by Ted Dekker
“Nothing much. Only the end of the world.”
“And here?”
She had a good point. “Okay.” He lifted both hands in surrender. “You’re right, the same awaits me here.”
“Us here,” she corrected.
“Okay, us here.”
“Eight billion people are on the cusp of either a tragic ending or a grand climax. And for all you know, you’re here to usher it in. That doesn’t sound like a rather important consideration to you?”
She was right, so right. But Thomas couldn’t wrap his heart around the importance of any role he might play in this reality.
He turned from her, gripping his hair. His chest felt as though it might burst.
And then suddenly it was. Bursting. He shouted his frustration through clenched teeth and keeled over. “I can’t be here! She needs me. Jake needs me. Samuel needs me!”
“I need you,” Kara said softly.
Thomas faced her. “I will take you, Kara. I swear I will take you. Billy will come back with the books, because if anyone has a role to play in the end of this world, it’s that redhead from hell! I won’t leave this place. I don’t care how long it takes, I’ll eat here, I’ll sleep here. The moment he appears, I’ll . . .”
He’d what? Knock him out, take the books, and vanish? Yes, if that was what returning required.
“You never know how much you love someone until they’re gone,” Kara said. “When you left us, I thought I would die. I understand how you feel.”
“They are my life, Kara. And Chelise . . .” He felt his eyes tear up. “I’m telling you, she is my breath. A constant reminder that Elyon longs for me the way I long for her. Without her I would dry up like an uprooted Catalina cactus.” He spoke the words in a rush, feeding on his need to say what was eating him alive.
“She’s water to me, my gift from the Giver of all that is good. She’s my sky, my ground, my reason for waking and my reason for sleeping. She is my life!”
Kara’s neck darkened a shade. “Wow.”
“It’s all about him; of course it is. But I see him in her! She’s become the lake that I drown in!”
Overstated in a state of despair, perhaps, but hardly.
“I would rather die than stay here, separated from the woman I love, from the son who turned his back on me! I need to find them!”
Kara set her jaw. “Then beg Elyon to save you from a living death. Because from where I’m standing, you’re stuck here. In this death.”
She was right. Dear Elyon, she was so right!
Thomas turned around and fell to his knees. He squeezed his hands into two fists, faced the ceiling, and through streams of tears begged Elyon to send him the books.
Send him the books or let him die.
36
CHELISE HAD raced over the desert, expecting at any moment to see signs of stragglers converging on the Gathering in Paradose Valley, latecoming albinos who’d heard the summons that Thomas of Hunter was calling the Circle together for the first time in many years. And Eramite scouts, preceding Samuel.
But it wasn’t until she was nearly in the valley that she saw any sign of albinos or Scabs, and the sight made her pull her mount up hard. The mare snorted.
A line of Horde, maybe twenty in all, turned to look at her. They rode in full battle dress over a dune not a hundred yards from where she’d stopped. Horde scouts, so deep?
But these weren’t from her father’s army, which she’d left last night. To begin with, their armor was a light tan and blended into the sands, not black like those she’d seen yesterday. And these warriors wore no helmets. Their hair blew freely, no dreadlocks.
Her first thought was that they were Eramite, though she’d never seen an Eramite warrior before. And she knew they couldn’t be scouts. These twenty carried spears and maces, spiked steel balls, dangling from each saddle, not the lighter weapons of a fast-moving scout.
This was a contingent from a full army, riding without care within a half-hour march of Paradose Valley! That the warriors saw her and made no attempt to cut her off disturbed her even more.
She stared in stunned silence, lost for a moment. Thoughts of the Gathering crashed through her mind. All twelve thousand had surely arrived by now.
Did these soldiers know how close they were to the Circle’s most prized tribe? But of course they must!
Samuel.
