The Hemlock Queen, page 28
“We aren’t giving up.” Malcolm frowned down at the book in his hands as if it might help him find the words. “There might be a different solution. I still think we should look at the prophecy.”
His eyes darted toward Gabe, gauging his reaction.
Alie leaned forward in her seat, her eyes intent on the Priest Exalted as if this was a continuation of a larger argument, one she’d been waiting to start again. “Yes. We should.”
“That document is sealed,” Gabe said to the desk. “Ritualistically sealed. The only prophecies with that level of security are ones that could have dire consequences if read by anyone other than the prophet.”
“That has happened exactly once,” Malcolm rebutted.
“And that once got us the Night Witch,” Gabe replied.
“I thought it was a Tract that made her go mad,” Lore said quietly. “She misinterpreted a Tract, isn’t that what you told me?”
Gabe shifted uncomfortably in his seat, the first sign of real emotion he’d shown. “That’s what happened, in the simplest terms. She read a prophecy, that prophecy referenced a Tract.”
It shouldn’t surprise her by now, but the way the Church twisted itself into knots of apologetics was enough to do her head in.
“I mean,” Lore said, huffing out something that was decidedly not a laugh, “it sounds like maybe she wasn’t that far off, if you think I’m supposed to be Nyxara’s vessel now. Was she just the first one Nyxara tried?”
It was daylight, so the goddess in Lore’s head couldn’t make a real reply. But there was a dark flutter at the back of her mind, like the ghost of a nod. Nyxara hadn’t wanted her to tell anyone that She’d taken up residence in Lore’s mind, but it seemed She was resigned to it now.
“We were only taught to prepare for Apollius’s return,” Malcolm said. “Not all of them.”
And that dragged in a realization that should’ve been obvious, one that made Lore’s stomach pit. “This is what you wanted,” she murmured, speaking to all of them but looking at Gabe. “Isn’t it the whole point? Paving the way for His return?” Lore put out a hand on the desk to keep herself steady. It made her fingers come very close to Gabe’s arm, and she saw him flinch. “This is what every Priest Exalted has been waiting for since the fucking Godsfall. All of you must be thrilled.”
“No.” It came harsh, punctuated by Gabe’s hands slamming against the desk, making her jump back. “No, we are not, Lore.”
She shook her head, another one of those mad not-laughs clawing out of her. “You’ve been devoted to Apollius since you were a kid, Gabe, forgive me if I don’t believe that you aren’t jumping for joy at the confirmation that you were right—”
“We weren’t.” He’d schooled his voice even again, but he rose from behind the desk like something avenging, looming over her with lightning crackling in his one blue eye. “We weren’t right. Apollius was supposed to return from the Shining Realm and bring paradise to the earth, restore it to a place of peace for His faithful. Not… not live in the head of an Arceneaux asshole and play power games!”
The hard-won evenness eroded as he spoke, and by the end, he was nearly shouting.
A moment, then Gabe drew in a ragged breath, ran a shaky hand over his disheveled hair. It’d grown out more than he usually let it. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be,” he said finally, and he sounded so… so wounded, like this was a personal failing, a personal slight.
“If you haven’t noticed,” Alie said drily, “none of us exactly believe the Church’s teachings as written anymore. At least, not the way they’re presented in the modern Compendium.”
Gabe frowned.
“Some of us have taken it harder than others,” Alie murmured.
Lore’s anger alchemized to something harder to name, guilt and shame and something almost, maybe, hopeful.
“So what do we do?” Lore asked quietly.
“The gods were all human once.” Malcolm put the book back down on the desk, satisfied that Lore hadn’t hurt it. He took off his gloves with small, meticulous movements, making a show of not looking at Gabe. “There has to be a way to… not stop Them completely, maybe, but put Them off somehow.”
“And the way is probably in that prophecy,” Alie finished. Where Malcolm refused to look at Gabe, that was all she did, her dark-green eyes fixed on the slumped, dejected figure of the Priest Exalted like she could haul him up through will alone.
