Uriel: The Inheritance (Airel Saga Book Five)

Chapter VII

Arabia—788 B.C.

QIEL HAD JUST TURNED twelve. It wasn't two months ago, and his mother wondered many things about how to proceed as his only parent. How can I teach him to be a man? She looked around at the little shop she had managed to build for them in one of the towns of men. These little trinkets she crafted and sold—inkwells and pens, paper, the tools of the scribe; brushes, reeds, inkstones, paperweights—these were all so meager, and the life they now lived together was nothing if not humble.

It was, she realized, a perfect opposite to everything she lived for before Qiel had come along. He had changed everything—everything that was possible to be changed.

Should I now abandon him to another? Someone, a man, who would show him how to embrace true masculinity? Someone not part of the Brotherhood? Someone who will not, no matter what he intends, she thought bitterly, activate his gift? Someone who will not, no matter what he intends, shine it like a beacon in pure darkness, beckoning the Horde to come and kill him?

Uriel's life was drifting in uncharted waters—all of it. While she knew this, and while she had made her peace with it as much as she could, she still wondered in these moments why El had consigned her to such an existence. She had ceased to ask the question aloud many years ago.

She stood at a crossroads in every sense, and neither path looked suitable or even reasonable. If she were to keep Qiel close, try to keep him safe, he would turn—if he hadn't already—and when he did, what might his reaction be? He would hate her, probably as much as she had hated her own father. But not now. Oh, to have certain decisions to make over again. The cup of their lives would be filled to brimming with misunderstanding and hatred and ultimatum. Already the boy knew there was something different about their lives. Indeed, how could he miss it?

But what if she were to let him go now? He would not understand. He would feel abandoned. Rejected. He would not understand that it would be for his own safety, that her decision to leave him, to send him out into the world at this young age, was for his own good, his safekeeping. But what would he do? Where would he go, and to whom would he cling for shelter, for love and for peace, for food and clothing? Would he come into manhood in the filth of the gutters, surviving on what morsel he might beg from those in the streets more respectable than he? Than we?

Had she raised a beggar? Had they come all this way for nothing? Would there be no end to consequence in her life, in the lives of those she loved?

"Mama," Qiel called to her, ducking in from the blinding sun outside under the blanket draped at the entrance to their little shop.

"I'm here," she said, standing from where she had been kneeling behind one of the tables that held her wares.

"Oh, there you are," he said. He was already taller than she was, though that wasn't saying much. Some in the village mistook her for a child, at least at first. "What's wrong, Mama?"

"Nothing."

"You had a funny look on your face."

"No, I didn't."

Qiel screwed up his own face as he regarded her.

Her heart thundered with fell anticipation; something terrible was going to happen soon if she didn't do something. But what? What decision should she make? How could a mother choose between two different kinds of damnation for her son? Was there no alternative?

"You cannot fool me, Mama."

She gasped in playful shock.

He smiled. "Mama, there is a rich man in the square hoping to buy a paperweight for his scribe. I told him to come, but he was very specific about the kind of weight he desired."

"Good. Let him come," Uriel said, crouching down again to the small crate she had been unloading. She took two such stones from it and laid them on the table before her. "We have what he requires. Even if he does not yet know it." She winked at her son.

"Yes, but he said he wants a red one, and we don't have—" Qiel was interrupted by the blinding light of the rug flap being drawn aside at the entrance. In came a tall, cloaked man, his hood drawn low over his white-bearded face. "Oh, sir. You're here. We were getting our paperweights ready to present to you."

The man did not look up or reveal his face but strode quickly into the shop, hands tucked away out of sight.

Uriel noticed this, but didn't put up her guard like she would have in the past—when she was a warrior, not a mother.

Before she could react, before she gave the first thought to the powers of her gift, now long dormant and unexercised, it came. From out of the folds of the man's robe a thin reed rose up against her, and with a small blast of air, the poison barb launched and sailed, pricking her throat and fouling her angelic blood with its payload.

As her vision began to fade, her ears rang with the whine of the drug's effects, and she heard the screams of her son as the man in the cloak seized him bodily. Oh, El. There is a third way. Qiel... She faded from the world, wishing she could weep but lacking the strength or the will. She saw Anael turn and leave with her son in his arms.

***

WHEN URIEL AWOKE, SHE was no longer in the village. She was in a dark, cool place, her breath a vapor, the air a fume of dank fungus that racked her lungs and assailed each breath she took, making her wheeze and cough.

The first thing she thought was, Where is my son? The first feeling with which her heart was seized was terror, and not for herself, but for Qiel.

She opened her eyes. She struggled to focus—everything was hazed and milky white.

She heard a voice.

"Before you begin to get too creative with your gift, Uriel, you must know first that I hold all power over you now."

Anael. Traitors could never rest easy in the company of thieves. Uriel knew already that her worst fears had come upon her, had overtaken her. Anael has my son; he will use Qiel as his token for trade. A dark titter of laughter swept over her, and she smelled Anael's rot. He was close.

"You have already guessed my game—good. I smell despondency upon you. Let us not waste any words. You will bring me the stone—surely you remember what pact we crafted between us over four hundred years ago?"

She managed a groan as she tried to come to herself, but it was mostly in vain, like puffing air into a great canvas sack in an attempt to fill it round. She reached for the limits of her body—as she would do when remanifesting from having dispersed herself into the air—but those limits were vague and unreachable. Yet she felt her body was sound. Only numbness. What was on the tip of the barb with which he poisoned me? She filled with alarm.

Anael continued. "When I possess the stone, I shall return your son to you, greasy traitoress. He shall be as you have known him to be, but oh," he snorted, "apart from one difference." He leaned closer, and she began to suffer from his rank breath. "I am afraid the boy has started to metamorphose. Regrettable," he said, his tone nonchalant. "I do not suppose I can pretend to know how many more days will be allotted to him, even if you were to fulfill our covenant and earn his release. Many Brothers will pursue the spark his life emits under the sun and seek to snuff it." He backed away from her prone and motionless body. "But such things," a wicked smile became audible in his tone, "tend to make one's life ... compelling. Yes. The compulsion will drive you as you were meant to be driven—like a dumb beast." He struck her.

She could hear the footsteps he made as he took his leave of her.

"I shall return with instructions when you are lucid. If you betray me again, your son will die."

She fell again into darkness.