11 Normalcy #2
“I did some asking around.” Méherre broke in, taking the seat at the third side of the table.
“Every single one of the killings was a case of retaliation against someone who’d been tormenting the killer for a while.
Professional jealousy, harassment, the sort of slow, indirect wounding that the law doesn’t entirely punish or is too slow to.
Can’t blame people for seeing to their own security. I don’t see what the crime is.”
Sarai’s response collapsed into a sharp inhale. “Innocents died because of those women in Arsamea.”
Méherre’s features turned serious. “And they’ll be punished for scapegoating the village’s poor. But Sal Flumen’s folk don’t seem to have been as spiteful.”
“Therein lies my difficulty.” Florus set down his empty bowl, folding his fingers into a tremulous basket, then unweaving them to grip the lip of the table.
“The town has but one prison, and it now holds over a hundred. Most have waited months to know if they’ll be sent to the mines or suffer a hanging.
Other locales have chosen between those mandated punishments, but I like to think that the Corpus Juris Totus isn’t entirely devoid of pity. ”
So, this is an issue of determining judgment. She frowned. Why didn’t he seem as interested in finding the cause? “Aren’t you worried that these killings will continue? You said it’s been five months since—” She quieted as the rest of his explanation finally registered. “Five months?”
The Praetor’s brow smoothed, worry descending into something that looked awfully like pity. As though he’d been waiting for the reaction and found it unfortunate that she had proven him right. “Since the Month of Radiance,” he confirmed.
She stared. “Is there a reason you didn’t write to the Tetrarchy?”
He held her eyes steadily. “What would they have done, Petitor Sarai, while your capital was in chaos? Your newest Tetrarch ran off that month, impeached by Aelius’s people.
What time and resources would the Tetrarchy have spared for us?
Even now, you’re here because of Edessa’s tumult, not our own. ”
Stung, she curled her hands around her cooling bowl of porridge in a bid for calm. “I also came because a village I hate requested my aid. I would have done the same if any Praetor had asked!”
“But would the south have forgiven you for it?” Florus said with a gentleness that held no rebuke.
Yet, it dug claws into her anyway. “You would have regretted coming after a few months when their protests and insults worsened. We all understand Edessa well. We’ve served its needs too long not to.
” He split his gaze between her and a point past the inn’s open doors.
She glanced over her shoulder and winced at the Guild wagon trundling into Sal Flumen’s town square.
The coat of arms of the Wines and Spirits Guild—a shield with an ornate chalice as its charge—draped the wagon’s sides, two Guildsmen casting bored glances at the amassing public from the coachman’s seat.
The few puzzle pieces she held melted into a single, dark realization. “It doesn’t matter to you if these whitesleep murders continue across the north or south. You want to exonerate the culprits.”
Méherre’s dark gaze arrowed between them, turning thoughtful as she propped a boot on the table.
Florus’s shock of white curls bobbed as he chuckled.
“I’d heard you were blunt, Petitor Sarai.
Some deaths,” he mused, “are judgment from the gods. You saw the eyes of those responsible, I’ll warrant.
” He pulled a satisfied breath at her flinch.
“Far be it from me to punish the human hands carrying out their work.”
Chilled, she shrank back against her seat at the memory of the Arsamean woman’s irises engorging to swamp her sclera, just like Junia’s had in Edessa.
“The Elsar wouldn’t interfere with a land so closely.
I’m the last person who’ll condemn the use of violence, but the law allowed for remedies for these people.
They didn’t have to resort to homicidium! ”
“But the law’s remedies forgive too easily. Wasn’t this more expedient? The wrongdoer blotted from life without their victims having to watch them meander and fail through supposed rehabilitation.” For the horror of his words, Florus’s smile held only eager benevolence.
Fear settled beneath her skin like a too-deep splinter. Has everyone in the north gone mad? “Don’t people deserve the chance to change?”
The pity in his eyes intensified. “I learned much about people as a Cleric and gathered the rest as a Praetor. They don’t change.
