She turned her fingers, and the key rotated in the lock, the handle turning in her palm. She removed the key, opened the door, and slid inside the room. She silently closed the door and waited for her eyes to adjust to the dimness. The light from the moons cascaded through the glass of the balcony door and windows to illuminate the opulent sleeping chamber. A dressing table with a large mirror stood beside a massive, canopied bed, across from a large fireplace. Couches sat beside full-sized dressing dolls, their bare wooden frames showing a thin layer of dust in the bluish double light of the moons.
Her room had not changed since she last stood on its thick carpets. Odd that her father had left it intact, as though she might return any night to lie once more upon the feathered mattress and silken sheets, an oddity that kindled a vague hope within Kellatra’s heart. Surely the static state of the chamber implied some manner of longing on her father’s part.
She chided herself for letting sentiment cloud her thinking in relation to her father. She had made that mistake once. More than once.
She crossed the floor and gently opened the door to the hall, looking both ways along the darkened corridor before easing through the doorway. She closed the door and walked quietly down the hall toward the stairs. It would do no good to search the upper rooms or her father’s sleeping chamber. So early in the night, he undoubtedly still sat in his study, poring over some ancient tome, trying to elicit from its words meaning that he might master and turn to his own uses.
Kellatra descended the stairs curving down around the edge of the great hall, walking on the balls of her feet to keep the heels of her boots from clicking against the stone. At the bottom of the stairs, she turned left, down a wide hall, toward an open door. Flickering lamplight spilled into the hallway and pooled in undulating waves along the polished marble floor. At the door’s edge, she paused, bracing herself for what came next. She had rehearsed the words repeatedly over the weeks of traveling with the pilgrim bands. Now these well-prepared arguments vanished one by one — ink magically evaporating from the page — vowels and consonants enunciated but lost in a maelstrom of silence. Uncertain what to do, unsure what would happen, but knowing she could do nothing else, she stepped into the room.
TEN YEARS AGO
KELLATRA stepped into her father’s study, the sound of her forceful footsteps running back along the stone floors and up along the marbled walls behind her. She spoke the first words before her feet crossed the threshold.
“How could you?”
Kellatra stopped in the center of the main rug, its geometric patterns forming a cage around her feet. Her father looked up from reading a book at his desk, the gentle glow of the lamplight softening the deep wrinkles of his face. With her mother’s death, he had let his body return to its normal state. His eyes narrowed at her as he leaned back in his chair.
“You should be far away by now.” Her father closed the book before him, but he did not stand.
“How could you betray her memory with your cowardice?” Kellatra clenched her fists but moved no closer to her father.
“You are the one who has betrayed her memory.” Her father sat straighter in his chair, resting his hands on the tabletop.
“He killed her.” Kellatra tried to calm her breathing, to pacify her anger.
“You believe that, but there was no evidence.” Her father pressed on the table with his hands and pushed himself to his feet. “You took judgment into your own hands and violated the sacred oath of all seers. Your mother would never have condoned such a thing.”
“He killed her.” Kellatra swallowed back the emotions causing the bile to rise in her throat. “He confessed it to me.”
“Under duress, no doubt.” Her father shook his head slightly.
“No. He bragged about it. He believed himself untouchable. Beyond punishment.”
“If that were true, why did you not approach the council?” Her father leaned on the table, suddenly seeming unsteady.
“To air a dispute of words? The word of a councilman against mine.” Kellatra grunted in disgust. “He deserved justice, not accusations.”
“Even if what you say is true, justice is not yours to dispense.” Her father tapped the book on his desk with a finger. “We have laws and rules and oaths to guide us in our actions. You have abandoned everything your mother sought to establish and maintain.”
“I have abandoned my oaths.” Kellatra’s voice rose with her anger. “You have abandoned your family.”
“We are nothing but animals without the law.” Her father stepped around the table. “The oaths protect us even when we have been wronged. They shield us from our own actions even as they guard us from the deeds of others.”
“Your oaths did not defend Mother.” Kellatra resisted the twin urges surging within her — to turn and flee, and to beat her fists against her father’s chest.
“Your mother…”
A loud banging at the front door interrupted her father’s words.
“Who is that?” Kellatra turned to the sound of the metal knocker still clanging against the outer door.
“The council guards,” her father said. “I knew you could not resist coming back even after your banishment. Your anger has always made you predictable.”
Kellatra made to run for the entrance, thinking to escape into the hall before the servants answered the knocks still resounding upon the main house door. Her legs did not move, her arms hung frozen at her side. An invisible force held her still — a beetle suspended in resin.
“Do not do this.” Kellatra’s lips still functioned, even though her head could not turn. Her father stepped before her, his hand raised, his eyes squinting in concentration.
“The guards will take you, and you will be remanded to the Academy High Council for secondary judgment, having failed to abide by the sentence of your banishment.” Her father’s lips curled downward in sadness. “I take no pleasure in this, but you were afforded the lighter sentence of banishment, and you have ignored that punishment. There must be consequences.”
“They will kill me.” Kellatra stared into her father’s eyes.
