24 Ancient History
Night was quick to draw over the sky in the Month of Breath.
Smoke clouded the horizon from the direction of the Aequitas, the courthouse still burning itself to death.
It was a decidedly grim group that convened outside Méherre’s domus. The brisk scent of crushed pine soaked into the muddied air as Méherre related what news she had gathered within Edessa.
Noceo apparently hadn’t needed much time to acclimate himself to sitting at the top of a country.
He’d dragged every available priest and vigile he could bribe or Coerce to watch Cassandane’s tower and Kadra’s. He had also spent the better part of a day attempting to brute-force his way into Aoran Tower with little luck in the face of Cato’s wards.
He wondered what it was about his home that inspired such devotion.
“Edessa will lead him on a merry dance, certo, but how do we fight a god? We don’t even know which one it is!
” Cassandane finally whispered. “Six and a half thousand dead and nine thousand madness-struck now. Perhaps we should face it. Noceo’s one thing, but this is all far, far beyond our reach.
We’re…” She waved her hand in search of words that weren’t coming.
A green-faced Harion bemoaned his existence, trying to determine which of the Dark Reaches he might be condemned to.
Anek looked grimly resolute. “We research. Gods have their foibles. We aren’t without recourse. You,” she snapped at Harion’s moaning figure, “we’re going to the Hall of Records.”
“I’m heading to the horreum again.” Sarai crossed her arms. They had decided on that course of action last night. “That was our first bloodbath. It might be able to tell us something.”
“Kadra?” Cassandane glanced at him.
“I’ll tie up a few loose ends and join her.”
Cassandane’s brow pinched. “One of us could theoretically perform a Summoning ourselves and ask one of the Elsar to aid us.”
Kadra had considered it. A Summoning created an obligation on the part of the god. He had the power to call one forth and demand aid. Taxing, but it would end the greater battle here. Cassandane’s narrow-eyed glance at him said that she was hoping he would do it.
“Summonings are dangerous,” Méherre broke in quietly. “I know the south popularized them during your former Head Tetrarch’s reign, but there are dangerous caveats that could invite the wrong attention.”
Sarai winced. “Noceo said the same. Something about how anything can slip through the cracks.”
Cassandane’s brows hit her hairline. “Alright. No Summonings.”
They parted at the artery of a main road to make for their respective leanings.
He caught the smile Sarai sent his way and tucked it close as he veiled himself in shadow.
The pines lining either side of the mountain road breathed with him and shielded him from the worst of the snow.
Wind wove the snap and spice of conifer needles into harmless eddies.
No one was out tonight. A darkness like this was an invitation to hunt.
Prey grew braver when they couldn’t see.
They lauded themselves for being among the few to stalk the night and mistook their adrenaline for strength.
Desperate men amused Kadra greatly.
The old tunnel from the city into Sidran Tower remained well functional.
He emerged from the trapdoor within Sidran Tower’s broom closet to the dulcet sounds of Noceo roaring at least a mile away in an effort to cajole Cato into undoing his own wards and let him into Aoran Tower. Interesting approach.
His brother was no fool, but the god’s appearance seemed to have thrown him from meticulous to desperate. Kadra stalked toward Aoran Tower, staying off the cobblestone path and watching his brother storm away after more screaming.
Padding toward the gates, Kadra took in Noceo’s guard standing watch, back facing him. Kadra yanked the man back and clapped a hand over his mouth before he could loose a scream. The furious epithets meeting his palm were proof that the man wasn’t Coerced. Bribed then. No loss.
Kadra slid the man’s dagger from him and slipped it through his throat. It sank in with ease. A well-maintained blade. Drawing it loose, he waited for the man’s dying gurgles to end, then rolled him onto the path.
Moments later, he caught steps nearing the gate. It swung open. “I wouldn’t recommend leaving, Cato.”
“Why not—gods.” A sconce parted the dark and vanished just as quickly as Cato hurriedly retreated from the corpse. He wiped his sweating forehead as Kadra entered Aoran Tower. “Who’s that?”
“Your jailor apparently.”
Cato nodded. Downturned lips, misty eyes. Sadness. “I’ve heard a great deal.”
Ah. This had been a long time coming. “I apologize for how long it took for me to say it,” Kadra said gravely.
“What stopped you?”
Kadra leaned against the tower’s exterior, crossing one leg at his ankles. “I considered it until the Fall. Nothing mattered after that.”
“Can I hear it now?”
A reasonable expectation.
The outraged roars beyond the Aoran Tower’s gates spoke to Noceo having found the guard’s body. Behind Cato’s wards, Kadra told the man who had been the closest thing to a father of who he had been and how he had come into Othus’s life.
Cold and sorrow lined Cato’s weathered features by the end. “Othus could never explain why he brought you with him. What did you tell him when Noceo failed to show?”
“That he had died while gathering the information Othus wanted.”
Cato winced. “You used guilt.”
“I did.”
The older man watched him sadly. “But things didn’t get better, Drenevan.”
“Hmm.” It hadn’t taken long for Othus to put together the sort of monster he was. His attempts to force the evil from him hadn’t been successful. Beatings and public disdain simply hadn’t been effective on Kadra when he had known worse.
Cato blew out the sconce against a wall and heaved a long breath. “From one abusive home into another. Othus was wrong for it. I’m sorry, Drenevan. I didn’t try hard enough to stop him.”
“It was nothing compared to the Clan,” Kadra reflected. He had his regrets but consequence had brought him here. “I held no ill will. Think nothing of it.”
Cato cleared his throat and gripped Kadra’s shoulder for a few quiet seconds. Side by side, they watched Noceo return, howl some more, and cart off the body.
