Hawk’s own mouth went dry. This was dancing on the edge of a volcano, and in the caldera here were Argon and Nasheth. She didn’t trust her own voice, so instead merely shook her head and looked up at the impressive God, trying to radiate submission in every cell. “I…I don’t…” she finally managed, and watched the interest die in those intense, divine eyes. “I don’t know her at all.”
“Pity,” Nasheth said. “I would have wanted to give my condolences personally. Without Alex West…none of this would be here. He was our Archetype. He went inside the Prism—Willingly, even enthusiastically, because he knew what would happen the way we did not.”
Hawk remembered her last phone call with Alex. He’d been terrified and desperate, both for escape that would not come…and to wish her goodbye. She knew in that moment that she was, indeed, speaking to the mastermind behind Alex’s fate. And she couldn’t let one ounce of hate, one iota of anger, escape her expression. She couldn’t even clench her fists in protest. This woman had every reason to believe her lies were sacrosanct…and Hawk would betray it all if she dared correct her. “What then?” Hawk said.
Silence, and a growing expression of sorrow on Nasheth’s face. “Oh, Hawk, I am so sorry. Your friend did not survive his time in the Prism. We did, because he was there, but we felt ourselves dying. We lost twenty of the children to the Glass Energy because…well, our Archetype was dead. I guessed that some of us could assume his status by consumption. So we ate him, myself and three of the surviving staff, because we thought the burden of keeping our children alive might be survivable if we spread it across more people than just one.”
“One part for you, three parts for them, and a fifth part saved for Edgar Studdard, right?” Hawk had to focus on keeping her words light, or at least keep the growing heat in her chest out of her tone. Nasheth’s words echoed through her head like a reverberating bell, We ate him. But she knew this game. It was one Alex had armed her against. This was deliberate provocation, to get her to expose just how much she cared. If she were Alex’s friend, or more than his friend, she would have reacted to that phrase. We ate him. She had to keep it in. She had to swallow Nasheth’s poison and hope it wasn’t fatal.
“A bright interpretation of our Creation Myth,” Nasheth breathed, just loud enough to be heard only in the area around her throne. “And a fairly accurate one.”
“You could give us the fifth piece.” Kaiser Willheim suddenly spoke. He crossed to Hawk and stepped in front of her. “Give us something to take back to his family.”
Horseshit, Hawk thought, and for the first time welcomed an expression in Nasheth’s eyes—the goddess wasn’t buying it either.
“Families are human things. I care not a whit for them. Are you surprised? Do you think I liked running a school? All those poor, poor parents you’re so concerned about, do you know what they were like? The only thing that gave me any pleasure was imagining how they would react if they knew the school was experimental, that we were using their precious little spawn for something far nobler and grander than anything they could imagine. And West…the greatest pleasure I’ve had in all my years was in destroying that man. Are you married, Dr. Rayne?”
“What?”
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“Are you married? Do you have someone you love? No?” A smile so filled with hate it would have withered a redwood tree. “Then you cannot imagine how great my pain is. My Edgar is gone. Oh, he survived his own trip in a Prism, but he did it alone. He had no one. Did you know that isolation is torture under the Geneva convention? And he was alone for millennia. Of course he came back mad.
“I told him what we were doing, and I told him to come find me when he was ready. When Alex died, and I realized that the Archetype state can be transferred between not just individuals, but multiple individuals…well, my hope all those years ago was that the fifth piece would be my husband’s cure. But he never came.”
The sorrow in those words was undeniable. Nasheth might be a lot of things, and Hawk rather suspected she’d been a sociopathic leech long before her God-hood gave her a reasonable excuse, but she’d loved Edgar Studdard, might still love him.
Kaiser, perhaps rising to the defense of his old business partner, said, “All due respect, ma’am, you’ve only been in this hole for a week.”
She got a stricken look, as if he’d hit her. “One week? Seven days? You are telling me that all of this has only transpired across seven days?” and even Nasheth looked horrified.
“Yeah,” Kaiser said, and then added, “There hasn’t even been enough time for the military to move in place. We got a general and a couple of soldiers and a handful of guns. And even if we had time to warn them, they won’t have time to do shit about it.” And he was smiling.
“I hear the suggestion. But for one, the Temple of Light is still too far down for us to reach the God-World—what you call Earth—by aught but the crystal pylons, and even if we should climb, and avoid the high winds and the Shadowbeasts, there are six of those cancerous crystals for us to choose from. Unless we choose the right one at once, our first blow against the Nexus would summon the Shadowmaster himself.”
“And who is this ‘Shadowmaster’?” Kaiser asked. His eyes were glittering with greed.
Nasheth smiled. “He’s the one who stole the last piece of Alex West.”
***
Hawk had to sit down. Her knees seemed to come unstrung with Nasheth’s last words. She knew in the back of her mind that the collapse she was moments away from would give the whole game away. She had to stand up for as long as she could. But her heart…oh, God, her heart was bleeding. To have her loved one reduced to dead matter, to be eaten and stolen by these…these ghouls, these monstrous creatures—it might not be the truth. It probably was not. It didn’t matter. Those words kept reverberating. “He’s the one who stole the last piece of Alex West.”
And then she felt a hand slide around her waist. It was the Light Archon, who had come to stand beside her at some point. When her knees did give out at last, he caught her with that grip around her waist, and drew her to his side so that it looked like an embrace of reassurance, not a rescue.
“And tell me, Archon of Light, how this woman managed to deceive you so thoroughly.” Nasheth’s voice was less than pleased.
“To the contrary, I knew she was lying, and that there was something quite special about her. I am an old man, My Lady, and growing older still by the day. I need an apprentice, and a desperate young woman with a lithe mind fell into my lap. I named her my heir honestly.” A pause, and Hawk was able to find her feet once more. The Archon let her go, and added, “Not quite unlike how I was chosen by my predecessor, if you remember rightly. Did I know she was from the God-World? No. But I can teach her honesty. I cannot teach her subtlety of mind. She brought that as her gift to us both.” A pause, and something glinted in the Archon’s masked eyes. “Unless My Lady has decided to support the Green-Robe faction and erase the post of Archon of Light entirely. In which case I bow to your wisdom and—”
“What foolishness is this you’re spouting?” Nasheth said. “I have not closed the Temple of Light and I will not. It will be ready when my husband does finally come at last. It will be soon.”
“As you have said, Mother,” Argon said, and raised his own glass to the sky. “And now that you are here, we may continue to sanctify my altar.”