9 Rebirth and Reinvention #2
Lighting every sconce in the atrium with a sweep of his hand, he considered the dazed sellsword they illuminated in a corner.
Recognition dawned on the man’s face. “Fuck, they weren’t wrong. You’re alone,” he whispered reverently, sliding out a pair of daggers. “I’m going to get so much aurei for this.”
Not a sellsword. Kadra grimly took in the crest pin affixed to the man’s tunic. Bounty hunter. He raised a hand, and the man mirrored the motion, pointing his blades at the sky where icy wind met the courtyard’s warmer climate.
A familiar pressure sank into the atrium, air currents of different intensities and humidities clashing and sparking. Light flared, multiplied, until lightning sizzled along the hunter’s blades, wrapping around them like twin tongues.
He leapt forward and released both right as Kadra lazily brought his hand down. A lightning bolt slammed the daggers to the ground, metal warping in white-hot protest. Thunder rattled the pillars.
The hunter stumbled back as Kadra advanced. “Wait—” He broke off as a cage of lightning enclosed him without a hair’s breadth of mercy.
Kadra extended his palm. “Your pin.”
Swallowing, the hunter tore it off and gingerly extended it through the fiery bars.
Bronze Grade. Newly-badged hunter. His unease returned at the sight of the four safshers—ancient Urd swords—engraved in a circle on the inch-wide crest. “How much were you offered?”
“Nine thousand aurei.” The hunter’s northern twang turned the thousand into a taysand. “The dealers promised that you’d show.”
“When were you hired?”
“Two weeks ago when the den relocated here.”
A week before he and Sarai had heard the plague case. A whitesleep den masked as an ordinary domus. Two hunters paid handsomely to watch for him. His enemy had anticipated his moves.
Eyes had begun following him from across the atrium as the battle interrupted the users’ pleasant oblivion. His gaze narrowed on a familiar pair that looked just as irritated to see him.
Harion peeled himself off a divan and a naked, comatose woman to stagger forward. “So, you’re behind the racket. Here to ruin the fun?”
Interesting. Kadra studied the younger man’s bloodshot eyes and the sweat trickling from his hairline with faint humor. Three rubs.
“This place has nothing to do with the plague, alright? My vigiles are as busy as yours, trying to hunt down a…” Harion snapped his fingers in search of a word and gave up. “They’ll find something.”
Kadra considered the coincidence. Harion had ignored the first few victims in Aelius’s Quarter. Now, he was here. If it was an act, it was a brilliant one. This man didn’t have that capability.
Harion’s sly grin faded at Kadra’s silence. “I’m well enough to do my job, godsdammit. No one cares about a couple rubs when we’ve three hundred dead. People want answers. You can only blame the Grains Guild so much. Cassandane’s lies aren’t holding.”
Kadra hid a smile. Six months as Tetrarch and Harion still couldn’t conceal how new he was to power. His improved verbiage, crisp vowels, all of it mimicry of a position he knew he hadn’t earned. So, he construed everything as an attack and rushed in, teeth bared so tellingly.
Kadra spared a glance for his companion, now stirring awake.
Following his gaze, Harion snickered. “That one’s mine.”
“Stones Guildmaster Albanus would disagree.”
“Not much the fat oaf can do about it when his daughter’s smitten. The courtship’s nearly over. You can’t blame me. It’s a bad time to be a Tetrarch, and the Guilds have always weathered everything.”
Kadra’s lips quirked. “How many of her rubs have you paid for?”
“Enough to secure the marriage. Best coin I’ve spent.”
“Her betrothed agrees.”
Harion’s chest swelled. “Little premature for titles, but yes. The announcement’s coming soon.”
Kadra grinned. Most people fell into two camps when they caught that rare occasion. They flinched. Or quailed. Harion was among the latter. “I refer to her engagement to Clay Guildmaster Septimus’s son. The marriage is in two weeks.” His smile broadened. “A Guild alliance.”
The smugness slid off Harion’s face. “You’re lying.”
“But you would know that.”
The Petitor-turned-Tetrarch twisted his armilla around and paled at zosta’s glow. “She wouldn’t,” he said after a long look in her direction.
“She’s drained her father of coin and patience, and unfortunately, Septimus’s son has inherited the family tightfistedness with aurei.” Kadra noted as the girl tottered to her feet, looking distinctly alarmed. “You must have seemed gods-sent, paying for everything.”
“Fuck off!” Harion reddened. “She isn’t sold off yet. If I secure her, then I’ll have blood ties with the Guilds, and the Tetrarchy’ll be under my fucking feet.”
Kadra nodded. “If.”
