17 Mantle of Madness
How had his brother gone unnoticed?
Kadra downed another glass of wine, splitting his thoughts between dreading Méherre’s return to Bridge him back to Sarai, and how he had missed the resurgence of his godsdamned Clan. Footsteps raced through his atrium before the door to his study flew open.
Kadra raised an inquiring brow at Cato’s disheveled appearance.
“You’ve a visitor.”
Now for the truth. Kadra set down the wineglass, catching the faint tremble to his fingers. Fuck. He rose, mentally going over the halting speech that he’d prepared for Sarai when Cato shook his head.
“It isn’t Méherre.” Avoiding Kadra’s eyes, he stared at the floor, breathing hard. “Come—come outside, Drenevan.”
A spark of unease burned a path through him stronger than the persistent ache in his spine. He followed Cato to where Anek stood by Aoran Tower’s gates, with red-rimmed eyes and a haunted expression.
Red-rimmed eyes.
Realization flared like lightning before he snuffed it out. No. His hands slipped on the gates he had replaced after Wrath’s tantrum. He fumbled with the key as he unlocked them. She’s safe.
“Petitor Anek.” He inclined his head, emerging from Aoran Tower’s wards.
Their head jerked toward him as pale as Cato. “Magus Supreme Kadra,” they said hoarsely, like they had been screaming. “I was calling for you, but your wards—you couldn’t hear me.”
“I found them outside.” Cato’s voice was barely a whisper.
The pieces fell into place again before he shattered the picture. “Has something happened to Cassandane?” Kadra asked carefully.
“No.” Despite their ramrod straight posture, Anek looked close to tears. “I’m sorry to have to say this, Magus Supreme. But we’ve received word from Méherre. She didn’t have much time, so I came to deliver the news. It seemed that Sarai paid a brief visit to Komis.”
Fuck. A bolt of agony burst down his spine when he tensed. “And?” he grit out.
“I don’t know how it happened, but there was a lightning strike at a market that tore down the western city walls. The death toll is in the hundreds. Petitor Sarai—” Their voice wavered, and he knew.
Blood rang in his ears, a war drum. His heart cracked like a sheet of ice.
He vaguely registered that he had snarled out a “speak” when Anek blurted out the rest. “Méherre says she’s unaccounted for, but they’re still looking. There’s nothing confirming her as…” They shook their head. “Wrath’s teeth, I can’t say it. She can’t be dead.”
He couldn’t move.
“Méherre said that she saw Wines Guildsmen call down the strike, but that they seemed to be acting under duress. She was by Sarai, and she got out alive. There’s a chance—” Anek broke off.
Sarai could be alive. She could be dead. And all because—Anek’s words finally penetrated his haze of disbelief and fury. Duress. Blood sang to him as strong as grief. Noceo.
The rage that swamped him was bone-deep. Tundra currents that would freeze all in his path, their screams still trapped in their throats. “Where’s Cassandane?”
Anek flinched at his menace. “Her tower. Look, Sarai could be alive—”
“She is alive,” he growled, bitterly noting the way Cato and Anek flinched.
Storming back inside, he saddled his horse. When Cato appeared at his shoulder a moment later, he barely listened to the older man’s pleas for restraint and set off for Favran Tower.
The ride was a blur of wind. Every hoofbeat a drop on a water clock, a second away from a time when she had been alive. His guilt at her Fall paled in comparison to the fissure that split him now. There was so much he hadn’t told her.
He wouldn’t allow it. He was Magus Supreme. If she was dead, he would go to that desolate dock facing Death’s barge and take her with him. The gods would not have her.
Gaius met him at the base of Favran Tower, features stark with shock. “I heard—” He broke off. “What must I do?”
“Inform me when Méherre returns.” Kadra dismounted. “I’m going to Komis.”
“Please don’t.” The doors to Favran creaked open. Cassandane emerged, red dressing gown wrapped around her, features pale but firm.
To Gaius’s credit, he didn’t waver for a second. “Certo, Magus Supreme.” He hadn’t finished speaking before riding off.
Pain and exhaustion made dark smudges of Cassandane’s eyes. “I can’t imagine what you’re feeling, but you can’t leave.”
“Don’t stop me, Cassandane,” he said, voice dangerously soft.
She flinched. “You hold a duty to more than just Sarai. We need you here.”
“She needs me.”
Cassandane’s knuckles whitened around the doorframe.
“Our people are being mass murdered! We don’t know the cause, culprit, or weapon, and the land is teetering upon civil war.
No one here has seen true battle or can fathom what it’s like.
They need leadership, and they will look to whom they believe best capable of quashing this. It isn’t me!”
“It must be,” he said coldly. “I won’t abandon her.”
“War needs blades not judges! You are our strongest. Sarai wouldn’t want you abandoning everyone in Ur Dinyé just to run to her!”
His heart cracked. “Don’t presume to tell me what she would want when she could be lying in rubble!” he snarled. Cassandane stumbled back, going white as sparks hissed around them.
“I’m sorry, but I’ve already made the decision. Méherre won’t return here until she’s found Sarai, alive or dead—” She froze at the knife that materialized in Kadra’s hand.
“That was not your choice to make.” His voice rose barely above a whisper, but she shrank back.
“Please, I’m not doing this without reason.
Nearly two thousand fell madness-struck in my Quarter today.
Inquisitor Verentia has agreed to submit Clanlady Dalvia for an Examination at the Aequitas tomorrow.
If Sarai is alive, can you really have her return to a city that thinks she’s Death’s handmaiden?
Let Méherre find Sarai. We’ll set these rumors to rest and ease her path home. ”
His vision ran red with fury. “Tell me, when did you decide that having the Order as an ally was more useful than finding one of our own?”
