“I’ll teach you rhetoric, philosophy, how to preside over all the major rituals. You’ll have access to more books. You’ll learn so much more about your gifts.” Jacen spoke of all the things that, at her age, he’d found exciting. “Next year, you’ll start training to fight with the Guard. Sometimes, novitiates assist at clinics or schoolhouses. I was a scribe for the Citadel Archives.”
He might as well have given Nines a choice between eating a live roach or a dead one. She said, “I’ll do whatever you tell me to.”
Finally, Jacen gave up and let her retreat to the dusty closet that served as her sleeping quarters. He’d once had a far-better arrangement, ministering to a wealthy district in the Inner City. Here, though . . . he’d swept the floor of dust and debris that first night, laid fresh bedding on the rickety cot, and prayed Nines didn’t see the spider the size of his head before he smashed it with his copy of the White Codex.
“We’re expected at the Citadel again in the morning,” Jacen said. “Do you have any ques?—”
“No,” Nines said, and shut the door. Later, Jacen thought he heard her crying.
He was unaccustomed to dealing with so many adolescent emotions. He had been rather infamously awful at dealingwith his own, he’d staunchly ignored Elyas’s, and considering everything else on his mind . . . Jacen fished in his robes for his flask, drained its dregs, and sat still for all of a minute before deciding it would not suffice.
He stalked to the cabinet and dug through it, knocking out a mug. It shattered on the ground. He swore and promptly smacked his head on the open cabinet door as he leaned down to collect the shards. He swore again. Then someone knocked on the door, and the sheer frustration of the moment was like a dam burst inside his head.
“What?” he exclaimed in a tone that would have given Brother Marez a stroke, as he stormed toward the wretched sound. Who, in the name of all the gods, had the temerity to knock—not just knock butpound—on his door at this hour of the night? During the Harvest curfew, no less?
He braced himself to lecture them, mustering his most scathing, shame-inducing impression of Mother Akkani, and?—
He sensed fear. It brought him up short.
His training took effect. He walled off his mind with an empty chasm of calm. Fear was a raw, contagious emotion, prone to devouring reason, and its only antidote was silence. Serenity. He breathed deep and opened the door.
A slight man stood on the threshold, wrapped in threadbare robes and red desert dust. He clutched a roughspun sack, lightly singed, to his chest. The light of the twin moons threw the blisters on his face and arms into sharp relief, but he did not appear to notice them. Though the night was warm, he shivered.
Jacen took an instinctive step back, pulling the cowl of his robe over his nose. “There’s a clinic down by?—”
“It’s not the plague. I’m not sick.” The man raised the sack, as if in offering. “Please, Brother. I need to show someone.”
Jacen ushered him inside. He knew this man, though not by name. A year before, his wife had been Harvested, and hehad taken to lurking in the back of Jacen’s chapel on holy days, listening with a desperate hunger in his eyes. The look he wore today was much the same—though notquite,and the subtle change made Jacen’s blood run cold.
Before he barred the door shut, Jacen glanced both ways down the street. Nothing human stirred, not in the sand and not in his mind. Roaches scuttled in the shadows. An owl circled overhead. He stretched his extradimensional senses to their limit through a nebulous landscape of dreams, undulating over the surface of sleeping minds like oil on water. Old habit compelled him to clutch his medallion as he slipped back inside and pulled up a stool.
The man wouldn’t sit. “I followed a falling star past the funeral grounds, to the cactus grove on the south rim.”
An unwise decision, and an inauspicious start to this conversation. But Jacen maintained his discipline, letting nothing of the other man’s mind infringe on his own.
“I saw . . . a god.” The man’s voice grew faint, reverent. “He was just like the statues. And he was burning.”
The trepidation in Jacen’s gut abated somewhat. The man was a scavenger—likely, he was dehydrated. Maybe he’d failed to heed the warnings and had quenched his thirst with cactus fruit or from a spring infested with telkaan roots.
Slowly, gently, Jacen reached out with his mind. His extradimensional senses brushed the edges of the man’s consciousness, searching for the telltale shimmer of hallucinogen use.
Nothing. He was as agonizingly sober as Jacen. And the question remained: “What’s in the bag?”
“It was like he was on fire from the inside. The sand turned to glass. I couldn’t get close until—” The man’s hand moved like a disembodied creature, grazing his burns. “I followed him intothe canyon. I had to see. And—and—there was nothing left of him.”
“What’s in the bag?” Jacen asked again, very quiet.
Trembling, the man pushed it across the table. Jacen picked it up and turned it upside down, quickly so he couldn’t change his mind, spilling the contents with a heavythunk.It was a human skull, charred to the bone.
No—not human. It was bigger, sturdier, and more elongated, with razor-sharp canines and ridges over the mandible and orbital sockets. Even burned, it glistened, whiter than moonslight.
The room spun. Jacen braced his hands against the table.
“He spoke to me in my mind,” the scavenger whispered, heedless. “I don’t understand. They’re immortal. We give them everything. My wife, last year—the Harvest took her. She followed the old ways. She spoke of—of heat and shadow. Could this?—”
“Enough.” Jacen’s voice, barely a hiss, sliced through the scavenger’s like a dagger. The man fell silent.
On the outskirts of Zivora, where the Church’s hold was most tenuous, many still kept to older, stranger traditions. Jacen was aware of them and had felt little motivation to stamp them out as he was, in theory, divinely ordained. He had often wondered whether his congregants could tell he was weak of faith. But this—whateverthiswas—seemed a step too far. A greater heresy.