Samuel had done precisely what her father predicted. He’d brought a contingent of Eramites to the Circle. She’d fled her mother’s tent with the scout Stephen as an escort and made the best possible time across the desert, hoping that Qurong’s information was wrong, or at least twisted. Stephen had left at her insistence nearly six hours ago. She knew the way from here, and it was safe.
But here and now, she knew that there was only one explanation for the twenty nonhostile half-breeds on the dune to her right. She kicked her horse and galloped on, down the slope and up the far rise, heart pounding. Up the rise, begging Elyon for time. The elders knew about Samuel, but what would they say to . . .
Chelise slid to a halt atop the next dune and gawked at the sight that greeted her. The valley was alive, flooded by an army that stretched to the horizon.
Samuel had not only brought a contingent of Eramites, he’d brought the whole half-breed army! A massive throng, no less than a hundred thousand strong, capable of crushing the Circle under hoof without breaking stride.
And where was Elyon?
The world awaits you, Chelise. Michal’s words whispered through her mind.
Chelise whipped her horse and cried out, urging it to run, to race as fast as was possible despite legs tired to the breaking point.
She had to tell them that Qurong had already gathered his army.
That they could not listen to Samuel.
That they could not make a move without Thomas!
A hundred thoughts pounded through her head, and she slapped the mare’s hide harder, racing around the army. It didn’t matter; not one seemed even slightly disturbed by the presence of an albino on a horse. Only curious. They’d already seen plenty today.
They were half-breeds, but their gray eyes and flaking skin were no different from full-breed Horde’s. These half-breeds were as Horde as her own father.
They watched her from a distance, and the sheer scope of their enormity sent a shiver down her spine.
It took her less than twenty minutes to cut a line across the dunes, around the gathered army, into the canyon, and to the corrals behind the tents.
The camp looked deserted. But the albinos had to be around the corner, gathering in the amphitheater where Thomas himself had toasted the Great Romance not two weeks ago.
Then she heard his voice. Samuel’s voice, echoing unseen from beyond the cliff. She ran up the path to the overlook and pulled up sharply.
The Circle had indeed arrived, all of them. They stood or squatted on boulders and sat on the cliffs, and their attention was firmly fixed on the flat stone surface where Marie had fought Samuel in the earliest bid to end this craziness.
And here he was again, this son of Thomas, Samuel of Hunter, standing next to an albino woman dressed in Horde battle armor and a red cape. Behind them, an Eramite leader, perhaps Eram himself, sat on his horse with a half dozen other half-breed fighters.
The elders stood to their right, arms crossed, watching with a mix of skepticism and interest. Why weren’t they stopping this?
“Wasn’t this day prophesied of old?” Samuel called. “It is said he will ride on a white horse and deliver those who swim with him to a new world, where there are no tears.”
His voice rang out. “Where his fruit is heady enough to make the most pained heart laugh with delight. Where our children no longer fear that a Horde sword will gut their mother or drop their father’s bloody head to the ground. For ten years we have fled this oppressor. Will Elyon never rescue us?”
“But he has,” Mikil said.
“Let him speak!” someone shouted ba
ck. “This is Thomas’s son, and what he says has merit.”
Samuel continued without giving Mikil opportunity. “Mikil’s right. Elyon has saved our hearts, and now he extends his hand to pull us from this wretched life on the run. Our enemy will not mock us, they will not ridicule us, they will only envy the Great Romance. I am Elyon’s prophet and I say it is so.”
“It is as he says!”
“He speaks the truth!”
“No, no, this can’t be . . .”
The response was a cacophony of mixed sentiment.
“Do you doubt?” Samuel shouted, red-faced. They quieted slowly. “Do you think I was born to Thomas of Hunter for no reason? If he was here, would he deny the prophecies of old? We cannot escape our destiny.”
“It is as he says.”
“He speaks the truth.”
“The day of Elyon’s wrath against the Horde has come, my friends. We will destroy the Horde!”
“Through an alliance with the Horde?” Johan demanded. “This is ill-advised.”
