A Division of Souls - A Novel of the Mendaihu Universe (55 page)

She gave the door a much harder kick than
expected, and they were met with a wall of icy rain pounding
directly upon them. They both yelped and shielded their eyes as
they crossed the roof towards a small wooden shed set up near the
rear of the building. She fumbled with her keys, unlocked the door
and pushed Poe in.

“You are invited,” she said, waving a hand
around the shed. “I do most of my spells, rituals, and healings up
here now. Put the case near that floor latch.”

“I remember this place,” he said. It was
once a bare room with very little in the way of comfort, though
comfort was not always a concern when she did spiritual work. Now
there were several throw pillows on which to kneel, a kotatsu for
gathering circles, a supply of candles and incense, and a tiny
refrigerator in the corner for refreshment. The room looked well
used. In the months since she’d left the ARU, she’d done well.

Christine opened the briefcase and pulled
out a sturdy leaden hoop shaped in wide oval. It had no ornamental
carvings or meaningful symbols inlaid on it, nor did it have any
intricately placed objects reaching to the heavens. It was a
simple, dark-colored, egg-shaped hoop. She had him fasten a heavy
rod into the base of the hoop while she held it in place. Lastly
she opened up a roof hatch, and together they stuck the artifact
through to the outside and secured a weighted stand at the base,
and secured it into the notch in the floor.

The Benjamin’s Key stood before them, twelve
feet high and completely uninspiring. Poe had only seen one once
before, and that had been in the artifacts library of ARU
Headquarters. It seemed like an ordinary scepter, and to an
untrained eye it would have been little more than a curious
conversation piece. Its true power, however, lay within its
wielder. It was a conductor of spiritual energy that needed to be
drained as quickly as possible. Such energy was usually unstable,
chaotic and in such vast quantity that only the best of wielders
were physically and psychically strong enough to withstand it. The
misbegotten name had come from an old pre-Landing myth of a
provincial forefather experimenting with energy using lightning and
a key, and it had stuck over time.

Satisfied, Poe reached out to Kai and Ashan
over his comm to let them know everything was set on his end…and
added with some trepidation that Caren had returned to the
warehouse. The news was met more with curiosity than with
worry.

“Perhaps it is better she’s there with her,”
Kai suggested. “If anything happens…” She herself did not want to
finish her words, the same Poe had thought but had dared not say.
The silence hung for what seemed too long a time. “Ashan and I will
start the ritual,” she said finally, her voice cold. “Christine can
activate the Key whenever she feels ready.”

“I’ll be here as well,” he said, and held
the commlink away from him for the moment. “We do this
together.”

“You don’t have the knowledge or the
experience,” she said.

“I have the faith,” he said, giving her an
impish smile.

The comment made her laugh, and she nodded
approval. “Yes,” she said, “that you do, Alec. In abundance. Tell
Kai to give us ten more minutes so I can give you a crash
course.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Revelation

In the span of twenty-four hours, Denni had
gone from protected little sister and recently awakened Mendaihu to
the world-revered One of All Sacred. She had gone from Earth to
Trisanda and back in under an hour. She’d figured out how to
control Nehalé’s ritual almost as soon as she’d seen its reach from
space. She’d returned to the warehouse with the ability to calm the
emotions of everyone within. She suddenly had a claim to such a
vast amount of knowledge it could not be measured; a knowledge she
couldn’t completely fathom, yet she could access it with ease, and
understand it instantly once within her grasp. She could do so many
impossible things with her newfound power she feared she was losing
focus. She ran on Mendaihu instinct as much as possible, and
thanked Caren profusely for giving her reason to trust it.

And now Caren was here. Thank the Goddess,
her sister had come!

Led by Anando, Caren entered through one of
the bay doors with her eyes wide. She’d expected a gathering, but
nothing this large…and luckily, she had come after the crowd had
calmed again. Denni could sense her from across the room…her whole
spirit shimmered with equal parts confusion and awe, but when Caren
finally found her standing at the top of the mezzanine stairs, that
confusion turned to such a powerful love and relief that Denni
nearly lost her footing. She giggled in delight, never having felt
such a strong energy from her, and bounded down the stairs to meet
her. She darted past the throng of people who were making way for
her as quickly as they could, and finally crashed into Caren’s
awaiting arms.

