The Demigod Proving (10 page)

After sliding the blade into the scabbard, he donned his bracers. He’d made them himself. All demigods made their own bracers, and therefore all were slightly different.

His bracers curved at the wrist, so a good portion of the bottom his wrist lay exposed, but the top remained covered. At the elbow, they extended to a point. He’d stitched on ornamental lengths of leather with red thread, and had sewn on little metal loops to help with the lacing. As did all Novitiates, he used red lace to tie it, a reminder that although the bracers were white, and he was a Novitiate, someday he would become a Caretaker, and later the Master would spill his blood for the good of the people.

As a child, one of the first things he’d learned was to lace and tie the bracers with one hand. He could remember seeing the older children with the bracers and being jealous of them, wishing that like them he could wear the symbol of his dedication to the Master. Now, he looked forward to the day when he could fashion red bracers.

But if he became god, would he still wear bracers?

He examined himself in a metal mirror on his nightstand, and remembered Rashel’s admonition regarding his hair. If he was going to be proven, he might as well heed her advice.

As he did so, he heard the door to his house open. Footsteps as someone came in. Then the door clicked shut.

“About done,” he said, assuming Teirn had gotten impatient.

No one responded, but he poured some water from the pitcher into the basin, wet his hand, and rubbed the hair on the back of his head. As he leaned over to pick up the comb, he heard footsteps behind him.

Pain blossomed in his head, and everything went dark.

Chapter 10: Confession

The first time I saw a soul, I understood that our bodies are not who we are. They are merely husks that hide our true identities.

-Athanaric

Athanaric stood over the broken body of a Caretaker, Ricken, considering the names of the cultists this son had given him. He simply couldn’t trust the list—for his own sake, and for Teirn’s and Wrend’s.

A candle sat at the foot of the table between Ricken’s feet. Its steady orange glow cast odd-shaped shadows over the rough walls. Athanaric could see fine in the light; over the centuries he’d refined his vision with Ichor so he could see perfectly well in little light.

Ricken groaned. He twitched against the many ropes securing him to the table, which stood on twelve-foot legs so Athanaric didn’t have to stoop or bend. The table’s surface glinted in the candlelight; Athanaric had ordered it polished and lacquered centuries before, so it wouldn’t absorb blood.

Not that he often brought people to this room deep in the Wall. Only every century or so, whenever a group of people or demigods—or both—thought to overthrow his authority. It occurred regularly. He’d grown used to it over the two millennia of his reign. Nearly a hundred and fifty years had passed since the last rebellion, which only he knew about—at least, if the priests and demigods had done their jobs by removing all record of it. He didn’t want his people to know there was a precedent for rejecting his laws, ceremonies, and punishments.

The only evidence that any rebellions had taken place hung on one wall, in the form of a tapestry woven nearly sixteen hundred years before. Red colored most of the surface, broken by the bodies that had spilled blood. They lay in an extensive field, cut to pieces and mangled and twisted by those who’d executed the second rebellion against him. More than one priest had asked to be excused from cleaning or entering the chamber because of the tapestry.

But Athanaric kept it. For a remembrance of what could happen if he didn’t hold to his method. If he didn’t raise his children and teach his people properly.
 

He reached to the table behind himself, to a supply of breads and fruits, and plucked up a loaf of bread. He began to eat it like a roll. He had to consume as much food as possible, to generate the Thew Ichor necessary to sustain his body, and to keep himself immortal.

He turned back to Ricken, one of the demigods that had attacked him in the Courtyard of the Wall, and touched his son’s cheek. The sheen of sweat glistened on the boy’s brow—
man’s
brow, he had to remind himself; he always thought of his children as young no matter their age. He passed his fingers over the forehead, to wipe the film away.

“Son,” he said, still chewing, “why did you do this?”

Ricken looked up at him with wet eyes. His lips quivered. A sorrow passed over his face—the sorrow of the penitent or the damned, Athanaric couldn’t tell. He wished he could. He longed for the omniscience of the old gods. It would have made things so much easier. Then he could have saved his little ones at the nursery.

As Ricken spoke with visible effort, blood dribbled down his cheek from the corner of his mouth.

“You . . . tyrant. You torture . . . the entire country . . . with your . . . laws.”

Athanaric didn’t respond to the accusation. He’d faced it many times through the centuries. Instead, as punishment, he bound Flux Ichor to Riken’s left knee and applied the Ichor down, toward Ricken’s foot. With a pop, the ball slipped out of the socket, and the knee became misshapen. Ricken jerked against his ropes, and cried out.

“Which names,” Athanaric said, “were lies?”

They’d spent an hour in the room. At the outset, Ricken had named scores of demigods and priests, certainly with the intention of obfuscating the truth. In fact, if Athanaric hadn’t silenced him, the demigod probably would’ve named all three hundred Caretakers and as many Novitiates as he could. He’d probably memorized all the names precisely to confuse.

The tactic had worked.

With measured application of Thew and Flux Ichor, Athanaric had tried to convince Ricken to confess which demigods did not participate in the rebellion. Break this bone. Tear this ligament. Crush this internal organ. He had no need to cause blood to flow; he’d learned that during the last rebellion. He could inflict plenty of pain without opening up the body.

