47. ASCENSION
ASCENSION
SETH
Seth Semira could not comprehend what had happened to him, why he seemed to be lying between the spires of Zal Fel, nor why he was surrounded by blood and bodies and—oh, gods, that was Ged.
Had Seth done that? Sickness lurched through him. His body was his own once more, but the last day was so full of holes . . . When he reached for those memories, his head swam with panic.
No time to dwell. He prioritized as he’d been trained to. He saw Ysira holding Neri tight in her embrace. Strangers milled about the platform, giving the two a wide berth, shouting and gesturing madly. Some were weeping.
There were Firstborn nearby, armored and diminutive. A pair of Zivoran knights kept pointing at them, berating their Captain, who appeared to be desperately trying to explain. Nearby, Saraida—of all people—knelt with her head bowed, as though in prayer.
It was chaos, and it was all too much. Seth wanted to retreat deep inside his own head, refamiliarize himself with every corner of it and ensure it was truly his again. No many-legged thing lurking in the dark, waiting to emerge when he least suspected.
His breathing came faster. He closed his eyes, but it didn’t help. The afterimage of that terrible fire still glowed red against the back of his lids.
A long, pale hand touched Seth’s cheek. At first, he flinched—and Jacen recoiled. Concern lined his face.
Seth started to interrogate him about whatever this was, because it
was almost certainly his fault, but . . . instead, he pulled Jacen toward him, one hand catching in his fair hair, and kissed him.
They touched foreheads. Jacen wrapped his fingers around the back of Seth’s neck.
I love you, Jacen said in his mind, where one could not lie.
That sensation—the voice inside Seth’s skull—made him flinch again. He pulled away, swallowing hard. He had so many questions, but all that came out of his mouth was a strangled “What the fuck?”
“You’re free.” Jacen’s face was stricken, his tone strange. “We’re all free. It’s—” He looked to Neri, and words failed him completely.
Neri turned, giving Seth a clear view of him. His eyes, already so alien, had changed again. Now his red irises burned in pitch-black sclerae. Dark veins spidered outward, framing those eyes like a mask. Seth could not discern a single human emotion on his face.
Without being told, Seth knew. It was too late.
There were so many bodies. Jacen and Ysira must have brought more than just Saraida, Teheda, and Nines from Otavok, but those three appeared to be all that remained.
Teheda and Nines were injured, the latter unconscious.
They couldn’t have put up much of a fight.
But no one, neither the Firstborn nor the loyalist knights, dared attack.
Even as they argued amongst themselves, paced, wept, and nursed their injuries, they all kept Neri in their sights. His will was all that mattered now. Should he decide it, not one of them would not leave this rooftop alive.
A Firstborn soldier approached Neri and Ysira, hands raised. “We surrender,” he said. “What are your terms?”
A dozen others clustered at his back, all motionless. They hardly dared to breathe.
Ysira surveyed them. Then she drew herself up, tall and proud, and spoke as befitting the mother of a god:
“Kneel.”
Most did not hesitate. Knights and Firstborn alike knelt amidst the carnage.
A few remained standing. One, a Firstborn woman, said sharply, “This freedom won’t last. You’ll all burn for this.”
“Maybe,” said Ysira. “But you won’t live to see it.” She advanced on the woman, ignited her ashek, and drove it through her chest. The blade sliced through her armor like it wasn’t there.
“Reckless,” said the Knight Captain. Seth recognized the man from his father’s old guard. “Reckless and stupid. I’ll never bow to the likes of you.”
Ysira paced toward him, wearing an expression hair-raisingly close to a smile. “Captain. You just watched the sky split open and swallow a piece of the moon, and now you speak in defiance of that very power. And you call me reckless?”
He lifted his chin, defiant. Ysira nodded once. She cut his throat. In silence, Neri watched the knight bleed out on the stone.
Ysira raised her voice, addressing the two knights who remained standing.
“You’ve seen the truth now, and soon, so will all Celes Lor.
You were nothing but tools for them”—she stabbed a finger at the Firstborn—“to use and discard. Even if you stood a chance against us, you could not contain this. The choice is yours. Will you side with your own people or with the parasites who enslaved you?” Her gaze swept across the platform—a challenge. “Choose now.”
The knights finally knelt. Other than Neri, only Ysira, Jacen, and Seth remained standing.
The Firstborn man who’d surrendered said, “We intend to cooperate.” His tone was difficult to parse behind his helmet, but Seth thought he detected a current of barely restrained terror. “This base’s resources are at your disposal, Lady—?” He hesitated.
