4

CINZIA CAUTIOUSLY APPROACHED KNOT and Astrid. Jane and the other disciples were rounding up and calming the panicked, scattered crowd of Odenites—in the chaos many had run into the forest, while others had even rushed the Sons of Canta at Kirlan’s gate. Fortunately, while the Sons had barred any Odenites from entering, they had kept their word and refrained from seriously harming anyone.

The Odenites, it seemed, would be all right. Cinzia was much more worried about the possibility of this—whatever it was—happening again.

Cinzia eyed the monster’s sleek black body, unmoving in the soil, now muddied with blood. “Is it…?”

Knot looked up at her. “Dead. But best keep your distance for now.”

Cinzia looked back at where she’d left Arven, in Elessa’s care. The young woman had not said a word since the man had killed himself in front of her. Cinzia could not blame her. She, too, was shaken by the whole thing. First the man’s violent suicide, and then this monster emerging in the light of noonday, of all things. That it happened in the sunlight made it seem all the worse. Things like Astrid, at least, were not as menacing in the sun. What was different with this creature?

Miraculously, other than a few minor injuries, it seemed the Odenites had escaped mostly unharmed. Knot, Astrid, and the quick reaction of the guard force had saved them. And yet, despite the relief Cinzia felt at the fact that everyone was still safe, that Astrid and Knot had defeated this monster, another feeling expanded, burning and wild in her chest.

Anger.

“What was that thing?” she asked, keeping her emotions in check with some effort.

Knot and Astrid looked at one another.

“I do not have the patience for you to pretend you do not know.”

Knot’s jaw was clenched tightly before he answered. “One of the monsters we encountered in Izet. An Outsider—that’s what Astrid calls them. Don’t know much more than that.” He looked pointedly at Astrid. “Do you?”

Astrid shrugged. She had wiped the blood from her face, but messy smears still remained. “There are daemons even daemons fear. This is one of them.”

“And yet you defeated it,” Cinzia said. “And not even at night. Is that really something to fear?”

Astrid scowled, but Cinzia did not care. Now was not the time to be cryptic.

“Just because we killed one of the things does not mean I don’t fear them,” Astrid said quietly. “And… I’m less worried about the Outsiders themselves, and far more about what they serve.”

“Azael,” Cinzia whispered. A voice, deep and rumbling, echoed in her mind.

You will all die screaming, and I will watch, and take pleasure in it.

She remembered Kovac’s eyes, leaking iridescent green smoke.

“How is it possible,” Cinzia asked through gritted teeth, “that we know so little about him?”

“About who?”

Cinzia turned to see Jane approaching, Ocrestia and Baetrissa trailing behind her.

“Azael, the Fear Lord,” Cinzia said.

Astrid coughed. “Not sure saying his name is the greatest idea.”

Cinzia wanted to spit. “What difference does it make whether I say his name or not? If he wanted to be here, to kill us, he would.” Cinzia wanted to believe what she said was true, but she really had no idea. Was she provoking an unknown force? And yet, at the same time, she could hardly control her anger. Just when she thought they were making progress, they had run into the blockade. And now this.

“The Lord of the Nine Daemons?” Jane asked. “Was this his doing?”

Cinzia nodded to Astrid. “She seems to think so.”

Astrid raised her hands, palms forward. “Just saying what comes to mind.”

“That man who killed himself… he had just arrived in the camp?” Jane asked.

“That is what Arven said.” Cinzia hoped the young woman was all right. “But our numbers grow at an unmanageable rate. Arven updates our records daily, but even she cannot keep them updated quickly enough. He may have been with us for some time.”

“We need to interrogate Arven,” Jane said. “See if we can figure out the identity of this man. See if anyone else in the camp knew him, who he associated with, where he came from.”

Cinzia’s anger flared. “The man just slit his throat in front of her, Jane. Did you not see Arven’s face? Her hair, her hands, her clothes covered in this man’s blood? Give the girl a break, for Canta’s sake.”

“We will give her the time she needs to recover,” Jane said. “But we must find the truth.”

Cinzia could not argue with that. Her emotions were getting the best of her.

“What connection exists between what the man did to himself, and the daemon that emerged?” Jane wondered.

“We saw the same thing in Izet,” Knot said. “Not sure what exactly happened, but there was a connection with the Ceno order.” He glanced at Astrid. “And with blood, too.”

“It’s always blood,” the girl muttered.

“Could this happen again?” Jane asked.

