12. WITNESS
WITNESS
JACEN
Jacen was a bottle and a half deep by sunset. He must have drifted off at some point; he came to hunched over his table, face stuck to the rough surface. Nines was tapping him on the shoulder, leaning anxiously over him.
He sat up too fast. She skittered back in alarm.
“Sorry,” said Nines. “I thought I saw a spider crawling on your robe—one of the big ones—and then I wasn’t sure you were—”
“Not now,” Jacen snapped at her. How could he have been so careless, passing out in front of his novitiate? It was something Brother Marez would have done.
With another mumbled apology, Nines shrank back. Jacen rubbed his temples. “Wait.”
She stood there, muscles clenched taut, prepared to bolt at an instant’s notice. Jacen realized, She’s afraid of me.
Afraid, and probably more than a little disgusted. His bottle had rolled away, across the table. He smelled not much better than that corpse he’d tried to exorcise.
“I’m sorry.” He clawed through his foggy memory for context, struggling to recall where Nines must have come from. “You were at . . .”
“The Cathedral,” she supplied.
“Right.” Jacen slapped the table. “Your presentation.”
It was a ritual cleansing, after which a new novitiate was allowed to stand in the presence of a god. Jacen had prepared obsessively for his own, at which he met Zephon, the Lord of Sorrow.
“I know it can be . . . unsettling to meet a god up close,” Jacen said. “Tell me how it went.”
He motioned for Nines to sit, which she did not.
She hesitated. “She seemed like she wanted to be somewhere else. The goddess, I mean. The Lady of Despair.”
Ileth. Jacen had never met her in person.
But he understood what Nines meant. Zephon had struck him as both remarkably ordinary and unthinkably alien, something that played at being human, wearing skin like Jacen wore his robes.
After a lackluster conversation, the god had shooed Jacen on his way with all the ceremony of a dockside clerk passing out equipment.
Jacen had come away feeling cheated. It should have been an encounter that made him fall to his knees and weep, cementing his faith for the rest of his life, but instead, he’d been disturbed. Like he’d lifted up a rock and seen the crawling things beneath.
But Jacen would not burden Nines with that, so he said what was expected of him: “The gods’ time is valuable. And . . . we can’t lose sight of our purpose. We help the gods wage a war against demons and preserve peace for our people. There is no greater calling.”
Following his earliest moments of doubt, Jacen had written those words on a scrap of parchment and carried it around in his robes until it disintegrated.
He often felt the ink on that faded scrap had sunk into his body, his bones, his very being.
He had lived in terror—though for years, that terror had simmered quietly in the darkest depths of his soul—of the day those words, his calling, would no longer be enough to sustain his faith.
Was it enough for Nines? Did those words mean anything at all to her—this girl who’d demonstrated no desire to become a priest?
Jacen could not say.
Then Nines blurted, “Who is Elyas?”
Jacen’s mouth went dry as bone. “Who told you that name?” “Mother Akkani.” She shuffled her feet. “She didn’t tell me. I just overheard.”
She refused to be specific. Probably for the best. After a time, Jacen made himself say, “He was my first student.”
Nines picked at her sleeve. “What happened to him?”
Jacen had never told this story aloud. After some consideration, he settled on a condensed version. Swift and brutally efficient, like resetting a broken bone. “He let a demon possess him, to gain its power. He was . . . part of a movement.”
Her eyes grew wide, fearful. She whispered, “Against the Church?” “They followed the old Zal religion,” said Jacen. “Elyas tried to convince me to do as he did and join them.”
Even if it hadn’t been blasphemy, it was folly. The ancient ritual of the demon priests, the valak, demanded that one cross the boundary between universes in the hopes the Source would deem them worthy of a demonic passenger. It had created as many abominations—and dead aspirants—as it had valak.
“You told the Council?” Nines’ tone struck Jacen as very carefully neutral.
He gave a short, single nod. He had not seriously believed the Church would kill Elyas. Punish him, yes; exorcise him, obviously, but . . . Jacen had been too certain of his own standing, too confident in the justice of his faith. He’d underestimated the severity of his student’s transgression.
He didn’t bother trying to defend his actions to Nines. “I have a great many regrets about what happened.”
“I would never do anything like that,” she said. “I swear.” Oh, gods. She thought he was threatening her.
“No. No. I don’t think you would. Nines”—it was better than Ninety-Nine, but Jacen still suddenly hated the way the nickname sounded—“you have nothing to fear from me. And you can ask me anything.”
But Nines seemed guarded, uncomfortable, and who could blame her? She could not hide her relief when Jacen dismissed her.
Though his first instinct was shame, he was not sober enough to let it engulf him, and he knew how to keep that from happening. He had not allowed himself to be alone with his emotions, absent the numbing blur of intoxication, in close to five years. He was not about to start tonight.
The room spun when he stood. He stumbled to his liquor cabinet, dug out another bottle, and decided walking back to his seat wasn’t worth the effort.
He sat on the filthy floor, rolling grains of sand between his fingers as he stared out the window and drank until Oe shone outside, until he was back to that point of blissful numbness.
Nines did not reemerge. Jacen prayed she had gone to sleep, that she wasn’t wide awake and feeling sick about the state in which she’d found him.
Gods knew Jacen had spent enough nights in such a way.
He’d had to put Brother Marez to bed sometimes.
He’d had to clean up his vomit, talk him down from raving tantrums, distract him so he’d stop pawing at the young girls in his congregation .
. . For a twelve-year-old novitiate who’d hoped to see Marez as a father, it had been painful in a way Jacen still could not articulate.