Leaving the sputtering man to his folly, he made for the atrium’s only decor, a thick tapestry in the peristyle. Behind it, was a staircase to the den’s bowels. Descending, the iron tang of blood hit him in seconds.
The cellar door stood ajar, a sanguine handprint on the handle sending trails to the ground. In their haste to flee, the dealers had turned on each other. The victors had thrown the bodies in a corner, the blood on the walls already frosting in the cellar’s cold. Murder not plague.
A leftover candlestick cast a glow over the sacks by the bodies. The den’s owner had been busy. At least a hundred thousand aurei in powder.
He slit a sack, snow-white chunks trickling out like wet sand.
That had been part of the allure at first. Whitesleep didn’t require the months of curing that blazeleaf did.
Venom could be reduced to powder and concentrated in days, and there was no need for anything as conspicuous as ingestion or inhalation for effect.
One rub on the eyelids for relaxation. Two for relief from aches and pains for a day.
Three for euphoria. Five for respiratory distress.
Jaw tight, he dipped a knuckle in and inhaled. A familiar stench burned the back of his throat. Sweet, some users would profess. So sickly that they smelled it for hours after use. But this batch had a sour note that he knew well.
He eyed the wriggling bodies with yellow venom sacs emerging from within the sack with interest. A corner of his mouth curved in an empty smile. One answer and a renewed question. Who?
A familiar tread sounded on the stairs.
“Mind the blood,” he called absently as Cato gingerly toed the door open and swallowed at the pile of corpses. “Our dealers added themselves more charges. The product’s infected with beetle larvae.”
“Wrath and Ruin, is that how the plague’s been spreading?” Cato hurriedly stepped back when a larva landed on the floor. “What is that doing in whitesleep?”
A connection that had baffled even Sarai. And the same one that he had known since the horreum.
“Boil beetle venom is the main ingredient in whitesleep.”
Cato’s head whipped up from the sacks, jaw agape. “Is that how the plague’s been spreading? An ingredient gone rabid?”
“Partly.” An insensate user wouldn’t notice a larva burrowing in. “But beetles and whitesleep alone can’t explain the raving. This isn’t our murder weapon.”
“Something that causes immense blood loss and shared hallucinations? Sounds like a nightmare.” Cato shuddered, examining a sack. “Can the healers still use any portion of this?”
“No.” Diluted whitesleep was a powerful analgesic, so Kadra had made a practice of donating the spoils from den raids to healers across the country. But the larvae made that a risk. “Venom’s already leaked in.”
The people upstairs were in for hell once they sobered and found patches of their memory gone.
“I’ve never understood how you can tell.” Cato sniffed the powder and coughed. “How’d you learn about whitesleep’s ingredients?”
Eleven years ago. “An unwilling source.”
“A useful one. Perhaps our scholars can create a safer version. Eleven years of that drug ruining people.” He shook his head. “Didn’t it hit the streets just after Othus found you?”
Kadra paused while lifting a sack. Pain burst in his spine. “Yes.”
The older man’s face creased in thought, still trying to put together the sparse pieces he’d been given back then, when his husband had suddenly brought home a northern boy and announced that he was adopting him.
Othus had never been able to explain it beyond repeating the same answer, looking equally baffled at himself as he’d said it.
“I had a feeling. Seeing the boy on the streets, I knew that there was greatness in him and that I could bring it out.”
Even at death, he had never guessed at the lie that had been perpetuated on him.
Kadra’s jaw tightened as he hefted another sack. The past was too damned close.
“Drenevan, as helpful as this find is, it doesn’t take us far with the public when they’ve already been told to blame the Grains Guild,” Cato wrung his hands.
“We’re no closer to identifying a culprit, let alone how they’re doing this.
Meanwhile, no one can enter or leave Edessa, and the Order’s fomenting suspicion that you’re Ruin’s scion. ”
A more interesting appellation than the ones he generally got. “Sarai’ll send for me when she finds something. In the meantime, patience remains to our advantage.”
“I hope you’re right. All those poor people screaming of laughing skies and eyes.” Cato took the sacks from him with a shiver. “I’ll get these on a wagon for disposal.”
“There’s a body upstairs too.”
“And another in that lightning cage of yours. Gaius is handling them. He’d probably prefer if you dissipated the cage.”
Kadra spared a thoughtful glance at the ceiling, now drumming with footsteps. “I seem to have acquired a mother hen.”
“Try an entire coop. Sarai was firm in her instructions to watch over you. Your vigiles are taking no chances when half the city’s turning against you.
” At his exasperated sigh, Cato clicked his tongue.
“No one’s forgetting the Unraveling in a hurry.
You may be Magus Supreme, but you can’t blame them for fearing that you’ll die, when you already did. ”