Chapter 67: The Mother’s Words

The little golden spark flew off the tip of Kai’s finger and shot across the Hall of Seven Doors, and Kai held his breath and waited for it to veer.

The spell didn’t veer at all, and it didn’t turn upwards towards the dome or drift off towards any of the benches, and it didn’t stop halfway to think things over the way it had in Hale’s courtyard. It flew straight through the circle of sunlight falling from the roof and struck the Sun Mark in the very middle of its golden face.

For one long second, nothing happened.

Then the golden stone cracked with a sound like a bell breaking, and another crack followed it, and then another and another, spreading out from the center like the rays carved into its face. The entire Sun Mark split into seven pieces and fell inwards, and a cloud of ancient dust came billowing up out of the hole into the sunlight.

The Hall was so quiet that Kai could hear the dust settling back down onto the marble.

[Kai]

"I did it," Kai whispered, and his voice was trembling. "I actually hit it."

[You aimed at what needed to be hit. For once, they were the same thing]

Kai stood on Voss’s line with his finger still pointed at the hole in the floor. For the first time in his life, a spell had gone exactly where he had aimed it, and he realized that he had spent weeks learning how to aim at the wrong thing, when all he had ever needed to do was aim at the right one.

Down in the hole, beneath the broken pieces of the Sun Mark, something was shining.

It was a small lead box, dented and dull from all the years it had spent under the stone, and the blow had knocked its lid loose. A faint white glow was leaking out from underneath the lid, the same pure white light that had poured out of the Silent Heart beneath the Cathedral. As everyone in the Hall watched, the lid slid aside all by itself, and a folded piece of yellowed paper rose out of the box and floated slowly up into the circle of sunlight.

On the bench behind Kai, Celestine made a small, choked noise.

"That is my handwriting," Celestine whispered.

The paper unfolded itself in midair, and then a voice echoed through the Hall of Seven Doors.

It wasn’t Celestine’s voice, and it wasn’t Syraphim’s. It was a woman’s voice, old and warm and very tired, and it seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, from the floor and the walls and the sunlight itself. Kai recognized it from beneath the Cathedral, and he felt Syraphim go perfectly rigid beside him.

"I am dying, my faithful one," the Radiant Mother said. "I have been dying for some time, and I will not last much longer. I am going to gather what light I have left, and when my time comes, I will send it to someone who is not my Champion, and not a follower of my Church. I will send it to someone who will fail, and fail again, until the people finally learn what gods truly are."

Kai could hear her words rising up into the dome, and he knew that everyone in the Hall could hear them, from the King in his tall chair to the smallest child in the gallery. This wasn’t Divine Echo, and it wasn’t meant only for him. It was meant for everyone at once.

"We do not live on gold, my faithful one," the Mother said. "We do not live on your temples, or your candles, or the coins you throw into our bowls. We live on being believed in, freely, by people who were not paid or forced into it. Every blessing your Church has sold in my name has taken a little more of me away, until I have almost nothing left."

Somebody began crying quietly up in the gallery, and Kai didn’t have to look to guess that it was a priest of the Radiant Church.

"Now hear the part that you will want to keep hidden," the Mother said, and her voice grew softer. "Every god of this land was born from my light. The Moon and the Sea, the Harvest and the Forge, and the Twins who keep the dead are all my children. When my light goes out, theirs will go out with it."

Brannoch’s head snapped up, and across the Hall, High Sister Aurel pressed both of her hands over her mouth.

"My last light will have one year to be believed in," the Mother said. "If a hundred hearts believe in it freely, it will be enough to wake me, and my children will live. But if it is not believed in, it will be forgotten as if it had never been. So will I, and every god of this land will die after me, one by one, until there is nothing left above Veyrath but an empty sky."

As the Mother spoke, the seven great doors of the Hall began to glow, one after another. The hammer door burned the deep red of a forge fire, the moon door shone silver, and the wave door turned a dark blue-green like deep water. The wheat door glowed gold, and the door with the flame held between two hands flickered gray and white like ash, and the sun door blazed so brightly that Sunny had to cover his eyes.

Only the door carved with a single tear stayed dark, because the Weeping Saint had never been a god at all. Celestine looked up at it for a long moment, and then she lowered her face into her hands.

"You will want to hide this, my faithful one," the Mother said. "I know you, and I know that you will be afraid of what I have told you. Please do not hide it. If you cannot bear to say it, then write it down, and I will make certain that my last light finds it."

Her voice faded slowly away, like the last chime of a bell, and the paper drifted back down and settled on the edge of the broken stone. Every one of the seven doors kept glowing, except one.

[Kai]

Kai turned to look at Syraphim, and she was crying, with tears streaming silently down her face and her golden halo slowly dimming above her head.

"She knew," Syraphim said quietly. "She knew that Celestine would hide it, and she knew that I would fall on someone who could only ever hit what needed to be hit. She aimed me poorly on purpose."

"That’s cheating," Kai said softly.

"It is a loophole," Syraphim said, and she smiled at him through her tears.

Then her light began to flicker like a candle that was running out of wax, and Kai knew that her ten minutes were up.

"I will be right here," Syraphim said, and she placed her hand against the center of his chest. "Where I always am."

She melted back into him in a soft rush of golden light, and Kai felt the warm spot behind his ribs beat once, gently, like a second heart.

Mira appeared at his side before he even heard her footsteps, and she slipped her hand into his without a word. Her fingers were freezing, and Kai realized that she had been sitting in Hale’s dining room on the morning he told everyone about the hundred believers and the single year, so she was one of the very few people in this Hall who had already known how scared he was. She squeezed his hand tightly, and he squeezed back. Behind them, Elowen slid her sword back into its sheath, and Garrick let out a long breath like a bellows emptying.

No one in the Hall spoke for a long time. Kai looked around at the seven benches, and every single one of them seemed different now. Brannoch was staring at the glowing hammer door as if he had never seen it before, and the Keeper was flipping through her giant book of names with trembling fingers. Elder Hollis had dropped his hat on the floor and didn’t seem to have noticed, and Elder Marrow was gripping her cane with both hands, with tears standing in her eyes.

They weren’t looking at Kai like he was a con man anymore, and they weren’t looking at him like he was a god either. They were looking at him like he was the last boat leaving a sinking harbor.

Kai met Draven’s eyes across the Hall, and for once, Draven didn’t look happy at all, because underneath the polish and the rings, he looked scared. He had bet that whatever was under the stone would hurt the God of Failure, and instead, it had turned every church in Veyrath into a family that could not afford to lose him.

Draven reached up and slowly straightened the cuff of his sleeve, and Kai knew exactly what that meant, because he had done it himself a hundred times. It was what a man did with his hands while he was trying to figure out his next move.

Justiciar Hale cleared his throat, and the sound rang all the way up into the dome. He looked down at the broken stone, and then at Kai standing on Voss’s line, and finally he struck his cane against the floor three times.

"The proof has been given," Hale said, and his voice was shaking slightly. "The Sun Mark has been struck from thirty paces away, with a single blow." He looked around at each of the glowing doors, and at the one door that stayed dark. "The seven churches will now cast their votes."

[Kai. They all know what will happen if we fail]

"I know," Kai whispered.

[341 days. Ninety-eight true believers to go]