Rebellions—and the accompanying purging of his children, priests, and followers—always saddened him. But this time it also caused despair. He almost wanted to let them succeed, just so that he could have release from his prolonged life. So little in the past two hundred years had given him a reason to live. Life had turned dull and lethargic. Boredom wore on his soul like sandpaper on skin. Waking up each day required strength of will. How many times had he thought to take his own life, to simply end the misery?

But the memories of how it had been before his rule—back when his brothers and uncles all vied for power and the people suffered the chaos of their whims and vices—kept him going. The common man had endured war after war, famine after famine. Few lived beyond age thirty, and reaching forty was a rare feat. Disease spread through the malnourished and under-sheltered people every year.

He’d fixed that. He’d brought order. At least to
his
people. And that kept him pushing through the desire to die.

“Tell me,” he said between clenched teeth, “which names are lies?”

“None,” Ricken said in little more than a whisper. “They all want you dead.”

That couldn’t be true. It simply couldn’t be. Based on the information Athanaric had already gathered, at least two of the names were accurate. Perhaps a third. And Wester was still out there. But no rebellion had ever reached scores of demigods, let alone all of them. And this one certainly hadn’t.

“I can’t trust the list you’ve given me,” Athanaric said, yet again. “Speak the truth, or all of them will die. Your brothers and your sisters. Your priests. All of them. And you’ll be the cause of their deaths and suffering.”

This rebellion had already caused enough pain and death. Athanaric could imagine the corpses of toddlers and nursing wives filling the nursery—he could not strike the images from his mind, though he hadn’t even entered the room. The imagined scene—confirmed by his priests in the hours since he’d been at the nursery—had burned itself into his mind. Every minute since, he’d seen the torn-open bodies of newborns, the gaping mouths of silent mothers, and crimson everywhere. He couldn’t shake the imaginations. He couldn’t banish them. Yet they weakened his heart. They rent his soul.

At least the slaughter had ended there. It could have easily been a different story.

At the start of the torture, Ricken had mocked Athanaric, gloating over the slaughter of all the mothers and Novitiates in the Seraglio. He’d believed that the rampage had not ended with the nursery, but continued down the canyon, with all of the children dying. Athanaric had let him believe it, so he would talk more. Athanaric didn’t say that he’d verified with his own eyes, from the back of his draegon, that no other villages in the Seraglio had suffered the same as the nursery.

He could only fathom that conscience had overtaken one of the demigods who’d perpetrated the murders at the nursery, and he’d stopped his brothers from moving down the canyon. That would explain the three dead demigods outside the nursery.

Ricken shook his head. He clenched his jaw, but blood still flowed from between his lips. Tears streamed from his eyes.

Athanaric balled his trembling fists and fought his own tears. In all his centuries of living, he still hadn’t mastered the flow of tears. They simply came unbidden when great sorrow or joy touched his heart. He could hide his emotions by schooling his face to calmness, but he couldn’t command his tear ducts to stop functioning. More than once he’d destroyed the ducts, which only ended up drying his eyes out and forcing him to repair the ducts with Thew Ichor.

He couldn’t make good on the threat to kill all the demigods Ricken had named. He simply couldn’t. Too many innocent demigods would die—chief among them Wrend and Teirn. They couldn’t be part of the rebellion, could they? They’d been with Wester, but surely that had been a coincidence. Hadn’t it?

He glanced up at the tapestry, at the mangled bodies.

He couldn’t bear the thought of one of those two precious sons betraying him. He simply couldn’t bear it. He’d hinged too much hope on them. Of course, one would die soon—but which one depended on them and their actions. Regardless, an honorable memory and death awaited the one who died.

A half sob, half laugh escaped Ricken’s lips. Blood splattered over his chest. He looked at Athanaric with triumphant eyes, knowing Athanaric couldn’t kill all the demigods. He depended on them too much.

“We win,” Ricken said.

In response—in impassioned reaction—Athanaric bound Flux Ichor to both sides of Ricken’s skull and applied it inward. The head collapsed with a crunch. Ricken’s body convulsed.

Immediately, a gray cloud began to seep from Ricken’s body, almost like smoke rising from a fire. It oozed out of his entire form, from head to foot, and sparkled in its depths. It shifted and roiled like a storm cloud, but it was not a cloud. It was not smoke. It was not even something that most people could see. It was Ricken’s soul. It smelled like a field of wild flowers.

It hung for a moment over the body, as if saying goodbye. A croak escaped Athanaric’s throat—the beginnings of a farewell cut short by anger. The soul drifted toward the ceiling, and passed through the stone.

Athanaric watched the place where it disappeared. He remembered Ricken’s birth. He could see clearly the first time Ricken had bowed to him. The first fish he’d caught.

With a sob, he pulled Ricken’s sacrificial knife from its sheath. He then cut off Ricken’s red bracers and dropped all three items to the floor. The knife clattered in the silence.

He glanced at the tapestry, then hung his head and mourned for his son.

And considered what he would say to Wrend and Teirn in just a few minutes.