The Firstborn man who’d surrendered said, “We intend to cooperate.” His tone was difficult to parse behind his helmet, but Seth thought he detected a current of barely restrained terror. “This base’s resources are at your disposal, Lady—?” He hesitated.
“VarNaktis,” said Ysira. “You report to Commander Teheda now.” She pointed at the tattooed militiaman. “You will order your forces at Otavok to stand down, and then you will brief the commander in detail on every inch of this place and its capabilities.”
She paused as Teheda rose, clutching a badly broken arm to his chest. He lingered beside Nines.
“Take him, and the girl, to receive the finest medical care you can provide.” Ysira’s next words were an undisguised threat: “I’ll be checking in on them personally.”
The man bowed. “At once.”
Ysira watched him, black eyes unblinking, until he called his remaining forces into line and departed with them. The knights followed—only after each kneeling before Neri and pledging their loyalty. Jacen scrutinized them, probing for deception. He appeared to find none and nodded to himself in satisfaction as the last of them disappeared below the obsidian floor.
Then he said, “Saraida.”
Despite palpable grief and exhaustion, she approached Jacen with an earnest expression. She awaited whatever he had to say as if she were a Candidate again, and he, her Knight Captain.
“Go with them.” Jacen gestured after the knights. “You can talk to them in a way I can’t, and we’ll need them to consolidate power.”
Saraida saluted with a fist over her heart. “Consider it done.”
On her way to the stairs, she stopped in front of Neri. She knelt again and murmured something that sounded very like“My lord.”She remained there until Neri touched her shoulder as if in blessing and motioned for her to stand.
When Saraida had left, Seth finally remembered how to speak. “What the fuck is going on?”
Ysira pointed at the Firstborn woman she had executed, who said their freedom wouldn’t last. “She had a point.” Her voice betrayed nothing but detached pragmatism. “We need to rally Zivora, and quickly. We have proof here that the Firstborn are only people and they can be killed.”
“Right,” Seth said, with a forced nod. There would be riots in Zivora. Everyone would have seen those impossible celestial events and felt the ripple that shook the world. “Someone needs to tell them what—what happened.”
“They’ll want answers.” Ysira appeared to agree with him. “We have to make sure we’re the ones to provide them. It’ll be chaos, especially after the Cathedral, but we can take advantage?—”
“What happened to the Cathedral?”
Ysira looked at Jacen. It took him too long to answer. “It’s gone.” “Gone,” Seth repeated, aghast. “Jacen. What did you do?”
“Ogden had been planting explosives for decades,” Jacen said tonelessly. “A contingency plan. I used it. Akkani gave me no choice.” Seth recalled the way the tunnel had collapsed behind them as they fled Zivora. He imagined that on the scaleof the White Cathedral—imagined the collateral damage such a disaster must have left—and felt suddenly nauseous. He thought of the terrified, desperate masses he’d left behind in the Citadel after he himself had spread the word the Church would protect them. His knees went weak.
Jacen averted his eyes. Seth knew he was engaged in that habit he had of arguing with himself until he was sufficiently intellectually convinced of whatever he’d wanted to believe in the first place. Whatever doubt Jacen struggled with vanished, replaced once more by inhuman conviction.
“The Church won’t be an obstacle,” Jacen said. “Not anymore. Now we can rebuild from the ground up, combine what remains with the Disciples of the Gate. We get enough of the Guard on our side, seize control, implement a new power structurequickly, and then we can crown a new High Lord.”
All Seth managed to say, inanely, was “I never wanted that.”
“Not you,” Ysira said. “It has to be Neri.” She and Jacen exchanged a look, one of startling intensity, as though they were of one mind. Neri himself remained quiet, staring out across the canyon.
“There will be violence,” Jacen said gently to Seth. “But when the Firstborn Empire comes for us, we must be united. There is no better way than faith.”
He would know, wouldn’t he? Faith. Of course. There was an older god in this desert, one whom many Zivorans still prayed to. And they had ample precedent. What, if not faith, had held this city in thrall to the Harvest for the last five centuries?
Ysira knelt beside Ged’s body. Seth had been trying not to look, pretending he couldn’t see it in his peripheral vision. Now he had no choice. Ysira dislodged her obsidian dagger from between his ribs, its blade slick with clotting blood.
For a fleeting second, perhaps a transient insanity, Seth glimpsed the future—this moment in effigy, a thousand yearsfrom now. Her face eclipsing the sun, red light at her back as she held the dagger, contemplating as it dripped with his brother’s blood. She drew a finger along the blade and painted the sacred symbols of rulership on Neri’s forehead. Anointing him.
She let her hand linger on his face, brushing her thumb beneath his strange new eyes. “Can you . . . can you see?”
Neri nodded slowly. “Yes, Mother. I see everything now.”
Ysira paled a little. Jacen knelt before Neri and took his hands. He asked, “Are you ready?”
A chill crept down Seth’s spine. The peculiar tone Jacen had assumed . . . that was worship.
