Eve of Destruction (11 page)

He snickered, and she slapped his arm lightly.

“We’re just friends,” she insisted, doing her best to ignore the sudden flush in her cheeks.

Danev’s eyes glimmered in amusement. “Ah.”

He sat down on one of the couches and gestured for them to do the same. Eve sunk into the chair and crossed her legs, then almost jumped out of the seat when a second man soundlessly followed them into the room.

“That’s Aram, my bodyguard,” Danev added quickly. “You’ll have to forgive his lack of manners.”

“I apologize if I startled you,” the man said in a cultured Esharian accent.

Eve nodded awkwardly and tried to force herself to relax again. One look at the bodyguard, however, convinced her it wasn’t worth the effort.  

He was tall and well-muscled without being bulky, not so different than Zach. That was, however, where the similarities ended. Aram’s cold gray eyes matched his dead expression, and he moved with the lethal grace of someone who could crush a man’s neck in the blink of an eye and not think twice about it.

No, she definitely wasn’t going to be able to relax with him in the room. At least not until she was certain they were on the same side…and maybe not even then.

 “Sorry to move us like that, but this office is considerably more private,” Danev said. “I’ve gotten a touch paranoid in the recent months, what with the increase in gang violence.”

 “I certainly can’t blame you,” Eve replied.

Aram sat down in one of the open chairs. It was such a mundane thing, and yet somehow he looked awkward doing it. She noticed Zach watching the other man carefully, and she wondered dimly if he’d seen many men like this before in the service.

“If you don’t mind my asking, did you take up your mother’s calling at Rorendal?” Danev asked.

“No,” Eve said, shifting her attention back to their host. “I’m studying sorcery, actually.”

“Impressive,” he commented. “I suppose that is one positive side effect from this ‘Age of Innovation’ we’re living in. Now more than ever people are interested in explaining the world around them. They want to know how it all fits together.”

“I find it fascinating,” she said.

“I never had the mind for it, personally.” He pressed his lips together in thought. “I ask because I’m curious how much you knew about your mother’s talents.”

“I know she had dreams. I didn’t realize until recently that some people thought they were more like premonitions, or that a few members of the church actually thought she was the Prophetess.”

“I wondered how much she’d told you about that,” he said pensively. “I expected not much, given all the things that happened to us when we were younger.”

Eve raised an eyebrow. “Like what?”

Danev took a deep breath and rubbed his hands together. “I suppose if Tara sent you here then you ought to know. There were decidedly more than a few people who thought your mother was special. Myself and her other friends back at Valmeri might have been the first, but we weren’t the last. By the end of our tenure there, the Exarch herself paid Tara a visit.”

“The Exarch,” Zach breathed. “I thought she rarely left Esharia?”

“She only leaves for rare visits to the major Edehan temples or in response to a particular crisis,” Danev said. “In this case, she wanted to confirm whether or not your mother was the Varishal.”

Eve frowned, a knot twisting in her stomach. Mr. Maltus hadn’t mentioned anything about the Exarch, but if he was there at Valmeri, then he surely would have known about it. So why hadn’t he told them? She looked over to Zach, and she could tell he was thinking the same thing.

“So what did the Exarch say?” Eve asked, her voice sounding especially hollow.

Danev grunted. “She never told us one way or another.”

Zach cocked his head. “Huh? How does that work?”

“There are politics involved, even within the church,” Danev said sourly. “You have to remember that the Exarch position was originally created by the Kirshal several centuries ago. She created the Enclave at the same time. In principle, the church would act as the spiritual leaders of the people while the Enclave defended them. By divine edict, however, both would have to cede their authority to the genuine Prophetess.”

“So if they admitted her mother really was the Varishal, then she would have been in charge,” Zach reasoned. “And I’m guessing neither the Exarch nor the Enclave wanted that.”

“I’m sure that’s putting it mildly,” Danev murmured. “On one hand, I can hardly blame them. The Kirshal herself was a legendary figure, the one who restored the soul of Edeh and cleansed the Fane. Even most skeptics grant her that much. But the notion of this Prophetess is much more nebulous. There’s no precise test or anything like that. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the clergy saw it as a parable rather than literal, like the Tarnsday Nymph or any other holiday myth.”

“That’s on the one hand,” Zach prompted. “What about the other?”

Danev eyed the younger man for a moment before smiling tightly. “The other is that I actually met Tara, and anyone who knew her at all had no doubts left in their minds. Tara DeShane was the Prophetess.”

Eve looked over to Zach again, and the knot in her stomach continued to twist. It was too much to take in at once. Visions of the future, a mysterious journal, the legend of the Prophetess…it was completely surreal. And it was made even worse by the fact that her mother had never once mentioned any of it.

“Predicting the future is right up there with immortality as far as hopeless aspirations go,” Zach said into the silence. “But if you’re saying she really could do it, then that journal would be worth a fortune.”

“It would be priceless,” Danev agreed. “But if you’re looking for motive, Tara has been keeping a journal for decades. The question is why someone chose to take action now.”

“And who,” Aram added. Despite being so worried about him at first, Eve had almost forgotten he was there.