“Ill-advised,” Samuel mocked. “Our elders are too intellectual to follow the passions of Elyon, who uses whomever he sees fit. Today that is Eram and the famed Forest Guard.” He called the half-breeds as they were known before acquiring the scabbing disease. “I’m proposing we ally ourselves with Eram to this end. He needs us as much as we need him. Let me take five thousand of the strongest fighters here, and we will lead the army you’ve all seen just outside our canyon in one crushing blow against the Horde!”
It sounded perfectly reasonable, Chelise thought, except for what they didn’t know. And according to the Roush, the world awaited her, Chelise, who’d been sent back by Thomas in his stead, to save them all.
The Circle awaited her.
She lifted both hands and stepped forward, overlooking them all. “I am Chelise, wife of Thomas, and I find fault with this son of mine!” she cried for the whole Gathering to hear. They tilted their heads up. A murmur ran through the Gathering as she hopped down and stood on a large boulder to Samuel’s right.
“Hello, Mother,” Samuel said.
She ignored him. “I have come from the east, where the Horde army is assembling in the Torun Valley. They know we are here at this moment, with the Eramites, and they beg us to come so that they can crush us and leave our bodies for the buzzards!”
“I love you, Mother, but you’re wrong.”
She whirled to face him. “You’re saying the Horde will not slaughter many, if not all, if you march now?”
“Well, yes, there would be some bloodshed. But you’re still wrong. Mother. You don’t know everything. You don’t know that Elyon has given me a supernatural means of victory.”
She was at a loss for words.
Samuel stepped forward and addressed the assembly. “It’s true, I’m a prophet for this day, but I don’t come with words alone. How could I stand up to the quick tongues of the council or my own mother? But I come with another.” He looked at the woman beside him. “I present to you the strong arm of Elyon himself, in the flesh, for our benefit.” He reached for her hand, kissed it, and held it high. “Friends of the Circle, I present to you Janae, a messiah in her own right.”
Applause started with a smattering and grew.
“Show them, Janae.”
The dark-haired witch had the look of a seductress. There was a strange rash on her neck, similar to the one Chelise now saw on Samuel’s neck.
Janae stepped forward and paced before them like a general surveying the troops. She motioned casually over her shoulder with a single finger. “Bring him.”
Two of the half-breeds hauled a chained Scab into the clearing. Chelise recognized him immediately: This was Stephen, the very scout who’d treated her so kindly as an escort.
His gray eyes found hers. “Please . . .”
“Let him go!”
The witch twisted around. “We will! As soon as he shows everyone what I already know.”
Janae pulled out a small vial and held it up for the whole assembly to see. “In my hand I hold Elyon’s gift to us all.” She plucked the stopper from the top of the glass tube and waved it in front of her nose like a precious perfume. “The scent of the most high. To you and I, who have bathed in the lakes, half-breeds and albino alike, it is a gift.”
Chelise could smell the potent scent from where she stood, a mix of lemon and gardenia flower if she was right.
Samuel’s seductress lifted it up and walked to the closest observers. She held it out. “It gives us only strength. But to this infidel behind me, the scent of Elyon is poison. Yes? If he comes within ten paces of me, as he is now, the scent will enter his nostrils, penetrate his blood, and excite the very scabbing disease that makes him Horde. To be more precise, the scent repels the worms that eat him alive, throwing them into a fit. They will wreak havoc . . .”
The scout began to whimper. He scratched at his skin in a growing panic.
“. . . with his nerves,” Janae finished. She nodded at the guards. “Release him.”
They unlocked the scout’s chains and pushed him forward. Stephen had gone from a terrified Horde who feared his captors to a debilitated man panicked by whatever was happening to him. He staggered forward, bent at his knees like an old man. “What’s happening? Take it off me!”