“The story of the Fount said there have to be vessels for Its power.” Malcolm’s voice put capitalization on the pronoun, just like the book had. “I don’t think we can change that. But we can delay it, maybe, lure Apollius and Nyxara back into dormancy until more… appropriate vessels can be found. Now is not the best time for physical manifestations of the gods to suddenly reappear. And They clearly aren’t at Their best if They’re choosing you lot.”
Gabe knuckled at his exposed eye. “Will that exacerbate the issues with the crops? The weather?”
“Maybe the opposite, actually,” Malcolm said. “If you look back at the records, none of those things started until Bastian was born.”
That put a funny hitch in Lore’s middle. Bastian was older than her, though only by a month or so. She’d never lived in a world he hadn’t touched. All of them were of an age, here in this room, and the changes in climate and landscape had always been a volatile thing, starting subtly, getting worse in such small increments that she hadn’t known to be wary of it until she was told.
And there was what Apollius had said as they rode back from Courdigne. About Gabe being just as much a part of this as she was. About the others.
There were four more gods other than Apollius and Nyxara. Four more gods, and three more people in this room.
But surely, if things had gotten that far—if her friends had gods in their heads, too—they would have said something? Maybe they could stop this before it got to that point.
With a sigh, Gabe leaned back in his chair. When he spoke, it was quiet. “Fine. We can look.”
Neither Alie nor Malcolm seemed to know what to make of his sudden capitulation, after what Lore suspected was weeks on weeks of resistance. For a moment, they were still, then Malcolm all but jumped toward the door. Gabe followed reluctantly. Lore fell in next to Alie, bringing up the back of their small crowd.
She still had something to tell her. Something she probably should’ve said before they entered Gabe’s study, but she’d been distracted.
Gabe and Malcolm gained a longer lead as they made their way to the staircase again, to that unsettling statue of Apollius. Lore hung back on purpose, and Alie followed suit.
Much like telling them she had a goddess in her head, she didn’t know how to finesse the news that Bastian had killed Alie’s father. Well, not-father. And not-Bastian. So she just said it.
“Alie,” Lore said quietly. “There’s one more thing.”
The other woman arched a brow.
“Before we left, Bastian—Apollius, really, He’d fully taken over—He killed Bellegarde.”
Silence. The only sign Alie had heard her at all was the widening of her eyes, gone glassy in the afternoon light.
“Is he still there?” Alie asked, her voice barely sound. “In Courdigne?”
Lore nodded.
“Good,” Alie snarled. “Let him rot.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
When does religion cross from faith into governance? Where is the line between what a god says, and what a priest claims They say?
—From the writings of Moira Killory, Caldienan
scholar. Fled to Ratharc when orders for
her arrest came from the Auverrani Priest Exalted, 150 AGF.
The ritualistically sealed prophecies were kept in secure rooms below the Church. That sounded a little too close to the catacombs for comfort, but Lore had a dearth of choices at this point, and none of those she did have were pleasant.
It was a long walk, winding through wooden corridors and more now-defunct confessional rooms, a small hallway lined in extra Apollius icons whose marble had gone dingy. Then the halls narrowed, their path taking them from the wider expanse of the Church that housed the South Sanctuary into the thinner part of the building that held storage and cloisters. Every few feet, they passed an empty room with nothing but a bed made up in white linens.
They spooked her a little, these empty cloisters. But the walk gave her time to think. A small detail from the mythology text stuck in her mind, and after turning it over in her own thoughts as much as she could, Lore picked up her pace to come level with Malcolm.
“In the book,” Lore started, “the pronoun for the Fount was capitalized. And It spoke. Neither of those things are typical for normal fountains, in my experience.”
Malcolm shot her a smile, the one that said she’d tripped upon some obscure theology question he was simply thrilled to explain. “It isn’t typical, no. There’s not much documentation about the state of religion before the rise of the pantheon, just a few murals painted in Myrosh and some extremely old texts kept in the archival libraries in Caldien, but the leading theory is that the Fount was actually considered a god Itself.”
