When the Goddess Wakes by Howard Andrew Jones

Author:Howard Andrew Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

18

The Other Way

Tesra watched the shambling, awkward run of the ko’aye bearing Rylin and Thelar, astonished that such graceful creatures were so clumsy on the ground.

Once in the air they transformed almost immediately from ungainly feathered reptiles to lithe and lovely predators. She admired them as they retreated into a cerulean sky.

The audience who’d gathered to see them off retreated to the fortress, talking among themselves. Tesra, who didn’t properly belong to any of the groups, waited to one side for them to precede her. M’vai passed, in close conversation with N’lahr. Neither paid her any notice.

Tesra still couldn’t reconcile the loving organization of which she’d thought she’d been a part with the secretive cult that had imprisoned General N’lahr and murdered noble Asrahn. It didn’t help that she had grown suspicious of her own emotions, memories, and judgment. She had been angry with Meria and M’vai for betraying that organization. Now she mourned for the kinder of the two sisters and envied the intense survivor for being trusted and valued by those the auxiliary had betrayed.

“Are you wondering what they’re talking about?”

Cerai had come up behind her so quietly Tesra flinched in surprise.

The others had disappeared into the gloom of the fortress. Cerai waved away a servant who poked out his handsome head to give her an inquiring look. She continued as though Tesra had answered in the affirmative, sounding and looking composed and cool, if tired. “N’lahr has been infected with order. I’m sure you’ve noticed. And M’vai’s increasingly worried about him. But there’s nothing to be done.”

Tesra had seen the commander’s strange symptoms as well as his peculiar energy matrix, though she struggled to make sense of the description Cerai had provided. She repeated it slowly. “Infected with order?”

Cerai smiled thinly. Because the older woman had visited the queen and the exalts infrequently, Tesra had never known her well, though she had always admired her. Master of her own fate, Cerai would slip into and out of Darassus whenever she pleased and seemed to be the only alten whom both the queen and Synahla completely respected, though in recent months both had grown suspicious of her. Tesra inferred that the Altenerai had the same misgivings about her, for Cerai had apparently been playing her own canny little game for years, preparing for a crisis neither side had fully understood.

“Didn’t you notice it happening to the queen?” Cerai asked.

That question pulled Tesra up short. She had never thought of the change in the queen’s personality as an infection. “The queen did change,” she said. “But I thought that was just because she was growing more powerful. I don’t know N’lahr at all, so—”

Cerai didn’t wait for her to finish. “You probably weren’t examining the queen closely through the inner world, were you?”

“No,” Tesra said. One simply didn’t do that. Scrutinizing a fellow spell caster was impolite, although not entirely avoidable if you happened to be working spells together. “What happened to N’lahr?”

“Well, several things. I’m sure you knew

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