4 Horror #2
Fire burned beside her, casting garish shadows over the dead.
The dark invited her closer. She felt her feet rise over the step holding back the blood.
Crimson swallowed her boots and lapped ankle-high.
She could hear her breaths, ragged and fast. Yet, she walked as though caught in a dream not of her making.
The dead can hurt no one. You’ve met Death. He isn’t one to bother engendering such fear.
So, why was she shaking?
A woman lay face down at the front of the human pile, the back of her skull bashed in by the Guildsman behind her. Clumps of brain matter curdled in the liquid at her feet.
Shit. Sarai closed her eyes, forcing back memories of another night, her ruined skull, when a watery gurgle came from below. Fingers seized her ankle. A scream tore from her as she sprung back until she realized what was gripping her.
The woman with the broken skull was alive.
Blood cascaded down the Guildswoman’s face when she raised it.
Sarai’s nails cut into her palms, twitching to the terrified drum of her heart.
Don’t panic. You were once in this position too.
Mercifully, the woman’s face was intact.
Dark hair, dark eyes. She clawed up to Sarai’s knee, gripping it with such strength that Sarai had no hope of crouching.
“You—” The Guildswoman choked on a thick blood clot and spat it out. Her voice was a ragged gurgle. “You.”
Was this how I looked five years ago? Sarai swallowed and reached for calm. “Let me help you sit up—” She froze, eyes trailing to where the woman’s back should have been. She’d been bludgeoned in half, her exposed spine the only bridge between her torso and legs.
The woman followed her gaze and shrieked, part desperation, part resignation.
Sarai’s eyes burned. “There may be hope yet. I’ll ride for a healer. Wait—”
“I am out of time, Petitor,” the woman spat, propping her torso on her elbows. “You can’t save me when you brought this upon us.”
“What do politics matter when you’re at Death’s door? Let me help!”
Laughter wracked her bifurcated frame, bubbling out of her with more blood. “Help?” She bared her teeth. “Didn’t you bring this on us, northerner? Our hourglass runs low. A reckoning has followed in your wake. The gods have spoken and call for our end. The sky itself will laugh.”
I don’t understand. Fear traced cold fingers down Sarai’s spine. “I swear on all the Elsar I know nothing of this. What happened here?”
“Vengeance.” A guttural note underlay the word. “You have proven your point, Petitor.”
“Please believe me, I’ve done none of this—” Sarai halted when the woman’s dark irises grew and grew until they swallowed her sclera. Almost like Kadra’s. Terror choked her, burgeoning until her inhales came thick and labored. “What do you see?” she whispered.
“That life is a shared nightmare. And you can always wake up.”
The Guildswoman smiled beatifically, staring at something unfathomably distant. “Have you ever seen so many… eyes?” She heaved a rattling breath and fell face-first into the blood.
She didn’t move again.
A dull buzzing filled Sarai’s ears. She felt herself stagger, turn, and run out of the pool of blood, inhaling deeply in a bid to calm her pulse.
But the sight, the smell. Just like it had been back at Sidran Tower.
Her chest constricted to the point of pain, every heartbeat battering against her ribs. Darkness seeped across her vision.
And then, she couldn’t breathe at all.
Blood swamped her lungs. It trickled from her throat to flood the empty socket of one eye and spread questing fingers from her shattered body.
A man spoke above her, his mellifluous voice a caress to her dying senses.
She knew him, and yet she didn’t. But her heart bled further when he walked away while her mouth gurgled a plea.
“Come back!” she screamed, wondering why her voice worked. “PLEASE!”
His boots were so far—
Footsteps thundered to a halt. “Sarai, look at me,” ordered the same beautiful voice in glacial tones, tearing through terror and memory. Hands gripped her shoulders when she didn’t respond. “Breathe.” A hoarse note this time. She complied. “That’s it. Again.”
Sound blurred as she struggled to get her bearings, sucking in desperate lungfuls of air. The agony in her chest eased with every gasp. Reality returned slowly.
“You’re safe.” Kadra released a low breath when she sagged against him. His arms banded around her like steel. “I have you.”
She realized that she was whispering pleas into his chest and nearly bit her tongue in half in her haste to trap it between her teeth. Shit. I was doing so well for months. She knew what she’d find even before she raised her face to the quiet self-hatred lining his too-severe features.
Her heart ached. She had forgiven him, but he would never forgive himself. “I’m—”
His finger against her lips gently forestalled the words. “You have nothing to apologize for.” With a flick of his wrist, he contained the fire from her oil spill and regarded her gravely. “Come outside.”