“I know.” Her father’s hand wavered slightly as he struggled to keep his emotions in check.
The banging at the door stopped. The servants had been roused. It would not be long. Kellatra continued to stare into her father’s eyes, the eyes she had once looked into with love and respect and admiration. Now she saw only the sickness of self-righteousness, and it frightened her. He would sacrifice his own daughter to maintain his beliefs.
Kellatra could think of no parting words, no final declarations of anger or love or defiance. She opened her mind to The Sight and willed her father’s heart to stop. Unfamiliar with counter attacks to his use of The Sight, and anticipating no such lethal violence, her father did not know how to defend himself. He clutched at his chest and fell to his knees, gasping for breath.
His control over the forces of the universe ceased, and Kellatra’s body resumed its motion. She grabbed her father as his eyes rolled into the back of his head, guiding his body to the floor. The footsteps of the servants leading the guards through the house echoed down hallway outside the door. She placed her hand on her father’s chest, feeling its stillness and looking at his face — the beard that she had played with as a child, the lips that had kissed her mother for so many years, the eyes once bright with piercing intelligence, now closed forever. His betrayal stung almost as painfully as her mother’s death. He had rejected her in full. A daughter dead to him in all ways, and she had killed him. The tear striking the back of her hand focused her thoughts. She could not lose both her parents.
Still in the ecstatic embrace of The Sight, Kellatra willed her father’s heart to resume beating, looked at him one last time, then stood and fled from the room. She ran on her toes down the hall, her boots making little sound as she climbed the back stairs and rushed to her sleeping chamber. She heard the guards downstairs, shouting now. They had found her father unconsciou
s in the study. She did not bother to take anything, not even pausing for a last look around the room in which she had grown up. The council’s banishment the day before had been intended to be carried out immediately. No provisions or personal effects were allowed. She had been escorted to the city limits and told never to return under threat of execution.
As she slipped through the door to the balcony and hoisted herself to the roof as she had done so many times in the past when sneaking out after hours to steal into one or more of the libraries she had been banned from, she paused for a moment to look out at the city. She would never see this again. Never walk the city streets. Never sit at the library tables reading books. Never see her father and friends and family.
She thought of these things, and the people never to be seen or heard or touched again, and felt no anger, no pain — only release.
THE PRESENT
KELLATRA CAME to a stop and stood in the same place on the same carpet where she had so many years ago. Her father looked up from several books spread across his desk, the angle of the lantern light showing the aging of his face, deep lines creasing his forehead.
“I…”
“You…”
Kellatra and her father stared at each other, their incomplete words eliciting a protracted silence that stretched on, heartbeat after heartbeat, breath after breath. Finally, Kellatra cleared her throat and relied on instinct to guide her speech.
“Hello, Father.”
“You have returned.” Her father frowned. “Unwise.”
“My return is forced, not chosen.” Kellatra noted her father’s stillness behind his desk.
“You always blame others for the choices you make freely,” her father said. “I see you have not altered in any significant fashion.”
“I do not want to be here.” Kellatra ground her teeth, trying to hold her growing anger in check.
“Then you will not kill me again?” Her father raised an eyebrow as he raised his chin.
“Hopefully not.” Kellatra nearly sighed. She needed to forget the reasons she left and focus on the reason she had returned. “Menanthus came to see me.”
“Really?” Her father squinted at her in the lantern light. “I wondered where he had gone. What did he want with you?”
“He gave me a package and asked me to keep it for him,” Kellatra said. “Then someone turned him to stone.”
“Turned to stone?” Her father fell back in his chair, his eyes blinking in shock. “Menanthus is dead?”
“Yes. Very much so.” A tinge of guilt struck Kellatra for so blandly stating the demise of her father’s oldest friend. “I would be as well had I not killed the soul catcher sent to impersonate him and collect the package.”
“Soul catcher?” Her father looked up, his face a mix of confusion and sorrow that rapidly transformed to curiosity and anger. “What package?”
“A book.” Kellatra paused before revealing more. “The Unseen Codex.”
“Impossible.” Her father shook his head. “The Unseen Codex is in the vault of the Library of Mysteries. I have seen it there myself.”
“Whatever book may rest there is not the codex.” Kellatra wondered how long the theft would have gone unnoticed.
“Where is it now?” her father asked.
“Here in the city,” Kellatra said. “Someplace safe.”
“You should not have returned.” Her father leaned forward in his chair to emphasize his words.
“The only way to make sure I and the people I care about are safe is to return the book to the Academy.” Kellatra stepped forward, feeling the need to explain herself.
“Banishment is banishment.” Her father stood up, seeming threatened by her sudden close proximity. “You should have sent word. Someone could have been dispatched to collect the book.”
“Not before I would have been dead.” Kellatra frowned in annoyance. Her father had changed even less than she expected. The time had come to put forward the true purpose of her homecoming. Had she merely wanted to return the book, she would have left it on her father’s desk while he slept. “I am returning the codex in exchange for the Academy High Council commuting my sentence.”
