Chapter 49: The Last of Her Light

No one in the long room moved, and for a few seconds, they all just stood there listening to the soup line murmuring on the floor below them.

Kai looked at the High Priestess standing in the doorway with her bandaged hand and her four guards behind her, and then he looked down at the skinny old woman in the black dress beside him. He tried to find some resemblance between the two of them, and once he started looking, it was everywhere, in the line of their jaws and the color of their eyes, and in the way both of them carried themselves as if they were wearing invisible crowns.

[Kai. She called her Mother]

"I know," Kai whispered, in Sister Kaia’s voice.

At some point, Mira had stepped up beside Kai without a word, and her hand had found the back of his habit and closed around a fistful of black cloth.

"Liora," Celestine said softly, and the High Priestess flinched at the sound of her own name. "You should not be here. Not while he is here."

"I come here every week, Mother," the High Priestess said, and her voice was tight. "I bring you bread, I pay the guards, and I listen to you cry. For forty years, I have listened to you cry. I believe I deserve to climb my own steps." She turned her cold eyes back on Kai. "Take him and the girl."

Two of the guards started towards Kai, and he did what he had always done best, which was talk.

"Okay, okay, okay," Kai said, holding up both hands. "Before anybody grabs anybody, I just have one question. Just one, and then you can all take me wherever you want."

The guards stopped and looked back at the High Priestess, and she hesitated for a split second, which was all Kai needed.

"What did the Mother tell you?" Kai asked, turning to Celestine. "Forty years ago. What did she say that was so bad you had to silence every god in the city, just so no one else would ever hear it?"

"Mother, do not," the High Priestess said.

Celestine looked straight through all of them, at the black cloth covering the window, as if she could see something far beyond it.

"I was praying alone in the Cathedral one night," Celestine said. "And she spoke to me. I had been her servant for thirty years, and in all that time, she had only ever spoken to me in whispers. That night, her voice was so loud that I thought she was standing right behind me."

"What did she say?" Kai asked.

"She told me that she was dying," Celestine said.

Everyone in the room went silent, and Kai felt Syraphim go quiet in the back of his mind, just like she had in the tunnel under the arena.

"The gods do not live off gold, or marble, or promises," Celestine said, and tears were running down her wrinkled cheeks again. "They live off faith, the kind that is given freely. The Radiant Church had been selling her faith away for so long that she had almost none left. She was starving, and so were all of the others. The Moon, the Sea, the Harvest, all of them were starving."

"Mother, stop," the High Priestess said, and her voice cracked.

"She told me that she was going to gather the very last of her light," Celestine said, ignoring her daughter completely. "And that one day, she would send it down to someone who was not her Champion, and not a member of her Church. She would send it to someone who would fail over and over again, until people finally understood the truth about what gods are."

[Kai]

Syraphim’s voice was so small that Kai barely heard it.

[Kai, I think I am the last of her light]

Kai couldn’t breathe, and without meaning to, he placed his hand flat against his chest, right over the warm spot behind his ribs where Syraphim always was.

"If the people had known that the Mother was dying, the Church would have crumbled," Celestine whispered. "So I silenced her. I silenced all of the gods, so that none of them could ever tell anyone what she had told me. And then I faked my own death and came here, because I could not bear to stand in her Cathedral for another day."

"You silenced the gods to save the Church," Kai said.

"I did it because I was a coward," Celestine said. "That is the truth, and I have cried over it for forty years."

For a moment, the High Priestess looked pale, and she looked less like a High Priestess and more like a daughter who had just heard her mother say something terrible out loud. Then her face hardened again, and she pointed her bandaged hand straight at Kai.

"Take them now," the High Priestess said.

The guards charged, and one of them grabbed Mira by the arm and yanked her away from Kai. She kicked him hard in the shin, but he didn’t let go, and Kai threw out his hand and pointed it straight at the guard’s chest.

"Minor Smite!" Kai yelled.

