I made a face and flung myself onto the futon. I preferred a system where the demahnk all had an equal say, rather than him being in charge. “Any ideas what he’ll do?”
“Plenty.” He shook his head. “And that’s the problem. There are a myriad of steps he could take next, and there’s no possible way to defend against them all.”
“Which means you have to wait for him to act. Ugh.”
“It sucks.” He slouched back in the big armchair, revealing a flash of brilliant green and purple at his collar.
“Dude!” I sat up straight. “You got a leaf, too?”
Reverently, Szerain pulled the leaf from beneath his shirt. Like mine, the stem of his leaf formed a loop, but his hung on a delicate silver chain.
“I spent hours out there communing with Rho,” he said. “Far better rest than sleep.” He glanced at me. “Xharbek isn’t my sire.”
“Uh huh. You mentioned that. Is it Helori?”
“No, he’s Kadir’s. Rho is mine.”
“Wait. Rho as in grove Rho?” My confusion only increased at his solemn nod. “But I thought . . . how could it . . . ? Whoa. Is Rho demahnk?”
“He is.”
I stared at him. His daddy was a forest? “Why is Rho the grove, but Helori and the others default to the elder syraza demon look?”
“More forbidden knowledge,” Szerain said with a bitter edge to his words. “Initially, Rho was the same as the rest of the demahnk, and we were ptarl bound. But from what I’m able to understand, when a harmonic disturbance collapsed the Earthgates, he merged with the planet and helped hold it together. It was a permanent change, it seems, since it involved uniting with the rakkuhr core. Xharbek became my ptarl—my guess is that he didn’t have a lord-child—and I was conditioned to forget it had ever been any other way.”
“That sucks,” I said, angry and horrified on his behalf. Bad enough that he got ripped away from his Earth family, but then to lose his real ptarl-daddy, too? “If Rho was able to become a planetary-wide grove system, that means the demahnk could be anything. Are they Ekiri, too?”
“I’ve speculated as much, but don’t have confirmation.”
I frowned. “Though if so, why wouldn’t they still call themselves Ekiri? Maybe they’re Ekiri kids, like the lords are demahnk kids. Of course then y’gotta wonder who the Ekiri would have mated with to make the demahnk.”
“I don’t know,” Szerain said with a shrug. “The ones who called themselves Ekiri were different in form than the demahnk, for whatever that’s worth.”
Interesting. One of Lannist’s visions had shown me a willowy, dual-pupiled creature atop an Ekiri pavilion.
“But I am ninety-nine percent sure the Ekiri are the ones who bind the demahnk,” he added.
Ha! I was right. The enforcers were the Ekiri. “With the same constraints that destroyed Lannist,” I said sourly.
Szerain straightened. “Even as dissociated as Zakaar is from the demahnk, he felt Lannist scatter. What do you know of it?”
I gave him the CliffsNotes version of the events in Lannist’s dimensional pocket, including the warnings he’d offered about Trask and Ilana. Yet when I went into seeing the lords as children, Szerain started to get agitated. Though he was free of most of the demahnk manipulation, I had a feeling some lingered. “Speaking of parentage,” I said, deftly sliding into a parallel topic, “you’ve yet to answer my question about my lordy lineage.”
His agitation evaporated. “Huh. You’re right.” He gave me a bland look.
I glared.
“Fine, I’ll tell you,” he said, eyes sparkling. “But don’t blame the messenger. Your grandmother’s father was Jesral.”
“Ew.” I made a face. “Oh well. At least it wasn’t you, Rhyzkahl, or Mzatal. Though it’s really going to ruin Christmas when everyone finds out that Great Grandpappy tried to turn me into Rowan.” I angled my head. “Since we’re on the subject, who is Rowan? I mean, I was her for a few minutes, but I still don’t get it.”
“Not who. What.” He leaned forward to make an adjustment to a sigil. “During the years after the cataclysm when the ways were closed, I not only made repairs, but I also worked on creating a ‘potency robot’ to—”
I slapped my hands over my ears. “Dude, if you’re about to tell me that you made an arcane sex doll, I’ll take back my question.”
“You’re a filthy minded perv,” Szerain said, rolling his eyes heavenward. “I created it to mimic the potential I’d seen in Elinor—though the construct couldn’t match it. And while I could infuse a semblance of life, she was basically an arcane AI, with a body made up of minute, intricately entwined sigils tucked away in a dimensional pocket. She could be called up for interaction, but without a real person as an underlay, she couldn’t act.” He sighed and kneaded the back of his neck. “Rowan was an experiment, a creation I could learn from. She was never intended to be used.”
“But then you were exiled, and the Mraztur stole your never-to-be-used weapon.”