She squeezed his hands. “I’m well.” Forcing herself to face the macabre sight, she flinched anew.
“Ruin’s blood, what happened here? They look like they were fleeing something, froze mid-scream, and bled out.
Yet, they’ve no weapons but that rock.” She indicated the limestone chunk that had broken the Guildswoman’s head. “And the bodies are…”
“Pristine.” Releasing her, Kadra stalked into the bloodbath, uncaring of it soaking into the hem of his robes. “No offensive or defensive wounds.” He pulled down some of their collars and examined their wrists. “No ligature marks or visible attempts at suicide.”
Then how did they die? She stared at the blood lapping at his boots, then took a deep breath and walked over the tiled step holding back the waves. Kadra’s gaze followed her, sharp and tinged with concern, as she approached the newly-dead Guildswoman. I don’t even know her name.
“She was alive when I got here. I—” She drew a ragged breath and steeled herself. Kadra would never ask this of her, but they both knew it was necessary. Forensic information degraded by the second. By the time a Lugen arrived, it could be too late. “I’ll take a look.”
He tracked the frenetic trembling of her fingers. Guilt mingled with quiet pride on his face before he moved behind her and gently steadied them over the woman’s skin. Closing her eyes, she let her magic feel its way into the body’s fraying workings. A second sight of its own.
She came up empty.
To reach into a corpse was to enter an abandoned domus on quicksand.
Decomposition threaded through the walls and furniture, and to touch anything was to risk its collapse.
She could only observe the slow spoil and attempt to piece together how it had happened. Telmar’s lessons had prepared her well.
Thighs, feet, arms. No damage. Odd welts on her shoulders. A rash? Nothing in the liver or stomach that indicated poison, but traces of what could be a drug. Blood in the throat too. She examined the esophagus. A lot of blood. Hemorrhage? She glanced up at the brain stem. Perhaps a brain bleed.
Shifting her gaze higher, she examined the brain and froze. What in hav?d? She rapidly drew down, past the woman’s ribcage and to her heart. Chills pricked up Sarai’s neck, burgeoning into terror the longer she stared at the shredded organ.
Opening her eyes, she relinquished the body in a rush.
“Her brain and heart—” She swallowed. “They’re pulverized.
Like she had a hundred heart attacks in a minute or her mind fell apart and her body followed suit.
There are a few welts on her shoulders and indications that she consumed some sort of drug, but I don’t have the ability to look deeper.
Gods! You know what people will make of this.
Especially, the Order.” She couldn’t keep the tremor from her voice.
“Kadra, she said it was my fault. That a reckoning followed in my wake.”
“It isn’t.” Low and hard, his voice cut through her fear. He considered the woman’s frozen mask of terror before drawing her eyelids shut. A crust of white powder lay over them, visible even through the blood on her face.
Whitesleep. Clan Kader’s most dangerous creation, if she had her history right. Arsamea had been too remote to see any drug-trafficking, so she’d been kept innocent of the numerous ways people induced joy or oblivion. Ten months in Edessa had left her much wiser.
Blazeleaf was ubiquitous and legal, albeit controlled by the Tetrarchy’s dispensaries.
Ibez had been banned for sheer potency. But whitesleep, an addictive analgesic rubbed on the eyelids, had aided as many as it had harmed.
One of Clan Kader’s last known inventions prior to their mysterious end, it had capitalized on the fact that there were pains that even healers couldn’t pinpoint the cause of, diseases that could only be slowed and not cured.
Whitesleep, when diluted, allowed most users to lead largely normal lives.
It was the pure version of the drug that was highly addictive.
Once hooked, there was no getting anyone off that euphoria. Their bodies couldn’t survive it.
She tested the theory. “A pure batch that disintegrated their brains and made them hemorrhage through every orifice?”
“Potentially.” Perturbation flickered across Kadra’s features.
Because it doesn’t explain why they all died screaming. Terror wound around her. This is something new.
“And it had to be Aelius’s Quarter too—” She halted at the cold sweeping across Kadra’s gaze the longer he examined the tableau. Taking his arm, she spoke louder. “I’ll stay here. You’re the faster rider. Off you go to Cassandane’s.”
Turning to her, he arched an eyebrow. Something amused and tender broke through the ice in his eyes when she frowned back. “Very well.” Inclining his head, he swept off in a cloud of black.