Her father laughed, his eyes filled with pity and repugnance.
“Impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible. A seer should know that.” Kellatra licked her lips to give pause before proceeding to plead her case before the only judge she had ever really acknowledged as having authority over her life. “The Academy High Council can overturn its judgment in acknowledgment of the service I have provided in returning an irreplaceable artifact into its care. No one need know of my return. I can work in secret within the libraries in the night hours.”
“Work?” Her father’s confusion returned. “What work?”
“Deciphering the language of the codex and learning its secrets.” Kellatra swallowed. She had finally spoken aloud her true desire. She wanted Rankarus and her children to be safe, and returning the book to the High Council would accomplish this, but another part of her longed to know the truth behind the mysteries of the codex. Not simply to assuage her curiosity; greater reasons motivated her need to understand the book.
“You were only banished to ensure your actions were never spoken of beyond the High Council.” Her father stalked to the fireplace, coals still glowing in its iron grate. “The leaders of this city and this nation must see our oaths as inviolable. Even the punishment of death would not be enough to calm their fears of seers who can murder with a thought. Return the book and go. Bring it to me, and I will forget I have seen you.”
“Have you had the dream?” Kellatra’s only hope to make her father understand her motivations lay in revealing her suspicions.
“The dream?” Her father rubbed his hands together over the embers of the fire, seeking warmth that had long ago faded from the hearth. “What does the dream have to do with this?”
“The codex arrived in my life the same night the new star appeared in the sky.” Kellatra clasped her hands together to keep them from flailing about as her passion rose. Her father had always chided her for speaking with her hands rather than her mouth. “I do not believe that is a coincidence. The dreams I have had since suggest that the book and the star and the new god and the pilgrims are all somehow connected.”
“Dreams.” Her father coughed a half laugh of derision. “Dreams and fancies and the willful desire to have again what you have been denied for good reason.”
“I need the libraries to research the codex.” Kellatra frowned and cursed herself. Her approach to her father followed the same worn path to the same closed lane as ever.
“Always what you want instead of what is right.” Her father shook his head as he stared at her, his face bearing the sad look of a man who had failed to raise a child capable of his own iron integrity.
“The dreams are real, the pilgrims are real, the star is real, and there is a prophet who is going to cross the Zha Ocean to the Forbidden Realm, and this book has something to do with all of it. I know it. I am certain. And I do not believe it is a coincidence that it should fall into my hands, of all people, on the very night the dreams were confirmed as being portents of the future and not the wild imaginings of the deluded.” Kellatra had avoided considering what to do if her father could not be persuaded. Could she risk keeping the book and fleeing the city once more? Would it put her family in twice the danger, hunted not merely by unknown adversaries but the very Academy of Sight itself?
Her father turned from her and looked at the fading glow of the coals in the fire, standing there without speaking for a long time.
“I have had the dream. You are right about it being a harbinger of future events.” Her father turned back to her, wariness in his eyes. “You may be correct about the codex as well. Bring it to me. I will make your case to the High Council. I can make no promises. They banished you for a reason, but they also know of your Philosophership in … esoterica. They may be convinced to allow you to stu
dy the codex under watch if you agree to banishment once more after you have uncovered its mysteries.”
“Thank you.” Kellatra could not restrain the smile that filled her lips nor the warm ripple of emotion that spread throughout her breast. She made to step closer to her father, but he raised his hand.
“Leave through the servants’ entrance in the back. Return that way tomorrow night. It would be best if you are not seen coming to this house.” Her father gestured toward the door with his hand, a dismissal and an order.
Kellatra’s lips tightened and her stomach hardened, dark feelings swirling in her head and heart as she did as her father bade. As she left his house, no longer thinking of it as her home, she considered whether she trusted the man who had so often betrayed her for his principles. As she stepped into the dark street behind the house, she realized that while she doubted she could trust her father to uphold his promises, she really had no other choice if she hoped to protect her family. As much as she might desire to ply the unknown depths of the codex in freedom, her greater care came for Rankarus and the children and even Abananthus and Jadaloo. She would sacrifice anything to defend those she loved. She had changed in many ways over the years of her banishment, but that aspect of her nature would never alter.
To continue reading the Seer story arena follow this link.
To continue reading Kellatra’s storyline follow this link.
THE PHILOSOPHER
KADMALLIN
SPARKLING EMBERS of crimson and gold floated upward on wafts of heated air, glowing against the charcoal-tinted clouds still coating the sky, concealing the noonday sun that gave the dark canopy above a dim glow. Kadmallin sat before a small fire outside the tent where Sketkee meditated, her clothes hanging on a makeshift rack fashioned from long sticks. He wriggled his bare toes before the blaze, enjoying the warmth and dryness provided by the heat of the flames. The rain had fallen all through the previous night, and well past dawn, encouraging the pilgrims to maintain their camp and huddle in their tents or beneath their wagons and wait for the seemingly ceaseless torrents to end. He and Sketkee had spent most of the morning beneath the waxed canvas of their tent, she either in meditative repose or reading a book, while he cleaned his weapons.
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