Purity of Mind

Chapter 25: The Sin

King vanished, replaced by the flat nothing-cutout that was his armor. Any hopes I'd had about Shekhar casting off whatever reservations kept him from using his power vanished. They'd be evenly matched now, even if the father could bring himself to fight his son. Given that he hadn't even attempted to fight me when I'd broken into his house, it didn't seem likely.

Shekhar winced. "Devraj..." he said, almost plaintively. "You must believe me, I didn't know you lived."

King laughed, mockingly, the tone turned even more menacing due to the echo of his armor. "Oh, this is rich."

Shekhar seemed barely able to even look at King. "It is true."

"No, no, not that," King said. "I already interrogated your favorite son about that. They were keeping my survival a secret from you, it turns out."

The Subtle Man looked to the Witchdoctor. Adhita just nodded soberly, without explanation.

King continued, "No, what I can't believe is that I was just about to pull your powers out the way that I did all the rest of my half-siblings, and you beat me to it."

This, finally, seemed to rouse some kind of defiance in Shekhar, though even it seemed subdued: "What have you done to your sisters? Your brother?"

King shrugged. "Girls are stacked over there in that wagon. I put them to sleep since fighting them was taking too long. Dear brother Adhita got a longer talking to, and I took his powers away. Temporarily, of course. It'd take more time and effort to drain him permanently, but I have plenty of time and am more than willing to make the effort. Also I slapped him around a bit, because it was fun."

Shekhar looked aghast, yet still defeated. "Please," he said, "leave them alone. It's me you want."

"Oh, *now* you're noble? Where was that nobility when you abandoned a child in the undercity?" King demanded, his anger clear even through the muffling of the armor. "I'd have left your other children alone had they left me alone, but they're complicit. They kept me from you. They kept me below, the same as they kept the Pure in the Ward. So no, you don't get to bargain for them. As far as I'm concerned, you're all the same."

I could see tears streaming down the Subtle Man's face. "Please," he begged.

"Stop avoiding the question!" King shouted. "I came here to tear your power from you as painfully as I could before killing you, only to find that you'd already sealed yourself off from it. Why?"

I was, by this time, relatively certain I'd got the right person, but now I knew why he hadn't seemed like a Pure Mind: Because, effectively, he wasn't. I'd known that mind magic could be turned inward against itself, but I'd never expected that anyone would actually do so. I'd hoped that Shekhar would be able to help us escape, that he could restore at least some of Pawn Seven to herself, but those hopes vanished. The Subtle Man was as helpless as I was, perhaps even more so. *I* could still use my magic, however weak it was.

An idea came to me, then. A desperate, terrible idea, one that depended on me to accept things I'd rather not, to put my life into the hands of speculation and what little magic I could bring to bear. But King had just outright said he'd intended to kill the object of my mission, and I doubted he'd let either me or Pawn Seven walk away.

"I sealed my power away to atone," Shekhar said, "for my sin."

"If you wanted to do that, you could have just come back and got me, you know." King said acidly. "Call it a 'life lesson' or some bullshit. Like camping but with more gutterfolk trying to stab me."

Shekhar drew himself up. "No. I regret the necessity of abandoning you, but it was a necessity." His voice had grown cold, though it still wavered. "I sealed my power away before I cast you aside, because I was not worthy of my power, and the world was in danger because of yours."