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The front door finally swings open.
“You.” The old man makes no bones about his feelings toward Corey: he looks him up and down, huffing at his withdrawing fist — the afterimage of a knock — and at his stomach. “How far along?”
“Five months.”
The old man’s fingers twitch toward his own neck. Softly, they brush the chain hanging there and fall away again.
“Five months,” he repeats. “Disgraceful.”
A gust of wind almost slams the door back shut, saved only by Corey wedging his foot in the gap. “Yes,” he says impatiently. “Disgraceful. Wicked. Bad. Naughty, naughty me. Now, could you please spare some verbiage for your son-in-law, and perhaps a cup of tea?”
The inside of the house is not as ascetic as the Faith would decree. All shelves are lined with the same kind of bibelot, a blown-glass dragon wearing a blindfold: the old man seems to be a collector. And instead of the usual drop-leaf table, the dining room boasts a sanded teak monstrosity, with carved scrollwork along the sides. Some priest you are, Corey muses, but he schools his features to indifference.
The old man puts the kettle on. Corey sits down at the hoity-toity table and idly watches the preparations. The old man’s casualwear is not as pretentious as his house. It is, if anything, too low-brow for his station: red flannel and jeans, held up with an eyesore of a tan belt, suede with a buckle so big you could lasso cattle with it. The storm is still in full roar outside, judging by the skirling moans, the rattling panes. Corey clicks his tongue politely when the porcelain arrives.
“Just put it down here, please. Yes.”
As the old man sits down across from him, lightning flashes, illuminating every splotch and canyon on his face. They seem to have multiplied in the half-year since their last encounter. That had involved teaware, too, as Corey recalls. Only… used as a projectile weapon. The two of them take a sip in tandem.
“I’m boiling more water,” the old man volunteers.
“Hmm. Tastes like… foxspoor? You went all out. Thanks, Dad.”
“You do not get to call me that.”
Corey hides his frown behind another sip of tea.
“Fine,” he says at length. “Fine, Edgar. I guess we can’t strictly be called family, since your son and I never married. And never will.” He crosses an ankle over a knee. “Tell me, though: did you know, half a year ago, the sorts of things he was getting up to? No… no, you don’t even know now, do you? It took me a while to notice, too.”
The foot dangling over his thigh begins to jiggle nervously. Edgar has not reacted to the mention of his son in any way, but he squints at the foot with something like mistrust.
“There were signs,” Corey continues, “of course there were signs – like that time Dan knocked a bird’s nest to the ground for no apparent reason. Picture a dozen eggs going splat at the same time, all yellow and pink and red. I was mad at him for hours. And all of a sudden, he took to killing mercenaries, when he used to just detain them.”
“Really.” Edgar sounds almost bored.
“Really,” replies Corey, feeling only slightly off-balance. His tongue prickles with heat: he sets the teacup back in its saucer. “But it was the Sacking of Tabathea that truly opened my eyes. The corpses…”
The corpses were strewn about the village helter-skelter, topsy-turvy, higgledy-piggledy. As far as I could tell, anatomy had no meaning anymore: elbows rested on lolling tongues, knees bracketed clavicles. Like some gigantic infant had suddenly bored of its playthings and abandoned them midgame. A woman was bent over a sink, hair half-white with suds. An old man had crumpled over, shirtless, with a swatch of expensive fabric on his lap. There was a cat beside him. It was dead, too.
We first heard these anecdotes from the scouts Dan had sent ahead, but our outfit rode to Tabathea the next day, and I saw the aftermath of the Sacking with my own eyes. ‘Sacking.’ What a laugh: no one had sacked anything. There was no blood, no pillaging, no sign of struggle. The city had just… powered down.
“Who would do this?” I said to Dan. “It’s beyond monstrous.”
At least a monster would take pleasure in disemboweling the body politic. The slaughter would not be so dry, so… regimented. Dan had a different view. He claimed it was a kinder dispatchment than most people receive: at least they didn’t suffer, or rave, or lose control of their bowels.
“I’d rather die shitting myself than washing the garlic press,” I told him. And I looked out at the open theater where three dozen people had perished watching Laarp the Screaming Jester – who it was said croaked mid-squeal, right at the close of an iambic mourning anecdote. The nature of the catastrophe was more than I could process. I felt like a serpent being taught archery. “Between this tragedy and the war up north,” I added, “your marriage might not even last until the wedding.”
I was not subtle. I meant to provoke. Dan’s engagement to Lord Wasdorf was still a sore spot for me, even if it had been done at his father’s behest.
Not one of your better ideas. Not by far. But I would only learn that later, after Dan had taken off, and the liches and the cannibals had started swarming through the borders, all because—
The kettle gives an importunate screech, and the priest gets up to remove it from the stove. His movements still signal irritation: taps and sweeps become shoves and jabs, and objects are not set down but slammed down, like a tippler’s empty tankards. Edgar seems to gather his thoughts while in the kitchen: when he comes back, he has a question at the ready. Bardiche-like, it swings down.