A bolt of golden light shot out of Kai’s finger, flew right past the guard’s shoulder, and slammed into the old wooden floor between his feet.

The floor of the granary was old and rotted all the way through, so instead of breaking, it simply gave way, and the boards beneath the guard, beneath Mira, beneath Kai and beneath Celestine’s chair all split apart at once. The four of them dropped straight through the hole in the floor.

Kai landed flat on his back on one of the long tables below, sending bowls of onion soup flying in every direction, and Mira landed on top of him a second later. The guard landed on the bench beside them and broke it clean in half, and Celestine’s chair came down last, landing upright at the end of the table with the old woman still sitting in it. Her black veil fluttered down over her face as if nothing had happened at all.

Eighty widows, beggars and barefoot children stared at them in complete silence, with their spoons frozen halfway to their mouths.

"Ow," Kai said.

[You have been hit. Your glamour is wearing off]

Kai looked down at his hands and watched Sister Kaia’s long, slender fingers turn back into his own, while the black habit faded back into his fishing vest and his dirty pants. Every person in the room watched a beautiful nun turn into a scruffy man in a fishing vest right before their eyes, and somewhere near the back, one of the children dropped his bowl.

"Sister Kaia?" one of the women asked.

"It’s a long story," Kai said.

Mira rolled off of him and wiped the onion soup out of her silver hair with a look of pure disgust, and then she looked down at Kai and saw that it was his face again instead of Sister Kaia’s, and some of the tension went out of her shoulders.

"I prefer this one," Mira said quietly.

The fish woman pushed her way through the crowd, took one look at Kai lying in a pool of soup, and put her hands on her hips.

"Honey," the fish woman said. "What did you do to that poor nun?"

The front doors of the granary burst open before Kai could answer, and Garrick, Sunny, Elowen and Princess Seris came running inside, having heard the floor collapse from all the way out in the street. Garrick looked at the soup splattered everywhere, at the broken bench and the groaning guard, and at Celestine sitting calmly on the end of the table, and he let out a long sigh.

"I told you," Garrick said. "I told you three times."

Up above them, the High Priestess appeared at the edge of the jagged hole in the ceiling with her three remaining guards, looking down at the Holy Champion standing in the middle of her soup kitchen with his sword drawn.

"Come down, Liora," Sunny said calmly. "Your mother is down here, and so am I."

The High Priestess looked at Sunny, then at her mother, and then at Kai, and for a moment, Kai thought she might actually come down. Then she turned away from the edge of the hole, and a moment later, they heard a door slam somewhere above them and footsteps running away across the rooftops.

Sunny started for the stairs, but Celestine held up one thin, spotted hand, and he stopped.

"Let her go, Champion," Celestine said. "She will come to the Conclave. She cannot help herself, any more than I could keep myself away from the Cathedral, even when I was dead."

Elowen walked up to the end of the table and turned her blindfolded face towards the old woman, with her sword hanging quietly at her side.

"Did you tell him the truth?" Elowen asked.

"Yes, I did," Celestine said. "The Mother is dying, and she has been dying for forty years."

Elowen’s sword stayed dark, and every woman and child in the room could see it, and Kai noticed more than a few of them look up at the hole in the ceiling with an expression he couldn’t quite read.

Celestine lifted her veil one last time and looked down at Kai, and for the first time since he had pulled back the curtain, she wasn’t crying.

"Take me to the Conclave, God of Failure," Celestine said. "I want to tell every church in Veyrath what the Mother told me, before I die for real."

Kai lay there in the soup, staring up at the hole in the ceiling while the broth soaked slowly through the back of his vest, and he pressed his hand against his chest again.

"Syraphim," Kai whispered. "Are you okay?"

She was quiet for a very long time before she answered.

[I always wondered why she sent me to you and not to him. I thought I must have been a mistake]

"What do you think now?" Kai whispered.

[I think maybe she picked the wrong person on purpose. Just like you miss on purpose]