15. SIN #2
Lev had not returned alone. He stood at Chief Inquisitor Jarak’s shoulder beside four city Guardsmen and Mother Akkani.
“Oh, Jacen.” Her voice was quiet, almost pitying. “What have you done now?”
The prison at the bottom of the labyrinth was a vast, gloomy pit, lit by distant pale lights on a vaulted ceiling.
Its dozen cells were square indentations in the floor, eight feet deep and twelve wide, with metal hatches that left an occupant in pitch blackness when shut.
Tonight, all sat empty. This place was reserved for the vilest of criminals, and few lasted longer than a cycle.
None left alive unless it was without a tongue, bound for a life sentence along the darkest parts of the deepriver.
The guards escorted Jacen to the edge of a cell at swordpoint and hauled open its rusted hatch.
“Search him,” ordered Akkani.
They patted him down and rummaged through his robes, confiscating his flask, his knife, a handful of birdseed, and the pages he’d torn from the Rite of Exorcism. Akkani beckoned for the pages and examined them, face expressionless as a mask.
She instructed the guards to wait outside and faced Jacen at the edge of the cell. Chief Inquisitor Jarak flanked her with a hand on his weapon.
“Go on.” Jacen spoke over the ringing in his ears. “Let’s get this over with.”
Akkani ignored him and turned to Jarak. “Make sure Brother Lev understands the consequences of his error.”
Lev hovered near the door. He had the look of a man whose whole life had just slipped through his fingers. Jacen almost felt sorry for him. He knew the feeling well.
Brother Jarak gave a stiff nod and steered Lev toward the exit.
They left Jacen and Akkani alone.
Akkani brandished the torn pages at him and asked, “Did Ged Semira send you after these?”
“No one forced me to come here,” Jacen made himself say—the truth, technically. She would know if he lied.
“You took out your tracker.” Her pale eyes skated over his bandaged arm. “How much do you know?”
“I know the gods can die,” Jacen said. “I know you know they can die, and you’re trying to cover that up. They’re not gods, are they? What are they?” He lifted his wounded arm. “What is this?”
Akkani was silent for a long moment. Her eyes were bright and old as the stars.
“You’re right. They are not gods—at least, not in the sense that you were taught.
They did not create the universe, they do not answer prayers, and they are not immortal.
Not . . . quite.” She heaved a deep sigh, shoulders rising and falling as though she had shrugged off a heavy burden.
“The device in your arm was a tracker. They use them to monitor everyone in the city. They study us. To what end, I do not know.”
Jacen was sinking, drowning beneath the magnitude of her words, but she gave him no time to process.
She tapped the pages. “You believe you’ve encountered an archdemon, don’t you? For your sake, I wish you hadn’t.” Then: “What did you do with the body?”
Of course, she already knew. Which meant that thing inside the corpse, surviving far longer than it had any right . . . that was an archdemon.
“We buried it.” It wasn’t as if Jacen could have destroyed the creature. Only extradimensional energy could—
All of a sudden, something clicked into place.
Only extradimensional energy could kill a demon. He had known this as long as he had been an exorcist. Yet he never imagined it might also apply to other supposedly unkillable beings—until the scavenger arrived on his doorstep with the skull of a dead god.
What if gods and demons shared some fundamental fact of their nature that Jacen had never been taught?
Whatever had killed the god in the canyon channeled extradimensional energy on a monstrous scale, dealing damage beyond the capacity of any mortal weapon.
Only extradimensional energy could kill a demon—and only the same could kill a god.
And there existed a higher order of demon, known to the Zal, that had been kept secret by the Church.
Jacen’s mind spiraled, forming connections without his permission—every inconsistency he had refused to examine, all those thoughts he’d stopped dead in their tracks before he could follow them to their logical conclusion.
The gods were demons.
The thing in that corpse was a demon, and it was a god.
Akkani watched him piece it together. The grim look on her face was as good as confirmation.
The questions spilled out of Jacen. “Where do they get their bodies? What was one doing in that corpse? Is the demon in the canyon one of them too?”
Akkani held up a hand. “Let me be clear, I’m offering you the courtesy of an explanation because you’re about to give me the truth I want, one way or another. Perhaps my offering this information first might persuade you to reciprocate before I’m forced to resort to less-pleasant methods.”
She spoke the truth and let him sense it.
The discomfort of a psychic interrogation aside, she genuinely believed she might persuade him.
Jacen was too stunned to speak, so she continued, “The entity in the canyon is a weapon of the old Zal empire. It is imperative that we find it. Why else do you think I allowed Ged Semira to send his son into the canyon?” A sad smile touched her lips.
“You threw a bit of a wrench into that, didn’t you? No matter. This will all be over soon.”
“Why?” was all Jacen could say.
“Consider the power you’ve been taught our gods possess.
Ontological arguments aside, consider a power which, from our perspective, is functionally the same.
Now strip from that power any inclination to benevolence.
They have capabilities you’ve never dreamt of.
Our whole world exists at their whim. Should we cease to be useful .
. .” A hollow chuckle escaped her, and the barest tremor entered her voice.
“We cannot fight them. We cannot comprehend them. No, Jacen, they are not gods. They are far worse.”
She was terrified. More than that—her terror was familiar, because it was Jacen’s own mirrored back at him: that the universe was nothing but uncaring darkness, and they were insects beneath the thumb of eldritch beings who could crush them without a thought.
“We bear it,” Akkani said, “so that our people do not have to. We nourish their belief, sell the lie of a blissful afterlife to the faithful, so that they might live in ignorance, yes—but in peace.”
Peace. Was that what this was called, beneath the shadow of the Harvest?
“Why did you tell me I’m Dalish if I’m Zal?” Jacen felt a child again, a mere acolyte begging for her approval, when he asked, “Why did you lie to me?”