14. TRUTH
TRUTH
JACEN
Jacen woke with a pounding headache, a rancid taste in his mouth, and a lingering sense of shame. That was not unusual, but he was also surrounded by unfamiliar smells, lying on a very clean cot, and—
Oh, no.
He tried to sit up, but a surge of nausea stopped him. Someone handed him a bucket. He vomited into it. When he looked up, wiping away sick, the first thing he saw was Seth Semira’s concerned face. He threw up again.
Most of the time, he was smart enough to do this at home.
At home, he could wake up and go expeditiously back to the bottle.
Here . . . his head felt stuffed full of wool, every thought was like trying to shift a load of rocks, but he had the overwhelming sense that here was the worst possible place for him to be.
“Where am I?” he croaked.
Seth withdrew the bucket. “Ogden’s clinic.”
Jacen could not recall what was so bad about this, only that it was very bad indeed. He hauled himself to a sitting position and winced when he put weight on his right hand, which was wrapped in clean white bandages.
“Your novitiate found you,” Seth explained. “She said you came back late, ranting about things that didn’t make sense. You also said my name. She didn’t know who else to call, so she sent me a message by pigeon.”
“What happened to you?” Jacen touched his face to indicate the bruises decorating Seth’s, and the smear of dried blood under his nose.
Seth scrubbed at it with a grimace. “I came by your chapel to make sure you were alive. And then I took a fall, because it was dark, and you don’t pick up after yourself.
” He brushed off Jacen’s concern. “I’m fine.
Your novitiate also said you mentioned this place, and Ogden’s good at what he does. He’s helped people like you.”
Jacen knew the sort. Drunks and thorn eaters, the most pitiable people in a pitiable city. People like me. Jacen massaged his forehead as though it might dispel his headache.
“I have no idea what Nines said to you, but I’m not here for—for treatment. I have to get out of here.”
“I didn’t realize,” Seth said quietly, “that it had gotten this bad.”
Where was the door? Jacen tried to stand again, but another wave of nausea overtook him.
“I don’t want to lose you.” Real pain showed in the faint lines around Seth’s eyes and the set of his mouth. “And you can confide in me. If I ever said anything to make you think you couldn’t, I’m sorry.”
The thought of that was simply unbearable. In fact, everything was unbearable. A terrible heat rose in Jacen’s chest, constricting his heart, making it hard to breathe. He wanted to be anywhere but there. Anywhere but inside his own skin. He swayed on the cot.
“Jace!” Seth caught him, alarmed, warm hands against his ribs and back. Seth’s fingers brushed over his knobby spine, clenched in the robes that hung too large on Jacen’s frame. “You can’t go on like this. You need help.”
“What makes you think I want your help?” Jacen’s pulse thudded in his ears. It was all too much, far too much. “I couldn’t be bothered to speak to you for the last three years.”
Seth watched him with some awful mixture of pity and frustration. “I can’t imagine learning what you’ve learned. I know I’ve said many things about your faith over the years, but I have never wished that part of you gone.”
Gone.
To hear it out loud, to be forced to admit it . . . Jacen felt the loss of his faith like pain in a phantom limb, an agony with no cure.
And from Seth, he sensed no vindication.
No smugness. Nothing of the sort from the man Jacen had spent so many late nights debating about faith.
Odd as it might seem to anyone on the outside, this had been a foundation of their friendship.
Seth’s ability—his willingness—to test and challenge Jacen was rare, and Jacen held it priceless.
Forbidden as he was to say the words, let alone act on them, he had fallen in love with it.
To find it absent today was what broke him.
He could not stand for anyone to see him like this, let alone Seth. He needed him out. And so, he said something he knew he would regret.
“You’re right. You can’t fathom what I’m going through. You’ve never believed in anything, never had to risk anything. Your brother is right—you should be glad someone has the courage to do what you won’t.”
Finally, finally, Seth recoiled. “You know as well as I do that Ged only cares about his own—”
“I’m not talking about Ged,” Jacen said. “I’m talking about Neri.” Seth stared at him. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Maybe!” Jacen burst out. “But what’s the alternative? You couldn’t possibly know; you don’t see it all up close like I have to—” His voice broke.
“You are talking about sacrificing a child,” Seth said through gritted teeth. “And unleashing forces none of us understand.”
“What makes Neri more valuable than every other child taken by the Harvest?” Jacen demanded.
Now that he’d started, he could not stop.
“There’s no path forward in which we don’t make compromises.
We’ve all been complicit. Would you have Neri do the same, or become a victim of the Harvest because of what we both know he is?
