JACEN
Jacen was a bottle and a half deep by sunset. He must have drifted off at some point; he came to hunched over his table, face stuck to the rough surface. Nines was tapping him on the shoulder, leaning anxiously over him.
He sat up too fast. She skittered back in alarm.
“Sorry,” said Nines. “I thought I saw a spider crawling on your robe—one of the big ones—and then I wasn’t sure you were?—”
“Not now,” Jacen snapped at her. How could he have been so careless, passing out in front of his novitiate? It was something Brother Marez would have done.
With another mumbled apology, Nines shrank back. Jacen rubbed his temples. “Wait.”
She stood there, muscles clenched taut, prepared to bolt at an instant’s notice. Jacen realized,She’s afraid of me.
Afraid, and probably more than a little disgusted. His bottle had rolled away, across the table. He smelled not much better than that corpse he’d tried to exorcise.
“I’m sorry.” He clawed through his foggy memory for context, struggling to recall where Nines must have come from. “You were at . . .”
“The Cathedral,” she supplied.
“Right.” Jacen slapped the table. “Your presentation.”
It was a ritual cleansing, after which a new novitiate was allowed to stand in the presence of a god. Jacen had prepared obsessively for his own, at which he met Zephon, the Lord of Sorrow.
“I know it can be . . . unsettling to meet a god up close,” Jacen said. “Tell me how it went.”
He motioned for Nines to sit, which she did not.
She hesitated. “She seemed like she wanted to be somewhere else. The goddess, I mean. The Lady of Despair.”
Ileth.Jacen had never met her in person. But he understood what Nines meant. Zephon had struck him as both remarkably ordinary and unthinkably alien, something that played at being human, wearing skin like Jacen wore his robes. After a lackluster conversation, the god had shooed Jacen on his way with all the ceremony of a dockside clerk passing out equipment.
Jacen had come away feeling cheated. It should have been an encounter that made him fall to his knees and weep, cementing his faith for the rest of his life, but instead, he’d been disturbed. Like he’d lifted up a rock and seen the crawling things beneath.
But Jacen would not burden Nines with that, so he said what was expected of him: “The gods’ time is valuable. And . . . we can’t lose sight of our purpose. We help the gods wage a war against demons and preserve peace for our people. There is no greater calling.”
Following his earliest moments of doubt, Jacen had written those words on a scrap of parchment and carried it around in his robes until it disintegrated. He often felt the ink on that faded scrap had sunk into his body, his bones, his very being. Hehad lived in terror—though for years, that terror had simmered quietly in the darkest depths of his soul—of the day those words, his calling, would no longer be enough to sustain his faith.
Was it enough for Nines? Did those words mean anything at all to her—this girl who’d demonstrated no desire to become a priest?
Jacen could not say.
Then Nines blurted, “Who is Elyas?”
Jacen’s mouth went dry as bone. “Who told you that name?” “Mother Akkani.” She shuffled her feet. “She didn’t tell me. I just overheard.”
She refused to be specific. Probably for the best. After a time, Jacen made himself say, “He was my first student.”
Nines picked at her sleeve. “What happened to him?”
Jacen had never told this story aloud. After some consideration, he settled on a condensed version. Swift and brutally efficient, like resetting a broken bone. “He let a demon possess him, to gain its power. He was . . . part of a movement.”
Her eyes grew wide, fearful. She whispered, “Against the Church?” “They followed the old Zal religion,” said Jacen. “Elyas tried to convince me to do as he did and join them.”
Even if it hadn’t been blasphemy, it was folly. The ancient ritual of the demon priests, the valak,demanded that one cross the boundary between universes in the hopes the Source would deem them worthy of a demonic passenger. It had created as many abominations—and dead aspirants—as it had valak.
“You told the Council?” Nines’ tone struck Jacen as very carefully neutral.
He gave a short, single nod. He had not seriously believed the Church would kill Elyas. Punish him, yes; exorcise him, obviously, but . . . Jacen had been too certain of his own standing, too confident in the justice of his faith. He’d underestimated the severity of his student’s transgression.
