Ascendant's Rite (The Moontide Quartet) (4 page)

‘My family is from Baranasi,’ Ramita declared.

‘I knew you were an Aruna Nagar girl!’ Corinea smiled faintly. ‘I can hear it in your voice, and see it in the way you wrap your sari. I know Baranasi well. It’s my favourite place in Lakh.’

Alaron wasn’t pleased to see Ramita beam at the compliment.
The Big Question
was hanging in the air, and he could no longer leave it unasked.

‘Lady,’ he said gruffly, ‘I must ask: why did you
murder
Corineus?’ The word wiped the smile from the lips of both women.

Corinea’s face became reflective. ‘I will tell you,’ she said softly. ‘You know what Sertain said about me, but you’ve never before heard the
truth.
So listen, and withhold your judgement until afterwards.’

Alaron nodded cautiously, wishing these monks distilled some kind of liquor, because he could see he was going to need a strong slug of something any minute now.

‘I was born Lillea Selene Sorades,’ Corinea began. ‘I come from a small town in Estellayne, but my mother was Argundian.’

‘So you weren’t Johan Corin’s sister?’ Alaron interrupted. The
Book of Kore
said she was.

‘Not I! If he had been my brother, he couldn’t have been my lover, could he? We’re not Sydians! No, no, my Argundian mother married my Estellan father during a period of peace, then they had to flee when war came again and we settled in West Bricia. That’s where I first heard Johan speak. I was sixteen and betrothed to a Brician farmer who was fifteen years older than me and poor as the dirt he tilled. Johan and his band of forty followers, as it was then, came to our little village a month before my nuptials.’ Her voice softened and her eyes half-closed. ‘It was summertime, hot and humid, and the air was filled with bees and buzzing insects, the fragrance of flowers and ripe fruit and crushed berries, and passion.

‘Johan’s friends were mostly young men who’d run away from their homes because there was no future except soldiering or farming if they stayed. They were mostly from well-off families with too many heirs, and they were all well-educated – they read poetry aloud and debated ethics and morality and slept with anyone who smiled at them – they had a retinue of young women who were wild and free in a way that I had never even dreamed of. I would creep out to hear Johan speak – he used to stand on the edge of the village well and preach that freedom was our birthright! His friends filled the local pub, drinking the beer and dancing and flirting with the prettiest of the local girls. My fiancé was one of the village men who took cudgels to them, and that made me feel sorry for them, so I ran away and joined them.’

Alaron frowned. The
Book of Kore
spoke of young men filled with holy zeal, preaching in the name of Kore, not a drunken mob of lechers staggering from town to town.

Corinea preened. ‘I was young then, and very pretty, with a dewy dark complexion, different to the milkmaid-white girls who’d been following Johan around. I caught his eye and he took to dancing with me, and then he taught me how to dance beneath the blankets.’ She sighed softly. ‘It was a magical time. I was infatuated with everything he did and said – I loved this word “freedom”, to say and do what you liked, without priests or nobles telling you not to. To marry who you chose, and not the person your parents picked. And most of all, to be able to do everything a man was permitted . . . oh, we were all besotted with freedom, and we wanted all the world to be like us. We wanted to remake the empire with love.’ She laughed softly. ‘Oh, stupid, foolish youth.’

‘Was my husband there?’ Ramita asked.

‘Antonin? He joined us in Lantris. He was very intelligent, with the most piercing eyes and a really earnest manner. He was a sweetie.’ She fixed Ramita with a knowing smile. ‘I remember making love with him on starry nights, when Johan had taken another girl to bed.’

Alaron was shocked at this casual promiscuity among those who would become the moral guardians of the empire. He presumed Ramita’s discomfort was more personal, even though it was hundreds of years before she even met Meiros, let alone married him.

‘I had most of his inner circle,’ Corinea went on, careless of their disapproval, ‘because that’s what freedom meant to me: doing what I liked with whomever I liked. Half the girls got pregnant, with no idea at all who’d fathered their children. I was marginally more sensible: I took precautions, even though Johan wanted me to bear his child. In those days I went by Selene, my Argundian middle name, because Estellayne was in revolt against the Rimoni. By the time we reached southern Rondelmar, there were more than a thousand of us, including some nobles like Baramitius and Sertain – I didn’t like them; I was sure they were there for the wrong reasons. They were ambitious, for a start, and Baramitius kept coming up with increasingly new and unpredictable drugs. But Johan was close to them – he liked to sleep with women, but it was to the men that he really talked.’ She paused, regret on her face. ‘We should have talked more, he and I.’

