Page 6 of House of Dusk
“Not all experience is useful,” Sephre bit back. Curse it. She’d let Halimede take control of the conversation. They were no longer talking about apprentices. This was an older argument. “Some things are better forgotten.”
Or, better yet, burned away completely.
Halimede sighed. She cupped her hands before her, kindling a blue flame in her palms. The sight of it filled Sephre with an ache, her own flame leaping in kinship. “The flame does not make an ashdancer pure. An ashdancer makesherselfpure. Which you have done, sister. The flame you carry is proof of that. If the Phoenix judges you a fit vessel, who are you to question it?”
“I’m not. I’m asking you to. It’s been nine years, and it’s still as bad as ever.” People were always saying that time cured all ills, but Sephre doubted it was true. Not if the infection was deep enough, the poison strong enough. “You promised. You said that you would grant me the Embrace, if I truly needed it.”
Halimede’s lips pursed as she stared into the cupped fire between her fingers. “The Embrace is no small thing,” she said at last. “The holy flame is still a flame. You cannot burn away only the memories you wish.”
The tent is full of wounded soldiers, full of the stench of too many broken bodies, of sick and piss and blood and screams and moans. But Vyria needs her. Vyria is the only one left. A scream coils in her throat. She was supposed to keep them safe. And even now, she is failing. The healers cannot save the leg. The rot is spread too far, they say. All they can hope is to save her life. Vyria grips her hand with painful, desperate strength, as the man in the blood-stained smock draws out the saw.
She swallowed, hard. “I accept that. Whatever it takes. I could serve Stara Bron so much better if you’d just grant me this, Agia. Please.”
“You’ll forgive me if I trust my own judgment on that.” Halimede’s lips quirked. “I am the agia, after all. And I see a sister who has served well and faithfully, who has skills and strengths that none other has here.”
“Making novices cry?” Sephre suggested. “Quarreling with Sister Beroe?”
“You are hardly the only one at Stara Bron withthatskill,” said Halimede, so drily that Sephre might have laughed if her throat weren’t so tight. “Come. I will show you what I speak of.”
Sephre ground her teeth, trotting after the agia as she continued across the cloister. The woman was impossible. It wasn’t as if the Embrace was so unusual. Granted, it was generally bestowed on criminals, but it could be given as a mercy, too. She’d witnessed it herself, five years ago. A small boy had been brought to Stara Bron by his grandmother. Sephre didn’t know what had happened to him, only that the hollowness in his eyes echoed against her own heart. He, too, had seen something terrible.
Something Halimede had burned away. When they departed the next day he had skipped beside his grandmother. Only the old woman wept, and her tears were joyful. Innocence had been restored.
Call it mercy, call it punishment. The end result would be the same. She would be free. If only Halimede would listen.
But clearly the agia had other things on her mind. She quickened her pace, leading Sephre up a seemingly endless set of steps cut from the stone of the mountain itself. Tradition placed the agia’s chambers at the highest point of Stara Bron, just below the open ridge where the Holy Flame burned. The ascent left neither of them breath to spare. Halimede paused once, gripping the smooth curve of the balustrade, her fingers pale and thin against the golden stone. She kept her spine grimly erect, but the glimpse Sephre caught of her face—gray, tight-lipped—was troubling.
She continued on before Sephre could suggest a longer rest, pushing them both up the final flight to the arched doorway that led into the agia’s office. Even Sephre was wheezing and puffing by then, and it took considerable effort not to simply collapse into the softly cushioned window seat that bowed out along one wall. Instead, she stood tall, sandals set against the smooth stone floor, relentless in her cause. “Agia, you promised to consider—”
“Look.” Halimede touched a blue spark to the delicate copper lamp wrought in the form of a Phoenix that hung above her desk. “And tell me what you see.”
I see an agia trying very hard to change the subject.But she was still too much a soldier for that sort of insubordination. Sephre joined the agia. The lamp revealed a broad oak table covered in papers. No, it was a single large sheet, marked with spiderwebs of ink and whorls of color. Rippling waves and sinuous rivers. She blinked, and for a brief, unsettling moment she was elsewhen, stepping into the general’s tent, watching the Heron slide a single crimson stone past the inked walls.It will end the war in a day.
The map before her now did not show some distant island, marked with enemy fortifications and tactical positions. This was home. The entire sweep of the Helissoni peninsula. But there were markers, of a sort: round wooden chits scattered, seemingly at random. There were a dozen down along the southern coast, where the Hook curled out into the Middle Sea, trailing a chain of tiny islands. Then more spotting the midlands. A stack of five chits nearly covered Helissa City.
Scanning further north, Sephre found the sharp cut of the Veil, the line of mountains that severed the peninsula from the mainland almost completely. Only the Vigil Gap allowed clear passage into the northern steppes of Scarthia. A blue flame was inked onto the parchment just south of the Veil, above the wordsStara Bron. Another wooden chit nestled close beside the temple. Squinting, Sephre noted the number painted onto it. 47.
“These are the deaths,” she said, with a chill of understanding.
“Indeed.” Halimede’s brown eyes sparked blue. “And what else?”
Sephre scanned down to the southern coast, then north again. “The numbers. Those are . . . ?”
“The order in which the reports came in.”
It wasn’t a perfect pattern, but then, not all the bodies had been discovered quickly. “They’re moving north. It’s almost like...a trail.” A trail of death.
Halimede nodded, looking grimly pleased.
Sephre gripped the edge of the table, doing rough calculations in her head. Whatever had done this was moving no faster than a traveler on foot.
“You think it’s a person?” There were stories of mystics, forbidden cults that still honored the Serpent. Sephre had never given them much heed. The evil she’d seen had no need to hide behind secret rites and masks. More often than not, it flaunted itself as righteousness.
“A pattern,” admitted Halimede. “That suggests intent. There’s more. Something that I haven’t shared with the others.”
A shiver rippled up Sephre’s spine. “What?”
“Reports of a stranger,” said Halimede, “seen in conjunction with at least half the deaths. A man with a shaved head, carrying a sword.”
