Lev chuckled. “He might be.” He raised a hand and pointed two fingers at Seth, who dropped his sword. He fell to his knees with a scream. Nines shrank back, petrified.
The attack was not a powerful one, merely the best of which Lev was capable. Jacen knew the technique—the agony was a harmless illusion. But something inside him snapped. He shredded through Lev’s mental defenses with the subtlety of a hatchet. Drove him screaming to his knees like Lev had done to Seth.
Lev fought back, forcing Jacen out of his head. With a cry, Lev pulled a knife from his sash and slashed upward. Reflexively, Jacen blocked with his hands. Steel sliced his palm. It caught on the filthy bandages of his right hand, but he managed to drive Lev’s knife down. The blade screeched against stone. Jacen plunged deeper into his mind, rending his focus like taking a hammer to a spiderweb. As his psychic offensive crumbled, Lev seized the front of Jacen’s robe and wrenched him forward. Jacen groped for his dagger, fingers too slippery with blood to grasp the hilt.
The next moments blurred into a haze of metal and shadow. Somehow, they both ended up on the ground. Finally, Jacen located a pressure point, a mental fulcrum he could strike and force Lev tostop.
The despair and helpless fury of the last few days—the last thirty years—boiled over. Jacen got hold of his dagger and scrambled to his knees, behind Lev. He sawed into the inert Chief Exorcist’s throat until the blade scraped bone. He held the wound open as a fountain of red gushed out. He had not expected so much blood. The smell of iron choked the air.
It had all probably taken less than ten seconds. Jacen knelt on the ground, heart thudding, staring at Brother Lev as he died suffocating on his own fluids. A few feet away, Seth stirred and groaned. Nines had crawled backward on her hands and heels until she was pressed against the wall, eyes enormous, red staining her white hair.
It took Jacen several tries to speak. “Are you all right?” She nodded. He didn’t believe her. He reached out, bloody palm open, but she recoiled. Pressed herself closer to the wall as though she hoped it would swallow her.
Jacen pulled back and said quietly, “It’s over.” He glanced at Seth—shaken but back on his feet. “We’re leaving this place.”
Nines was speechless for so long, Jacen worried she’d gone catatonic from shock.
“The funicular’s about to go,” Seth warned. He nudged Lev’s body with his boot. “We can drop him on the tracks about halfway so the cart gets stuck on the way back down. It’ll buy us some time.”
He hefted the corpse over his shoulder and boarded the funicular, but Jacen hesitated.
Then he said to Nines, “Syl Inissa.” Her true name, which he’d found in the archives.
As he spoke, he invoked the trigger placed in her mind long ago. Embers of recognition flickered to life, shining on the surface of her consciousness. Breaking through the fear and the pain like the sun beyond its eclipse.
If Nines followed him, Jacen feared she was doomed. What was he capable of teaching her other than what the Church had taught him? What was he capable of showing her other than misery and horror?
But he could give her this—this one thing he never had: her real name. Her history. Something to shape her that was so much more than the nothingness into which the rest of them had been made.
“Your name is Syl Inissa,” he repeated, firmer, “and your friend’s name was Daru. You’re from a place called Kasoa. You have a name, and you might still have a family somewhere. It may have been taken from you, but you have always been worthy of it. You have always been more than this. We all were.”
Even Lev. As Jacen looked at his Brother’s corpse, he felt a sudden, unexpected surge of grief. He’d become a vile man in this life, but in another, given the chance, might he have been capable of better? He would never find out.
But Nines might.
Jacen held out his hand. This time, she took it.
25
CRUSADE
JACEN
Lev’s body landed on the tracks with a heavycrunch.Jacen braced a hand against the side of the cart to steady himself as a wave of nausea burned his throat.
“You’ve never killed anyone with your hands before,” Seth asserted. “Have you?”
“Only once.” Jacen was such a blasted hypocrite. Of course he’d killed before. When he was ten years old, his teachers locked him in a cell with an armed prisoner. With no weapon available but his mind, he’d learned fast. His control had been just sophisticated enough to compel the man to give him the knife.
He could not look at Seth, let alone Nines. “This has to end.”
Jacen hadn’t a clue how to find Elyas’s network, but he knew who might. “I’m going to the Shrouded City. Ogden knows where it is, and I think Ysira might have taken Neri there.”
Seth tensed at his nephew’s name. “What do you expect to find?” “The truth.” Jacen did not know how to convey that in away Seth would understand. “They won’t be happy to see me, but . . . I have to.”
Concern lined Seth’s brow. He started to speak, but Jacen moved on: “We have to take out your consecration markers.”
“What?”