“How did that happen, anyway?”
Amazing, how much scorn can fit into a single demonstrative. “Right,” says Corey. “So. When a man and another man love each other very much…”
“Forget it.”
The priest’s complexion has taken on a bit of color. Irascible pink, Corey wants to call it. He will not let it get to him.
“This is your fault, too, you know?” he snaps. “You were so fucking intent on having a successor. ‘There must always be a Knight Devout; these borders won’t defend themselves’ — I overheard you saying that to Dan – and ‘This dalliance was charming when you were thirteen, but at twenty-nine it is grotesque.’ I’m pretty sure you said grotesque.” He scowls at the memory. Even Edgar looks a bit chastened. “Dreadfully sorry my family tree is not to your liking. Not enough godsblood on those branches, hm? Lord Wasdorf poisoned his city’s water supply just to quell a riot… but as long as he can bear you grandchildren, I bet you’d claim the arsenic improved the flavor.” He exhales loudly through his nose. “You’ve always been like that.”
Corey must’ve been four or five when he first saw Edgar – Dan, who is a few years his junior, hadn’t been born yet. In the interest of imparting good citizenship, Corey’s parents had taken him to Edgar’s investiture ceremony. The previous Knight Devout had vanished after a chain of disasters with a high death toll, and Edgar was forced to replace him on short notice. The role was supposed to be hereditary, but strange times called for strange measures, and he had all the right qualifications: lineage, faith and swordsmanship. He had been portlier back then, leather belt buckled a few holes further than it is today, but shimmering and resplendent in his chainmail armor. He made a speech, too, which Corey has put out of his mind, except the part about godsblood needing godsblood.
Partly, Velana is to blame for this classist ideology. She has bribed different groups of people with fertility over the ages — or occasionally threatened them with it, if the dominant culture happened to prefer sex over procreation. The current ‘benefactors’ of her godsblood are male descendants of Harry the Hallowed, but past centuries have seen many and more criteria, from mercantile ancestry to birthmarks shaped like crocus flowers. Corey knows all this from his history lessons. However, since he cannot haul Velana up from the Earthpyre, he’ll content himself with poking up her priest’s cinders.
“These massacres are on your head, too,” Corey snarls. “You have mistreated Dan for as long as I’ve known you: imposing curfews and rules no other child was subject to, invading his privacy, giving him daily tongue-lashings. I once saw you deliver a backhanded slap because he kicked down an anthill! He was five. He didn’t know any better. As to the current matter, he didn’t even want children — with me or your fiancé of choice. The only reason he did this was to please you.”
Through the awning window in the dining room, Corey sees the outline of a tree bent low, as if to listen more attentively. Despite himself, he finds himself mimicking it, leaning ever so slightly forward.
“And he very nearly didn’t get his way.”
I was too upset to make love that night. But Dan was insistent: he started stripping me while I was still expounding on the brutality of the crime, the vagueness of the motives, the identity of the perpetrators. “The archivists are still performing autopsies on the corpses,” I said, “but they have a working theory already. They reckon the cause of death was light magic.”
Dan didn’t answer. He just kissed me — here, on the neck scar I sustained in the thief-and-executioner games of our boyhood. But I batted him away.
“Not many people are capable of light magic,” I said. “Could it be a Knight Devout gone rogue? Someone from another generation.”
Dan was quick to rule that out, saying the only one left besides him was his father, who was a priest of Velana, and whose faith strictly forbade taking another’s life.
It’s hard to pinpoint the moment, the exact moment when I began to suspect. But if I had to choose, I would go for the few seconds of exposition between ‘Velana’ and ‘life,’ when Dan rolled his shoulder in an insouciant way, and directed his gaze to a spot above me.
“Who, then?” I pushed. “The God of the Cycle doesn’t have a lot of traction in these parts, and Ponver’s insurgency is all but extinguished…” I put forward a number of possibilities like that.
Even as a child, Dan had always been a little melancholy, a little retiring, but I didn’t know him to be evasive until that night. He didn’t want to talk about death anymore. Save it for the daytime, he said: it takes on wings and fangs here in the dark. And we have better pastimes at our disposal…
“Spare me the sordid details, please.”
“Fine.”
An uneasy silence stretches its hammock across the dining table. Sprawled upon it are Corey’s self-reproach, Edgar’s prejudices, and an overflowing mass grave.
“I don’t have proof that Dan’s responsible.” Corey’s right hand lies flat on the table, fingers at neat angles to the saucer. A few centimetres further, his pregnant belly pushes at the wood, asserting its own geometry. “Nothing conclusive, I mean. I can only point at Tabathea and what came after — Danburo City and Mesklun and Rijkavel.”
The last word induces a shiver.
“Rijkavel…”
I couldn’t tell you why — perhaps because so much of Rijkavel’s populace was of the Faith, and thus resistant to this brand of light magic — but this particular massacre was far from bloodless. There were searchflames. There were fumes. There were trebuchets. At the mass grave, some of the bodies were so mutilated that —
“Everyone knows about Rijkavel,” the priest cuts him off.
