Half a sun, arcing up from the points of her crescent moon. She knew without looking that Bastian’s palm would match, a moon sliced beneath his sun, their two scars fit into one symbol. Life and death, light and dark.
Through the atrium window above, the sky slipped into totality, two celestial bodies momentarily mirroring their new scars before the moon covered the sun.
Dropping the bloody knife, August took their cut hands and pushed them together before him, palm-to-palm, wound-to-wound.
Lore felt like she’d been struck by lightning. Power arced from where her hand pressed against Bastian’s, shooting down every limb, a magnification of what she’d felt when he pulled the strands of Mortem from her in the catacombs. Life, a rush of blood, a torrent of clean air in labored lungs.
And Bastian felt the opposite. She saw it, and felt it, too, the connection she’d sensed all along made manifest as a bridge between them. Cold and stillness, emptying, traveling through him in a storm of death. Opposites, brought together, strengthening each other.
August’s mouth opened. He made a high, mad sound, not a laugh or a cry but something more animal than either. In the darkness of totality, the angles of his face were stark as a skull.
He dropped Lore and Bastian’s hands. Both of them slumped, consciousness hard to hold. Lore’s body felt like it was pulled in opposite directions, like it would shake itself apart at the seams. Dark and light and life and death, things that shouldn’t live in the same space, both held in her now.
“That’s quite enough.”
Anton. Finally.
The Priest Exalted stood at the other end of the atrium, wearing his white robe and the gleaming pendant. It swung as he walked, slowly, up the center of the floor.
August impassively watched his brother approach, toying with his knife. A smear of blood marred his doublet. “You finally deign to show up,” he said, hiding his wariness behind a haughty tone. “It’s your turn, now. Their powers are bound together, but only a priest of Apollius can strike the last blow and redirect the magic into the proper vessel.” The curve of his smile gleamed as merciless as his blade. “I know you’ve longed for this moment, when your power is needed instead of mine.”
Anton gave his brother a gentle, almost pitying smile. “And you know I cannot put our earthly desires over those of Apollius.”
Every courtier August had invited, everyone he’d thought was on his side, watched the Priest Exalted walk slowly toward him without raising a finger. The Presque Mort holding Lore and Bastian backed away as Anton came forward, bringing them off the throne’s dais and down to the floor. Lore’s knees buckled, so they dragged her. Bastian stepped in a pool of his own blood, tracking it in boot prints across the floor. Behind them, Gabe was still unconscious, sprawled against the wall in a boneless heap.
“But he isn’t worthy.” To August’s credit, he didn’t sound afraid. His voice remained clear and ringing, even as his illness-dulled eyes went wary. “We’ve discussed this, Anton. The boy cannot be the chosen, there has to have been some mistake. He isn’t ready, and time grows short.”
Anton climbed the stairs to stand before his brother. “But he will be,” he said. “He can be, with the proper training. The leadership he needs.”
“But he cannot hold this power.” Even now, when things were so clearly going sideways, August looked stronger than he had, the promise of magic invigorating his sickened body. He stood straight, his head tipped upward to gaze at the eclipse-darkened sky, as if he could see Apollius Himself somewhere in it. “It would be too much for him.”
They were of a height, the King and the Priest, near-perfect mirrors, differences marked only by their clothing and the scarred half of Anton’s face. So when Anton stared at him, their gazes were perfectly level. “Then someone else will have to guide him. To show him the way.”
“I can be that leadership.” For a moment, a sly smile tugged at August’s mouth; the sense of an opening, a way he could still spin this how he wanted. “I’m his father.”
“But you never acted like it,” Anton said.
When Anton plunged his own knife into August’s side, he barely had to lift his hand to do it.
CHAPTER FORTY
Behold my return.
—The Book of Holy Law, Tract 896 （green text, spoken directly by Apollius to Gerard Arceneaux）
Lore didn’t know what she’d expected. Anton had said he’d stop August from completing the ritual, and killing him certainly did that. She considered this fact with aloof detachment, even as death and life still rushed through her in a heady mix, making her vision blur from color to grayscale and back again.