Chapter 6 Cero #2
“Holy Tel Ilessi.” A woman scurried up to her with a child. “Will you bless my daughter?”
“Tel Ilessi—please say a few words over my garden that it might grow!”
“Thank you, Tel Ilessi, this is the first time my children have eaten—”
Sometimes, he wanted to shake those who looked at Aiz with such faith. She let a monster eat our children’s hearts. She’s not worth the dirt on your shoes.
But he understood his people too. The Tel Ilessi was the Holy Vessel of Queen Div, the ruler who saved the Kegari from destruction a thousand years ago.
As Tel Ilessi, Aiz had given them food, shelter, clothing, purpose.
She treated them as human when the highborn Hawks and the middle-class Sparrows didn’t.
Cero watched as Aiz kissed the babies. As she touched the cheeks of the children and squeezed the hands of those who needed her strength. She gave each devotee their moment, moving through them like water, even as her guards and Cero struggled to keep up.
Aiz thought the absence of magic meant no power. But her love of her people had always been her power. She simply didn’t value it.
Cero caught a flash of blue amid the crowd.
A cleric, no doubt under the sway of Aiz’s most loyal acolyte, High Cleric Dovan.
Most of the Kegari clergy was devoted to Aiz because of her dedication to their holy scriptures, the Nine Sacred Tales.
She believed and her faith inspired others—even highborns.
That devotion made Noa’s, Olnas’s, and Cero’s disloyalty all the more dangerous. They had no one within the Kegari clergy or leadership they could trust.
“Ghaz brought too many Snipes,” Aiz said to Cero as they departed the foreign quarter. “He will make them secure and they will not wish to return to Old Kegar. He is undermining me.”
As they arrived at the airfield, a former park, dozens of Sails took off around them. Cero looked longingly at the aircraft. Aiz had grounded him, arguing that she required him nearby, as she had so few people she trusted.
But he missed flying. He missed the rush of an updraft, and the way he flowed into the wind, unfettered, as if he had no body at all.
“Cero.” Aiz turned her pale blue eyes on him. He looked away quickly, fearing his disgust would be obvious. “I need you to back me today,” she said. “I need your power. I’ve not shown them proof of mine in too long.”
Noa’s orders notwithstanding, Cero had to draw the line somewhere. “I’m not murdering anyone for you, Aiz.”
“I’m not asking you to,” she snapped. “Just help me persuade Ghaz that working against me is not in his best interest. Make him think twice about crossing me. I need him cooperative, Cero. I need his influence with the highborns. Help me.”
“No, Aiz.”
“Tel Ilessi!” she said through gritted teeth, and he couldn’t help his bitter laugh.
“Maybe you are the Tel Ilessi.” Cero kept one eye on her guards a few yards away.
“Or maybe not. Only you know what deal you made with that monster you awoke in the dark. But before you called yourself Tel Ilessi, you were Aiz. You took care of your fellow orphans and told the Nine Sacred Tales with love in your heart instead of death.”
“You never even believed them,” Aiz said. “Even when we were little, you were always disappearing to places I couldn’t follow.” She cocked her head, and her gaze narrowed. “What did you see down there, Cero? What did you learn that was so important?”
Cero was but five the first time he wandered the tunnels beneath Dafra cloister; he’d wished to escape the clerics’ lessons.
Over the years, he witnessed many things in those caverns and passages.
Voices that spoke of his future. Specters who whispered of the past. Scrolls and drawings that hinted at a grand history the Kegari no longer remembered.
“We don’t have to stay here,” Cero said. Just try to get her to see reason, he told himself. One last time. “You could withdraw our troops to the south. Open trade. Our people—”
“Everything I do is for our people, Cero.” She looked at him as if he were a latrine pit.
He thought of the Imperial citizens she’d tortured and killed. The cities and villages she’d destroyed.
“The cost is too high, Aiz.”
“Tel Ilessi.” Ghaz emerged from the shadow of his Battle Sail and strode toward them. He looked like he was barely holding his temper—which meant Aiz had managed to surprise him.
Men like Ghaz didn’t like surprises. Once, Cero had thought the former Triarch handsome with his wild curls and fine nose. Once, he’d caught the Triarch’s eye. But a short and ill-fated dalliance had taught Cero that this highborn was like all the others.
A group of pilots and politicians trailed after Ghaz. Only one was Aiz’s ally: High Cleric Dovan.
“Light of the Spires, Tel Ilessi.” Dovan greeted Aiz with a low bow. The others followed suit with quick, reluctant bobs.
“Long may it guide us,” Aiz intoned in response before eyeing the Snipes loading Ghaz’s weapons chutes. “That is a great deal of ordnance, General,” she said. “I do not appreciate you planning an assault without my knowledge.”
“Empress Helene attacked one of our mountain bases,” Ghaz said. “Nothing significant, of course, but I’d like to have a look myself.”
Cero fought not to snort. He’d been the one to pass on the location of that base and its ordnance. It was one of the larger caches the Kegari had.
“Certainly nothing for you to worry about, Tel Ilessi.” Another highborn spoke. Voss Oona was his name, Cero recalled, and he was a two-faced liar who spent most of his time licking Ghaz’s boots. “Instead, you should speak to the clerics.” He gave Dovan an acid look. “Their…rhetoric is unhelpful.”
“To speak of the Return is not rhetoric,” Dovan shot back. “It is scripture. The Nine Sacred Tales—”
“—are essential,” Ghaz cut in, giving Voss a warning look. “But perhaps we don’t need to remind the people quite as vociferously about the Return, dear cleric, lest they grow restless. We do not, after all, have the Loha to make it a reality.”
Cero could practically feel the blood rise in Aiz’s body. Her magic—what little she still had—seemed, briefly, to seethe beneath her skin.
“And whose fault is that?” Aiz said. “You’re bringing settlers over by the thousands when I tasked you with one thing, Ghaz—to find Loha.”
Ghaz cocked his head, a few curls falling into his ophidian eyes.
“Tel Ilessi, I thought you’d be pleased.” Ghaz spoke so everyone could hear. “Most settlers are Snipes who have homes now. Gardens. We will open a school. I’ll be meeting with a Martial Pater about—”
“We need a thousand pounds of Loha to power the two thousand Sails for the Return,” Aiz said.
“We have a mere two hundred pounds, most of it allotted to our Battle Sails, which we need to keep the Martials and Scholars in line. No schools. No meetings. Stop shipping more people over.” Aiz clenched and unclenched her fists. “And start hunting Masks.”