***
Tiel Aranis gazed into the face of his stalker. It wasn’t one of the priests, like he had expected. It was a woman with a veil and layers of loose clothing. Her amber eyes looked up at him in fear…
“Vorani?” he breathed.
She coughed a gargled response. Held firmly in his grip, she could barely even twitch her arms and legs, and she had already given up trying.
“What in Edeh’s name are you doing here?” he asked, lifting his forearm just a bit.
She gasped for breath but didn’t otherwise struggle. “Following you.”
“But wh—” He stopped himself and shook his head, desperately trying to work this all through. “What do you want?”
“Your help,” she said. “You know something about the Kirshal.”
Tiel’s entire body stiffened, and he knew his guard dropped for a split second. She didn’t try to escape, though, and he kept his grip relaxed as his mind continued to spin.
For two days now he had been trying to come to terms with what all this meant. Master Bale seemed certain the Kirshal was here, but Tiel’s own faith had waned the more he had thought about it. He realized he could have made a mistake with the antiques—the symbol they had brought him could have been a legitimate forgery that had simply duped them. The odds that anyone had actually found the Kirshal—the odds that She even really existed—were preposterously slim. He had spent his entire life in service to Edeh and even he could admit that. The very idea of a woman kept alive in a coffin since the days of the Sundering…
It was impossible. It had to be. All of this had to be some giant misunderstanding. Vorani was a Sunoan, and they loved practical jokes. He had spent most of today convincing himself of that.
But now she was here beneath him, and had apparently been following him. It led to a single inescapable conclusion.
“You found Her, didn’t you?” he asked softly.
She glanced past his head towards the cracked door behind him. “This might not be the best place to have this conversation.”
“I need to know,” he insisted.
Her eyes fastened on his for a long moment before she nodded. “We found someone. We’re not sure if it is her or not. That’s why we want your help.”
Tiel released the breath he had been holding. “I need to close the door before someone comes by, but I’m not convinced you won’t shoot me in the back.”
“I could have done that plenty of times by now,” Vorani pointed out. “I’m just here for information.”
His lips thinned and he decided to take a chance. He leapt off her, then bounced over to the door and pushed it shut. She leaned up but didn’t stand.
“How long have you been following me?” he asked.
“Since we left your house, more or less,” she told him. “You obviously knew more than you were letting on, and we wanted to see what you would do.”
“I see,” he replied softly, frowning. “Aren’t you supposed to be an entertainer?”
She shrugged, and a wry grin formed on her lips. “Singing is just my day job. I thought you were supposed to be a monk, and here you are breaking into a temple like a master thief.”
Tiel grunted. “Hardly. I just knew they wouldn’t part with it willingly. I do plan on giving it back.”
“What, exactly?”
“You first. You said you might have found the Kirshal. What does that mean?”
She sighed and put her arms on her knees. “We bought a coffin from a group of salvagers a few days ago, and inside was a woman—alive and preserved by magic, as far as we could tell. The coffin bore Septurian runes.”
“Shakissa’s mercy,” he breathed. So it really was true, after all this time…
He blinked and forced himself to calm down. He was still in the middle of a heist inside one of the city’s major temples, and the woman in front of him could have still been lying about everything.
“The symbol you showed me,” he asked. “What was that?”
“A fake, as you obviously noticed. But the symbols were the same ones tattooed on her stomach.”
Tiel pursed his lips. Yes, it was entirely possible she was lying just for his benefit. But he couldn’t conceive of why she would go to all this trouble if that were the case. “What have you done with her?”
“Nothing,” she said. “We’re not slavers or anything. Rook bought her because he didn’t want her to fall into someone else’s hands. Even if she isn’t the Kirshal, a lot of people might believe she was. That’s almost as bad.”
“Bad? How?”
Vorani grunted and stood. “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but Haven is full of people who would exploit an opportunity like this. It would threaten the peace treaty, among other things.”
“So what were you planning on doing with her?”
“Honestly, I’m not sure Rook knows,” she admitted. “We poked around the city for people who might know something, but you were the only one who took the bait. If you want, we could grab whatever it was you were looking for and go talk to him.”
Tiel didn’t have much experience with this sort of thing—and he definitely wasn’t a thief—but even he knew how much that sounded like a trap. She had apparently been following him around the city for almost two days, and he only had her word that she didn’t have anything more sinister planned.
But the other option was for him to figure out where they were keeping the Kirshal on his own, and then somehow free her and get her all the way to Jehalai without anyone else finding out about it. He had told Master Bale it was impossible, but his mentor didn’t seem to care. He insisted he had faith that Tiel would somehow figure out a way…
Well, this was the only one he could think of. He would be risking his life on the chance the Kirshal really had been found. Many others from his order probably would have gladly done the same. It was just that before today, he hadn’t been sure he was really one of them.
“The archive holds the Osahn Scriptures, the earliest known writings on the Kirshal,” Tiel told her. “They’re also considered the most accurate. I was hoping they would give me some type of inspiration.”
“I didn’t know any of the temples here had a copy of those,” Vorani said, pulling herself to her feet. “I would have thought they’d be stuffed in a vault in Sandratha.”
He shrugged. “Master Bale told me they were here. I hope he’s right.”
“Well, let’s find them. Then we can get out of here and I’ll take you to her.”
Tiel eyed her for a long moment. “I have your word on that?”
“You do,” she said. “I’m not sure how much it’s worth to you, though. I realize you don’t really know me.”
“I don’t,” he murmured, “but I have faith that the Goddess involved me in this for a reason. I need to see if it really is the Kirshal.”
“Good enough. Now how about we find these scriptures of yours before we get caught?”
He nodded and moved over towards the bookshelves on the left-hand side. She helped him look in earnest, and two minutes later, they found it.
“Let’s head out the way we came,” she suggested.
“Right.”
The two of them quickly made their way out of the temple. Perhaps the Goddess really was watching out for them, for it didn’t seem like a single person had noticed their intrusion. He decided to take it as a good omen, because as he followed this mysterious woman across the city, he dreaded to think how many more miracles he was going to need to see this through.
The Last Goddess Page 12
