13 Web in the Ashes #2
They ended the squalid stone building Sal Flumen reserved for its worst, which, until recently, had apparently been the odd drunkard, tourist, or both.
Walking past the few vigiles on-duty, he turned the corner to find a long hallway of rusted metal bars and cramped cells.
A host of bedraggled people, four to a cell, stared at him from behind the bars, faces torn between fear and awe.
Kadra hissed out a low breath when no less than a quarter of those faces blanched in recognition. Years in the south with his own Quarter not knowing him at times, and the north read his father’s face in him within seconds.
“What are you?” A wiry man clawed himself upright using the bars. “Have we died or has the Clanlord of Clan Kader come to take us there?”
He was conscious of Florus leaning against the wall, watching him. The next few seconds would determine whether this town chased him out or not. Yet, he had no choice. “Drenevan bu Kadra.” He waited for the explosion.
The group didn’t disappoint. Those who’d recognized him looked bewildered. Roars of “the Magus Supreme?” mingled with “the fucking Tetrarch?” and his personal favourite, “Who?”
His ego was doing well tonight.
“How the fuck do you sleep knowing you’re ruining our lives?”
“I have children, you rich asshole!”
“How does Guild cock taste?”
Kadra’s brows rose mildly. “Formerly Drenevan bu Kader.”
This set off an even louder storm of garbled yells and accusations about everything from the size of his cock to the state of his mind to claim all these extravagant titles, until a voice croaked above the rest.
“Step up here. Let’s see the truth of it.”
He went toward the speaker, finding a gray-haired man seated on the floor of his cell. The man stared, the line of his mouth never once relaxing. “I see the Clanlord in him,” he said after a moment. “Stronger resemblance than the scion. You’re the younger son, aren’t you?”
Kadra inclined his head in acknowledgment.
“Thought you died years ago after that fire,” another man said. “People stopped seeing you and assumed.”
In a manner of speaking, he had. “I went south.”
That prompted a chorus of annoyed spitting on the floor, before the older man spoke again. “You’re the killer. The one the Clanlord used to butcher folk when he didn’t feel like going himself.”
“I am.”
Silence hung cold and telling. A sardonic smile twisted his lips at the quiet weight of their stares.
“Then, you’re the only one of us who deserves to be in here,” the gray-haired man finally said. Several bitter voices expressed their accord in epithets. Sarai might do the same.
He smiled humorlessly. “I’m here to release you.”
A woman squinted. “Why’s that? You want us to owe you?”
“My Petitor wants you free. I happen to agree.” He turned to Florus. “Do you have a copy of the Corpus?”
“Every volume.” Nervousness seemingly gone now, the Praetor looked curious. “What laws will you be using?”
“Most of them.” Weighing the sentences the dead could have received for their quasi-criminal behavior against the time their killers had already served, would shave their sentences down to years of house arrest. “Bring the volumes on sentencing to their trial.” Kadra tilted his head toward the imprisoned group.
Florus’s eyes cleared. “You’ll tout them to anyone who disagrees.”
“And you’ll keep my past to yourself.” He seized their gazes and held them until most of the group flinched back. “That life is gone.”
“It’ll find you when it’s ready,” a man spoke in an odd tone, irises widening to cover his sclera. “You should have been ready too.”
Ten fucking hells. Kadra surveyed the series of eerie ear-to-ear smiles and dark sclera that slowly bloomed on the inmates’ faces. It was no wonder that Sarai hadn’t wanted to be here. Behind him, the chorus of fervent pleas to the Elsar told him that Florus’s vigiles didn’t either.
Only the Praetor seemed to be in awe. “Divine revelation.” He reverently made a note of it in the prison’s record book.
A howl of laughter cut through Kadra’s turbulent mind that sounded suspiciously like Wrath’s. The gods, he decided, were a menace.
“Blindfold and gag them when you bring them before the town,” he ordered to Florus’s squawk of outrage. “Not everyone takes well to revelation. Your heretic priestess should be proof enough.”
A second laugh sounded in his head as he left the prison for the town square. It was only much later, midway through eleven dozen cases in front of an irate crowd, that he realized that the laugh had been female. And distinctly bitter.
Long hours later, he stripped off his robes and tunic and slid into bed beside Sarai’s sleeping form. She unconsciously curled into him, a habit borne of months in his arms. He wondered whether he would soon live off these memories once she knew the truth.
