. She wasn’t sure how many people she had healed that day—perhaps a dozen, maybe a few more—and she wondered how in the Sfaera she would manage to get back to the Odenite camp at this point.
“I’ve got you, sister.”
Cinzia looked over to see Eward, a sad smile on his face, on one side of her, and another Prelate on her other side.
“I can handle myself, Eward,” Cinzia said, between deep, ragged breaths. “See to Jane.”
“Jane is fine, believe it or not,” Eward said. “She is still healing people. Raising some from the dead, if you can believe it. But the disciples are collapsing.”
Cinzia looked around and saw he was right. A Prelate was helping Ocrestia move slowly along, her body heavily supported by his arm around her waist and hers over his shoulders. Two more Prelates carried Elessa, lying prone on an impromptu stretcher.
“Is she—”
“Exhausted, and she’ll need a great deal of rest. I imagine you all will. But they say she’ll be fine.”
“Eward—”
“I know, Cinzi. It’s all right.”
“Thank you, Eward.” Cinzia could not bring herself to say anything else; the exhaustion bit deep, and she feared if she began sobbing she might actually use up what little remaining energy she had and die right there on the spot.
Her brother helped her move away as she faded in and out of consciousness.
35
“YOU WENT TO SKY PLAZA YESTERDAY.”
Code nodded, standing at attention. Kosarin faced him from across the great table at the center of the Heart of the Void.
“I did,” Code said. After the Eye fell, he’d spent the entire day at Sky Plaza, recovering the injured and dead, clearing the rubble—both of which it seemed they had only faintly scratched the surface of.
And you weren’t there, Code wanted to say. He refrained— Kosarin was his superior, after all.
“I trust you didn’t use psimancy to help?”
“Of course not, sir.” The Nazaniin were forbidden to use their powers for public use—for money or otherwise. But helping yesterday, Code had seriously thought about forgetting that rule completely. His telenic tendra could lift far more and far heavier things than he ever could on his own. If the Nazaniin donated a dozen telenics to the clean-up effort, it might only take months instead of years.
Code shivered. Years, months, all of those terms were meaningless. The fall of the Eye had changed everything. The next moment would come if they
all survived this one. Code would go back to Sky Plaza again today, damn whatever it was Kosarin was about to say.
Which is why what Kosarin said next surprised Code so much.
“Good,” Kosarin said, nodding. He finally saluted Code in return, and Code stood at ease. Kosarin slumped down in a chair at the large table. “That is good work you are doing,” Kosarin said. “And I think you should keep doing it. I’ll send some other Nazaniin to Sky Plaza today, and release all Citadel students from their classes and nonessential duties so they can help with the effort. We need solidarity more than anything else at a time like this.”
Code tried to keep his shock under control. The old man could still surprise him, apparently.
“You understand that you still cannot use psimancy to help?”
Code managed a nod. “Yes, sir.” The fact that Kosarin was willing to spare anyone at all was a miracle; he’d take what he could get.
Silence rested between them, and Code was about to ask Kosarin’s permission to go when the Triadin spoke up again.
“While you’re down there,” Kosarin said, his eyes meeting Code’s, “I have a small mission for you.”
Code cleared his throat, willing himself to stop the frown that tugged at the corners of his mouth.
A small mission. Of course there was something.
“What is it, sir?”
“It won’t interfere with your clean-up; in fact, it should go right along with it,” Kosarin said slowly. “A rihnemin powered the Eye. One of the smallest rihnemin on record, but one of the only stones that had proved to exert power—until the Chaos Queen came around.”
Code had suspected as much. Rumors circulated through the Nazaniin—especially since the Eye had demonstrated its power, in a relatively cloudy sky, no less—of what exactly it was that powered the weapon.
A part of him wanted to refuse Kosarin’s order outright. Code was helping at Sky Plaza because people needed him— not because there was something to be gained.
“You think me callous,” Kosarin said. Before Code could respond, he continued, “You may be right. But I will tell you one thing: we cannot let that rihnemin fall into the hands of the Cordier woman. Carrieri may have lost his edge, but removing all the rihnemin from the area was not a mistake. We must keep this artifact safe from the Chaos Queen until we can find a new home for it, or rebuild the Eye.”
Chaos Queen--Fear the Stars (Chaos Queen 4) Page 34