“It could be the Enclave,” Zach suggested. “Maybe your mom did something to make them mad.”

“No,” Eve said. “It was Chaval. It had to be.”

Danev shrugged fractionally. “He’s certainly the obvious choice. We’re standing on the cusp of the most important election in the last fifty years, maybe since Independence. If the Industrialists win—and right now it appears they will—all of us will be in great danger.”

“They’re insane. There will be anti-mage lynch mobs marching through the streets.”

“In some places, it has already come close to that,” Danev said gravely. “But Simon is not insane—ruthless, certainly, but he is a calculating man, and that makes him much more dangerous. I suspect he might have believed your mother knew things that could unravel his plans or maybe even expose something from his past.”

Zach leaned forward. “Simon? I take it you know him?”

Danev’s face twitched ever-so slightly, and Eve wondered if that name drop had been a verbal slip. “I haven’t seen him personally in many years, but yes, I knew him once,” Danev said. He paused and eyed both of them carefully. “So did your mother.”

 “What?” Eve asked. “When?”

“At Valmeri,” he told her, leaning back in his chair and nodding at Aram to get him a drink. “He was part of our social clique at Valmeri. She never told you about that?”

Eve shook her head. Maltus had mentioned Valmeri. He had said he, mom, and Danev had been a part of that group, but he hadn’t included Chaval in it. And now that she searched her memory, she realized he had, in fact, tip-toed around the issue quite expertly.

Two thoughts immediately popped into her mind, and Eve wasn’t sure which was the most harrowing—the fact that her mother had known Simon Chaval, Industrialist leader and demagogue…or that Glenn Maltus, their longtime friend and neighbor, had lied to them about it.

“I knew that’s where she went to school,” Eve said, her throat suddenly dry, “but I never knew anything about her friends. She definitely never mentioned anything about Chaval.”

“We were a tightly-knit bunch, once,” Danev said wistfully. “All of us were youthful and motivated as people that age tend to be, and we believed the lot of us would change the world. We even called ourselves the Valmeri Seven. It seems a little silly now, but at the time it was…fitting.”

Zach frowned and folded his arms across his chest. “What do you mean ‘change the world?’”

Danev smiled wearily as Aram handed him a glass. “It was a different era. The Polerian War had just ended and thousands of men and women our age had been slaughtered—few magi, of course, but lots of torbos. People were frustrated with the government and the treatment of returning soldiers, and riots were growing more and more frequent. We felt like something was about to break, and we were frustrated that our instructors, especially the older ones, just didn’t seem to get it.”

“So what did you do?” Zach asked.

“We had this notion that the magi needed to change if the country was going to survive. The older generation liked to say that anyone could go to the university if they wanted to, but that wasn’t realistic for most families, financially or otherwise. They liked to point out how the temples took care of the masses, tending to their wounds and giving them spiritual guidance, but we all knew there weren’t nearly enough priestesses to handle the need. Most of the casualties from the war were poor conscripts, often from rural areas, and a lot of them had never even seen a real priestess, let alone been blessed by actual magic. We were living a big lie, and the war had started showing people the truth.”

Danev took a long sip from his drink. “Tara was our leader, as much as we had one. She and Simon were the most zealous of us, and they believed the future was in technology. Now keep in mind back then we had just started hearing about the first trains, and the rifles our soldiers had been using were dangerous and inaccurate. Everything was new and undeveloped, and they saw massive untapped potential.”

Eve slowly shook her head. “I don’t know who you’re talking about, but that’s not my mother. She thought that industry was killing the Fane.”

The man’s eyes softened. “I’m sure her opinions changed over time, but back then, she was Simon’s staunchest supporter. More than that, actually.”

“What do you mean?”

Danev licked gingerly at his lips and sighed. “They were lovers.”

Eve’s jaw fell open and she knew the color drained from her face. It was impossible. It had to be. Mom would have told her about that if it were true. Her dad would have, at least—if he even knew about it.

She brought a hand to her cheek. That was a particularly grim thought. Had mom kept this from dad, too? What about the other magi? Did they know she’d helped Chaval get started? Did they blame her for his success? Was it motive enough for them to finally make their move and murder her for it?

Or was the man in front of her just lying about it all?

“It was nothing scandalous,” Danev assured her after a moment. “Simon was a good man at the time. I admit I was jealous; I had always fancied Tara myself. But they worked well together. He was studying sorcery too and using what he learned to create new inventions and refinements.”

“Wait,” Zach muttered, wetting his lips as he recovered from his own shock, “Chaval is a mage?”

“A krata, nothing more,” Danev said, rubbing at his chin. “He learned many of the basic concepts, but he never took the Oath Rituals or finished his last year at school. The Enclave doesn’t teach krata anything truly dangerous, as I’m sure you know. By now I doubt he remembers much of any of it, and given his politics, he probably wouldn’t use them anyway. You can appreciate what it would do to his image.”

Zach nodded slowly. “It would destroy him. He’s built his entire platform on opposing the magi.”

“Indeed. He has admitted in public that he attended a university for a while, though. He explained how it has helped him understand the ‘corruption’ of the magi, but there’s much more to that story.”