Chapter Twenty-One Cat
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Cat
Partho brings Cat and Elician to where the Blue Guard is camped in the morning.
It is not far. Cat senses them before he sees them and he tries to stay calm.
Steady. He tries to summon any memory he can grasp, remembering how his father looked addressing his troops.
The Guard is sworn to the Blue Lands first and foremost. And if Partho is to be believed… they are also still sworn to Cat.
But seeing them is not the same as imagining them.
As the troops become visible through the trees of the Grünewald, a strange sense of calm slides down Cat’s spine, flowing outwards to the rest of his limbs.
Scores of blue cloaks, all draped over the shoulders of stern-faced men and women.
These were the guards in his home, once.
Long ago. The men and women who patrolled the Blue Palace, stood sentry at the doors.
Protecting their nation’s most treasured resource.
He had never seen a single blue cloak while living in the Reaper cells.
None had ever come for him. But once, before the despair settled into acceptance: he had dreamed that they would.
They look at him as he rides through their encampment. Curious, assessing. Cat wonders what they see in him. He wonders if he measures up to their expectations, low as they must be. They all know what he is.
And still, he thinks, they came anyway.
The encampment breaks down quickly under Partho’s orders. Then soldiers fall into place on all sides, a willing and prepared escort. Disciplined, but perhaps most important: without any sign of illness. The plague hasn’t struck any of them. As far as Cat can tell, they are all perfectly fine.
Partho provides Cat with various updates on the status of the Guard as they leave the encampment and ride out to the city of Endura, where the standing army of Alelune is apparently located.
He tells him about their training, their numbers.
He tells him about the status of the Blue Lands and the Palace itself.
Each word triggering a memory long buried.
He misses it. Misses it with a fierceness and a longing that he hasn’t allowed himself to consider. He never thought he would see his home again. And yet, the temptation to believe is so close at hand, surrounded by a sea of blue that has always meant safety and faith.
Elician is quiet throughout this journey.
A show of respect, perhaps, or a deference to Cat’s position here amongst those who swore to follow Cat when he was a child…
long before tragedy had taken them all. When Cat glances to his husband, his beloved, Elician is always there.
Attentive, listening, offering a smile or a nod – subtle though they are – in an active show of passive, gentle support.
They reach Endura only a few hours later.
And all the gentle support in the world is not enough for the sight that lies before them.
Endura is nothing like Altas. Its towering outer walls are made of bright white stone, with watch points capped by canvas tarps.
The gates are barred shut, but they are battered and bruised.
Worse yet, the chips of wood press outwards from the gates, as if someone has tried to break them down while still in the city. Tried, and failed.
There are bodies lining the ground along the walls of Endura.
As if one by one, people had climbed all the way to the top and, in desperation for the gates never opening, pitched themselves over the edge.
No one has come to tend to these corpses; they have been worn raw by the elements and left out to rot.
Cat climbs off his horse. He pays little attention to who takes control over it or how.
Both Partho and Elician call after him, but he crosses the distance to the bodies at the foot of the wall.
They are of all different sizes and lifestyles.
Some clothing is well tailored, some of poor make and quality.
The people are young and old. There is nothing that shows an all-encompassing similarity – nothing, that is, save the very clear evidence they were inside Endura when the gates closed.
He hears footsteps behind him. He asks, without looking: ‘Can you—’
‘No,’ Elician replies, cutting off the question before it can take shape. ‘I cannot feel their souls in the water. None of them. They don’t feel dead or lost…they feel like nothing.’
The Alelunen army is nearby. That Cat can sense very well.
He hears them, smells the smoke from their cooking fires.
There were sentries in the distance as the Guard approached the city, quickly vanishing behind a hill to alert their commanders of their arrival.
Those sentries must have seen the bodies strewn along the ground.
And still, nothing has been done for the dead.
Alelune does not care for the intense rituals of Soleb.
They do not tear at their hair or cry out in grief.
They do not create ceremonies to read the names of the dead or speak the lives and loves of the deceased.
But their bodies are never left to the open air without even the slightest respect.
All the dead of Alelune, save the fathers of Reapers, are buried so the earth may reclaim the bones and new life can grow.
It is a fate made beautiful by the eventuality of it all, one shared between Alelune and Soleb despite their disagreements.
Death begets life, Elena had said once in the days that followed Fransen’s death at Kreuzfurt.
To live, something must die. There is no life without death.
And there can be no death without life. After all, you cannot die if you never lived at all.
Death is precious. As is the life that comes after.
‘Why didn’t they…do something?’ he asks. ‘Bury the bodies, show them care – anything?’
‘Fear of contagion,’ Elician replies.
‘These people didn’t die from the plague.’ Their necks are broken, faces crushed. They must have dived off the top of the wall, without care of the hard earth down below. They were fleeing from it, perhaps. But it was not what ended their lives.
‘Those soldiers wouldn’t have known that, and it wouldn’t have been safe for them to get close enough to find out.’
Cat knows that makes sense. But all he can see is clear and vivid evidence that so many people…
were abandoned right when they needed care the most. ‘Why would they jump?’ he asks.
He glances back at the Guard, holding formation and doing a formidable job of not openly staring at Elician and Cat crouched by the bodies of the dead.
Elician frowns up at the top of the wall, brows pinched tight and nose crinkled in consternation. ‘We should see what’s inside.’
‘We cannot leave them like this,’ Cat says. Elician winces. He glances at the doors to the city.
‘We should see what’s inside first,’ he replies.
‘But—’
‘Please?’
Cat does not want to leave them. But Elician starts walking away, and Cat follows, glancing back at the heaping masses and wishing he knew a better path forward.
Partho calls out to them, keeping the Guard where they are and approaching on his own.