“No way to tell,” Knot replied. “In Izet, the Tokal-Ceno… he needed both royal blood and tiellan blood. The man who killed himself today was human, and wasn’t no king I’ve ever heard of.”

“But only one Outsider appeared today,” Astrid said. “In Izet, there were half a dozen at least, not to mention that huge bastard that appeared at the last.”

Knot crossed his arms in front of his chest. “And Azael was there, too. Wasn’t here today.”

“Not that we know of,” Cinzia added. She had yet to tell anyone about her encounter with Azael after the Kamite battle. She had killed the man Azael had possessed. He might have been dying anyway, but Cinzia did not know that for a certainty. Just thinking of the event made her feel hot with shame. There was no way she could tell Jane. She wanted to tell Knot, but she had yet to find a good time to do it.

“Is there anything else we can do to protect ourselves from another event like this?” Jane asked.

Knot shrugged. “Getting that information from Arven is a start. Maybe assigning more people to help her. We could train the Prelates in some specific tactics that might help in taking another one of these things down. Other than that, ain’t sure what else we can do.”

“Then in the meantime, I suppose the rest of us should occupy ourselves with this blockade problem,” Jane mused. “Ocrestia, do you—”

“Jane,” Cinzia said firmly, interrupting her sister.

Cinzia felt Jane’s eyes rest on her, wide and expectant.

“We cannot continue to ignore the problem behind all of this,” Cinzia said, voice straining with the effort of keeping herself calm.

Jane let out a heavy sigh. “I believe our best hope of addressing that problem awaits us in Triah.”

“I do not agree,” Cinzia said.

The others around them were silent. It was the first time any of them had openly expressed such direct dissent against Jane.

Well, it’s about bloody time, Cinzia thought. And yet she was surprised to find herself so ardently on the attack. She, too, had experienced Canta’s power recently. She had healed her own father. They had nearly finished translating the Codex, too. All things considered, she had witnessed miracles.

But she had witnessed horrors, as well. Horrors they still had no means to understand, let alone deal with.

“We are nearly finished with the translation,” Cinzia said. “We need to finish it. See if there is anything in the Codex that can help us with the Nine Daemons, anything other than the scraps we’ve already found.”

“On that, at least, we agree,” Jane said.

That was the easier of her two suggestions. “We also continue to ignore the Beldam’s splinter group. They’ve traveled behind us since we left Harmoth, but we’ve hardly acknowledged them, let alone done anything about them.” The Beldam, an eccentric old woman who had once been a prominent member of the Odenites, had nevertheless seemed to have her own agenda— including “getting rid of all the tiellans,” as she’d put it—and preached as much to the Odenites. Cinzia had approached the woman with an ultimatum, a deal, that if the Beldam shared what she knew of the Nine Daemons and stopped her campaign against the tiellans, Cinzia and Jane would offer protection from the Nine as best they could. But the Beldam had broken that arrangement, holding secret meetings where she still postured against the tiellans, eventually leading a group of Odenites who agreed with her on that count away from the Church of Canta.

Then, the Beldam had left, taking a few hundred Odenites with her. They had not gone far, however, and had eventually followed the Odenites all the way down Khale’s eastern coast, always keeping their distance, but always within sight.

Jane pursed her lips. “We’ve already tried dealing with the Beldam once, and it did not work.”

“Dealing with her, one way or another, can come later,” Cinzia said. “Right now, I think we need to work with her. The Beldam broke her part of the deal, but she has still been following us. I would wager she still thinks we can protect her.”

“You really want to ally yourself with her, of all people?” Ocrestia asked. So far, Ocrestia was the only tiellan appointed as one of Jane’s disciples, despite more than a third of the Odenites being tiellan.

Cinzia’s heart softened just slightly. “I do not agree with her, Ocrestia. But I think she may have knowledge we need. We need to talk with her. Beyond that, there is no place in this movement for that woman or her philosophies.”

Ocrestia said nothing to that, and Cinzia could not tell how her explanation was met.

The Beldam wanted to annihilate Ocrestia’s people, yet Cinzia wanted to deal with the Beldam. Cinzia could not imagine how that must make Ocrestia feel. But Cinzia needed to do this. She needed to find out more about the Nine Daemons, and she would go to any lengths to do it. They had other problems, to be sure, and she hoped Jane and the others could do their part to get them through what lay ahead.

But this was what she was going to do. This was what she needed to do. No one would convince her otherwise.