‘Then what happened?’ Alaron asked, caught up in the story despite himself.

‘As we travelled north, Johan became more and more outrageous – he’d already started calling himself Corineus, and though we looked nothing alike he called me Corinea and told people I was his sister and lover – just to shock them! But as we became more extreme, some of our own followers started leaving, and there were huge arguments. Meiros and his friends tried to get Johan to tone things down, lest the authorities turn on us, but that just made Johan act up even more. And Baramitius was becoming completely obsessed with his alchemy – he started boasting that he was on the verge of distilling a potion that would grant eternal life – it was an old myth of the Kore.’

Ramita frowned. ‘But is not your Corineus the same god as this Kore?’

Corinea laughed in amusement. ‘Good Heavens, no! Kore was a Rondian god, had been since time immemorial. Remember, this was the time of the Rimoni Empire, and Rondelmar was just a province. People spoke Rimoni as well as their native tongues, and the only gods who could be worshipped openly were Sol and Luna, the Sun and Moon of the Sollan faith. Kore’s worshippers had been driven underground.

‘Then Baramitius told Johan that he’d found the key, and by then his drugs had us all enthralled – we might have thought his ravings about eternal life were just symptoms of his insanity, but we were addicted, physically and mentally, to his potions and powders. He spent days measuring us and writing all these notes, as if researching every part of us, then he produced this special potion, with each measure tailored to the individual recipient. We were warned that it was potent, and that we would be sent into a dream-state for some hours.’

Alaron struggled to reconcile this account with the words of the
Book of Kore
, which told of a night of solemn purpose and destiny. He might be a sceptic, but questioning something he’d grown up half-believing in was hard.

‘We’d heard whispers that a legion was coming to arrest us,’ Corinea went on. ‘Baramitius wasn’t the only one of us to sense that our untrammelled freedom – and for him, the opportunities to experiment freely – were ending, but it drove him to take risks. Even so, that potion – the one now called “ambrosia” – well, it exceeded his wildest dreams. We all fell into a dream-state, which he’d told us to expect, and I remember my senses intensifying. I was sure I was dying – my body was wracked with shooting pains; I’ve never forgotten, even through all these years – but strangely I wasn’t afraid. My mind began to open up, and just went on opening. I felt like I was passing through room after room in a bewildering palace filled with glowing people and treasures, lights and scents and beautiful textures, laughter and crying, sweetness and fulfilment. I felt connected to everything and everyone, as if we were climbing toward a transcendent bliss, as if Paradise were seeping into our world and changing it for ever.

‘And most of all, I felt close to Johan. We were wearing nothing but white shifts and flowers, passed out on blankets with our food and wine spilled everywhere. Our hands were joined, and our every thought was shared, an intimacy that grew in intensity with every passing second. I felt like we were as one: the most profound communion I have ever experienced. Then the visions began.’

Corinea took a sip of water to calm herself. Her voice, which had started to become impassioned, even feverish, softened again. ‘I know now that the ambrosia was taking our bodies to the threshold of death while freeing our souls – normally the soul is confined until death, but the ambrosia allowed those who survived to access powers we now call the gnosis, the Secret Knowledge. Most of us gained simple things, like the ability to manipulate water or fire, but the more intellectual among us gained more complex powers. Johan was a visionary, of course, and in some ways so was I; with our minds entwined, we both dreamed of what was to come, a world in which the gnosis ruled . . .

‘Then Johan tried to kill me.’

Her final sentence was like being doused suddenly in iced water. Alaron clutched Ramita’s hand and they both squeezed.

‘In the vision Johan and I shared,’ Corinea continued, ‘I became a Seeress, and the future I saw was without him – because he, like so many in our group, was not destined to fully gain the gnosis. His body partially rejected the ambrosia, so he would only become a Souldrinker . . .’

