Chosen of the Gods

victims of the Longosai, but there were others, too, who did not bear the dark blotches that marked them as plague-stricken. The healing light flared for them all, as it had so often in Luciel, filling the shadowy hall again and again as Beldyn laid his hands upon the supplicants. Those with the Creep rose from their knees, untainted. A woman blind since childhood blinked back tears from eyes that could see once more. A man paralyzed from the waist down rose and began to walk. Some laughed for joy, but many others wept, murmuring tearful thanks while Beldyn sprinkled them with holy water and signed the triangle in farewell.

Ilista stayed near at all times, standing silently behind the altar. Beldyn was getting stronger, his powers holding up better than in Luciel. Then he had only been able to heal eight a day and one at a time. Today in the Pantheon, though, he touched more than a score of Govinna’s folk before sending them away again, fully cured. Ilista watched as one by one they rose, as healthy as if they had been well all their lives, and the light that hung around Beldyn grew from a flicker to a dazzling glare.

In the end, though, even the Lightbringer tired, and as the sunlight that lanced down from the hall’s high windows shifted to evening crimson, Beldyn’s endurance finally gave out. His shoulders slumped and his eyelids drooped as he pronounced Paladine’s blessing upon a healthy young boy who, only moments before, had been covered with weeping sores. As the child’s sobbing mother led him away, he gave a weary sigh and shook his head.

“No more,” he breathed. “Tell them they can return on the morrow.”

Cries of disappointment rang from the vestibule as the temple’s clerics turned the rest of the people away, then the worship hall’s dragon-carved doors boomed shut, blocking them out. Beldyn walked to a pew and slumped down onto it. Ilista watched as he spoke briefly with Cathan, then the young bandit bowed and withdrew, disappearing out a side door.

“His sister,” Beldyn said when he caught her look. “He hasn’t seen her all day. I told him he could stay with her tonight.”

Ilista nodded, sitting down beside him. “You did great things today.”

“Not enough.” He shook his head, gesturing about the worship hall. “How many more are out there, for every one I helped today?”

She nodded, thinking of the mobs that had been in the courtyard this morning. Probably they were all still there. She rested a hand on his shoulder. “You can’t ease the world’s suffering in a day.”

“Not without the Miceram” he whispered.

Ilista looked up at the mosaic of Paladine on the ceiling, her stomach twisting. Even when she’d heard Kurnos had declared her Foripon, she hadn’t thought of herself as a traitor to the empire. Now… she had brought Beldyn here, had stood by as he all but named himself Kingpriest this morning.

What does that make me? she thought. Paladine, how am I to serve thee?

She didn’t hear Ossirian come in, didn’t see him until he was nearly upon them both, lowering his bearish form to genuflect toward the altar, then bowing to Beldyn as he came forward.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Durinen,” the lord replied. “He’s awake and asks for the one who healed him.”

Beldyn nodded. “Very well,” he said, rising from the bench. He smiled at Ilista. “There are things I wish to discuss with him as well.”

The Little Emperor would not receive guests from his sickbed, so he had moved from his private chambers to the study. He was still weak from his wound and leaned heavily against his desk, staring across at Ilista and Beldyn when Ossirian showed them in. His eyes narrowed, his mouth drooping into a grave frown.

“I hear,” he said, “that you have been making my subjects your own.”

Ilista’s brow creased at the words, and Ossirian scowled as well, but Beldyn folded his hands politely.

“Pardon, Your Worship,” he said from within his mantle of light, “but that is not quite right. They have come to me. I only received them.”

“Hmph,” Durinen replied with a shrug. “Well, I am a practical man. I know I have little power to stop you.” He pressed his fingertips against his stomach, where the quarrel had been, and his eyes closed for a moment, remembering. “Besides, perhaps you are right to do so. There are things I know about you that even you have not yet perceived.”

Beldyn nodded. “The Miceram, you mean.”

The Little Emperor’s eyes flared wide, and Ossirian let out a snort of laughter. Durinen glared at him, lips pursed, but chuckled in spite of himself. His eyes flicked to Ilista, then back to Beldyn. “You do know, then. How much have you guessed?”

“Very little,” Beldyn replied. “Only that, whatever the tales might say, you may know the truth of the crown’s disappearance.”

“Indeed,” Durinen said, raising an eyebrow. “That is a great deal already.”

He rose and shuffled across the room to a bookshelf where several scrolls lay. He peered at them for a moment before producing one, then walked back around the desk and handed it to Beldyn. He said nothing, standing back as the young monk removed the silken tie about the parchment and unrolled it. Ilista crowded nearer and Ossirian too, as Beldyn studied the scroll. The words it bore were in the church tongue, as was a well-rendered illumination of a man in rich finery-flowing white robes and jewels, an emerald diadem on his brow. His face was dusky, his hair close-cropped, his face shaven. His prominent nose and piercing eyes gave him the look of a hawk.

None of this caught their attention, however, so much as what he held in his hands. There was a second crown, wrought of gold and aglitter with rubies.

“Pradian,” Durinen said. “The man who would have won the Trosedil had he lived, whose dynasty should be ruling the empire entire and not just this province.” His mouth twisted bitterly.

Ilista shuddered as she stared at the image. The man glaring back out at her had dared to challenge the Lordcity from this very temple a century before. She felt a strange kinship with him. Both of us traitors to the throne, she thought. Her eyes went back to the ruby crown in his hands.

“The Miceram,” she noted. “He stole it?”

“No!” Durinen snapped. “Not stole. Claimed it, as his due. He was at Vasari’s side when he died. He held him in his arms and heard the Kingpriest name him heir, but there was no one to witness those words, so it came to war. Here he ruled until he died untimely, and Ardosean seized the throne. We Little Emperors have kept the truth alive, ever since. We alone know where he hid the Crown.”

“Hid it?” Ilista pressed. “Why? Surely, if he’d used it-”

“Then people would have called him a thief, as you just did.” The patriarch shook his head as Ilista flushed in embarrassment. “Whoever wears the Crown may rule, but Pradian wanted the people’s respect. He meant to win the war on his own terms, then reveal the crown to affirm his claim. He would have done so, too, but for one killing arrow.

“Your next question,” he added, raising a hand as Dista’s mouth opened to speak, “is why none of his heirs have simply donned the crown. You hold the answer in your hands. Read.”

Beldyn and Ilista looked down the page, and Ossirian craned to see as well. There, written in archaic calligraphy, was a verse:

E Pradian Miceram nomid, e saw, nouton aulcam si adomfrit cilid, beton ‘tis cir boniit, bareis op onbordas. Bebo ninlugit attaid sum ib torpit.’

“And Pradian took the Crown of Power,” Durinen recited, shutting his eyes, “and concealed it beneath the temple he had built, saying ‘Let this remain here, guarded from the unworthy. Let the way not open until it is needed again.’

“We have all tried to bring it back, we Little Emperors,” he went on, “and we failed. The door it lies behind did not open for Theorollyn, who was first after Pradian, and it has opened for none since.”

The study was silent as Beldyn read the text again. His eyes settled on Pradian’s hard countenance, then rose to meet Durinen’s stare. “Where does this door lie?”

“In the catacombs,” Durinen replied. “There is an old fane there, far beneath the Pantheon. Its location is written elsewhere in the text you hold. But beware. The door is only the first-”

It happened so fast, Ilista barely had time to note the sudden chill that bit the air within the study. The shadows in the corner nearest to the Little Emperor came alive, bleeding outward like ink spilled on a page. A