“It’s not on him,” Janae said for all to hear. “It’s in him, and it is Teeleh’s breath, stimulating the worms eating his body.” She paced before the crowd, scanning them with an even stare. “Yet I feel nothing. The halfbreeds feel nothing. The council feels nothing. Those close enough to inhale this breath from hell feel nothing. Why? Because we have all bathed in the lakes at one time and are immune to my Raison Strain.” Then she added, “Elyon’s gift to us.”
A mumble of amazement swept through the crowd with a few sharp expressions of protest, but even more cries of agreement. “She tells the truth, she tells the truth!”
Janae walked to Samuel, who gazed at her as if she might be his own personal goddess. She stood on her toes and kissed him on the cheek. Taking his hand, she turned back to the Gathering.
“Elyon’s gift. He gave it to me and told me I would find Samuel with the Eramites. Together we would come to the Circle, in peace. We would extend the grace of Elyon, and then we would march on the Horde army, feed them Teeleh’s breath, and slaughter them all in their weakened state.”
Chelise stood on the boulder, bound by twisted cords of objection.
Where was Elyon in all of this? Janae spoke with authority. Could her son’s new lover have come from Elyon? Her message was desperately needed by many in the Circle. They would drink it deep and satisfy their thirst for Elyon’s power once again.
But this woman could not have come from Elyon! She was a seductress, a harlot with words that tickled the ears. And she was missing the most important element in Elyon’s charge to them all.
Chelise yelled it now, shouting over both Johan and Mikil, who’d stepped forward as one and were objecting.
“Love the Horde!” she cried, pointing at the Horde scout who was now shaking in fear and pain. “This is our only charge regarding these poor souls. Judgment will be Elyon’s to wield, not ours.”
“What she says is true,” Johan shouted.
“We can never take up a sword and cut down another human in Elyon’s name,” Chelise said. “Never!”
“So says the daughter of Qurong, the cousin of Teeleh.”
She didn’t know who from the throng of twelve thousand had made the point, but no one protested the comment. She stood high on the boulder, staring at the full assembly of albinos, and for the first time in many years she felt like a stranger in their midst.
She, who’d drowned in Elyon’s love and been washed of the disease, felt more Horde than albino in this moment. What was the difference between them and Qurong? Between Samuel and Stephen?
The scabbing disease was the difference.
And the insight to acknowledge that the condition was evil, aff
ecting the mind and heart as much as the skin. And the bravery to follow Elyon into the red pool, drown to this life of disease, and rise from the waters as a new creature.
Because wasn’t her mother, Patricia, capable of love? Wasn’t her father worthy of life? She would die before she considered taking up arms against any Horde!
All eyes were on her. Both Samuel and Janae seemed content to let her engage her own people. She silently begged Elyon to bring Thomas to them. Now. In these deserts, the people would follow him like no other. They needed him desperately.
She needed him. She required her lover by her side, for the warmth of his body and his soft words of encouragement and his tender kiss of love.
“Yes.” Her voice was shaking. “I am the daughter of Qurong, and yes, my father is still deceived. He can’t see the truth when it stares him in the face. But isn’t this the way of the world? They can only see the ordinary, and Elyon is anything but ordinary. His love is extraordinary, extending beyond you and me to our own fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers who are still Horde.”
“His love is extraordinary, Mother,” Janae said. “But then so is his wrath.” The woman stepped away from Samuel and drilled her with a stare. “Do you challenge my authority as the one who has come with this gift from Elyon?”
What if she was right? What if this really was Elyon’s gift to them all? It was strange that this woman had come to them from nowhere, much like Thomas had first come. Strange that she had taken up with Samuel, son of Hunter. So similar yet so . . . different.
Before Chelise could answer the woman’s question, Janae faced the Gathering. “And what say you?” She lifted the vial she claimed to be Teeleh’s breath. “How many will hear the voice of one calling from the desert? ‘Prepare the way of the lord, for every valley shall be filled in, every mountain made low. And the whole world will see the salvation of Elyon.’”
