27 Rancor
Despite her exhaustion and anguish, all thoughts of Noceo fled her mind as she stepped foot in the warehouse again, parting with Kadra at the same fork she had during their first foray here, over a month ago under the dead of night.
There were places, the Elsarian priests said, that were tainted by the dead.
Lands, homes, woods, and streams once unblighted, but now, forever altered by the brutality of the acts that had occurred within them.
Death took all who came to him, but some weren’t so eager to leave.
They sat, festered, demanded until the place of their end took on a fearful new life, and through it they lived and lived and ate all that crossed their path.
Perhaps it had happened here too. An odd lethargy took her as she strode into the warehouse. Her feet seemed to know the way as though she had walked it a thousand times since. Sconces flared to life as she walked. She didn’t question the light.
A left, another turn, and the hallway where she had found the dead stood bare, pristine but for the odd fleck of blood on the wall.
Closing her eyes, she sank into her memory.
When she resurfaced, it was to blood pooling on the ground past the tiled step running across the hallway.
Strange. Why a step in the middle of an otherwise flat hallway?
She had been too preoccupied with the dead and the Guildswoman split in two to pay it much heed. Now, she crossed it and crouched.
Around seven inches tall and practically invisible without the blood lapping at it.
A precautionary measure, perhaps? Or something to trip up anyone who entered this portion of the horreum, to make them stumble, drop whatever they were carrying.
A trap, an obstacle, a marker. Regardless of the step’s purpose, its presence indicated only one thing. A secret.
She tapped against the tile, pressing this way and that before relinquishing it to stride further down the hallway. The dead had been arrayed here, frozen in flight.
In fright.
In her mind’s eye, she saw their gaping mouths anew, bulging eyes weeping blood.
“Like they died of fear,” she whispered aloud, and something seemed to whisper in the back of her mind. A laugh? Her trembling hands vibrated faster.
They were running down the hallway. She followed it to the end, where it widened into an unremarkable dead end.
Four tiled steps led up to a storage room, piled high with sacks of assorted grains.
She stared. That doesn’t make sense. The room was too small to have fit all those Guildspeople which meant…
A hidden room. And if it wasn’t here, and wasn’t an offshoot of the hallway, then that left…
below. She examined the four steps into the room, kneeling to take a better look at the tile.
A handle in the bottommost step gave it away.
She tugged and all four steps came up and away from the floor.
A blood-smeared staircase led down into the horreum’s depths, the nose of each step stained like the teeth of a serrated knife.
Down, down, all the way at the bottom, she could make out a hand, reaching for help that had never come.
She stared at that gaping maw. This had been the true scene of the crime.
“And they deserved it,” a voice noted in her head with a trace of laughter. “You all might.”
Sarai stilled, aware that she was sucking air in at frenetic speeds. When had her breathing grown so harsh?
Something creaked from within the staircase’s bowels.
She peered over the edge and froze as the hand at the bottom moved.
It clawed an inch forward, then another.
The beginnings of a matted head emerged at the base of the staircase.
Half the head, then the entire thing. Her breath came faster.
Hoarse. The neck tilted up, slow and fluid, and pinned her with its—half a head.
A nose and teeth smiled. Terror made her its quivering instrument, drumming at her throat.
A hand clamped over her eyes, another drawing her up—when had she gone halfway down the stairs?—and back into the hallway. Citrus met her senses, and she sagged. Kadra.
He steadied her back against his chest. “Breathe,” he murmured against her ear. “That’s it, Sarai. Let it out. I have you.” He made her take a few more shuddering breaths before removing his hand from her eyes. “There’s no one here but us. Remember that when you look down.”
Heart in her throat, she dared blink. Her vision cleared, and she found a bloodstained staircase before her. There was nothing at the bottom.
“I saw…” She stepped back, suddenly chilled to the bone. “This god is really starting to irk me.”
Tamping down her nerves, she strode downstairs before she could halt herself. Her pulse thudded with every step.
Death had long come and left this place. The miasma of rot hung heavy and putrid in the air. A spark from Kadra’s free hand lit the sconces bracketing the walls. She flinched.
A small lake of now-dried blood swamped the stone tile floor, embedded in the crevices between divans, the odd sack of whitesleep, and crates of ibez.
“This is no cellar,” she whispered.
“An ibez den.” Kadra withdrew an amphora from an open crate with mild amusement. “Where does the Grains Guild find the time?”
Ur Dinyé had banned the dangerously potent mix of fruit, spices, and wheat years ago for its near-hallucinogenic strength. Looks like the Grains Guild were secretly distributing it. And imbibing it.
The dead here perched upon sofas, bottles smashed beside them, jaws agape in the same screams their compatriots had made on their way to the afterlife. Rot oozed from their decaying flesh, dripping black onto the ground. She steeled her spine against a shudder.
“It began here.” Kadra’s piercing gaze raked over the dead with disinterest.
Fear raked long fingers across the back of her neck. “They were drinking their way through a crate. A few were rubbing on whitesleep. Then, someone started raving. They would have chalked it up to intoxication at first.”
“Until fear took hold.”
“Then, they ran, like they thought that what was causing the madness was infectious.”