Her brow creased in sleep, distress twisting her features.
Loathe to wake her, he smoothed those troubled lines and painted a row of kisses over her cheeks until relaxation overtook her face.
A surge of affection choked him to breathlessness.
The gods could offer him every seat in their Bright Realms, yet this was the only one he craved.
“Kadra,” she murmured half asleep. “I keep seeing someone else’s dreams. These poor boys.”
Her last such dream had been eerily similar to his past. He wondered if Petitors could pluck memories out of another’s head unconsciously.
He cradled her against his chest. “They’ll survive.”
His use of the word seemed to rouse her fully. “But isn’t that the problem? How many survive without living?” She prodded his chest. “You don’t either.”
I owe you too great a debt for that. He took her mouth in a languorous kiss, tasting the soft skin of her neck and feeling her toes curl against his feet. “This,” he lovingly nudged her nose with his, “is living, is it not?”
Gold eyes glowed. “Perhaps,” her lips grinned against his. “But so is this.”
He reluctantly allowed her to pull him from bed and onto the balcony. Holding her from behind, he wrapped the sheets around their bare bodies.
“Look!” She angled her chin up.
Thousands of stars spilled over night’s ink ribbon sky. Even larger masses of rose-streaked gas formed oblong clusters behind them, around them, between them. Nebulae of a thousand striations in hues of sunrise, each larger than the world on which they stood.
Something tightened in his chest. He hadn’t seen this in years. Edessa’s thousands of oil lamps dimmed the sight.
“That constellation,” she pointed at an oblong circlet of stars tilted haphazardly in the east, “is what we in the north call “the Slingshot.” See that bright star just outside its reach? That’s the—”
Pebble.
“Pebble,” Sarai finished. “What do they call them in the south?”
He pinched a lock of her unbraided hair and slid his way down the length of it. “The Crown and its Jewel.” He hid a smile against her temples when she scowled.
“They would call it that. I suppose it was too much to hope that they’d name it the Pouch and the Coin or the—”
“Noose and the Head?” he supplied helpfully and got elbowed in the ribs for his trouble. He’d barely recovered from the agony when she rose on tiptoe, her breath floating across his ear.
“I want us to live this way too,” she whispered.
A bolt of devastation struck him and left him wordless. Her smaller fingers threaded into the ones he had splayed around her waist and interlocked, and it was all he could do to fight the burn in his throat.
“I’ll make the world give us that peace.” He stilled when the vow came from her. “I think I’ve been entirely too obliging since the Unraveling—oh!”
He hauled her back into their room and tossed her into bed, pressing his lips to her forehead, temple, cheek, drawing a path to her mouth before claiming it hungrily.
Beyond their entwined bodies, he knew that the constellation known as the Slingshot was upside-down. That the Pebble looked poised to tumble down and slam into the town—an ill omen. That he could ruin all of this because he’d simply wanted to wait for one crisis to end before giving her another.
So, when she fell asleep once more against him, he did as he had never done and asked the gods for the only gift they had never given any mortal—time.
He was unsurprised when they didn’t answer.
Ensconced in Edessa and consumed by its troubles, he had nevertheless sought to do his duty by the north. Coin, power, legislation, he had used every tool in his considerable arsenal to begin redressing the imbalance between both halves of the nation. He saw now that it hadn’t been enough.
Proof that the north was falling apart had taunted him over the past five days of visiting its locales. Poverty, Guild greed, and boil beetles had left a chain of devastation that would take at least a generation to heal.
Most towns had assumed that he and Sarai were there to ensure Guild interests and met them with anger before deflating upon learning the truth.
Most of the coalition of northern Praetors had treated him with icy wariness, but their peoples had been more forthcoming.
Most admitted that they hadn’t wanting to jeopardize their meager allocations from the Guilds but seen little choice in the face of them whittling away at even those quantities.
For all their poverty, the north wasn’t devoid of pride and hadn’t trusted him or the Tetrarchy with the minutiae of their despair. Much had gone unattended and unreported as a result—the whitesleep murders and the extent of the devastation caused by plague itself.
“Last month, we saw a beetle swarm approaching,” the Praetor of a small town had looked close to tears. “A crimson cloud over the horizon, thick as night, venom sacs bloated and yellow. Then, it arrowed into our fields, and we knew it was only a matter of time.”