CRUSADE
JACEN
Lev’s body landed on the tracks with a heavy crunch. 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 a way 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?”
Jacen tapped his bandaged forearm. “The Church, the High Lord—they use them to track us.” Before Seth could express any further confusion, Jacen waved a hand at the shortening stretch of track above them. “Quickly.”
Jacen sat on the bench, inviting Seth to do the same, and motioned at his sheathed dagger. “Yours is still clean.”
Seth sighed. “You’re lucky I trust you implicitly.” He passed Jacen the dagger and rolled up his left sleeve. He leaned forward, bracing his exposed forearm on his knee.
As he pulled Seth’s thick, muscled forearm onto his thigh, Jacen felt as if he were about to cross a boundary.
Seth’s pulse thrummed beneath his fingertips, steady and sure.
Jacen ran his hands over sun-darkened brown skin and soft black hair, searching for the tiny consecration scar. He took a breath, then made the cut.
Seth sucked air between his teeth, muscles tensing. But he held still as Jacen worked, much more neatly than he had on himself, and extracted the squirming metal device. He held it up to the light, marveling despite himself at the intricacy.
Capabilities you’ve never dreamt of, Akkani had said. We cannot comprehend them.
Seth squinted at the tracker as he put pressure on his wound. “If I wasn’t curious before, I certainly am now.” He tugged his shirt out from under his armor, tore off a strip with his teeth, and used it to wrap his forearm. “Nines—”
Something clattered to the ground.
Nines clutched her forearm, staring in revulsion at the device she’d just cut out. Jaw clenched, she picked it up and pitched it over the edge. She met Jacen’s eyes and nodded firmly.
The funicular creaked to a stop. Jacen tossed Seth’s device into the depths, and they disembarked together. The docking area had a muffled, clandestine quality to it, cut off from the rest of the Cathedral.
“There are three behind the door,” Nines whispered. “Cathedral guards.”
Seth rolled his shoulders and drew his sword. There was a glint in his eyes, an unmistakable air of purpose buzzing about him. He flipped his sword around in his grip and kicked the door open.
He seized the first guard by the neck and slammed him face-first against the wall.
The other two charged. Seth shoved the dazed one, sending him toppling into his fellow.
He stepped past both, wrenched a dagger from one man’s belt, and hurled it at the third.
In the time it took for that one to fall, dagger buried to the hilt in his eye socket, Seth killed the other two.
More footsteps approached at a run.
At the same time, Jacen and Nines both said, “Stop.”
Seth lowered his sword. A grey-robed girl—a novitiate—staggered to a halt as she rounded the corner.
Chest heaving, her dark hair disheveled, she appraised the carnage with eyes that had not yet begun to turn.
She held out a hand, too late to stop three acolytes from running up behind her.
Not one of them could have been older than six.
These children had not come to apprehend them. Rather, they were running. Must have heard the explosion and sensed the opportunity.
They all stared at each other. The acolytes huddled behind the novitiate, terrified. Then the girl said, “There are three Guardsmen down that hall on the left. A handful of lay priests barricaded themselves in the east-wing kitchen, but they won’t stop you.”
Seth stepped out of their way. Jacen did the same, then Nines, and the novitiate breathed a shaky sigh of relief. She raced away, taking the smallest of the acolytes by the hand. They ran as if the wind itself were at their heels.
They weren’t the first to attempt escape—though precious few ever succeeded. Nines knew that too. She had frozen, watching them run off.
When Jacen urged her to move, she said, “I sensed when the senior priests locked down all the entrances. The acolytes and novitiates don’t know about the secret passages. They’re stuck here. We can’t just leave them.”
“There’s no time,” Jacen said, firm but gentle. “Before this is all over, they’ll get their chance too. But no one will if we don’t hurry. Besides—if they’re not letting anyone in or out, I promise you the Cathedral is the safest place in Zivora.”
Nines reluctantly fell into step as Seth set them a renewed, brisk pace. They happened across a lay sister next, running by candlelight through an unlit passage. She took one look at Seth’s naked sword and got out of their way.
They reached the secret passage without further incident, but the relative quiet let all manner of psychic noise seep into Jacen’s head.
Chaos didn’t begin to cover it; whatever transpired outside was a waking nightmare.
He sensed the crowd beyond the Cathedral doors, begging to be let in.
The City Guard struggled to hold them back, a thousand frantic voices drowning out demands for order.
Jacen had to stop, hand against the palestone wall, trying to remember how to breathe.
Nines watched him closely. “Are you all right?”
“No,” Jacen said, more honest than might have been wise. “Are you?”
No response.
They watched as Seth produced a short silver cylinder and slotted it into a spot behind a column. A hidden door scrolled open to reveal a strangely sterile white corridor.
“Come on,” Seth said, waving them onward. “Before our luck runs out.”
They emerged from a wall in the palace atrium, in the columned expanse that separated the interior from the great steps and the Citadel plaza.
The night was unusually humid, and the hot wind whipping through the columns carried more than the promise of rain.
In the aftermath of a battle, the air reeked of ash and blood.
Rubble and bodies littered the ground, sprays of crimson staining the palestone.
Down in the plaza, the atmosphere hung thick as hot lava, smoke rising in all directions.
Such was the chaos there, it ripped Jacen from his body.
He sensed each consciousness in the plaza, clear as if they stood beside him.
It was as though cyclones had torn through the streets, kicking up homes and markets and casting hundreds adrift.
Some cradled the bodies of their parents, children, siblings, neighbors.
Others shoved one another in blind panic with only one objective: Flee.
But where could they go? There was no refuge from this.
Some chose the wasteland. Most clustered near the Cathedral, a monolith of terrible calm amidst the storm, even as its doors stayed shut.
Jacen tried to distance himself, but it proved as impractical as closing his eyes.
Had he been drunk for so long, he’d forgotten how to control his own mind?
Or had it always been this way before? The clarity was too much to bear.
The mob surged. He slipped on blood and almost went down.
His chin knocked against the back of someone’s foot, making him bite down hard and taste metal.
Seth took him by the shoulder, bringing him back to himself. He muttered, “Careful.”
Nines, too, looked like she might faint. She drew slow, rhythmic breaths, hands pressed against her eyes, attempting to steady herself from the shock of it.
“What are they running from?” Jacen started to ask, but Seth’s grip tightened. He pulled Jacen back toward the wall, away from the plaza. A massive octahedron floated there, still as the moons in the sky.
“Here’s the part that’s hard to explain,” Seth said quietly, as if the thing might overhear him. “They’ve got us boxed in.”
No sooner had he spoken than a blazing spear of green pierced the night. It exploded out of the octahedron and hit a structure opposite the palace.
Jacen watched, stunned, as the palestone facade broke apart like cheap pottery. Shouts and screams erupted from below. The octahedron rotated and loosed another blast.
Now Seth practically shoved Jacen around the corner, where Nines already had the sense to hide. The columns had been damaged—great pieces of them on the ground, some pulverized beyond recognition. Near the entrance to the High Lord’s audience chamber, a section of ceiling had crumbled.
“I think the polyhedra need to . . . er . . . see us.” Seth shook his head at the absurdity of his own words. “They respond to movement.”
“I didn’t know they could do that,” Jacen said uselessly. “No one did. One of the many factors Ged didn’t predict.” Jacen stared at him, unsure what to ask. Where to begin.