“In their eyes, it would have been. The more their compatriots fell to it, the more they must have believed it to be a disease or contaminated drink.” Kadra moved toward a corpse at the corner of the room, examining the ibez bottle beside him.
“But that doesn’t match what happened at the Aequitas.” Sarai’s boots scraped over a thick layer of dried blood. “All the madness-struck there weren’t imbibing ibez or whitesleep.”
“Hmm.” He leaned against a crate and studied the tableau. An imperceptible shift took place in the line of his shoulders.
She followed his probing stare to a body frozen half out of its chair. “What do you see?”
“A devouring.” His face darkened. “This god enjoys carnage.”
Ibez-drinkers, whitesleep users, the spectators at that marketplace, the crowd at the Aequitas, what did these groups have in common for the god to choose to take them?
By the time they returned to Méherre’s home, she was weary to the bone. A glance at Kadra’s tight jaw told her that it was little more than bloodlust still keeping him upright.
She ran a bath and was struck by how similar the tile here was to that in Clan Kader’s Hall of Relics.
She had crawled across it, acknowledged how worthless she was.
She had put herself back together in the rubble because she had had no choice.
But the pieces she had found hadn’t fit quite right.
They were missing corners and had too many teeth. She had wedged them back inside anyway.
“Sarai?”
She realized that she had been standing in the doorway of the bathing room, staring at the tile for several minutes.
“Oh.” She stepped away. The metal handle was ice against her clammy skin.
“It’s been a long—” No. That wasn’t what she’d wanted to say.
She let it out before she could think: “He had me say that I was worthless.”
A pause. She heard Kadra’s steps behind her. He turned her to face him. Ice and fury twisted in his eyes. “How,” he asked evenly, “would you like him to die?”
“That’s just it,” she whispered. “I don’t want him to. Even though the asshole had me—” she broke off before she could admit that she had crawled.
Kadra drew her against his chest, holding her like a fortress.
“I’ve seen powerful men turn catatonic after an hour of what he did to you.
This shame isn’t yours.” Scooping her into his arms, he strode into the bathroom and deposited her in Méherre’s stone bathtub.
Black eyes held hers. “I’m proud of you. ”
When her hands moved to the buttons of her tunic, he took them in his. “Let me take care of you, yes?”
She let him gently undress her and join her under the water. Taking the scrub cloth on the ledge of the tub, he ran it over her skin. She leaned into his touch, absorbing the feeling of him trying to put her back together. Had anyone done the same for him?
He dried her off and enveloped her in a robe.
Looking at those black eyes that terrified most people, she saw the quiet adolescent he had been—powerful and resigned, dangerous and lonely. “Thank you for choosing me.” His heart was all the greater a gift after what she knew of his past.
“You chose me too.” He rose from the tub, magnificently nude, cupping her face to kiss her. She parted her lips and clung to him in a surge of affection, peppering his cheeks and jaw with more kisses, and relishing the leonine way he nuzzled her.
Lifting her easily, he dropped her onto the bed and joined her.
She cuddled close, wanting more but conscious of his exhaustion after battling Noceo.
Several burst blood vessels still reddened his eyes.
The lines in his brow deepened, and she could see him turning the past over in his head in search of a pivot point where he could have changed everything.
“This isn’t your fault.” She followed the path of a stray water droplet slaloming through his chest hair. “You’re much too used to manipulating the world, Kadra, but some things are outside your control.”
“Hmm.”
Swatting him, she straddled his waist. “Not. Your. Fault,” she repeated.
His eyes softened. “I’ll try to believe it,” he said dryly, tangling a hand in her wet hair. “As should you.”
She sighed. “Noceo wasn’t wrong about me though. I do crave power.”
“You crave security.” Strong fingers massaged her scalp. She melted into his chest. “Noceo sees the means not the end.”
She stilled as the simple truth struck her. Suddenly, the world felt infinitely more hopeful. Sitting up on her elbows, she pressed her fingertips to his strained temples, soothing what she could.
“Today was a fatal blow to Noceo’s ego. Nursing it will keep him occupied.” Bloodlust bloomed in his eyes. “Tomorrow, we prowl Edessa’s hospitals for answers.”
She nodded, raking a hand through his hair. He pressed into the caress like an affectionate northern wolf.
“Should I call you Drenevan?” she wondered.
A wry smile curved his lips. “Noceo told you what Kadra means, hmm? Call me anything that pleases you.”
She propped herself up on an elbow. “My Tetrarch,” she tried.
“No, everyone uses that. My love? My dear?” She paused when he didn’t join in the fun.
His eyes were the rarest, softest black, glowing with contentment.
It struck her then that this wasn’t a bit of banter to him, but something he’d craved for a long time.
Leaning down, she touched her nose to his. “Perhaps I’ll try all of them.”
His cock stiffened against her legs. “Perhaps you should.”
She lost her battle with desire.
His gaze narrowed when she slid down his body. “You’re demanding to be sore tomorrow.”
“Well, I’m certain that the Magus Supreme can soothe me.”
A predatory gleam lit his eyes. “I’ll do a damn lot more than that.”
She yielded to him, relinquishing all fears and cares for a few hours while he sank into her and drove them to bliss.
But when she fell asleep, it was to stormfall and blood. And each time she tumbled from Sidran Tower, the god’s eyes found her.