Every new novitiate had the same question, and the answer was always the same: “It’s not for us to know.”
For the weak telepaths, the ones most often taken as children . . . for whatever purpose the gods required of them, they needed to last a long time.
Nines’ guard was down, her mind in turmoil, and Jacen was privy to all of it. Telepathic priests had to be taught to keep their emotions firmly leashed, because they were so prone to the influence of everyone else’s. It was easy, far too easy, to forget oneself in the churning tides. It was why they were forbidden families, lovers, and children. It was why they were given numbers, not names, until they had proven themselves trustworthy, until they could control themselves, until a name was only a word. It did not matter to Jacen what he was called, because he was not a person. Not really. And Nines was not a child.
He had learned that early and learned it well. It was his duty to teach his novitiate the same.
Jacen thought again of Elyas. His first student. His responsibility. His failure. Elyas was nineteen when he died, stuck in Jacen’s memory as little more than a boy—the day a god’s pale, fourfingered hands gripped his chin and snapped his neck like a twig.
“I’m so sorry,” Jacen said aloud to no one in particular.
There was a rock where his heart ought to be. He could not, as of late, shake the sense that he teetered on a precipice above an abyssal dark. Something was on the verge of breaking, and though he had faith in little these days . . . from that shadow he knew he would not emerge unscathed.
2
HARVEST
YSIRA
The people of Zivora gave their dead to the desert. They carried corpses through the dust and the cacti, walking as far as they could before nightfall—though never too far, lest the wastes take them as well.
Alone among the city-state’s denizens, Ysira Naktis made this journey not to give but to retrieve. She stalked along the hard-packed red dirt over meandering, gently hilly terrain. The sun lay low on the horizon. As totality drew near, stubborn, final beads of light winked along the edge of the black disc.
Ysira paused in her tracks to watch, an almost ritual farewell, until only Oe’s soft blue glow remained. The vast ringed planet kept a soothing vigil with the twin moons, tonight both waxing crescents.
Night, during the Harvest season, was the only time Ysira did not feel as though she were being watched.
Long ago, in days lost to living memory when Ysira’s people had freely roamed the desert, this ritual had demanded the dead be cast into the canyon—the sprawling, fathomless divide in theworld that gave the Scar its name. Nowadays, no one made it that far. Ysira followed a well-worn path through scrubby vegetation and a labyrinth of bones, taking care not to step on the desiccated remains of men, women, and children. Most were sun-bleached skeletons, stripped of meat and moisture by the Scar and its creatures, but a few had just been carried out today.
The funeral processions had long since departed. When the shadow came to Zivora and no one was promised survival, the city tended to become a mess of drunken revelry, desperate crime, and idiotic spur-of-the-moment commitments. Purchases. Business ventures. Weddings. Ysira was more than happy to get away from it all, but one could never be too careful outside the city walls. She ran her left thumb over the stump of her little finger. A perpetual reminder of the last time she’d run afoul of a higher power.
Her objective lay beneath a tall yucca plant, hunched like a twisted human figure at prayer. The corpse belonged to a man in his forties. He’d been gone a full day now, limbs stiff, skin bruise-dark where it met the ground. Ysira knelt beside him and pulled supplies from her satchel: a bundle of rags, a jar half-full of Ogden’s special solution, and an assortment of slender knives.
She cut the man’s shirt off, spreading it to reveal his chest and abdomen. Patches of red, peeling rash covered his skin. Pointlessly, she waved away the flies. She began with a long incision beneath the ribcage. She spread apart skin, fat, and muscle, scooping out clotted fluids, working through the tissue layer by layer.
From its perch on a nearby skull, a tiny owl watched her with enormous amber eyes. It hooted softly, almost reproachful.
After a decade of running errands for Ogden, Ysira knew better than to ask him why.This was not the first time the old healer had paid her to retrieve human remains. Once, he’d hadher locate a cave deep in the canyon, to which she still returned every now and then to scrape mold off the rocks. Another time, she’d stolen vials of pus, drained from lesions on sick goats in the High Lord’s personal stables.
People liked to whisper about Ogden, saying he was a purveyor of blasphemous knowledge, in league with demons. He never outright denied it. He kept the Church off his scent by sending Ysira to do his dirty work, and she didn’t mind. She’d become rather more comfortable among the dead than the living. Besides, she owed Ogden her life.
She located the head of the pancreas above the man’s third kidney and cut the organ free. She noted a fungating mass across its surface and a sulfurous odor that made her stomach roil. Cancer, just as Ogden had predicted.
Ysira’s ears prickled, picking up the crunch of dry yucca sheddings nearby. The owl took flight and flapped noiselessly away.
“Shit,” Ysira muttered. She covered her incision with the man’s shirt flaps, leaving him with as much dignity as she could muster. She dusted off her robes, crammed the jar inside her satchel, and slung her kirikilbone glaive across her back as she crept around the bend.
A man was racing toward Ysira, down the dirt path. She reached for her weapon and he skidded to a stop.
The man was young, probably younger than Ysira’s twenty-nine years, dressed in rags and clutching a roughspun sack. Red, blistering burns marred his brown skin. Not a Guardsman after all. She was almost disappointed. A fight would have done wonders for her mood.
She tilted her head at him. “What happened to you?”
No answer. His chest heaved as he regarded her with panic. Curiosity piqued, she prodded, “What’s in the bag?”
His eyes darted toward it, then back at her. “What’s in yours?”
Fair enough.Likely, he was a scavenger from the Knots. They came out this way sometimes, braving the wastes in search of forbidden salvage from the canyon ruins. But something about him—the way he held that sack like a clutch of rattlesnake eggs—unsettled Ysira. Was he afraid of losing it or afraid ofit?
