4 Horror #4
I don’t know how to stop. “It may have already eaten my mind. There’s a memory from months back that I can’t remember without my head feeling as though it’ll burst. It involved someone calling me ‘Death-Summoner’ at the Stones Guild.
” She shrugged sheepishly at Anek’s deadpan stare.
“I know. I should have mentioned it sooner.”
“I was outside the Stones Guild then too,” they recalled.
“It could be stress, unless you’re Godstouched and about to horrify us with some eerie power gifted by one of the Elsar—” Anek stared when Sarai stumbled against an ice block and nearly fell.
“I was only joking—oh godsdammit.” They recoiled as a group of vigiles carrying a corpse barged into the ice-room and deposited it atop one of the coffinlike slabs piled around.
Kadra and Cassandane followed, sporting identically dour expressions. Stones Guild and Godstouched people forgotten, dread curdled Sarai’s blood. This can’t be good.
Cassandane’s personal healer and Lugen, Destus, was the last to enter.
A steely-eyed man in his mid-fifties, he stripped the corpse after quick examination of the extremities and shut the door to the ice-room.
Lightning flared at a flick of Kadra’s finger, latticing from wall to wall until the room gleamed.
“From this point onward, nothing we see here can leave this room. Tetrarch Harion will receive word once we solidify a theory, no sooner.” Cassandane folded her arms, speaking through gritted teeth. “I have a feeling this may be at least partially his fault.”
Taking a deep breath, Sarai turned to the body.
Eyes bulging out of his head, the man continued to silently scream, rigor mortis having frozen his fear forever.
The muscles of his arms had distended in death, purple-gray and splotchy.
But what had her stop cold were the circular welts across his skin—pale in the center, with a raised, red, fleshy ring around them.
Like a wax seal made of flesh, they dotted his chest, his back, even the soles of his feet.
Is it a pox or a—hold on. Realization struck her like a boot to the face. She could barely hear over the roar of blood in her ears. By the Saints and the Wretched, don’t tell me this is…
Cassandane let loose a barrage of curses so foul that Anek looked mildly besotted. Their smile guttered when they squinted at the welts. “Well fuck.”
“This,” Cassandane pronounced in the hardest tone Sarai had heard from her, “isn’t the first corpse I’ve seen like this in Aelius’s Quarter.
There were two others that fell to our errant Tetrarch Harion to investigate.
I didn’t expect matters to escalate this grotesquely, or I’d have taken the cases myself. ”
Water trailed down the slab of ice and splattered on the ground.
She looked up at Kadra’s taut features and sadly recalled the hours he’d spent frowning over the few reports he’d received from the coalition of northern Praetors, trying to make sense of the paucity of information therein. Their conclusions had been fourfold.
The six-legged cause traveled in swarms. They still hadn’t identified the type. The condition wasn’t airborne. But in the north where it had originated a few months back, it was deadly.
She said it: “The northern beetle plague has reached Edessa.”
The hollow quiet that followed was only broken by the drip of water.
Then, Destus cleared his throat. “I’m afraid so,” he said with all the gravity of a funeral proclamation.
Things seemed to move in a blur after that.
Vigiles and gray-robed healers rushed into the ice-room and took the body.
Kadra led her outside, lifted her onto her mare, and bid her to meet him at a marketplace in his Quarter for their daily public court sessions, weary eyes tracing her face before he re-entered the fray.
She found herself on the road before her mind finally left that ice-room and what they’d learned therein.
Plague. Riots. Inquisitor Blasius’s voice slithered into her head. Omens.
She wasn’t one for superstition. The gods seemed more steadfast than people, and if Death was anything to go by, they communicated directly. Yet… the woman’s words haunted her. A reckoning has followed in your wake.
Plague, riots. Omens?
A Guild-wagon-turned-hearse trundled past her, carrying a mountain of corpses.
“The irony,” Anek muttered, riding beside her. “From ferrying sustenance to death.”
“Hoarding sustenance,” she said as the wagon veered past a crowd of accusing eyes. One by one, they slowly turned to her, saying nothing, yet she knew their minds as keenly as though they’d spoken them. How do I prove that I’ve done nothing wrong if even I can’t tell anymore?
“It’s a difficult matter, but you’ll have answers soon,” she said firmly to every barbed question thrown her way as she rode past. “Yes, Head Tetrarch Cassandane is aware. All will be well.”
And as she rounded the curve that took her out of sight of the Grains Guild’s horreum of death, she was painfully aware that Anek knew exactly when she’d been lying.