Chapter 46: The Book of Names

The cemetery sat on the far western end of the city, surrounded by an old stone wall with ivy growing all over it, and by the time the sun had started to set, Kai was standing outside its gate with the cold black token in his hand.

He had spent most of the day arguing with everyone about whether he would actually go in by himself, and he had lost almost every argument but won the last one. Mira, Garrick, Sunny and Elowen were waiting across the street in the doorway of a bakery that had closed for the night, close enough that Kai could see them through the gate, but far enough away that he could argue he had gone in alone.

"If you don’t come back before the moon is out, I’m coming in after you," Mira had said.

"They said nobody alive can come in," Kai had said.

"Well, then I’ll come in dead," Mira had said, and nobody had been able to tell whether she was joking or not.

[I just want to let you know that I am not alive. I double-checked, so I am allowed to come in]

"Oh, that’s great," Kai whispered.

[I am not excited about it. I was never sure whether I was alive or not, and now I know]

Kai didn’t have an answer to that, so he pushed the gate open instead, and it creaked inward slowly on its rusty hinges.

The cemetery was much larger than Kai had expected it to be. Rows of gray headstones lined the hill as it climbed upward, with pale ash trees scattered between them, and at the very top of the hill stood a small, round stone building with a chimney rising out of its middle. Thin gray smoke drifted from the chimney into the evening sky, and the faint smell of burning wood hung in the air over everything.

A man was waiting for him partway up the hill, wearing gray robes and standing so perfectly still between two headstones that Kai almost walked right past him.

"You came," the man said.

"You could have told me you were standing there," Kai said, almost jumping out of his new boots.

"I told you," the man said. "I told you now."

He turned and started walking up the hill without another word, and as Kai followed him, he noticed that a small bowl of gray ash sat in front of every headstone they passed, and that someone had written a name in each one with a finger.

"Why is there ash everywhere?" Kai asked.

"So that their names are remembered," the man said. "We write them in the ash every night, and in the morning, the wind blows them away. So we write them again."

"Every night?" Kai asked. "On every headstone?"

"On every headstone," the man said. "That is what the Ashen Twins ask of us. One of them carries the dead away, and the other makes sure they are remembered."

Kai felt a cold shiver run through him that had nothing to do with the evening air, because he was thinking about the High Priestess in the tunnel under the arena, and about what she had told him about being forgotten.

[Kai, your heart rate is elevated]

"I know," Kai whispered.

When they reached the top of the hill, the round building was warm inside, with a fire burning in a stone hearth in the very middle of the room, and the walls were lined with clay urns from the floor all the way to the ceiling. An old woman sat in front of the fire with an enormous book lying open across her knees. The book was thicker than Kai’s arm was long, and its pages were filled with thousands upon thousands of tiny handwritten names.

"Keeper," the man said, bowing his head. "He is here."

The old woman looked up at Kai with pale, cloudy eyes, and somehow, he got the feeling that she could see right through him.

"Sit down, God of Failure," the Keeper said. "The dead want to know about you, and I want to know why."

Kai sat down on a wooden stool in front of the fire, and beneath the crackling of the flames, he could hear two voices whispering together in perfect unison. One of them was deep and the other was light, and they were repeating the same word over and over again, and the word was remember. Kai realized that Divine Echo was letting him hear the Ashen Twins themselves, and that unlike the Lady of the Silver Moon, they had never stopped speaking at all.

"What are they saying about me?" Kai asked.

"That you are not supposed to be here," the Keeper said. "That you come from somewhere very far away, and your name is not written anywhere in this world." She pointed to a spot on the page in front of her. "Every person who is born in Veyrath has their name in this book, or in one just like it. Every person except you."

"I didn’t grow up here," Kai said. "I just kind of showed up in my boxers."

The Keeper didn’t laugh, but the corner of her mouth twitched, and she held out a thin black quill towards him.

"Then write your name," the Keeper said. "If you want the Ashen Twins to vote for you at the Conclave, I need to know your name, and I need to know that you will be remembered."

Kai dipped the quill into the little pot of ink beside the old woman and wrote his name at the bottom of the page, in the neatest handwriting he had managed since grade school.

The ink stayed on the page for a moment, black and wet and perfectly ordinary, and then it began to fade away. Within seconds, the bottom of the page was completely blank again.

The man gasped, and the Keeper stared down at the empty page for a long time.

"The book will not accept your name," the Keeper said softly. "It only refuses the names of those who have not been decided yet."

[Kai]

"I know," Kai said, and his hands had started to shake. "If I don’t win, then I was never here at all. The book knows that."

"The Twins cannot vote for a god who may never have existed," the Keeper said. "I am sorry."

Kai looked down at the blank page, and for the first time since the arena, he felt like he was actually going to lose. Every other church had wanted something from him, something broken that he could mess up and fix by accident, but the Ashen Twins didn’t want anything from him at all.

He stood up so quickly that his stool fell over behind him, and without really thinking, he pointed his finger at the book.

"Minor Blessing," Kai said.

He wasn’t sure what he expected to happen, whether the ink would stay or whether nothing would happen at all. The small golden orb shot out of his finger, flew right past the book and past the Keeper’s shoulder, and hit one of the urns on the highest shelf along the back wall. The urn wobbled, tipped over the edge, and shattered on the stone floor.

The man gasped in horror, and Kai felt sick to his stomach.

"I’m so sorry," Kai said. "I’ll pay for it. I’ll sweep up the, uh..."

But there was nothing on the floor to sweep up, because the urn hadn’t had any ash inside it at all.

The Keeper set her book aside and stood up slowly, using the man’s arm for support, and she shuffled over to the broken urn and picked up the largest piece. A name had been etched into the clay in neat, elegant letters, and Kai watched her face turn pale as she read it.

"Who was it?" Kai asked.

The Keeper turned the piece of clay around so that Kai could read it, and behind him, the fire seemed to go quiet.

High Priestess Celestine of the Radiant Mother. Returned to the ash forty years ago.

[Kai, there was never anyone in that urn]

"She was brought to us from the Cathedral forty years ago," the Keeper whispered. "They told us that she died in her sleep, and we have written her name in the ash every night since."

She looked up at Kai with her pale, cloudy eyes, and for the first time, the old woman looked frightened.

"If she is not in her urn," the Keeper said, "then where is she?"