Lore could barely conceive of a time before the pantheon. Everything she’d ever known centered on Apollius and Nyxara and the elemental gods. “You mean they worshipped a fountain on an island? Everyone did?”
“Not worshipped, per se.” Malcolm waved his hand in the air, as if balancing an invisible scale. “Revered may be the better verb. The Fount wasn’t a person, not at any time, and It wasn’t anthropomorphized. As best scholars can tell, the Fount was considered the source of the earth.”
Her brow furrowed. “The source of what of the earth?”
“Of the earth.” He grinned. “All the powers that made up the entire world, the… the world’s soul, I guess would be the easiest way to put it. The Fount was the soul of everything. It didn’t require worship or tending or prayer. It just existed.”
“Until Apollius found It.”
“Until Apollius found It, and opened It, and spoke to It.” Malcolm shrugged. “And wrecked It, apparently.”
All godhood passes in selfishness and desperation. It didn’t paint a rosy picture of divinity.
“But was He looking for it? Did He just wash up on the shore of the Golden Mount and stumble upon the world’s soul?” Lore barked a laugh that had nothing to do with humor. “That seems far too convenient to be a coincidence.”
“Who knows? Maybe He was looking for It. Maybe He just got lucky.”
Lore fell silent, but the open questions didn’t sit right with her. She couldn’t believe that Apollius—human Apollius, who surely wasn’t that different in personality from the god He became—had simply happened upon something as ancient and powerful as the Fount.
The myth said He’d asked It the question that had long pulled at His heart. And seemingly hadn’t liked the answer. Surely, He’d been seeking the Fount, thinking It could tell Him something.
Lore shook her head. “If the Fount held the world’s soul—for lack of a better term—and Apollius and the others took Its power, then does that mean They’re the soul of the earth, now?” She didn’t like that prospect, though the world hadn’t necessarily made a good case for itself as being something with an immaculate soul.
Malcolm shrugged again. “I don’t think that’s the kind of question one can answer easily. Like I said, the Fount isn’t the earth’s literal soul—as much as such a thing can be called literal—It’s just the concentrated essence, a place of great power.” A scoff. “You know, assuming It actually exists at all. But as for the question of the world’s soul…” He trailed off, frowned. “I feel like that can’t be determined by one person. Or even a group of people, even powerful ones. The world belongs to more than the powerful. Its soul has to be something we all have a say in, right?”
Lore didn’t have an answer.
She and Malcolm had kept their voices pitched low, not because they didn’t want to be overheard, but just because the atmosphere of these deep places in the Church seemed to call for quiet. Alie kept a few feet behind them, listening but not feeling the need to add to the conversation. Gabe was yards ahead, his back straight, his arms swinging by his sides, like someone marching into a battle instead of a storage room.
Her teeth worried at the inside of her cheek as she watched him. Gabe, who just wanted to be right. Gabe, who just wanted to be good.
How did a man like that cope when both of those things became too complicated to grasp, too ephemeral to hold on to? When the paradigm shifted so far it was nearly unrecognizable, the god you served becoming the evil you guarded against?
She loved him, too. Like with Bastian, it was an obvious thing to admit, once she let herself. The love here was more complicated, tangled up in knots from his betrayal the night of the ritual. But Lore was starting to wonder if she was even capable of feeling love simply. Who she was—what she was becoming—didn’t leave much room for simple.
And should she tell him? That was another thing. She was engaged to Bastian, and even if she couldn’t necessarily see a wedding going forward while they were dealing with all this god mess, surely it wasn’t fair to either of them for her to admit that she loved them both. That she could never make a choice that excluded one or the other.
Eventually, the cloister hallway ended at a small door, another staircase behind it. This one was stone, and already underground. The cold was enough to raise goose bumps on Lore’s arms despite the heat outside. Eventually, the sconces on the walls went dark, and Gabe had to stop and cobble together a torch from some supplies lying by the wall. It lit with barely a touch to the flame.
