Marez backhanded him, hard enough that he saw stars. “I know no Brother or Sister of mine taught you that one, boy. Don’t speak of Zal superstition in this chapel again.” His expression was grim. “A god is judgment. A god decides the fate of the world. They can take life as easily as they gave it, and if they are not appeased, we face annihilation. They are gods because no power can stand against them.”
He had left Jacen to mull that over, somewhat shaken. That night, he hadn’t slept at all.
When it came his own first novitiate’s turn, Jacen had told Elyas something more in line with his own answers—something about truth and purpose and the war against demons. But in the years since, he’d come to see the truth in Marez’s words. He had come to feel the exhaustion with which they were spoken.
And last night, Jacen had simply let Nines sleep while he drank himself unconscious.
On the day of the first offering of the four hundred and fifty-first Harvest, Jacen traveled with his novitiate to the Citadel on foot. The rambling adobe of the Knots gave way to Zivora’s landscape of ghostly stone, its brutal angles jutting up like the earth’s splintered skeleton. The city was built on a massive scale, large enough to accommodate three times its population of two million. It was as much artistry as architecture, designed to make one feel small. Jacen swore its paths shifted and changed according to eldritch whims, as though it had been built by beings with a far different understanding of geometry.
The way was forbidding beneath the waning light and painfully quiet. People tended to keep their affairs indoors during Harvest season, even before the nightly curfew, avoiding the floating polyhedra as tall as giant cacti. The polyhedra appeared to be made of the same stone as the city and moved steadily and silently as the sun across the sky. On the first of the forty days, they emerged from the walls, and on the last, they returned.
Jacen had watched it happen once, as an acolyte. He’d followed an octahedron down an alley, where it had merged with an archway as evenly as water poured into a pool. Whenhe asked his teachers about it, they said it was not for him to understand.
The towers of the Citadel soared high over the city and housed the High Lord’s palace, the City Guard headquarters, and—most prominently—the White Cathedral. Flying buttresses clawed up the sides of the great stepped pyramid, like arched vertebral columns bowed beneath the weight of centuries. Past a yawning, shadow-swept entrance, the interior was a labyrinth of twisting corridors and pallid lighting. Its walls brought to mind skin pulled tight against a ribcage.
Jacen chose a back door into the Cathedral, below the aviary where he’d spent countless hours as an acolyte. Twice he had to slow his long strides, as Nines struggled to keep up and sidestep pigeon droppings. Jacen’s ordinary walking pace had oft been described asalarming,and it was certainly worse today, but he wanted this over with. He hadn’t the faintest idea how he was meant to tolerate this nightmare of a ceremony.
He followed the Cathedral’s bent axis approach to its grand courtyard, turning at a sharp angle to enter the vast open space. Six equidistant statues lined the circle: the gods, rendered in titanic proportions, their powerful hands pointed toward the heavens. At their center, below the pyramid’s peak, lay a garden of cacti and desert flowers—a rare spot of greenery in the Citadel. Scores of priests and novitiates milled about the perimeter, self-segregating along lines of age, ethnicity, and doctrine. Try as it might to make them all the same, even as their pale eyes reflected the gifts they shared, the Church itself could not eradicate the human tendency to tribalism.
Jacen had always stood apart from the rest, comfortable neither among the elders nor his peers, at home among neither the foreign-born nor the people of the Scar. He’d also fancied himself their better. As a newly ordained priest, he’d torn his way up the Church’s echelons with aspirations of sitting onthe Council. Before the trouble with Elyas, Jacen had held the numerical designation of Seventeenth.
His idiot younger self would have been humiliated to know one day he’d be demoted to Eighty-Seventh, reduced to skulking through this crowd like an acolyte who wasn’t supposed to be there.
This place had the feel of a crack in the earth overflowing with ants, and Jacen was somehow in everyone’s way. He encountered Hesaya and Taoro first, whispering to each other as he passed. More whispers followed, and white eyes tracked him from every direction. For such a large group of telepaths, not a blasted one of them seemed to understand the meaning of discretion.
“Brother Kheris!” a priest called after him, loud enough to turn several heads.
Jacen cringed and forced himself to face the man.
Brother Andras Lev adjusted his white sash conspicuously, as if he worried Jacen might forget he was the Church’s Chief Exorcist. Lev looked him up and down with exaggerated surprise. “You’re alive!”
Jacen dipped his chin a fraction of an inch. Lev was of middling height, pale like a northerner with a wispy aspiration of a mustache. He was the most junior member of the Council, who’d been a sniveling acolyte when Jacen was ordained.
“Mother Akkani said she paid you a visit,” Lev said. “She told me, over tea, that you used to?—”
“What can I do for you, Your Eminence?” Jacen interjected. Talking to Lev was like talking to his younger self, and thus Jacen preferred to keep their conversations as short as possible.
“Your recent assignment wasn’t difficult, was it?” Lev said, heedless. “Sister Jinaan didn’t struggle too much?”
For gods’ sake.Faced with vermin of the Source in the body of an eight-year-old, of course Hesaya hadn’t struggled.Jacen managed to keep his mouth shut and turned to look for Nines. She’d shrunk back several paces, clutching the demon’s container as though she feared it would run away from her.
“I’ll take that.” Lev didn’t deign to approach a novitiate, only beckoned with two fingers and made her come to him. “Unless you mean to keep it as a pet?”
Nines handed Lev the container and mumbled, “Your Eminence.” She backed away more quickly than was proper.
Lev addressed Jacen. “I trust your additional task is complete?” The words were laced with implications. But Jacen said, “Yes, Your Eminence,” as contritely as he could muster. He reached into his pocket for the metal chip he had used to mark the little girl yesterday, praying Lev would justtake it,but the other priest waved a hand.
“I’ll be giving the prayer. I’ll let you do the honors.” With that, at least, he got out of Jacen’s way.
Jacen resumed his determined march toward the far edge of the courtyard and murmured to Nines, “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she said unconvincingly. “I was just noticing . . . you don’t seem to like him very much.”
Jacen failed to suppress a scoff. “He’s a pathetic excuse of an exorcist and was promoted to the Council because he’s worthless in the field.” Nines’ mood brightened a bit at the acid in his tone, so he let lack of restraint get the better of him. “He thinks he’s going to be Holy Father someday. Utterly delusional. Hesaya barely lost out on his position, and only because she’s not such a blasted sycophant.”
“Sister Jinaan said you were acolytes together,” Nines said.
It wasn’t quite a question, but at least she was speaking. Jacen had spent the better part of two days with her now and still he could not tell whether she liked him—let alone trusted him—or planned on poisoning him in his sleep.
