He didn’t bother trying to defend his actions to Nines. “I have a great many regrets about what happened.”
“I would never do anything like that,” she said. “I swear.” Oh, gods. She thought he was threatening her.
“No.No.I don’t think you would. Nines”—it was better thanNinety-Nine,but Jacen still suddenly hated the way the nickname sounded—“you have nothing to fear from me. And you can ask me anything.”
But Nines seemed guarded, uncomfortable, and who could blame her? She could not hide her relief when Jacen dismissed her.
Though his first instinct was shame, he was not sober enough to let it engulf him, and he knew how to keep that from happening. He had not allowed himself to be alone with his emotions, absent the numbing blur of intoxication, in close to five years. He was not about to start tonight.
The room spun when he stood. He stumbled to his liquor cabinet, dug out another bottle, and decided walking back to his seat wasn’t worth the effort. He sat on the filthy floor, rolling grains of sand between his fingers as he stared out the window and drank until Oe shone outside, until he was back to that point of blissful numbness.
Nines did not reemerge. Jacen prayed she had gone to sleep, that she wasn’t wide awake and feeling sick about the state in which she’d found him.
Gods knew Jacen had spent enough nights in such a way. He’d had to put Brother Marez to bed sometimes. He’d had to clean up his vomit, talk him down from raving tantrums, distract him so he’d stop pawing at the young girls in his congregation . . . For a twelve-year-old novitiate who’d hoped to see Marez as a father, it had been painful in a way Jacen still could not articulate. His master had grown sloppier, angrier,and crueler, until Jacen was finally ordained and swore he’d never treat a novitiate that way.
Marez died a year later of a ruptured esophagus. Soon after, the Church had trusted Jacen with Elyas. And now . . .
At first, Jacen had drunk to fall asleep, to keep the nightmares at bay, but that hadn’t lasted long. He suspected he’d been born without the capacity for moderation in anything. Love, hate, anger, passion, shame . . . every sensation burned a path through him, leaving deep, bloody furrows in his mind. What could he do but try to drown it? Fellow priests sensed his altered consciousness but never said anything so long as he did his job. He was not the first. He would not be the last. Brother Marez’s drawn, yellowed face remained burned into Jacen’s memory, echoing the words,A god is judgment. A god decides the fate of the world. They are gods because no power can stand against them.
The gods were meant to embody deliverance from suffering, but there was no shortage of pain in Zivora. Fear and sorrow hung over the city like a shroud each Harvest season. The people paid tribute to the Six not because of what they could give but because of what more they might take.
For years, Jacen had clung to the Church’s promises because he could not confront the possibility that nothing else existed. But coupled with the ever-shrinking ground of certainty beneath his feet, every new lie and unknown he uncovered . . . not enough remained. He could no longer sustain the lie. If what he searched for did exist—not only power worthy of worship but also hope worth fighting for—the Church of the Black Sun had never found it.
He reached for the bottle again.
The notion eventually entered Jacen’s head that he ought to visit Ogden’s clinic. The possessed man had been searching for something there, but Ogden had never said what. He had not disclosed everything he knew to Ged. Besides, if Ysira or Neri had been injured in the canyon, they might have gone to the clinic first.
The plan was tenuous at best, but the waiting was no longer tolerable. Going in the dead of night was also, obviously, the smartest course of action. It was brilliant. Jacen was brilliant. He crept through the dusty alleyways to the back of the two-story clinic and picked the lock.
He’d learned this from Hesaya when they were acolytes together, though he never managed to replicate her skill. The second time he’d been caught, he’d had two of his back teeth pulled out with pliers as punishment. “Next time, I’ll start from the front,” the old priest had said. “Then you won’t be quite so pretty, will you?”
With a savage stab of vindication, Jacen slipped inside.
Ogden’s clinic lay quiet, deserted at this hour. It was clean enough to trigger a certain resentment in Jacen—no sand, no clutter, not one tool or rag or sinister-looking jar out of place. He did not spot a single insect, which in the Knots was a staggering feat. Several cots, separated by curtains, sat in an orderly row. Jacen cast his psychic net wide, performing a head count of everyone in the building. Four bedbound patients slept upstairs. An exhausted healer’s apprentice dozed nearby, not alert enough to hear Jacen’s entry. Beneath the floor, though . . .
Jacen stopped in his tracks and nearly fell over. He caught himself on a shelf with athud. Too loud. He winced, but nothing stirred.
There was a consciousness below, unlike anything he’d ever sensed.
It took some time to find the door to the basement, hidden behind a wooden panel beneath the stairs. Had Jacen not been convinced of the presence beyond, he might have given up. He fumbled with the lock and followed a short flight of stone steps to another door. The presence grew clearer, and stranger still. Jacen probed closer than his scruples would typically allow, close enough to hear the being’s thoughts. They were not in a language he recognized—not Standard, nor Zal, nor any of the myriad tongues spoken throughout the Church’s dominion.
Jacen pushed the door open. It was heavy enough to give him trouble, as though lined with metal, and beyond it lay . . . He blinked in confusion. There wasanotherdoor, just a few feet away.
He tried to open it and found it locked. He forced it. Nothing. Then the first door swung shut with aclick,and something came loose. The second door opened. Jacen pitched headlong into the space beyond. His knee banged against the floor as he fell.
He struggled to his feet, swearing, shielding his eyes as bright light engulfed him. When his vision cleared, he almost lost his balance again.
This room was all silver and white, somehow even cleaner than upstairs, full of tools and materials for which Jacen had no name. A scent on the air, unsettlingly close to clear liquor, burned his nose.
He rubbed his eyes as if this might clarify matters or dispel some hallucination. It occurred to him that he was very, very drunk.
“Can I help you?” said someone to his left.Therewas that presence he’d sensed. It spoke Standard, albeit with an unfamiliar accent.
Jacen turned. Ice-cold adrenaline speared his chest, setting his heart at a gallop.
A god stood before him.
Other than his pointed ears and four-fingered hands, though, he did not remotely resemble any of the Six. The gods Jacen knew looked like stunning, inhuman sculptures with iron-gated minds and overwhelming presences. This being was shielding his mind, but not well, not like a telepath could. The taint of the Source pulsed through him in a current as discernible as in any human. His eyes were human too—blue-grey in white sclerae. He was much shorter than Jacen, perhaps in his fifties or sixties, with receding grey hair, a paunchy middle, and deep furrows between his ridged, hairless brows.