Alaron swallowed. This was the greatest heresy he’d ever heard: an inconceivable renunciation of all that the post-Corineus Church taught. In the
Book of Kore
– which had of course been revised by Baramitius! – Corineus was the Saviour, the one who sacrificed himself to gain the gnosis for his brethren. Corineus a Souldrinker?

Surely
not!

‘Our minds were linked,’ Corinea repeated in a hushed voice, as if she could hardly bring herself to say the words out loud, ‘and of course he saw what I’d foreseen, a future in which I was empress, blessed with a gnosis that he could only gain by killing. He saw himself demonised, alongside all those similarly tainted, and at first all I felt was his panic, and my own horror – because I truly loved him; I worshipped him beyond life itself, and I couldn’t bear what we both foresaw.

‘Then his mind seized on other potential futures in which he would kill me and trigger his own powers that very night, then show those others who were afflicted as he was to do the same, by killing their neighbour and draining their souls – so they would be the only ones to survive that night: there would be an Ascendancy, yes: an Ascendancy of Souldrinkers, led by Corineus, for no one else with these new powers would last until the dawn.

‘With that plan in mind, he took up his hunting knife and tried to kill me . . .’

‘What did you do?’ Alaron asked in a husky voice.

‘I fought back – I might have been in love, but my mother was Estellan and I knew how to use a knife. In the time it takes to tell you this, I had caught his wrist, twisted it and jammed the blade backwards, even as his other hand found my throat. As his weight settled on me, he fell onto the blade and it slid between his ribs and into his heart. By the time I rolled him off me, he was dead, but others were waking and some had seen what had happened – or at least, what they
thought
had happened. Baramitius was the first to have awakened and he started shouting that I had murdered Johan, so I ran.’ She looked sad. ‘I might have killed others, one or two who tried to stop me, but even now the rest of that night remains a blur. And I’ve never really stopped running.’

Alaron tried to take it all in: Corineus, the messianic figure of the Church of Kore, doomed to be a Souldrinker emperor, prevented from reigning only by his lover . . . ‘Why didn’t you tell them?’

‘Tell them what?’ Corinea asked sharply. ‘How could I have proven anything? And why would they listen? Corineus was our leader, and beloved by all, not just me. My crime was unforgivable. Anyway, I wasn’t thinking rationally! I wanted –
I needed
– to flee that terrible place. I’d just killed the man I loved and idolised! By fleeing, I proved my guilt.’

Alaron stared at her.
Holy Kore, is anything I’ve been taught true?
‘What happened next?’

‘I escaped,’ Corinea said, ‘because people were only just coming round and there was a lot of confusion. By the time the legion attacked at dawn and the magi awoke to their new powers and destroyed them, I was long gone. Afterwards, the leadership had other concerns, like conquering Yuros. Baramitius revised the
Book of Kore
as a rallying point against the Rimoni emperor, casting Johan as the Son of Kore and me as a tool of the Lord of Hel, and I have been reviled ever since.’

‘If this is true . . .’ Alaron began to say, then stopped. This
was
true. Not a word of it struck him as anything less than gospel – not a holy gospel of the Kore, but truth nevertheless. He floundered at the enormity of it all.

‘It’s true, every word,’ she replied, as if reading his mind. ‘I once convinced a Kore priest in Verelon, but that got him burned as a heretic and I barely escaped. I tried to tell Antonin Meiros, but he had loved Johan as deeply as the rest of us and wouldn’t receive me. At the time he was hunting a Dokken Seeress called Sabele, and I think he believed Sabele was my tool. I had to flee again. That’s when I went into Lakh.’

Ramita looked at Alaron, her expression way beyond confused. ‘Why do you think we can help you?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know that you can,’ Corinea replied, ‘but you’re my last chance. You see, I’m dying: my body is deteriorating in ways too complex for me to heal. Time is finally defeating me. I don’t wish to have my candle blown out without one final effort to tell my tale. I was travelling north after hearing of Antonin Meiros’ death, to see if those who succeeded him might heed me – then I heard Ramita’s prayers, her mind speaking aloud of all you’ve been through, and I learned that she was married to Antonin Meiros, that she has borne his children and lost one, that you’ve both held the Scytale of Corineus, the one treasure so valuable that I could use it to bargain with. I have seen the way you treat each other, that you are good-hearted people, and so I’m hoping you will help me.’