“Don’t leave the tower for the time being,” Kadra added after a moment.
“I won’t.” The old man smiled. “Thank you for coming, son.”
Kadra stared, nodded, and left with the same smile on his face.
The moons were thin crescents on his way back to Sidran Tower, an indicator that a moondark night approached. The stars had their time on those nights when both moons were new moons. The Order preached of them being an ill omen. Kadra wondered if they had it right.
He slowed his steps when two familiar shapes entered the corner of his vision.
Noceo and Dalvia appeared lost in conversation, unaware of his presence. Kadra slipped into the tree line ten paces away. His boots slid quietly into the powder-soft snow, masking his footsteps as he tracked them.
“You wanted power.” Noceo’s voice was low and tight, pale eyes boring into Dalvia.
She held them for a moment then looked away. “To change things. Not bring wanton death.”
“The two go hand-in-hand. Don’t tell me that after everything we’ve done, this is where you balk,” he said mockingly.
“I’m trying not to be a hypocrite.”
“No chance of that.”
Dalvia’s throat worked for a moment before she smiled.
Something squeezed too tight in Kadra’s chest at that look.
Sarai had given him the same only yesterday.
Glassy eyes, a pinched brow, and upturned lips.
Hurt, resignation. He suddenly had the urge to return to his Petitor and apologize a hundred times over.
“You’re deviating from what we planned for Sarai,” she finally murmured. “Weren’t you going to turn her against him? Why did you torture her that day in Komis?”
Kadra’s blood went from ice-floe cold to the temperature of lightning, his mind already plotting vengeance.
“If reason doesn’t work, then it’ll have to be fear,” Noceo grit out.
“Do you—” Dalvia took a deep breath. “You seem intrigued.”
Noceo gave her a cold once-over. “Jealous?”
That resigned look again. “There was a time when I might have been.”
The abrupt widening of his brother’s eyes was Kadra’s only sign that he had been thrown off.
Noceo drew his cloak tighter around him, walking faster than her. “You swore that you’d obey me. Do it. I didn’t ask for your thoughts on strategy.”
Dalvia slowed her paces, staring at the sky. It took Noceo several yards to realize that she wasn’t dogging his steps. He turned to her, exasperatedly roughing his hair with both hands.
He took a loud, drained breath. “I didn’t mean that I wasn’t grateful for your help.
” The words seemed to be pried from him with a blade.
“Your formula gave me more power than I thought possible. Three months of research and Bridging back and forth every night. None of this would have been possible without you.”
Kadra’s eyes narrowed at Dalvia’s near-soundless laugh.
“Sometimes, I wish it hadn’t been.” Her whisper hung in the air, too quiet for Noceo’s ears but close enough for Kadra’s. He watched her leave, brow furrowed.
Could I have saved her from this?
Sarai would tell him that he had been thirteen, that he had given Dalvia a choice, and that she had chosen to betray him to Clevsin.
All true. But the question lingered as he returned to the city, using the white claw Wrath had gifted him to see in the tunnel’s darkness, and then through a maze of alleys he was intimately familiar with for how often he had butchered people therein.
The god’s gifts were dangerously useful. He could understand why men had gone mad.
“It’s rather aggravating having that thrown in my face all the time,” a cold voice mused beside him in the next breath. Black robes swept his as Wrath materialized, long hair knotted atop his head. “Good evening, Tetrarch.”
“I haven’t asked for help,” Kadra reminded him.
“You aren’t getting it. I try not to fight with my colleagues.” He stroked his chin. “Do I need to have an occasion to visit my acolyte?”
“Preferably.”
Voids and stars burned in the god’s robes. Kadra grew faintly nauseous, watching suns crash into each other and die.
The alley they stood in bulged. Long gouges tore through the walls.
Hands of striated muscle reached from them, whether for mercy or to deliver condemnation, he couldn’t say.
Blood dripped from the invisible wounds to pool around his feet, lapping at his boots.
To act was to leave a mark upon the world.
There was no changing what he had done here.
“Life and death, blood and time.” Wrath examined the tears in the rock. “Echoes of what you’ve done, what you could do, and things that happened a long time ago that could happen again. You saw those very futures at the Aequitas, did you not? Death or obliteration.”
“Do you want gratitude for providing me with a third choice?” Kadra followed the god’s slow glide across his cell. “And the claw?”
“A nice touch, wasn’t it? I didn’t think a fang would suit.
” Wrath prodded at one of the hands reaching from a gouge in the wall and set it ablaze.
“But the worst would have come to pass had you not chosen my power. Which you only did because your woman was injured in Komis. Which, in turn, wouldn’t have occurred if your brother wasn’t seeking vengeance for what happened eleven years ago.
That is the nature of a god. Consequence. ”
You will see it soon, Wrath had said at their last meeting. He understood now.
“The process should still have more in the way of safeguards if I’m in the running,” Kadra dryly noted.
Wrath’s fangs flashed in the dim light of the cell. “You amuse me, Tetrarch. And you understand consequence better than most. So, when you dwell on the past and wonder what you could have altered, ask yourself what you would have lost in the present. Everything has a price. Even regret.”
Everything has a price. He had warned Noceo of that once, pointed out what his obsession with Parvine Poxtan could cost her. It had cost them both.
Wrath’s fiery eyes narrowed knowingly. “Stay alive, acolyte. Contrary to the opinion of the masses, I don’t enjoy losing those I mark.” He was gone in the next breath, the alley’s brick rearranging itself in an impossible snarl behind him.
The gods, Kadra reflected, were a headache to understand.
But he was starting to think that he did.