Thank the Gods she’d timed her weekly two days off to begin today. Two days to hide, sleep, heal and think before facing the world.
Her bed sheets and pillow called to her. The taste of the water carafe on her bedstand…
She made it to the chapterhouse’s center. People seldom came at this hour. Just the corridor, and the staircase to climb to her apartment. Two minutes’ walk.
She limped toward the residential wing.
Voices echoed, coming in her direction. Two people. Routine conversation. But…
Oh Polis, one voice was Lijjen’s! Of all people! He would interrogate her simply because he could, and even if he let her be, he would remember seeing her the night Makkdarm died.
Where could she hide? All the storerooms were locked. Gods, what was she supposed to do?
Suddenly, she had a blessed spark of memory. Every chapterhouse kept an unlocked chapel on the bottom floor. Symbolic remnants of the temples all chapterhouses had been built on, five thousand years earlier.
The voices closed in. She turned and ran, losing her breath and stumbling. The chapel was always at the chapterhouse’s center. She had a perfect reason to be in the chapel – she was praying for her daughter. The voices bounced along the corridor. Her mouth was a desert. She couldn’t read the signs on the wall.
Sweet relief, the chapel was where it should have been. A six-sided chamber the size of an apartment, its entrance was marked by a wooden arch. Inside, six rows of wooden pews surrounded Polis Sumad’s devotional statue. She was alone, oh blessed luck!
She slung her satchel under the pews and collapsed at the foot of Sumad Himself, the effigy erected on a circular plinth at the top of three small carpeted steps. It hurt to look at Him, ashamed by what had become of these Seekers. To think, when she’d achieved Assistant status eight years earlier, she’d proudly worn the singlet with the cut-outs, showing off her flame and cage tattoo and all it stood for.
Did she really hate herself? Or did she hate Keeper Lijjen, Holder Mathra, and whoever had created that underground workshop? Possibly she hated the whole order. Tears fell on her hands and her jaw ached from clenching. This was what came of spending a life trying to prove her worth to her father. No matter that she hadn’t known everything, she’d taken innocents and stuffed them into Immersion Pods. It was wrong, but imagining her father’s pride at her promotion ceremony had been too tempting. She’d needed to prove to him and the world so dearly, that she was worthy.
Stupid, selfish pride. Useless, petty ambition.
This was where it ended: Weeping like a child, her squad taken from her, running about a corrupted foreign chapterhouse in the dark. And she’d killed a man. She had to fix this. But who could help her? Jools was mindlocked and Toornan could do nothing. The four renegades might help, for they’d want answers too. But they probably weren’t even in Polis Sumad anymore. Who?
Unable to see properly, she looked up at Sumad.
Who indeed?
Legend said the Gods had once appeared in human form to be approachable by humanity. For humanity was Their greatest creation. When the Gods had chosen those twenty-four of their number to remain on Earth, they’d ordered the names of those who’d gone on to the heavens forgotten, so humanity could worship their own respective Gods. Their Polis.
There was no way of knowing this statue’s age, or if it had been modeled on how Polis Sumad Himself was reputed to look. It didn’t matter though: All prayers went to the same place.
His bearded, muscular figure was painted in chipped colors showing gray beneath, with purple robes over his dark skin. Very well, then.
“Sumad, God and Polis,” she whispered, barely audible in the chapel’s small arches. “I have failed Armer, I have failed you. Your brothers, my family. I have done things for my own benefit and brought harm on others.” She swallowed. “I deserve consequence.” She didn’t even deserve Pella, given how she had treated other families. “I ask only that you allow me to right what is wrong, to defend those who cannot defend themselves. I do not ask for revenge. I do not ask for justice. I ask You to help me to destroy evil.”
A deep breath. She recalled one passage of the Seeker’s Charter, word for word:
When judging, keep your mind clear and calm so you can know wrong from right, and give punishment suitable to the extent of the crime.
Whether her mind was clear was debatable, but for their crimes against Polis and nature, only one consequence was right.
Another deep breath.
Just say it.
“For their transgressions against You, Sumad, God and Polis. To rid this evil from the world, please grant me the means to destroy Sumad Reach Chapterhouse.”
When Terese had become a student Seeker at sixteen, things had seemed so right. There were stories of virtuoso musicians who stroked a piano as a child and even after hours of play, had to be dragged away from it screaming. Or future architects who received dominoes and created miniature country estates. A good Seeker child was not memorable as a prodigy, but there was a fire within them that could not give up the hunt for evil. Everyone had seen it in her. Years went by and the world had become more complex. Black and white had turned to gray and then into colors and gained texture and shape. The sense of doing right and knowing the call of light, effortless purpose had been missing for years. She had made bad compromises and stepped out of harmony with everything around her.
The path had been so clear when she was young. She’d hunted cadvers because she had an instinct for it.
Sumad seemed to regard her more closely, with a patient smile to those who came for help.
A truth occurred to her: One she’d not considered before, that seemed so
