Chapter Sixteen #2
Then, something shimmers in my vision. I blink, thinking boredom is playing tricks on me, but it remains: the faintest of glows in a building up ahead.
I reach out, brushing my fingers lightly over Nolan’s arm to get his attention, then point.
Moving in unison, we abandon our hiding spot, slipping through the shadows as we approach the light.
It’s low enough that a pair of normal eyes would have trouble discerning it—nothing more than a diffuse glow around a shaded window, on the second floor of a pitted stone building.
So, we’re not the only living things in Novena after all.
Nolan begins to move, but I grab him.
Footsteps.
They’re faint, so faint that it’s half instinct that alerted me, but as soon as I signal, Nolan indicates he hears them as well. We duck behind a crumbled wall.
Several minutes pass before their source comes into view: three figures, cloaked in black. They appear out of an alley and approach a spot in the lighted building. The wall there is partially obstructed by ruins, but as we watch, they disappear into it.
Nolan draws a rectangle in the air with one finger. There must be a door.
I nod. We wait a bit longer before heading toward the debris.
Even up close, nothing about it seems suspect, but after a bit of searching we find what we are looking for: a gap that leads to the remains of a doorway.
Nolan slips through, with me on his heels.
As soon as we are inside, I draw my sickles.
The room is dark and empty, save for the decayed remains of a table in one corner.
But there’s a stairway. Nolan takes the lead, sword drawn.
The light grows stronger, and I no longer doubt Magda.
Something clandestine is most definitely happening here tonight.
At the top of the stairs we find a short hallway filled with doors. Most are gone, rotted away, but there is one at the very end, around which a thin line of light escapes. Nolan and I slink to it. Voices sound from within, and I hear the faint notes of gathered bodies shifting around.
“—came as quickly as we could.” A male’s voice. Young, from the sound of it. “There was no time to make inquiries. And it would have been too dangerous anyway.”
“She’s dead.” A woman’s voice breaks in, sharp and angry. “She must be. They didn’t burn her in front of the city, but she must be dead.”
They’re talking about Magda.
Heretics in Belspire. It’s a lucky thing we didn’t encounter them on the road; they must have left the city around the same time we did.
“Maybe she died during their questioning,” says a third person, gender indeterminate.
“It doesn’t matter,” a deep masculine voice cuts in. “She didn’t know anything useful.”
Wrong. A flicker of annoyance runs through me. These are the people who came so close to killing the Goddess, who can’t even keep their own secrets tight enough to protect themselves? They should do themselves a favor and hand me the reliquary right now.
“It doesn’t mean they won’t be hunting us still.” The woman is starting to sound like the cleverest of the bunch. The murmurs that follow seem to agree. “This has all gone to shit… If they got even an inkling of anything out of her—”
“I know,” says the man with the deeper voice. “But the Goddess hides. They’ve barely been seen since the attack. The Priors claim mourning, but our spies in Lumeris are convinced they are afraid. The attack might have failed, but—”
“It was a foolish plan!” someone spits. “We should have gone with—”
“Emmaus sacrificed himself to get that close,” the woman interjects. “He knew it needed to be witnessed to be believed, not happen behind closed doors!”
“But what if they remain hidden away? If there’s no opportunity to strike again? This will have all been pointless.”
Strike again. Nolan and I lock gazes. That confirms it.
They didn’t exhaust the reliquary’s supply of blood.
It’s clear these heretics outrank Magda, but I don’t get the impression they’re pulling all the strings either.
Which means the chances of the reliquary being here are slim to none.
By the pensive set of Nolan’s features, I sense he realizes that too.
“We were told there was a chance of failure.” The young man speaks again, his counsel calm, measured. “And that if it did, to have patience. We will find another chance, or make one. The thing that there is always more of is time.”
“Not for Magda or Emmaus,” say a new voice, low, but tart.
“This wasn’t only about the Goddess,” adds the woman. “We should have been picking off the Chosen by now; my crew and I were promised—”
“Enough,” says the deep-voiced man. “The pieces we need to be in position are still in position. We can still kill the Goddess.”
“I knew you should have brought more in the first place,” grumbles the woman. “It wasn’t enough. I knew it wouldn’t be enough.”
Nolan and I both go even more still than before. There it is. She might as well have said We should have brought the whole bottle of dead god’s blood to the party.
“And where would Emmaus have hidden it?” The young man doesn’t seem the least bit thrown by failure, which makes me wonder what he knows that Nolan and I don’t.
“It doesn’t matter now.” The other man again. “I will head to Carsaire at daylight. The rest of you lie low and spread the word about what’s happened. I’ll contact you when I return.”
The conversation turns to useless things. Food. Sleep. Nothing more about conspiracy. By wordless agreement, Nolan and I creep back out of the building and into the ruined city.
“Carsaire,” he says when we’re far enough away. “We’ll get the horses, keep watch. Follow whichever heretic heads in that direction.”
I nod. “What about the rest of them?”
“Nothing,” he says. “If they don’t continue on their way, it will cause alarm.”
Now that we no longer need to search, we move faster through the city, taking the most direct route back to where we’ve hidden the horses.
It leads us close to the pit. Some of the roots here are large enough to walk like paths, which we do, to avoid the worst of the rubble.
As we pass a gap in the ruins that opens right to the side of the pit, Nolan slows, then changes direction, heading to it.
“What are you doing?” I say.
“Aren’t you curious?” He moves almost to the very edge and leans over in a way that makes my stomach twist. “Not all of us have gotten to see the aftermath of a god’s death up close.”
“Fair enough, but I didn’t figure you for a tourist.” Carefully, I make my way over until I am standing beside him.
The chasm stretches before us. “No wonder Tempestra had to take a new avatar,” I whisper.
“Imagine the sort of power expended to make a mess like this. It’s amazing they even survived. ”
“The Goddess is strong.” Nolan keeps an eye on the ruins. “So was Enoch, by all reports. A well-chosen avatar.”
Was that the difference in the end? Was the battle at Novena less about Tempestra and Arcadius than it was about Enoch and Viktori?
And what does that say about Innara, and the damage she’s taken?
It’s the sort of question I’ll probably never know the answer to, the sort of topic that would border on blasphemy to bring up.
I wish I’d had more time to spend in Belspire’s library.
Chosen or not, there are a lot of gaps in my knowledge about the finer points of both living gods and dead.
“How deep do you think it is?” Nolan continues. “Some scholars say it goes forever.”
“Do you believe that?”
“No. But like you said, it’s hard to fathom the power of the gods.”
Here, so close to the pit, it seems even quieter than before, as if the cavity is swallowing what few night sounds there are. The darkness of the void is mesmerizing. “It’s almost hard to blame them.”
“Who?”
“The heretics. Seeing something like this, the other sepulchrae… believing that it means that the dead gods are still here, somewhere.”
“They’re not,” says Nolan. “There is only one goddess now. And the only thing that matters is returning the reliquary to them, and what that will bring.”
The shift in his voice makes me look up, and when I do, I am staring at someone I don’t know. Nolan’s eyes have turned hard. Ruthless.
And I have only the barest sliver of time to understand how well and truly I have been played before he shoves me into the pit.