Seth could not convincingly say it. “Of course I’m not afraid of you.” For what felt like an eternity, Neri was silent. Then he simply said, “I am what I must be.”
The fraction of a second had passed, those eyes once more impossible to read. Would such splintered moments be all that remained of Neri? Would Seth have to search for him for the rest of his life, in tiny glimpses of hurt and grief?
Seth had endured demonic possession. He would never forget it—the sense that he wasn’t alone inside his own skin, experiencing his own words and deeds through whatever blurry, taunting glimpses Turil deigned to show him. He didn’t know how to ask Neri,Is it like that for you?
He couldn’t stand it. He reached out a hand, his real one, and took his nephew’s. “Maybe it’s not too late. We have access to so much more knowledge now, all these new technologies.” Though they were alone, he lowered his voice. “Please. Let me find a way to help you.”
Neri’s face worked. There was too much there, from too many, all battling for dominance. But when every disparate part that comprised Naxal was in agreement . . . it was much worse.
He looked up. His eyes were bright, so bright, it hurt to meet them.
Seth had no doubt as to what, exactly, he spoke.
Neri’s voice echoed through the audience chamber as only the language of demons could:
“I am what I must be.”
A heaviness settled into Seth’s heart, deep as the earth’s foundations. He stepped back, withdrew his hand.
“We will not mourn this victory,” Neri said. “But you can mourn what it forced you to lose. It’s only human.”
“And you?” Seth forced himself to keep looking at Neri. “What will you do?”
He did not ask,Are you human?
Neri heard him anyway. “We are. And we are not. We are Neri Semira, and we are all those who came before. We know and value everything Neri did, but . . . no longer Neri alone.Weare Naxal. And we will do whatever is necessary to achieve our grand design.”
“What is this grand design?”
Neri folded his hands. “First, unity. I am uniquely suited to my role but still vulnerable, and I cannot be everywhere at once. We need followers. We must increase our strength. This will take time, but we have learned patience these last five hundred years.”
He hadn’t actually answered the question. Though Seth suspected he would come to regret this, he pressed: “To what end?”
“We will spread.” Neri regarded him with a calm as cold as the farthest stars. “We will devour.”
To that, Jacen probably would have had something to say about the different translations and etymology of the worddevour—some way to make Neri’s words mean whatever hewanted them to mean. But Seth was not Jacen, and so, with a sinking feeling, he took the words at face value.
He asked his next question very carefully. “To that end—who do you think will follow you?”
“Enough,” said Neri. “You’ve seen it. You know what we promise them—what we intend to give to our faithful. As for the rest . . . they know the enemy we face. They remember the Harvest. They know what it cost them not to fight.”
Seth had tried to hide it in public, playing whatever part was required of him, but he’d felt awful since Zal Fel, sick to his stomach, unable to shake his conviction that they’d unleashed something monstrous—all this just to get their enemies to sit up and take notice. The only thing the Firstborn Empire would not ignore was their own language of overwhelming violence, and the people of the Scar had become fluent by necessity.
These last three cycles, Jacen, Ysira, and every Disciple Seth spoke to had been incessantly insisting that Naxal was not the same as Zivora’s demon gods.Thisentity was an amalgamation of all who’d borne it, mediated and spoken for by the current host. It was not a single consciousness subsuming every subsequent one.
No one had ever accused Seth Semira of genius, but neither was he a fool, and in the practical sense . . . the distinction was utterly lost on him.
Finally, he asked, “What would you do if I tried to stop you?”
Neri raised his eyebrows. He did not seem threatened by the prospect.“Could you?” He tilted his head, almost curious, and wiggled the fingers of his right hand to indicate Seth’s handicap. “You would be alone, and it would hardly be a fair fight. You’re the one who taught me—there’s no such thing.”
It sounded like mockery.
Seth felt terribly small, even meek. “I don’t understand.”
“It is not for you to understand,” said the thing that had been Neri. “Only us.”
50
