“Light and shadow, Browny, will combine to fight the darkness. And I don’t know if they will prevail. Return me to the abbey.”
A lurching sense of abrupt motion and he once more stood in the abbey’s sanctum. He enjoyed the quiet for a moment, the solidity of the walls. He could scarcely conceive of no longer calling it his home. But so it would be.
“I need you to get Abbot Eeth,” he said to Browny.
He would order everyone away. He would concoct some excuse, tell them that his vision demanded they go on a pilgrimage to Arabel while he resanctify the abbey alone. They would worry for him but they would obey. And after they were gone, he would remove all of the scrying wards that shielded the abbey from divination spells. Anyone would be able to find it, were they looking. And there were those who were looking.
He kneeled, faced Browny, and rubbed the dog’s face and muzzle. The dog must have sensed something amiss. His stubby tail did its best to wag.
“I’m going to send them all away, Browny. And after they’ve gone, you must go, too.”
The tail wag stopped entirely. The dog sat on his haunches and a question formed in his eyes.
“I know. But you must go. I am to be here alone.”
Browny licked his hand, refused to move, started to whine.
“Why?” The Oracle put his forehead against the dog’s head, rubbed his sides, and stood. “Because the chick has turned into a bird. And now we must kick him from the nest. Go fetch the abbot.”
Yellow lines of power spiraled out from Brennus’s outstretched fingers, flowed around and into one face of his scrying cube. Shadows spun around his body; sweat slicked his brow.
He was hunting a ghost.
“Come back,” he murmured, and once again slightly tweaked the nature of his spell.
An echo of the images Rivalen had shown to him had to remain in the cube. They had to.
He pictured his mother’s face, pictured the flower-filled meadow, her outstretched hand as she died.
On his shoulders, his homunculi hunched and mirrored his expression of concentration.
A charge ran through the line of his spell and a flash of light appeared in the cube. An image flickered, just for a moment, his mother lying amid a field of purple flowers. The image was blurry, not as clear as when Rivalen had shown it to him, but it was there. It was there.
“What did you wish for, Mother?” Rivalen asked, the replay of the images slurring his voice.
His mother, poisoned by her own son, said, “To be the instrument of your downfall.”
The image fragmented on the face of the cube: eyes, nose, hands, all falling to pieces before fading altogether. Brennus cursed and his homunculi echoed him. He blinked, wiped the sweat from his face, adjusted his spell, and tried to pull the echo back, but the face of the cube remained black.
“Damn it,” he said.
A soft knock sounded on the scrying chamber door.
“Not now,” he snapped.
“Apologies, Prince Brennus,” said Lhaaril, his seneschal. “But-”
Brennus irritably waved a hand and the ward on the door dispelled with a soft pop. The wood and metal slab swung open on silent hinges to reveal Lhaaril, standing alone in the dark hallway.
“You know I’m not to be disturbed in this chamber,” Brennus said.
Lhaaril, his hands clasped across his stomach, bowed his balding head. Shadows poured from his flesh, a sign of his agitation. “Yes, Prince. Humblest apologies. But the Most High wishes to see you.”
The words brought Brennus up short. His homunculi squeaked with alarm. Shadows slipped from Brennus’s skin. “When? He sent a summons?”
“No,” Lhaaril said, looking up, his glowing green eyes narrowed with warning. “He’s here, Prince. Now.”
The words did not quite register. “Here? On Sakkors? Now?”
From the dark hallway behind Lhaaril, the voice of Most High said, “Yes, Brennus. Now.”
Lhaaril stiffened, glanced over his shoulder in irritation, back at Brennus, and spoke in a formal tone. “Prince Brennus, your father, Telemont Tanthul, the Most High.”
“I think he knows who I am, Lhaaril,” said the Most High, and glided around the steward.
The Most High towered over the seneschal, and his platinum eyes glowed feverishly out of the black hole of his sharply angled, clean-shaven face. An embroidered cloak hung from broad shoulders that age had not bowed. He held a polished wooden staff in one ring-bedecked hand. His body merged with the darkness, the outline of his form shifting, difficult to separate from the shadowed air of Sakkors.
“That will be all, Lhaaril,” said Telemont.
The steward held his station, jaw stiff, upper lip drawn tight, and looked at Brennus.
Brennus nodded at him while he tried to gather his thoughts. “That’s all, Lhaaril.”
Lhaaril’s exhalation was audible. “Yes, Prince Brennus. Shall I have a meal prepared for two?”
Brennus looked his father, asking a question wioth his eyes.
“I can’t stay long.”
“Very well,” Lhaaril said. He bowed first to the Most High, then to Brennus, and exited the scrying chamber.
“This is a surprise,” Brennus said.
His homunculi cowered, covered their faces with their hands.
“I imagine it is,” the Most High said. “So. . ”
Brennus cleared his throat. “So.”
Father and son regarded one another across the gulf of things unsaid. The silence grew awkward, but Brennus refused to break it. At last the Most High did.
“You and your constructs,” he said, smiling, and nodded at Brennus’s homunculi. “Like Rivalen with his coins.”
“I’m nothing like Rivalen,” Brennus answered, and could not keep a bitter edge from his voice. “And you’ve always hated my interest in shaping-magic, father. Mother encouraged it, but never you.”
“No,” the Most High said, irritation coloring his voice. “I didn’t. Because I wanted you to focus on your gift with divination magic and-”
Brennus had heard it all before. “What do you want, Father?”
The Most High looked everywhere but Brennus’s face. Brennus had never seen his father so discombobulated. “Did you know that Rivalen no longer collects coins?”
“Of course he doesn’t,” Brennus said. “What use would a god have for such things?”
Shadows swirled around the Most High. “Godling,” he corrected. “Not a god.”
“Neither,” Brennus corrected in turn. “Murderer.”
Telemont sighed. “Still that?”
“That.”
Telemont glided toward Brennus’s scrying cube. “I explained this to you before, Brennus. We needed him.”
“You needed him. Do you still need him? He does nothing more than sit in his darkness and ponder his goddess. He can’t be of use to you, now.”
To that, the Most High said nothing.
“Or perhaps he’s just too powerful for even the Most High to challenge now? Is that it?”
The sudden tension in the air caused Brennus’s homunculi to squeal in alarm and secret themselves in the hood of his cloak.
The Most High turned to him, his platinum eyes mere glowing slits, the darkness about him deepening.
It took everything Brennus had not to back up a step or lower his gaze, but he thought of his mother and held his ground. Shadows swirled around him.
“You push and push, Brennus,” the Most High said softly. “And then push again. My patience is not limitless.”
Brennus’s homunculi trembled. Brennus bit his lip and held his tongue.
The fire in the Most High’s eyes diminished to coals. He cleared his throat.
“I didn’t come here to fight with you. And Alashar. . died long ago. I’ve come to terms with how it happened, with the. . compromises I’ve made.” He turned from Brennus and put his hand on the face of the scrying cube. “This was just used. What were you scrying?”