The elder lowered his voice, al calm certainty. “Then you must have your vengeance. Before Sanghelios has its own.”
“I shal .”
If only there real y was an avenging god who could come and erase humanity from the galaxy. Jul would gladly have become a monk if that kind of miracle could be persuaded to happen. Raia’s gone. Raia’s dead. What will I do without her? He felt his hands shaking. The shock wasn’t receding but getting worse, and he had to remain calm. If the situation had been reversed, Raia would have been in control of herself and thinking only of the clan, however much she grieved.
She thought I was a fool to follow ‘Telcam. She was right. I’m so sorry, Raia.
His sons would be distraught. He couldn’t even go to comfort them. He got up and walked to the door, desperate to be alone for a moment or two.
“I must get some air, Kaidon,” he said. “Forgive me. I’l be back when my head has cleared.”
Jul stil had no faith in gods, but Forerunner ruins always seemed to be the best places for private contemplation. It was the habit and indoctrination of childhood, he knew, but that didn’t make them any less comforting. He walked back out across the fields and sat down again in the shade of the stone wal s where he’d made his undignified entrance from the unstable portal. He leaned back against the blocks, staring at the horizon but not real y taking it in. There was a real pain in his chest, no il usion. Grief hurt. It would only get worse, too.
She’s gone. It’s not fair. She did nothing to deserve it.
It was another reason not to believe in gods. Either they let terrible things happen, or they were so cal ous that they cared nothing for creatures they created. He refused to worship them. Now he wanted them to exist, though, simply to scream his pain and outrage at them.
It wasn’t going to happen. He sat there for a long time, watching the shadows slowly track across the grass, going through an agonizing and unending loop of realizing Raia was gone forever, as if he forgot the terrible news one second and then remembered it afresh the next. He wanted it to stop.
Eventual y he found himself looking at the symbols carved into the wal s. It was a strange time to find that he was starting to recognize Forerunner symbols a lot more easily. There it was: there was the symbol for the Didact, just like the one on his belt, and there was the symbol for Requiem. He spent a few minutes trying to match the symbols scratched into the leather with the carvings on the stone.
You were right about the humans, Didact. It’s a pity you aren’t around now to help Sanghelios.
Jul tried to recal what he could of Onyx, the place where the Forerunners had managed to make time pass at the precise pace that they wished, defying creation. He almost wished he’d had more time to work on Prone and tease more information out of him. There were military advantages in Onyx, technology that Sanghelios needed, but the humans had laid claim to it first. No matter: he would find a way to destroy them, or die in the attempt, and both options seemed the same to him at that moment.
He ran his fingertips over the stone, trying to find distraction or focus in the symbols so that he could snap out of this fog of grief and do something. Eventual y he realized someone was watching him. It was Ilic, the young lad. Jul stared at him. The youngster edged forward.
“The kaidon sent me to see that you were al right,” Ilic said.
“I shal be,” Jul said. “Thank you.”
“Are you praying?”
“I’m looking for answers.”
“You can read the language of the gods.” Ilic tilted his head, and Jul realized he was fascinated by the belt. “You write it, too. That’s the symbol for the holy warrior who’l return one day to save us.”
He was pointing at the Didact symbol. “The Didact,” Jul said. “Not even the Huragok were al owed to know where he went.” Jul was about to point out that he would be long dead now, but this wasn’t the time to crush any more hopes. “He despised humanity, as should we al .”
Jul took off his belt and laid it across his knees. Ilic sat down beside him and tried to read the other symbols gouged into the leather. They looked like the scrawling of an infant to Jul now. He placed his hand on the symbol for the Didact’s name, and tried to think beyond the pain that was gradual y setting his chest as hard as mortar.
“Is it true that you came from a shield world, and that those living there have survived since the gods went away?” Ilic asked. “That’s a very long time.”
Jul nodded. “The Forerunners could manipulate the—they are the masters of time.” Jul managed to stay in character. His own restraint amazed him. Talking to this child felt like a rehearsal for the conversation he might one day have to have with his own sons. “I saw it with my own eyes.”
“And what’s this symbol?”
“It’s a place. It’s cal ed Requiem. But I don’t know where it is. Nobody does.”
“Why?”
“Because the Didact went there, and for some reason the gods wanted it to be kept hidden.”
Ilic considered the symbols for a long time, frowning. He was much younger than Jul had first thought. He was also terribly serious. He’d grow up to be a kaidon, that much was obvious: some children had their destiny written on them from the day they were born.
“Would you like to see the other holy gate?” For a moment, Ilic sounded rather like Prone to Drift, trying to keep Jul’s interest piqued during his exile by showing him the sites. “The symbols are there, too. Some are missing, though.”
Jul swal owed and concentrated on standing up. If he made his body act, then his mind would fol ow. It felt like he was turning his back on his grief and not mourning properly, but he could hear Raia now as clearly as he had in life: Don’t submit to things, Jul, change them, take action.
He got up. It didn’t relieve the weight in his chest or ease the misery, but he felt that he was at least doing something. “Show me,” he said.
He fol owed Ilic back toward the keep and through a smal thicket. In the middle, a sad and crumbling wal stood alone with the remains of its three brothers scattered around it as rubble.
“There,” Ilic said. He tugged at Jul’s belt, quite a courageous act for a smal child, and pointed up. “Some of it matches your belt.”
Jul took a few moments to see what he meant. There was a row of symbols at about eye height—adult height—and they looked familiar. Jul took off the belt and held it up against the wal , aligning the symbols as best he could. He’d simply copied what he’d seen on the wal back in Onyx- Trevelyan to help him find his way back in the maze of tunnels. The scale of the symbols wasn’t the same as his handwritten ones, but he could see that it was effectively the same sentence, if a sentence was what it was.
But the wal was damaged. Two of the carved symbols had long since crumbled away. Jul wondered if it was too much to assume that they would have been the same ones as on his belt, three scratched ideograms on the section of leather that held his holster. He looked around to see if the pattern repeated anywhere else, but there was nothing.
“The bits that are missing probably looked like my belt, then,” he said. “What’s the line below?”