” Saying it seemed to deflate him. “Killing the rapacious is no crime. You’ve done it yourself.
It’s a shame that you quieted after the Unraveling.
You had better options than trying to earn a fickle public’s respect. ”
She stared. “Options that would have likely led to imprisonment for tyranny.”
Disappointment snuck into his expression. “A pity then, that the good waste their time fearing that they’re evil, and the evil waste no time at all.” With a chastening arch of his eyebrows, he bowed and left.
She stared into her bowl of congealed oats for a long moment, conscious of Méherre’s silent scrutiny and the vigiles—who’d likely heard everything—muttering awkwardly at their table. Her spoon rose and dipped in. She tasted nothing.
Mass death in Edessa that could have been caused by the boil beetle plague. Larvae had entered the city via tainted whitesleep sacks. But that didn’t explain the madness-struck folk and their shared hallucinations.
The plague had originated in the lower, less-cold portions of the north and come out of nowhere.
Murders via whitesleep in the icy, upper-north without any connection to whitesleep but the same black sclera in the culprits as in Edessa’s madness-struck.
Death, beetles, whitesleep. All affecting different parts of the country in different ways. All at once. And the puzzle was still incomplete. There was something beyond this, weaving everything together. Or someone?
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. Junia and the dying Guildswoman’s words repeated in her head until her spoon clattered into an empty bowl.
She watched an intricate hourglass of iron sand empty at a corner of the inn.
Sal Flumen was too cold for Ur Dinyé’s traditional water clocks.
Our hourglass runs low. What would happen at the end?
Wind curled around her ankles, and she realized that she’d wandered outside.
A nexus of streets unraveled from the adjacent town square, and she followed one that sloped up in the distance.
Something struggled in her chest with every step, a new, bitter bird beating at the bones of its cage.
Her thigh burned when she reached the road’s abrupt end at a platform overlooking the Kaycakh Mountains.
Thousands of miles away, the mountain range that also served as Ur Dinyé’s land border with Errigal seemed startlingly close.
Size would do that. Bigger things drowning out all others, like the towns in the Kaycakh Mountains’ shadow being invisible from the platform.
Or the north’s tribulations being invisible from Edessa.
“I did this all wrong,” she said to the ice coating the branches of nearby pines like Errigalese glass sculptures.
Florus was right. She had pulled back after the Unraveling and tried to defend and make herself palatable to people who’d never be satisfied.
She had merely felled a tree at its trunk.
The roots ran too deep to purge, and law, government, and manners had no answer to such quiet, insidious cruelty.
She could either dig out the roots, godsdamn the consequences, or fight everyday to keep them from sinking deeper.
Florus had chosen to happily accept the former.
I wasted too much time on the latter, didn’t I?
The cage in her chest snapped open at that silent admission. Pain roved free like a hungry beast, gnawing itself without a target.
A crunch of snow before Méherre’s gaze speared her profile. “You really aren’t what I was expecting.”
“Were you hoping for a sly social-climber or a na?ve blowhard?”
“Finally. Some spite.” A tiny smile ghosted across the Bridger’s face. “You’re starting to see it. People are foolish. Trying to appease them only makes you join their ranks.”
Sarai laughed quietly. “I thought if I proved that the rest of the Tetrarchy had their interests at heart—”
“You could achieve what no politician ever has?” Méherre leaned back against the platform’s wooden rails. “National unity is a dream, Sarai.”
A flicker of curiosity penetrated Sarai’s numbness. Méherre hadn’t addressed her or any of the vigiles by name since their journey had begun as though intent on keeping distance between them despite her general frankness.
“Was I foolish for dreaming?”
“Only if you choose not to wake up. You can’t convince these people.
Take the matter of those scuta. An obvious crime with obvious culprits.
There was no real murder mystery after a point, was there?
But you still had to go through the tedious process of proof, because the world doesn’t ask evil to explain itself, but they will ask you.
The same holds true here. The south, its people, and its Guilds know what they’re doing to the north, and they don’t care so long as they can take our metals, oils, ores, and rock. ”