“Var Naktis,” said Ysira. “You report to Commander Teheda now.” She pointed at the tattooed militiaman. “You will order your forces at Otavok to stand down, and then you will brief the commander in detail on every inch of this place and its capabilities.”
She paused as Teheda rose, clutching a badly broken arm to his chest. He lingered beside Nines.
“Take him, and the girl, to receive the finest medical care you can provide.” Ysira’s next words were an undisguised threat: “I’ll be checking in on them personally.”
The man bowed. “At once.”
Ysira watched him, black eyes unblinking, until he called his remaining forces into line and departed with them.
The knights followed—only after each kneeling before Neri and pledging their loyalty.
Jacen scrutinized them, probing for deception.
He appeared to find none and nodded to himself in satisfaction as the last of them disappeared below the obsidian floor.
Then he said, “Saraida.”
Despite palpable grief and exhaustion, she approached Jacen with an earnest expression. She awaited whatever he had to say as if she were a Candidate again, and he, her Knight Captain.
“Go with them.” Jacen gestured after the knights. “You can talk to them in a way I can’t, and we’ll need them to consolidate power.”
Saraida saluted with a fist over her heart. “Consider it done.”
On her way to the stairs, she stopped in front of Neri. She knelt again and murmured something that sounded very like “My lord.” She remained there until Neri touched her shoulder as if in blessing and motioned for her to stand.
When Saraida had left, Seth finally remembered how to speak. “What the fuck is going on?”
Ysira pointed at the Firstborn woman she had executed, who said their freedom wouldn’t last. “She had a point.” Her voice betrayed nothing but detached pragmatism. “We need to rally Zivora, and quickly. We have proof here that the Firstborn are only people and they can be killed.”
“Right,” Seth said, with a forced nod. There would be riots in Zivora. Everyone would have seen those impossible celestial events and felt the ripple that shook the world. “Someone needs to tell them what—what happened.”
“They’ll want answers.” Ysira appeared to agree with him. “We have to make sure we’re the ones to provide them. It’ll be chaos, especially after the Cathedral, but we can take advantage—”
“What happened to the Cathedral?”
Ysira looked at Jacen. It took him too long to answer. “It’s gone.” “Gone,” Seth repeated, aghast. “Jacen. What did you do?”
“Ogden had been planting explosives for decades,” Jacen said tonelessly.
“A contingency plan. I used it. Akkani gave me no choice.” Seth recalled the way the tunnel had collapsed behind them as they fled Zivora.
He imagined that on the scale of the White Cathedral—imagined the collateral damage such a disaster must have left—and felt suddenly nauseous.
He thought of the terrified, desperate masses he’d left behind in the Citadel after he himself had spread the word the Church would protect them. His knees went weak.
Jacen averted his eyes. Seth knew he was engaged in that habit he had of arguing with himself until he was sufficiently intellectually convinced of whatever he’d wanted to believe in the first place. Whatever doubt Jacen struggled with vanished, replaced once more by inhuman conviction.
“The Church won’t be an obstacle,” Jacen said. “Not anymore. Now we can rebuild from the ground up, combine what remains with the Disciples of the Gate. We get enough of the Guard on our side, seize control, implement a new power structure quickly, and then we can crown a new High Lord.”
All Seth managed to say, inanely, was “I never wanted that.”
“Not you,” Ysira said. “It has to be Neri.” She and Jacen exchanged a look, one of startling intensity, as though they were of one mind. Neri himself remained quiet, staring out across the canyon.
“There will be violence,” Jacen said gently to Seth. “But when the Firstborn Empire comes for us, we must be united. There is no better way than faith.”
He would know, wouldn’t he? Faith. Of course. There was an older god in this desert, one whom many Zivorans still prayed to. And they had ample precedent. What, if not faith, had held this city in thrall to the Harvest for the last five centuries?
Ysira knelt beside Ged’s body. Seth had been trying not to look, pretending he couldn’t see it in his peripheral vision. Now he had no choice. Ysira dislodged her obsidian dagger from between his ribs, its blade slick with clotting blood.
For a fleeting second, perhaps a transient insanity, Seth glimpsed the future—this moment in effigy, a thousand years from now.
Her face eclipsing the sun, red light at her back as she held the dagger, contemplating as it dripped with his brother’s blood.
She drew a finger along the blade and painted the sacred symbols of rulership on Neri’s forehead. Anointing him.