21 There Is Someone Here
Clarity struck him as their warped tangle of evidence and clues sorted into smooth web strands. Thousands dreaming of the same visions and the same doom. A power he had never heard of. Broad.
Hemorrhage. Pulverization of the head and brain. A mechanism of action that seemingly didn’t require the culprit’s presence. Vague.
Murders done by whitesleep in the north, by unrepentant victims of pain who had all had the same realization that they could. Beetles gone mad to feed on human flesh. Unearthly.
Then, Sarai. Dreaming of the Fall, dreaming of his past, eyes glazed even now.
There is someone here who shouldn’t be, Wrath had said.
Someone.
The corner of Kadra’s lips rose in an icy smile as the sky continued to laugh. Cassandane and Harion yelled their terror to more uncaring eyes blooming dark above them. The answer was so simple as to be absurd. The fools of the Elsarian Order had gotten it right after all.
There was a god in Edessa.
Ahead, Sarai stared blankly at the growing spread of darkness, eyes glazed.
Smoke coiled around her and licked at her skin, the nape of her neck, invisible to all but him.
Thin wisps prodded at her chest to seek entry.
He paused at their familiarity, recalling seeing the same during the Academiae’s graduation and within the whitesleep den.
The voice who’d kept trying to crush his skull had a name then.
Sarai’s lips parted as she stepped forward. He reached her even before she could whisper his name and caught her elbow. Her face crumpled, irises nearly swallowing her eyes.
“I’m here.” He clenched her blindly questing fingers around his arms.
She sucked in a hoarse breath. Her pulse throbbed wildly in her neck. “We need to leave—” Hyperventilating, she struck her sternum when she couldn’t draw another breath and simply dragged him toward the portal.
Méherre stared at the sky, awe mingling with terror in her gaze. “Such power.”
Verentia’s shrieks suddenly cut through the air. He glanced over his shoulder to find her clawing at her eyes. Vicious glee bared her mouth in a rictus grin as she reached out, brandishing a knife toward Cassandane.
“You’ve had it for years,” she whispered, stabbing almost blindly as Cassandane darted out of her reach. “Let me sit there too.” Her jaw unhinged in another scream, reason seemingly fighting with madness. He knew she fought Death.
Tar oozed from her mouth as she fell to her knees, sanity dwindling to pinpricks in her eyes, which were swallowed by black.
The fragile hold that the god had over Edessa fractured at the sight. People splintered and fled in packs, stampeding all in their path. He drew a web of lightning over their group, parting it as Cassandane and Harion successively entered with numb eyes and slackened faces.
A shudder ran through Sarai. “There’s nothing we can do.”
“For now,” he agreed softly.
One by one, they walked through Méherre’s portal and left the Aequitas’s carcass to the eyes surveying it. And the god still laughed.