Oh Denysia…
Caren spoke from within,
her arms wrapped tightly around her.
You wouldn’t believe how
much I love you right now…

She sank into her sister’s embrace,
remembering the countless times she had done so before when she was
younger, smaller, and not yet awakened. She could feel her own
spirit intertwining with Caren’s, forever bound.

Karinna,
she said.
My one
constant. My anchor.

Caren looked down at her quizzically but
with a sense of amusement. In their lives together, Caren had
constantly told her of her personal troubles and how constantly
chaotic her own life was. But to Denni it was Caren’s unending
pursuit of that perfect inner peace that drove Denni herself to
achieve it for the both of them. She knew this was not out of the
many psychic gifts she now found herself with. This was from within
her heart.

“Poe is setting up a Benjamin’s Key a few
blocks from here,” Caren said out loud, not only for her sake but
for others to hear as well. “I believe they’ll be ready within the
next fifteen to twenty minutes whenever you want to start the
cleansing.”

Denni gaped at her. “How did you know…?”

“As soon as I saw Anando, I understood,” she
said, and blushed. Blushed! Caren never did that! “As much as it
pains me not to dig into past lives in order to remember where I’ve
met Anando before…” Caren turned to Anando and gave him a knowing
smile. Denni stole a glance at the young man she had seen floating
throughout the place an hour before. How had she not recognized his
signature before now? “I had to figure out how everyone fit in,”
Caren continued. “We were all wrong from the beginning…we all
thought it was chaos out there, that Rain of Light, an aftereffect
of edha Usarai’s ritual and the hrrah-sehdhyn, but that wasn’t it
at all — it was there for a reason. It wasn’t chaos, but a
gathering of spirits. I knew a cleansing was coming as soon as I
saw Anando, because he was there for me, to guide me back to you.
Every action had a reason, Denni. There was no chaos at all. And it
all fell into place at that moment.”

“Like things finally made sense,” Denni
said, more to herself than to Caren.

“And about damned time,” she groaned. “When
Kindeiya Shalei contacted us, he said that you’d be down at the
warehouse by four. Why the warehouse? And why so many Mendaihu and
Shenaihu jammed into one large place? Then it hit me: the reason I
couldn’t sense the Rain was because I was expecting to feel
Mendaihu
souls up there…of which there are very little.
Isn’t that right, Nehalé?”

Denni looked over her shoulder. Nehalé, who
had kept his distance, now stepped forward to join the
conversation. “That is correct, emha Johnson,” he said evenly. They
both stared at each other for a long and uncomfortable moment, she
with the cold professionalism of her duty, and he with what seemed
to be both wariness and pity. For that long moment, Denni dared not
breathe. This one moment decided the fate of more than just her
duty or his achievement in the Awakening.

Slowly and deliberately, Caren let out a
long breath, yet never taking her eyes off of him. “Kindeiya knew
about the Rain of Light being mostly Shenaihu spirits,” she said
coldly. “So did you. You planned on equalizing it once you had a
fair number of Mendaihu and Shenaihu here in this warehouse. Using
the polarities to what, cancel each other out?”

Nehalé smirked. “No…not entirely. Many have
thought that was my only motive. I was trying to disperse them, and
in the process, increase the flow of Light.”

Denni frowned. “Then why awaken me? Why did
you need me, as the One?”

He looked down at her with kind eyes and a
reverent smile. “To be honest…” he said, placing a gentle hand on
her shoulder. Caren stiffened, but restrained herself from doing
anything. “My Dearest One, originally to awaken you was not part of
the plan at all. Mind you, that was years ago.” He glanced quickly
at Caren. “Many years ago, emha Johnson, before either of you knew
or understood what you are now. And please, nyhnd’aladh, I say this
with nothing but reverence to them…but Kindeiya Shalei knew that
Denysia here was the One of All Sacred when your parents sacrificed
themselves to protect the two of you. He never told me it was your
sister…only that she was here, and being protected by Cheylan and
Aaramis Shalei.”