Corey is slightly reeling from his own narrative. “Yes. Of course.”
The tea has warmed him to his toes. Man takes to navel-gazing once he gets the fire-shelter-water trifecta sorted out, and Corey is no exception. Pathologizing himself, he can see he’s come here due to an incurable case of prove-your-critics-wrong-itis. And a chronic case of cut-your-friends-loose-when-shamed-and-miserable-and-busking-for-food… ism. That, too. Why the old man let him in is less clear. But if it’s answers he wants, Corey will see him in good stead.
So he plows on. “I think Dan’s faith wavered,” he says. “I think that’s why these massacres took place.”
“You mean” — and Edgar sounds so fucking glib about the whole thing — “he started worshipping Bakwad.”
Gods below, how can he speak that name so lightly? Followers of Velana have had their mouths sewn shut for mentioning the God of the Cycle, even during their ordained streams of consciousness. Corey can’t trust himself to speak: he only inclines his head.
“So he could knock you up.”
“I — yes.” Corey swallows. “Probably. It is an open secret that the God of the Cycle grants special dispensations to his followers. By taking life, they can produce life, even if they have no godsblood in their pedigree.” He shudders. “But why did Dan need to take so much life? That bastard Bakwad sold him a pup.”
“A Knight Devout must go to great lengths to prove his faith, compared to your average acolyte.” Edgar mouths at the rim of his tea cup and tips it just enough to smell the herbs.
“I don’t even know if I can carry this baby to term.” Corey’s entire thought process is probably plain to see in his mouth area. His lips twitch, pucker, compress, and finally part, so that the upper one can curl disdainfully. “And if he’s born, I don’t know if he will possess your precious light magic.”
“He will.” The priest seems awfully certain of this. Faith goes a long way, Corey supposes. “There is one point you have omitted. Do you know where my son has gone?”
A scoff. “If I did, I wouldn’t be here with you… digesting reasonably expensive tea and fantastically cheap insults.”
“Oh, I think you would be.” The old man’s eyebrows beetle in consternation. “You don’t want to be around Danny right now. A death-worshipping Knight Devout… there’s no coming back from that. Crack open your ledger, put him down as an uncontrollable cost. Even if he had meant to redeem himself originally, Bakwad’s favor is sweet and hard to shake. Take it from me.”
A significant pause vibrates above the crockery.
“You did the same, didn’t you?” breathes Corey. “That’s how you were so sure that the light magic would be preserved. You summoned the God of the Cycle, too.”
The storm has quieted down by now, so his accusation comes out shrill and anxious. A moment later, as if on cue, the wind picks up again. It must be a critical scene in the play called Life. The stagehand in charge of the firmament is drumming up rain sounds. The understudies are waiting in the wings. The director is trying to feed Corey his lines, but however he strains his ear, he cannot make out a single word.
It is Edgar who speaks instead. “No, I didn’t summon Bakwad.” After a beat, he adds: “Not I.”
Water pelts the windows, a steady tap-tap-tap grading into a fiercer dib-dab-dip. Corey swears he can feel the impact on his very skull.
“Oh.”
He tries to picture it — Edgar in his youth, towheaded, husky and big with child — when he remembers the investiture ceremony. He had been portlier back then, leather belt buckled a few holes further than it is today…
They'd never found the Knight Devout who vanished: Edgar’s partner. But people had been happy enough to take Edgar’s pregnancy as evidence of godsblood. Desperate enough not to inquire into his credentials any further.
On some level, Corey wishes he had shown similar discernment.
“Did you hate him?” he blurts out.
Edgar’s brow darkens, as if a candle has been stoppered in his eyes. “Who? Zachary?”
It takes Corey a few seconds to parse the answer: that must be the name of Dan’s second father. “No,” he replies, but cannot bring himself to elaborate.
Thankfully, the old man understands him. When all is said and done, they understand each other.
“Did I hate my son? Did I hate Danny?” Edgar says. “Yes. Of course I did. Every day. One thousand people had died just so he could live — I haven’t retained much of my school algebra, but that was one equation where I didn’t wish to solve for X.” Corey thinks of a crushing slap and a crushed anthill. Dan’s big sad eyes. Recrudescence. He is pretty sure he’d scream if the baby were to kick now. He doesn’t realize how tightly he’s been holding his tea cup until Edgar reaches out and pries his fingers from it. They look yellow and white, jaundiced, all the way up to the nails. “But that’s not what you want to know, is it, son? You want to know if I loved him.”
Corey presses out the words with difficulty. “Did you?” He doesn’t ask what he really wants to ask, which has been niggling at him since the first time he threw up at the sight of soft-boiled eggs: Will I?
Edgar squeezes his hand. Together, they levitate in this pocket of steam and solicitude. Thunder tolls out impressively. Rain pounds the awning window. The outline of a tree splinters and frays, and the downpour shows no sign of abating – not today.