Akkani paced to the ledge. The dread in her stare turned to horror.
Her black hair hung in a loose tangle around her shoulders.
“What have you done?” She wrung her hands, muttering something panicked. She did not sound like herself. She sounded as if some profound and essential part of her had snapped clean in two. “Oh, gods above,what have you done?”
On shaky legs, Jacen stood. He took a step toward Akkani. She raised a hand. “No.No.I will hear no more from you. I will not wait to see how this ends.”
She backed away from him.
He invoked the language of demons and said to her, “Be still.”
He seized hold of Akkani’s vital functions. He drove her to her knees like a puppet, and where his consciousness blurred into hers, he sensed two things: First, that fear. Second . . . the truth of how she felt, not only for him but for every acolyte and novitiate she had ever trained. Everyone he had just murdered.
And this shattered him, because blended with that grief and terror waslove.Deep in her mind where she could not lie, she loved her Church. Everything she had said to Jacen was true. They had both lived their lives in search of a higher, subtler truth, unconstrained by ordinary faith. She understood hislifelong struggle, even as her own had been in vain, and she had made him what he was.
She loved him, and still she had done this to him.
Jacen’s legs trembled. A hollow noise escaped him, and he found he could not continue.
All his life, he had been taught to walk by faith, never knowing what that meant until now. With a twist like a knife in his heart, he finally knew.
Faith was a leap over the dark chasm between mystery and truth, and such a leap requiredresolve.Faith was the will to do even the unspeakable—for the sake of a dream, for the promise of peace, for the shadow of a hope of a better future.
Jacen had, after all, summoned that will for the Church of the Black Sun. He had summoned it every Harvest season for the last fifteen years.
Wasthisfaith, then? As smoke rose from the ruins of the White Cathedral . . . was this all that he’d sought, all his life?
Is this all? Is this all?
But there was no time. No time to wonder, no time to mourn, no time to weep until there was nothing left inside him. He had made his choice, and now he had to finish this. To make this sacrifice mean something. Faith was a choice from which he could never turn back, because he had staked everything on it.
Akkani looked at the eclipse once more, as the wind dried the tears on her face. She closed her eyes.
She stepped off the ledge.
There was nothing he could have done to stop her, and she fell without a sound.
44
MESSIAH
YSIRA
The Church knows we’re here.”
When Sister Ilusha spoke, Ysira’s blood ran cold. Saraida, Ged, and Goran all looked at each other, then at the white door—still locked but not for much longer. Ilusha’s nose had begun to bleed. She tried to stand and had to lean against the dome below the pyramid. Her face had gone white as death. “They’re coming.Now.”
“Inquisitors?” Ged demanded. “How many?” “All of them,” she whispered. “I can’t shield us.” Saraida was already moving. “To the Gate!”
“They know!” Ilusha spat at her. “At Zal Fel, someone must have caught our allies and warned the inquisitors. It’s over.”
The ceiling shuddered. Ilusha stopped. They all looked up.
There was a sound, then, like nothing Ysira had ever heard. It was as though someone had driven a titanic hammer into the very foundations of the Cathedral and splintered them. Ysira struggled to keep her feet as a seismic force shook the chamber.
In an instant, she realized what must have happened. “Ogden’s failsafe,” she gasped. “Run.Now.”
Ilusha was right. Their allies at Zal Fel must have been discovered, and someone had pulled the trigger to block the Church’s access through the Gate. Someone was buying time so that Neri might yet make it to the station.