You said so yourself—that is the alternative. ”
“No. Of course not. I—I don’t know.” Seth’s shoulders slumped. He looked like he’d been struck. But he said no more, because the clinic’s proprietor pulled the curtain aside.
Seth stood. He hesitated a moment, bereft.
“I was just leaving,” he said to Ogden, and promptly did so. It did not make Jacen feel any better.
Ogden faced Jacen, arms crossed, waiting for him to speak. But why . . .
Jacen’s stomach turned over as he finally remembered what he’d seen in the basement.
“I should go, too.” He rose, but Ogden grasped him by the shoulder and pushed him back down. The old man had a grip like steel.
“That was impressive,” he said. “Truly. I’ve seen denial and displacement, but that was remarkably committed.” He took a cup from the table beside the cot and offered it to Jacen. “Drink this.”
Jacen wrinkled his nose at the thick yellow liquid. “What is it?” Ogden refused to explain beyond “Medicine.”
Jacen didn’t take it.
Ogden sighed. “It is not in my best interests, nor that of my patients, to draw attention to myself by poisoning a Priest of the Black Sun.”
Jacen gathered his faculties enough to assess the words for truth. He found it. He drained the cup with a grimace, then looked down. “These aren’t my clothes.”
“You pissed yourself,” Ogden explained, and Jacen nearly perished on the spot. “Semira has a point. If you want to live, this is not the way to go about it.”
“I had a bad night.”
“I’ve heard that one before.” Ogden took the seat Seth had occupied and folded his gloved hands. “Your gifts might help you remain remarkably functional, but they won’t save you when your body has had enough.”
Unwilling to respond, Jacen changed the subject. “Are we going to talk about your basement?”
“Are we going to talk about why you broke into my home?” “We’ve established that I was drunk off my ass.”
Ogden eyed him levelly until Jacen decided he was too exhausted and irritated to bother with anything but the truth. “I went looking for Ysira. You know each other, don’t you? Where is she?”
“If I knew,” said Ogden, “would it be wise of me to tell you?”
“Fine,” Jacen snapped. “I suppose I don’t care, considering you’re keeping a—a—” He couldn’t call it a god. “Some sort of mutant in your basement.”
“You were hallucinating when your novitiate found you. You never got into my basement.”
Jacen raised his bandaged hand. “You and I both know what I saw.”
“Do we?” Ogden lifted his bushy eyebrows. “You’re not even sure you believe that.”
“I’m sure you’re hiding things. How did you get involved with Ged? What aren’t you telling him? What did you think we’d find in that body I tried to exorcise? I want the truth.”
“The truth,” Ogden repeated, infuriatingly calm. “Why should I trust you with it when you can’t even confront the truth about yourself?”
Hot, poisonous anger flared through Jacen, fueled by his pounding headache and a potent undercurrent of shame. “I could just take it out of your head.”
To prove his point, he pushed at the edges of Ogden’s consciousness. He encountered an iron weave in the healer’s mind, held together by a frigid, spiteful determination—and then, awareness. Resistance followed like a flood in a slot canyon, forcing him out.
“You’re—” Jacen couldn’t finish, overcome by shock. A telepath.
Third Tier, at least.
“Arrogant,” the old man sighed. “Do not try that again.”
Jacen was disgusted with himself. To forcibly invade someone’s mind . . . Who was he becoming? Next time he faced himself in the mirror, would he see Brother Marez, complete with rotten teeth and yellowed skin?
Ogden studied him for a moment. Then he said, not unkindly, “I’ve been where you are.
Many, many years ago. The Church likes to pretend you’re the only one, but you’re not.
Did you know forty percent of telepaths in Zivora are addicts of some sort?
Alcohol, telkaan root, food, sex, adrenaline .
. . It’s as endemic to your order as corruption. ”
Jacen was not inclined to stay for a lecture. He started to stand, but the healer said, “I would like to trust you.” He paused. “Convince me you can be trusted.”
“I attempted your exorcism. I agreed to break into the archives.
What else do you want from me?”
“There is,” said Ogden, “the matter of your personal history.” “Right.” Jacen blew out a breath. “Your contacts.” He was tired enough of this that he put the question directly to Ogden: “You mean the demon priests, don’t you?”
Who else would be so interested in the demon of the canyon and willing to participate in a coup against the High Lord? Who else but Elyas’s people—that last gasp of rebellion Jacen had betrayed?
Ogden said nothing.
Jacen frowned at him. “Surely, you’re not a believer.”