Chapter 54: The Silent Heart

The staircase finally came to an end at the mouth of a long hallway hewn straight out of the rock, so far beneath the Cathedral that Kai couldn’t hear a single sound from the city above them. The air was cold and heavy with that strange sweet scent, and built into the walls on both sides of the hallway, in neat little alcoves, were rows and rows of golden urns.

Each urn had a name carved into the rock beneath it, and Sunny walked slowly along the row, reading them off one after another under his breath.

"High Priestess Amarante," Sunny read. "High Priestess Odile. High Priestess Verenne." He came to an empty alcove at the very end of the row, where the rock beneath it was smooth and bare. "This is where Celestine’s urn should have been."

"What about the one next to it?" Kai asked, pointing at the alcove beside it, which was also empty.

Sunny stared at it for a long moment, and his jaw tightened.

"That one is for Liora," Sunny said grimly. "Every High Priestess chooses her place on the day she takes her vows."

[Kai, it is past midnight. 345 days. 4 days until the Conclave]

"Not now," Kai whispered.

[I only wanted you to know that I am still keeping track]

The hallway split into three different tunnels at the far end of the crypt, and Garrick held up his glowing hammer and looked back over his shoulder at the rest of them.

"Which way?" Garrick asked.

[Left. She is that way, and she is close]

"Left," Kai said.

Elowen had stopped beside him with her blindfolded face turned towards the left-hand tunnel, and she was standing so still that Kai couldn’t tell whether she was breathing.

"There are two lights in front of us," Elowen said. "Celestine’s and Liora’s, both of them burning as bright as a fireplace. But there is another light behind them." Her voice dropped lower. "It is the biggest light I have ever seen, bigger than the entire Cathedral above us. And it is barely lit at all, like the dying embers of a fire that is about to go out."

No one said anything after that, because there was no need to, and Kai felt the warm spot in his chest burn hotter than it ever had before.

The left tunnel was narrower than the other two, and its walls were carved with hundreds of small suns, each one exactly the same, with long rays spreading out from its edges. The farther they went, the more of the suns had been defaced or scratched out, as if someone had come down here over the years and tried to carve them right out of the rock. Princess Seris ran her fingers across one of the ruined carvings as they passed it, but for once, she didn’t write anything down.

The tunnel sloped downward for a long time, and then it opened up into a huge round room with curving walls lined with burning torches. Two guards with spears stood at the entrance, and both of them turned towards the sound of footsteps.

Sunny and Garrick dealt with them before either guard could scream. Sunny grabbed the first guard’s spear and wrenched it right out of his hands, while Garrick simply bonked the second guard over the head with his hammer, and the man went limp and slid to the ground.

"Sorry," Garrick told him, and then he leaned the unconscious guard against the wall so that he wouldn’t wake up with a sore neck, because that was the kind of man Garrick was.

Kai walked past them into the room, and then he stopped so suddenly that Mira bumped into his back, and Princess Seris bumped into Mira.

In the middle of the room, rising up out of the floor, stood a giant golden sun. It was as tall as three men stacked on top of each other, a perfect circle of hammered gold with long rays extending from its edges, and it was bound from top to bottom in golden chains as thick as Kai’s arm. Every link glowed with the same sickly golden hue as the sludge in the canal and the fake clappers in the sea cave, and through the cracks in the gold, something was shining. It was a white light, so dim that it was barely there at all, and it flickered every few seconds like a candle in the wind.

[Oh]

It was the quietest Kai had ever heard Syraphim speak, and he felt it all the way down to his bones. The warm spot behind his ribs was pulling towards the sun now, gently but steadily, the way a compass needle pulls north, and he had to plant his feet to keep from walking straight towards it.

Celestine was sitting in a plain wooden chair in front of the sun, with her hands folded in her lap and her veil pulled back from her face. She wasn’t bound in any way, and she didn’t look injured, only very old and very tired. Standing beside her in her white and gold robes, with one bandaged hand resting on her mother’s shoulder, was Liora.

Liora didn’t look the least bit surprised to see them.

"I told you not to come, Mr. Mercer," Liora said, and her voice echoed around the huge round room. "I asked you politely."

"You left a threat on an old woman’s pillow," Kai said. "That’s not polite. Trust me, I would know. I’ve left a few."

Liora’s lip twitched, but she didn’t take her hand off her mother’s shoulder, and behind Kai, he heard Garrick snort and then try very hard to turn it into a cough.

"Do you know what this is?" Liora asked, motioning towards the sun behind her.

Kai looked up at the giant golden sun and the white light flickering inside it, and all at once, everything came together in his head so hard that he almost laughed. He was remembering the last words the Lady of the Silver Moon had spoken to him in the tower, the riddle that none of them had been able to figure out.

"The sun knows who is holding her tongue," Kai said slowly. "So go and ask him."

He turned around to face the Holy Champion, who had stopped in the entrance of the room with his sword in his hand and his face gone pale.

"Sunny," Kai said. "Sun. Ask him. She meant you."

Everyone in the room turned to look at Sunny, and the Holy Champion slowly lowered his sword until its tip rested on the stone floor. He stared up at the golden sun, and his hands were trembling.

"I have been here before," Sunny said, in a voice that sounded very far away. "When I was six years old, on the night I was chosen, the High Priestess brought me down here and made me kneel before this sun. She made me swear that I would protect the Silent Heart of the Mother with my life. I did not know what that meant, because I was only a child, and she told me that the Mother slept inside it and that the sun was there to keep her safe." He looked over at Liora. "You made me swear to protect her prison."

Liora didn’t look away from him, though her face had gone pale as well.

"Yes, I did," Liora said. "We needed a Champion who would never question it."

Beside her, Celestine looked down and closed her eyes, as if she couldn’t bear to watch what she had created being passed on to a young boy.

Liora tightened her grip on her mother’s shoulder.

"The Silent Heart is the voice of the Mother," Liora said. "All of her, gathered into one place and trapped there, so that she could never tell anyone what she told my mother. Every blessing the Radiant Church has given out for the past forty years came from that sun. Without it, there is no Church. There are no priests with light in them, no blessings, and no Cathedral."

"You’ve been draining her," Kai said angrily. "She’s been dying all this time, and you’ve been using whatever is left of her to power your Church."

"We have been keeping her alive," Liora said. "If those chains are broken, the rest of her light will pour out all at once, and she will speak, and then she will die. Is that what you want, Mr. Mercer? To kill a god so that she can have a last word?"

Kai didn’t have an answer for that. He just stood there with his hand pressed against his chest, watching the faint white light flicker behind the chains, while Mira moved up beside him and Garrick shifted his grip on his hammer, and nobody moved any closer to the sun.

[Kai, she is lying to you. Look at Elowen’s sword]

Kai looked back over his shoulder, and Elowen’s sword was glowing a soft, steady white in the torchlight, bright enough that every person in the room could see it.

"Some of that was a lie," Elowen said.

For a brief moment, Liora looked scared, and then she lifted her chin.

"Then allow me to tell you the part that is true," Liora said, and she looked down at her mother, sitting frail and silent in the chair beside her. "When my mother trapped the Mother’s voice inside this sun, she bound the chains to her own life, so that no one could ever break them without her consent. If the chains are broken, the oath that holds them will take her life along with it."

Liora looked back up at Kai, and her eyes were full of tears.

"So which one of them do you want to kill, God of Failure?" Liora asked.