Surprisingly Caren did not lash out. “So…”
she said, and bit her lip. She crossed her arms and moved closer
in, much closer than comfortable. Denni saw it purely as a
protective move. In the small time she had known Nehalé, however,
she had learned and eventually understood his motives for what he
had done. His plans may not have been executed perfectly, but in
the end…

…in the end, he had performed miracles, and
had protected them all along.

“So,” Caren said again. “You disperse the
Shenaihu souls throughout the city…why? Were you planning another
attack on a church? Saint Paul’s up the street, perhaps?”

“I planned no such thing,” he said as evenly
as he could without showing he’d been offended by the implication.
“That…” He cleared his throat, and continued in a softer voice.
“That was an unfortunate backlash of the Awakening…one that had
been exploited by Natianos Lehanna. I’m sure you know who and what
he is by now…”

“Yes…” Caren said, her voice as low as his.
“Yes, I do.”

Nehalé had said Natianos’ name so
disdainfully that Denni almost hadn’t made the connection.
Saone
Lehanna
, she thought to herself. The girl she had run into not
a half hour ago. If Natianos had been behind the hrrah-sehdhyn,
then Saone had either come to stop the Gathering…or had hoped to
take part in it. She felt the pang of heartache when she thought of
Saone and Kryssyna running away amidst the craziness that had
erupted so soon after…they felt they’d been chased away from a
chance of real peace.

“Natianos believes he has the upper hand,”
Nehalé continued. “He truly believes that the Shenaihu will
prevail, once the Cleansing commences. I am doing all I can to keep
that from happening, and at the same time ensure the Mendaihu will
not be the overriding power, either.

“In answer to your question the Cleansing
would, in broad terms, let the souls within the Rain of Light
disperse themselves throughout the city, perhaps even beyond the
limits of the Sprawl. The result would be…well, a bit like your
partner.”

Caren frowned. “Excuse me?”

“Nehalé is one of the strongest Soulsensers
in this hemisphere,” Denni said. “He might not have known it was
me, but he found me as the One of All Sacred, when he performed the
Awakening ritual. I’d give him the benefit of the doubt.”

Caren glared at both of them, first at her
own sister’s audacity, then at Nehalé’s intrusiveness. She waved
her hand frantically in front of her. “What does that have to do
with Alec Poe?”

“Everything,” he said. “He is
cho-nyhndah
, the twin spirits. He has both Shenaihu and
Mendaihu in him.”

“So?”

Nehalé reached out a hand to touch Caren on
the shoulder. She flinched, about to jerk away and out of his
grasp, but thought better of it and let him do so. “The cho-nyhndah
is extremely rare, emha. He is the
pure
soul. The
completeness of the Trisandi life thread that so many ancestors
have wished for. It is not hereditary by blood, but by spirit. By
releasing the Rain of Light…many of the souls within would merge
with the souls of those willing to participate, becoming
cho-nyhndah themselves.”

Caren stared long and hard at him. “Who
gives you that right?” she asked. “Who gives anyone the right to do
that?”

Nehalé sighed, dropping his head. “You
misunderstand, Karinna,” he said. “I am not forcing anyone to do
anything at all. I have merely given everyone a chance to make
their own decision without influence or ignorance. Just as I have
awakened your sister as the One of All Sacred so she may guide
us.”

“And yet…” she said, moving closer to him
with an icy hatred in her eyes. “Did you give Denni a fucking
choice at all?”

But Denni was too quick. “Caren, don’t,” she
said quietly, taking Caren’s hand and holding it tight.
“Please…it’s okay. You don’t have to do this.”

“I can’t forgive him, Den,” she said, her
voice frail and cracking. “I cannot forgive him for what he did to
you.”

Outside, they all heard the low rumble of
thunder.

“No, Caren. Please, it was my own choice as
well! Don’t do this!”

“Do you realize what you’ve done, Nehalé?”
she spat. “Do you realize what you’ve done to this city? My city?
Are you aware of how many people you’ve affected?”

“Caren!”

“Karinna…” Nehalé said unevenly, and took a
safe step backwards. “Believe me, I am fully aware —”

“Bullshit you are!” she screamed. “Do you
even see or sense what you’ve unleashed out there?”