His master had grown sloppier, angrier, and crueler, until Jacen was finally ordained and swore he’d never treat a novitiate that way.
Marez died a year later of a ruptured esophagus. Soon after, the Church had trusted Jacen with Elyas. And now . . .
At first, Jacen had drunk to fall asleep, to keep the nightmares at bay, but that hadn’t lasted long.
He suspected he’d been born without the capacity for moderation in anything.
Love, hate, anger, passion, shame . . . every sensation burned a path through him, leaving deep, bloody furrows in his mind.
What could he do but try to drown it? Fellow priests sensed his altered consciousness but never said anything so long as he did his job.
He was not the first. He would not be the last. Brother Marez’s drawn, yellowed face remained burned into Jacen’s memory, echoing the words, A god is judgment.
A god decides the fate of the world. They are gods because no power can stand against them.
The gods were meant to embody deliverance from suffering, but there was no shortage of pain in Zivora. Fear and sorrow hung over the city like a shroud each Harvest season. The people paid tribute to the Six not because of what they could give but because of what more they might take.
For years, Jacen had clung to the Church’s promises because he could not confront the possibility that nothing else existed.
But coupled with the ever-shrinking ground of certainty beneath his feet, every new lie and unknown he uncovered .
. . not enough remained. He could no longer sustain the lie.
If what he searched for did exist—not only power worthy of worship but also hope worth fighting for—the Church of the Black Sun had never found it.
He reached for the bottle again.
The notion eventually entered Jacen’s head that he ought to visit Ogden’s clinic.
The possessed man had been searching for something there, but Ogden had never said what.
He had not disclosed everything he knew to Ged.
Besides, if Ysira or Neri had been injured in the canyon, they might have gone to the clinic first.
The plan was tenuous at best, but the waiting was no longer tolerable. Going in the dead of night was also, obviously, the smartest course of action. It was brilliant. Jacen was brilliant. He crept through the dusty alleyways to the back of the two-story clinic and picked the lock.
He’d learned this from Hesaya when they were acolytes together, though he never managed to replicate her skill.
The second time he’d been caught, he’d had two of his back teeth pulled out with pliers as punishment.
“Next time, I’ll start from the front,” the old priest had said.
“Then you won’t be quite so pretty, will you? ”
With a savage stab of vindication, Jacen slipped inside.
Ogden’s clinic lay quiet, deserted at this hour.
It was clean enough to trigger a certain resentment in Jacen—no sand, no clutter, not one tool or rag or sinister-looking jar out of place.
He did not spot a single insect, which in the Knots was a staggering feat.
Several cots, separated by curtains, sat in an orderly row.
Jacen cast his psychic net wide, performing a head count of everyone in the building.
Four bedbound patients slept upstairs. An exhausted healer’s apprentice dozed nearby, not alert enough to hear Jacen’s entry. Beneath the floor, though . . .
Jacen stopped in his tracks and nearly fell over. He caught himself on a shelf with a thud. Too loud. He winced, but nothing stirred.
There was a consciousness below, unlike anything he’d ever sensed.
It took some time to find the door to the basement, hidden behind a wooden panel beneath the stairs.
Had Jacen not been convinced of the presence beyond, he might have given up.
He fumbled with the lock and followed a short flight of stone steps to another door.
The presence grew clearer, and stranger still.
Jacen probed closer than his scruples would typically allow, close enough to hear the being’s thoughts.
They were not in a language he recognized—not Standard, nor Zal, nor any of the myriad tongues spoken throughout the Church’s dominion.
Jacen pushed the door open. It was heavy enough to give him trouble, as though lined with metal, and beyond it lay . . . He blinked in confusion. There was another door, just a few feet away.
He tried to open it and found it locked. He forced it. Nothing. Then the first door swung shut with a click, and something came loose. The second door opened. Jacen pitched headlong into the space beyond. His knee banged against the floor as he fell.
He struggled to his feet, swearing, shielding his eyes as bright light engulfed him. When his vision cleared, he almost lost his balance again.
This room was all silver and white, somehow even cleaner than upstairs, full of tools and materials for which Jacen had no name. A scent on the air, unsettlingly close to clear liquor, burned his nose.
He rubbed his eyes as if this might clarify matters or dispel some hallucination. It occurred to him that he was very, very drunk.
“Can I help you?” said someone to his left. There was that presence he’d sensed. It spoke Standard, albeit with an unfamiliar accent.
Jacen turned. Ice-cold adrenaline speared his chest, setting his heart at a gallop.
A god stood before him.
Other than his pointed ears and four-fingered hands, though, he did not remotely resemble any of the Six.
The gods Jacen knew looked like stunning, inhuman sculptures with iron-gated minds and overwhelming presences.
This being was shielding his mind, but not well, not like a telepath could.
The taint of the Source pulsed through him in a current as discernible as in any human.
His eyes were human too—blue-grey in white sclerae.
He was much shorter than Jacen, perhaps in his fifties or sixties, with receding grey hair, a paunchy middle, and deep furrows between his ridged, hairless brows.
“What are you doing here?” asked the thing that was not quite a god. He was frozen in place, staring at Jacen, and for a fleeting second he might have even looked afraid. Then he seemed to collect himself. “Did Ogden send you?” A pause. “Are you well?”
Jacen was not, in fact, well. He had to be hallucinating. His brain must have finally broken after the years of abuse he’d put it through.
He stumbled sideways, knocking over something that shattered on the floor. Distantly, he noticed he’d cut himself. He slurred out an inane excuse about business at the Citadel. He half-ran, half-tripped back up the stairs, out of the clinic, back into the street.
After that, he remembered nothing.