The supplies pile itself looked old when Lore passed it, the cloths mildewed enough that she was surprised they’d caught at all. Clearly, it’d been a while since anyone came down here.
Right as her thighs were beginning to severely protest the seemingly endless stairs—not the best idea right after the long ride from Courdigne to Dellaire—the corridor leveled, stairs becoming a long, cold hallway, lined in small doors. The walls were damp, and though the flame of Gabe’s torch was steady, its light didn’t do much to illuminate the shadows. Instinctually, they all crept closer to one another, huddling around the yellow glow like children afraid of the dark.
“Well,” Malcolm said, looking to Gabe, “you’re the Priest Exalted, surely you know where the prophecies are kept.”
“I have a vague idea,” Gabe grumbled, his one eye scanning the hall as he moved slowly forward. Malcolm, Alie, and Lore clustered around him; Gabe gave them all a withering look, but didn’t comment, his attention focused elsewhere.
There were no doors in the stone walls. Instead, numbers, but not set out in order, just a senseless chaos. Gabe glanced at Lore over his shoulder, face stern. “When we find the right room, you’ll have to open it. Some of these locks can be opened just by using the Mortem in the stone, but some need more, and I assume Anton’s prophecy will have more security than the rest.”
Right. Because Lore had all the Mortem that once leaked from the catacombs.
“That’s taken some getting used to,” Malcolm said, in a falsely bright tone that hid what he actually thought about it. “I barely know what to do with all my newfound free time.”
“Apparently, you’ve been reading obscure theology,” Gabe grumbled.
“To be fair, I was doing that before. There was supposed to be a minor lunar eclipse tonight, actually. Just think, if Lore hadn’t gone wild that day on the docks, I’d be preparing instead of trekking down into the bowels of the Church with you three.”
Gabe grumbled.
Bringing up the rear of the party, Alie was still quiet, her delicate features composed in an unreadable mask. Lore kept shooting her covert glances, in case the righteous anger she’d displayed when Lore told her about Bellegarde had somehow collapsed into grief, but the other woman’s face gave no clue to what was going on in her head.
Alie was Bastian’s half sister. Lore didn’t plan to tell anyone—it wasn’t hers to tell—but dread chewed up her middle when she thought about what that kind of information might do. What it might mean.
Alie was an Arceneaux heir, another one of Apollius’s chosen line. Did He know? What would He do about it?
What would Kirythea do, if they found out?
Finally, Gabe stopped his seemingly endless trek down the dark, damp hallway, the light of the torch wavering over the number-marked blocks of stone. Lore squinted to see the number they’d arrived at: 918.
The number didn’t have any special significance to her, but when she looked at Malcolm, his eyes were wide. “Tract Nine Hundred Eighteen,” he murmured. “Only the Fount is eternal.”
Lore frowned. “I’ve never heard that one.”
“You wouldn’t have.” Gabe didn’t take his attention from the stone, as if his eye were a hammer that could break the stone room open. “It was never officially in the Compendium. One of the first priests brought a letter from Apollius back from the Mount with that line in it. The letters were included in the first few drafts of the Compendium, but they were taken out later.”
“Looks like I’m not the only one reading obscure theology,” Malcolm muttered.
“So the prophecies down here are organized by… what? The Tract most relevant to the content?” Lore took a small step closer to the wall. Mortem was thick in the air around them, all but humming through the stone, making her palms itch and her heartbeat slow.
“Not exactly.” Gabe sighed. “They’re organized by the Tract that the prophet was meditating on when they had the vision.”
“Of course Anton was meditating on stricken Tracts that no one can access but Church officials,” Lore grumbled. “Why wouldn’t he be?”
Malcolm gestured to Lore, then to the door. “Neither Gabe nor I can sense enough Mortem to undo the lock. All you, Sainted Queen.”
“I will give you whatever jewel strikes your fancy from the treasury if you promise never to call me that again.” Lore said it like a joke, but they all knew it wasn’t.
