Chapter 24 #2
Amy had gone still and attentive against his side, and he could almost feel her mind working. He recognized the particular quality of her silence when she was listening hard and filing every word.
“How many do they have?” he asked.
His mother and Ishala exchanged a look.
“Two that have been confirmed,” his mother said.
“Two bloodlines are already in their hands.” Her jaw tightened.
“We have heard they came close to two more, and that is why the hunt has grown so bold of late, and why priests travel to backwater ports themselves. Growing closer to a prize they have hungered for across generations has made them reckless.”
“We know they came close to what they call the Golden Key—” A grim thin line of a smile crossed Ishala’s face.
“But it slipped away from them. We do not know how, or to where, only that the Grorn suffered a great loss they have not recovered from, and that somewhere out in space a Golden Key is running.”
A Grorn priest travelling in person to a nothing warehouse. Talk of a recent discovery. Brannik felt the pieces of everything he’d overheard in that cell slide against each other and lock. “He came to Krebb’s port,” he said slowly, “because they thought they’d found something.”
“He came,” Ishala said, “because they have picked up a trace of Aurelian activity. We reveal things, warrior, no matter how careful we are because blood tells and technology answers to it and something always slips out into the dark. So they have been searching. Perhaps they have been searching for us.” He inclined his silver head.
“But they found you instead. From their view, a splendid stroke of fortune. From ours—” His eyes glinted.
“From ours, a warning. And something more.”
“More?” he asked.
“The Grorn hunt seven bloodlines. But that is where their understanding fails them.” Ishala leaned forward. “They think of bloodlines as fixed things. Pure things. Aurelian. Zathix. One lineage separated cleanly from another, preserved across generations.”
His brilliant eyes settled on Brannik.
“But blood does not remain pure, warrior. Aurelians have hidden amongst a hundred peoples for a thousand years, and where we hid, sometimes we loved. And that meant children. Children like you.”
He went still.
“You carry your mother’s inheritance folded into your father’s. Tuori and Aurelian, both of them part of you. Yet the old machines answered when you touched them. The door recognized you. Whatever our ancestors placed in our blood, mixing it with another lineage did not destroy it.”
Amy shifted beside him. “The Grorn don’t know that.”
Ishala’s thin mouth curved. “I don’t believe they do.”
“But they’ve been hunting these bloodlines for generations.”
“They have been hunting what they know how to recognize.” Ishala’s gaze returned to him. “Silver eyes. Zathix coloring. The physical traits recorded in whatever fragments of precursor knowledge they possess. They look for purity because they believe purity matters.”
Amy leaned forward. “And you don’t.”
“Not anymore.”
The words settled over the table.
He thought of the wall beneath his hand, and the light spreading outwards from his fingers. The mechanism had answered him as easily as if his mother had touched it.
“You didn’t know before me,” he said.
“We suspected.” Ishala’s expression grew thoughtful. “We have known for centuries that our people left descendants behind wherever they hid. But we did not know whether the old inheritance survived strongly enough to matter. You are proof that it can.”
Amy’s eyes widened. “Then the other bloodlines could have done the same thing.”
“Exactly.”
She sat back slowly. “So the Grorn could be searching for seven very specific peoples when the Keys aren’t necessarily where they think they are anymore.”
“Or what they think they are,” Ishala said.
A faint stirring moved through the Aurelians gathered around them.
Amy’s attention sharpened. “You mean someone could carry one of the Keys without even knowing it.”
“Yes.”
“And the Grorn could walk right past them.”
This time Ishala smiled.
“Yes.”
The hall went quiet, and he felt something change in the silence around him. These were a people who had spent generations hiding from an enemy that hunted them by blood, convinced that sooner or later the Grorn would find every lineage they needed.
But blood had refused to behave as neatly as the Grorn expected. It had wandered. Mixed. Hidden itself inside children who looked like their fathers instead of their mothers, inside descendants who might not even know what they carried.
Inside males like him.
Two Keys were already in Grorn hands. The Golden Key had escaped them. The others were still somewhere in the galaxy. And the Grorn might not be as close to finding them as they believed. For a single breath, the ancient story tilted the other way.
The hunters didn’t know exactly what they were hunting.
His mother reached across the table and gripped his free hand, and looked at him with shining eyes, and started to say something—
The stone under his feet shivered.
It was almost nothing—a faint, low pulse he felt in the soles of his boots and the roots of his horns before he heard it, a deep note humming up out of the mountain itself.
Then it became a sound, a rising tone that filled the hall, cold and clear and utterly without mercy.
Every Aurelian in the room rose to their feet at once, and the unfamiliar hope drained out of all their faces in a single heartbeat and left them white as bone.
His mother’s hand tightened around his.
“No,” she whispered. “No, not again, not again—”
He was already up and moving, already dragging Amy behind the wall of his own body, his mind gone clean and cold and fast the way it went when the thinking stopped and the warrior woke.
He knew that sound. He’d never heard it before in his life but he knew what fear looked like and it was written in every stricken face around him.
“The perimeter sensors,” Ishala said, and his old voice had gone flat as a blade. “A ship has entered the atmosphere.”
Serei made a small broken sound, and Ishala’s silver gaze met his.
“Grorn.”