There had simply been nothing left of Kenaz to return to.
Asher sheathed his sword.
The light faded slowly, not going out, dimming, the way a fire dims after the thing that called it forward has passed. He stood over Kenaz's body in the lane and looked at the boy's face, which was, now that the demon had gone, just a face. A young man's face. Twenty years old at most. Whatever had been there before the north, before the two years, before the thing that had used him had finished using him, it was not recoverable. It was simply over.
He looked at Elham. "It's not your fault, you didn't mean it."
Elham began praying.
"Lord God, his name was Kenaz, Eliab's son, and whatever he had once been before the thing entered him, he did not deserve what happened to him. I do not know how long the demon lived inside him or whether there was a moment near the end when he understood what was happening and could not stop it, and I hope the mercy was that he never knew. I commanded the thing to leave him and the command worked, but there was nothing left for it to return to because Kenaz was already gone before I arrived. Please Lord, receive whatever remains of him that the thing did not take, and stay close to Eliab, who must now carry what is left behind.
Amen"
Asher stood with that.
He had trained for fights. He had trained for the specific problem of demons and what steel could do to them and what it couldn't. But it was only now that he was slowly coming to terms with all the death that would be on this road.
It was the first time he saw what those costs looked like up close.
"He was someone's son," Asher said.
"I know," Elham paused. "…Eliab's son."
"Yes."
A silence in the lane. Nathan's door behind them was still closed. Inside, a man and his family slept through what had nearly happened to them, not knowing how close the night had come, not knowing what was lying in the lane outside their house.
Elham stood.
"Are you all right," he said to Asher.
Asher looked at his arm. The cut was deep enough to need attention but not deep enough to prevent function. "…I'll manage," he said. Then, after a moment: "The light was different tonight."
"Yes," Elham said. "I saw."
"It was already there. Before the fight. Before I got into position." He looked at the sword in its sheath. "It didn't wait to be called."
Elham looked at him in silence. Pondering.
"What do you think this means?"
Elham looked at him, at the blood on his arm and his face, at the years of training that had built the instincts that had put him between Nathan's door and the thing in the lane before Elham had even arrived, at the sword that now carried something that had started as a flicker in an alley and had become, tonight, something that protected him.
"I think," Elham said slowly, "the light and the channel are starting to become one thing. Not separate anymore. What you carry and what moves through you are beginning to align."
He glanced down at the sword before continuing.
"But that's not the part I can't explain."
His voice grew quieter.
"When the light reached its highest point, right before I spoke the command, I felt something inside the warmth I've only felt once before." He looked up at Asher. "Back in the white expanse. When Gabriel spoke to me."
A brief silence passed.
"It wasn't the demon. And this time it wasn't Gabriel either." He swallowed once. "It felt… larger than both of us. Like something had been watching the entire fight from somewhere beyond what we could see."
Asher was very still.
"Did you feel it too," Elham said.
A long silence.
"I think so," Asher said. Very quietly. "I felt it in the grip. When the light came up fully. Like the sword was, being held by something that also wasn't me." He looked at his hand. "Not against my will. With it. As if whatever was there had been waiting for me to be fully committed before it, stepped in."
Elham held that.
"We got work to do. Come on," Elham said.
Asher nodded. They did what needed to be done, the practical, quiet work of a night that had gone the way it had gone, and when it was finished they walked back through the dark city toward the inn, and the warmth in Elham's chest was full and grieving and steady all at once, and the sword at Asher's side carried, in the faint persistent glow that had not fully gone out since the lane, something that had not been in the metal when John gave it to a boy leaving a village.
Something was being forged.
Slowly. Correctly. In the only way real things were ever forged, through heat and pressure and the repeated return to the right position after being knocked from it.
· · ·
Elham went to Eliab's house alone.
He had thought about sending Caleb. About sending Asher. About whether a prophet's robe and a plain staff were the right things to bring to a door that was about to receive the worst news a father could receive. He had thought about all of that and then he had picked up the staff and gone anyway, because the thinking was a form of avoidance and avoidance was not something he was willing to practice at other people's expense.
The Eliab household was on the western edge of the market quarter, a solid house, well kept, the house of a family that had been in the tribe three generations. Eliab himself was perhaps sixty, a farmer who had diversified into trade in his middle years, a man who according to everything Caleb had told him had been well regarded until five years ago when Oren's influence had begun to bend things, and well regarded still by the families who didn't know what the influence had bent him toward.
A man, in other words, who had not known what his son was carrying when he came back from the north.
Elham knocked.
Eliab answered. He looked at the white robe and something shifted in his face before Elham said a word, the specific shift of a parent who has been waiting for bad news about a child who keeps irregular hours.
"…Kenaz," Eliab said.
"Yes," Elham said. "May I come in."
· · ·
He told him plainly.
Not everything, not the full extent of what Kenaz had been doing or how long he had been doing it or the two families whose deaths could be traced back to his movements through the night. That was more than a father needed in the first hour. What Eliab needed in the first hour was the fact and the truth and someone to sit with him while both landed.
Kenaz was dead. He had been found in the lane behind Nathan's house in the early hours. He had not been himself for a long time before that, something had taken hold of him in the north and had used him in ways he would not have chosen and was not responsible for in the way a man is responsible for his willing choices.
Elham said that last part carefully and meant it. The grief on Eliab's face was real, not the arranged grief Oren had worn at his father's door, but the real kind, the kind that arrives when a thing you have been dreading without admitting you were dreading it has finally become true and is exactly as bad as the part of you that knew was afraid it would be.
Eliab sat at his table with his hands in his lap and said nothing for a long time.
Elham waited.
"…I knew something was wrong," Eliab said at last. Quietly. "When he came back. His eyes were different. He didn't laugh the same way." A pause. "I told myself it was the travel. That people came back from long journeys changed. That it would pass." He stopped. "It didn't."
"I'm sorry," Elham said.
"Did he suffer."
Elham thought about the lane. About the face that had smiled with two years of practiced familiarity. About the emptiness after the command, the absence of the demon and the absence of anything beneath it. He thought about whether what had been wearing Kenaz had allowed the boy inside to experience any of what it had done through him, and whether the answer to that question was one Eliab could carry.
"What I believe," Elham said carefully, "is that your boy who left for the north two years ago, was not present for what happened after he came back." He paused. "Whether he was suffering or not, I don't know. I think it may be a mercy that I can't answer that question."
Eliab looked at the table for a long time.
Then he said: "The families that died. Bered. Abel."
Elham waited.
"Was it him."
The silence before Elham answered was the most honest silence he could give. "We believe so."
Eliab closed his eyes. Something moved through his face that was not grief anymore, something older and heavier, the expression of a man absorbing a weight that was going to be with him for the rest of his life. The weight of having housed what had done it, of two years of not looking directly at the thing that had been living in his house wearing his son's face.
"I'm sorry," Eliab said. To the table. To the Bered family and Abel's family and anyone who could hear him. "I'm sorry. I didn't—"
"It's okay, I know," Elham said. "I know you didn't do it, it's not your fault."
At the door, Eliab said: "The vote. At the gathering."
Elham looked at him.
"I've been on the wrong side," Eliab said. Not a question. Not looking for absolution. Just stating a fact with the plain flat tone of a man who had just received enough information to see something clearly that he had been not-seeing for five years.
"That's between you and your conscience," Elham said carefully. "I'm not here for your vote."
Eliab looked at him. The look of a man deciding whether he believed that.
Then he nodded.