But Elician ignores the captain. He walks to the tower doors of Endura and slams his shoulder into them, but they are too heavy to be opened by one man alone. ‘Help me with this?’ he asks.
‘The quarantine—’ Partho interjects as he draws near, but Cat ignores him too. He leans his shoulder against the doors and pushes hard. He slams his shoulder into it at the same time as Elician. Nothing. Brute force will not make these doors yield. There must be another way.
Stepping back, Cat looks at the doors proper.
The wood is thick, heavy and built with purpose.
There are some breaches – someone on the inside has attempted to hack their way out.
But the holes are not large enough to crawl through.
He rests his palms against the hard wood, trying to get a sense of its build. Its construction.
‘There’s something on the wood,’ Cat says as Elician throws himself at the barrier with an increasingly rampant fury.
‘It’s a fire lacquer,’ Elician says.
‘Fire lacquer?’
Elician’s shoulder slams against one of the doors again. It jars his body, and the door seems perfectly content to let him keep throwing himself at it for all eternity. ‘A paint’– another harsh attempt to bully his way through – ‘used…to keep anyone from burning it down.’
Oh. Then that’s simple. Cat pulls off his glove.
His bare hand presses against the wood and he closes his eyes, memorizing the slip of the lacquer against his fingers.
‘Step back,’ Cat requests. It is subtle, but there, infused deep into the wood.
Separate but not separate. Ever present but not really a part of the wood itself. He breathes in. He breathes out.
Break, he commands, slapping his hands against the door.
He can feel the whole frame shudder beneath his touch.
Elician lets out a gasp of air, and then he is pressed tight against Cat’s back.
His palms rest on the door on either side of Cat’s, and when he breathes out, Cat can feel his own command snapping through the structure before them.
Not breaking, no; Cat already broke the chains and bonds that tied atoms and molecules together.
The lacquer has torn itself apart from the inside out, shedding its protection as it desperately tries to make other bonds, other connections.
Hydrogen snaps from nitrogen, which snaps from oxygen, and as each atom comes spinning and shattering apart, Elician hisses at them all to burn.
The flash fire is so bright that Cat flinches away from it.
He jerks into Elician’s chest, squeezing his eyes shut as heat licks at his skin and threatens to consume them both.
Die, Cat thinks, and the fire flies in the opposite direction, back towards the wood, back towards the only fuel it has left, a fuel made of snapping bonds that cracks and snaps as new bonds are made and systematically destroyed.
It is over in moments.
Partho curses – ‘Where in the name of the gods did you learn to do that?’ The Guard’s perfect discipline splinters just long enough for a few startled words to pass between them. Cat pays none of them any mind.
Breathing hard against Cat’s back, Elician lets his arms fall to his sides. Cat wills away the last of the flames. He must. If he lets them reach out any further, they will begin to consume the bodies.
And there are so many bodies.
Tears crest in Cat’s eyes. They pool at the edge of his skin, daring to slip free when he finally inhales.
Corpses line the way to the door on the inside of the town walls as they make their way inside.
They are slumped over themselves, crushed, discarded.
The people of Endura tried to flee, and when the doors did not open, it didn’t matter.
The bodies closest to the gate were crushed by the people in the back.
And once it was obvious what had happened and the crowd dispersed, it did not disperse far.
Bodies continue to line the streets, mouths caught in a shocked rigor mortis, pain cascading across their features.
Silently, Cat steps forward.
‘Your Grace—’ Partho says.
‘They didn’t die of the plague either,’ Cat murmurs.
Crushed and splattered, these people show no signs of illness.
They died in gruesome terror, fleeing from something, but whatever it was is not there with them now.
There is nothing there, nothing but the dead who line the streets and open doors to houses with no one left inside.
‘Can you bring any of them back?’ Cat asks, looking at the faces of his people, sun-torn and rotting in the heat.
He knows the answer. Elician says it anyway.
‘No.’ There is nothing to bring back. Their souls are gone.
And there are too many bodies to bury. Cat knows that with the kind of certainty that made him argue with Elician to begin with.
It is what Elician wanted him to see. He had to have felt it.
The absence of life. Cat has always been able to tell when people are near.
He had known Partho had been alone when he came to them in the woods.
He had known when they had approached the Blue Guard.
But when they had approached Endura, he had refused to let himself pay attention to that which his mind surely, already, knew.
He had never felt a single soul alive in the city.
He had let himself hope that, somehow, he had just not understood the circumstances.
But the truth is, no one is alive. And they haven’t been for a long, long while.
‘This is the closest city to Soleb,’ Cat says slowly.
‘Yes,’ Elician agrees. ‘Can you feel it?’ He doesn’t specify what he means. He doesn’t put it more firmly into words. But he doesn’t need to.
‘Death was here.’
‘The goddess?’ Partho asks behind them.
‘Death did this,’ Cat confirms again. Body after body on the ground, fleeing from one place alone.
He had seen Death walking through the Reaper cells time after time.
He had seen her when she came to take Fransen’s soul.
He had never felt fear when he saw her; he had never feared being welcomed into her domain.
But for all that the people of Alelune believe in change: they believe also in a change on their terms. And none of them were ready.
‘She…killed them all.’
‘A city for a city,’ Elician whispers.
Cat’s heart squeezes tight in his chest. He shakes his head, trying to come to terms with it but seeing only a great swing of a petty god’s hand. Altas was beset by Reapers. Reapers who were forbidden from battle by the gods themselves.
There are consequences to your actions.
And here, the consequences hold true.
Bile boils in his gut. He squeezes his eyes shut, tries to hold it in but fails. He coughs, tears pressing to his eyes. Sinking to his knees in a city that is so quiet and still, he doubts it will ever again host the sound of laughing children or cheery market day.
Death has come, and unlike with Altas, here, her will is absolute and there is no coming back.