Jacen resisted the urge to touch the skull and confirm it was real, to run his fingers over its sharp canines and ridges—as starkly identifiable as he had seen that very day on Rakalem, Lord of Fear. He looked over his shoulder to make certain Nines was still in her room.
“Brother,” pleaded the scavenger. “I need you to help me understand.”
But Jacen did not understand. He had never felt less like a priest, not since he’d watched his god snap Elyas’s neck.
Jacen placed his hands on the scavenger’s shoulders, suppressing a wince as animal panic flooded into him, blending with and amplifying his own.
“Have you told anyone? Did anyone else see?” If there were more witnesses, he could get to the root of this. Find the reasonable explanation thatmustexist.
The scavenger shook his head. “My daughters were asleep. I hid it from them during the day while I decided what to do. There was a woman out in the desert, but she never saw—” He broke off. He’d begun to hyperventilate.
“Breathe,” Jacen said, not least to himself. “In through your nose, out through your mouth. You’ll be all right.”
He could have searched the man’s memories and seen for himself, but that was not his area of expertise. He’d lacked the stomach to train as an inquisitor. Stronger still, though, was his dread. Jacen did not want to know the truth. He wanted Mother Akkani to explain this and tell him the world was still as he’d always believed it to be.
There had to be a simple explanation. Jacen said, “Come with me.”
The way to the Citadel was empty but for the drifting polyhedra. Jacen could have sworn that as he passed, they slowed and rotated like human bystanders, craning their necks at a suspicious sight.
He arrived at the High Lord’s palace, perched over the desert on the eastern edge of the Citadel. The guards let him pass without question. Once they beheld his robes, his medallion, and his colorless irises, most people let him go wherever he pleased. The scavenger, though, shuffled a few paces behind and flinchedas if he expected to be hit. He hadn’t spoken a word since they left the chapel.
Jacen shepherded him along with the platitudes he’d been taught to recite, and they climbed the palace steps. He alerted an attendant and spent an interminable stretch of time pacing the great, echoing palestone hall before the High Lord’s audience chamber. If he sat still, it would have been evident how badly he shook, how abysmal he felt. At least the dry climate kept his sweating to a minimum.
The massive doors to the audience chamber were carved with a frieze of the gods—six tall, thin figures, four-fingered hands outstretched as they wove the world from stardust. Their eyes were rendered as pits bored deep into the stone and seemed to follow Jacen everywhere he turned.
Mother Akkani arrived looking the same as she always did. Her hair was perfect, black and shiny as a helmet without a strand out of place. Did she ever sleep? Jacen had a difficult time imagining it.
After a cursory glance at the scavenger and the sack, she said to him, “You did the right thing.”
There had been a time when he’d hung on her every word. He could not stop himself from asking, “What is this?”
With an expression belying a strange sadness, Akkani touched his shoulder. “A test.”
She bade him follow her inside the audience chamber. Four guards pulled the heavy doors shut, apprehension pulsing around them in a sickly aura.
A circular window as tall and wide as ten men faced east, high enough above the city to provide an unobstructed view of the desert. These lands were never fully dark, even when both moons were slivers, thanks to Oe’s constant vigil. The planet’s striated blue surface and rings of scattered, sparkling dust loomed over the sands, painting the Scar in a quiet light notunlike the stars’. Come morning, the sun would creep up over the horizon, and by midday, it would fill the window like a great eye, eclipsed by its pupil.
The throne itself, square and ascetic, sat shrouded in shadow beyond the window. High Lord Avram Semira sat upon it. A man in his late seventies, he looked unassuming—thinning silver hair, body softened by age, clothing dark and plain as a priest’s. Red tattoos adorned his forehead in lieu of a crown, remnants of a Zal tradition older than the Palestone City.
Avram’s heir, Ged, stood beside him, wearing full armor and a scowl. He was darker than his father, clean-shaven with a crisp soldier’s haircut, and at forty remained as fit as when he was freshly knighted.
“Drusa,” said the High Lord, and it took Jacen a moment to realize he was addressing Akkani. “What sort of breach are we dealing with? And why didn’t you bring this to me sooner?”
“Because it’s nothing to be alarmed about,” said Akkani. “Not yet.
Brother Kheris?”
Jacen stepped forward and bowed. “This man arrived alone with—” He lifted the sack, unsure of how to proceed.
Ged saved him the trouble. He snatched away the sack and reached in. His expression shifted from annoyance to confusion to shock. He dropped the sack. The skull of the dead god rolled across the floor, teetering to a stop before the throne.
“He found it in the canyon,” Jacen said, though by now, no one was paying him any attention.
The scavenger made a despairing noise, as if he’d won a hard-fought
battle to banish this from his mind, and now those efforts were for naught. Ged knelt to get a closer look at the skull.
“Gods above,” he breathed. He wasn’t afraid, but rather . . . Jacen frowned, struggling to get a read on him.