“Since I saw that they were our greatest detractors last night.” Cassandane swallowed. “If they realize that Clanlady Dalvia’s wrong, we appease the people, gain an ally, and keep our seats.”
His lips curled contemptuously. “The only seat I have ever craved is beside her.” The jagged fragments of his heart tore at his chest. “Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you now.”
Her voice fractured. “I can’t presume to know what Sarai would want. But you do. Ask yourself if she would want that.”
She wouldn’t. His soft-hearted Petitor would never abandon this land no matter how it treated her. His throat thickened.
“This city won’t survive without you,” she whispered.
“You have ten hours, Cassandane.” His voice was a scarred rasp. “I will attend your assembly. And afterward, if I am not Bridged to Komis, this city will not survive me.”
He couldn’t return to Aoran Tower. There was too much of her there; he’d go mad. Returning to Delran Tower’s empty ballroom with his saddlebags, he pushed the double doors open into the ballroom in which he had threatened the damned Guilds only last night.
She had been alive then. Not in that liminal space between death and existence where time marked a pendulum between both extremes until it provided an answer.
He slumped against the table, head in his hands.
There was so much he had meant to tell her.
An entire world he had meant to lay at her feet.
His gaze arrowed on one of the balconies overlooking the room.
Over nine months prior they had stood there, watching the partygoers at Aelius’s convivium weave to music.
Yearning had nearly brought him to his knees that night when she had defended him, smiled at him, teased him.
How had she done it knowing that he had walked away from her?
He tore his eyes away and entrenched himself deeper in ice, crushing his grief to a dull ache.
A reckoning comes, he had been told. And it will force your hand between love and country.
He spoke into the ballroom’s desolate quiet. “Wrath.”
Red soaked the walls in his next breath.
The room undulated and warped into the bleeding maw of an unfathomable beast. Garbled limbs reached from the pooling blood, skeletal mouths agape in suffering.
At the center of it all, Wrath flicked away a grasping hand with a sound of disgust. His black robes swallowed all light.
“I did warn you that you would beg.” Four rows of fangs glistened when the god grinned.
Kadra didn’t contest the statement. They both knew it was true.
“You reek of vengeance and regret, acolyte. Was that what changed your mind?”
“A man can save a country. A god can afford to sacrifice it. The Elsar may have brought Sarai to me,” Kadra said, his tone soft and lethal, “but you will not take her away.”
Worlds crashed, burned, and rose again in the god’s eyes.
“Regret that you couldn’t save her before.
Regret that you can’t save her now. Regret that you can never return all she has lost. Regret at the entrance to every whitesleep den in this city.
Your life, Tetrarch, seems predicated on self-flagellation.
You partake in it more than those trapped in the Hell of Whips. ”
“The gods would do well to try the same.”
Wrath’s amber eyes gleamed. “We do not repent, because we do not choose, Tetrarch. Contrary to mortal belief, the Elsar do not treat you as our puppets. We allow consequence to take its course. Many should be grateful for it.”
“Was it consequence that struck Sarai in Komis?” Ice and rage were a bitter chorus in his voice.
“It was.” A skull floated to the surface of the blood pooling around them.
Wrath stepped on it absently. It cracked.
“You’ll see it soon. Regret can be a dangerous thing for a mortal.
It blinds them to the present while they seek out what they wish had been possible.
Too much escapes you while you atone for a past you believe should have been different and force a future you want to exist. So, before I ask, Tetrarch,” he drew an unnaturally long sword from a slim scabbard that hissed as it struck the floor of flesh below them, “will you regret this too?”
“No.” He would enter any abyss if it restored her to him.
Wrath’s blade carved a wide circle arc into the ground, cauterizing the flesh it tore. Tinny screams echoed from the rift. “Then, step inside.”
Kadra walked across the pulsing floor to the Elsar. Face-to-face, the god’s features were a study in madness. Unnaturally sharp, inhumanely bright, Wrath was all teeth and plunder.
“Draw your sword, mortal. This is your contract. Immense power when alive as one of the Godstouched, and godhood once dead. With both, you will choose who you become. With both, comes the risk of monstrosity. Do you accept?”
The air throbbed, spat blood, burned. “I do.” Kadra withdrew the blade he kept on his baldric and, at the god’s bidding, thrust it into the center of the fleshy circle. It sank in. The room shuddered.
“Finally.” Wrath’s smile widened, teeth engorging.
Hands burst from the hole gouged by Kadra’s sword. He stiffened as they gripped his feet, abnormally long limbs winding up his torso to immobilize him. The cavernous space enclosing them grew infinitely high, Wrath engorging until he stood fifty feet tall, black robes trailing in his path.
Madness. This was why so few survived seeing the Elsar.
“No fear, Tetrarch?” Wrath’s enormous form boomed.
“No.” Fear was knowing that the woman he loved, to whom he had barely spoken of love, could be dead under the city walls of his former hometown.
“I chose well.” The god neared him. A claw the size of an arm tapped his forehead. A previously unknown tightness eased in his chest.
Wrath looked pleased. “Well, Time will tell what this makes of you. They told me that you’d come. A most useful sibling, though this world persists in calling them male.” His fangs snapped together with a laugh. “This should be quite interesting. I’ll see you soon, Tetrarch.”
The cave of flesh receded into Delran Tower’s tile and glass.
He stood alone at its center. The floor-to-ceiling windows circling the ballroom told him he hadn’t undergone any physical changes. But the Elsar didn’t lie. He drew a grindstone from his satchel and sat at the empty banquet table.
Ten hours. He began sharpening his sword, counting down the seconds with each slice of metal against the grindstone. Ten hours, and he would go to her.
And if he found her corpse, if it was too late to pull her from the docks by the river to the afterlife as she had done for him, it wouldn’t be Wrath he pledged himself to but Ruin.