28 Mechanism
Above, Silun and Praefa slid behind a cloud.
She mirrored Kadra’s footsteps, one with the shadows as they glided from street to street, sans mounts—their routine of the past two nights.
They’d gone through most of the hospitals in his Quarter, finding sparse tiled hallways and rooms of pallets and screams. Narrowing down a god’s identity while an angry populace kept Noceo occupied.
Who called forth a god this vicious? And why?
She squinted at the smaller hospital at the edge of his Quarter where they’d planned to meet Cassandane and the others.
A dying brazier crackled weakly by unguarded main doors.
She pulled up her sleeve, confirming that beshaz was active on her armilla before following Kadra across the road.
Snow masked their approach, giving way softly under their boots. A lone owl called to the sky.
The hospital doors swung open noiselessly under Kadra’s grip, sending forth a draft that blew out the brazier.
Smoke and ash wreathed the air. He took a step into the tiled atrium.
Quiet seethed around them, interrupted only by the creak of the door falling shut.
Moonlight snaked past the curtains to dapple the steps of the twin staircases that led up to the patients.
Kadra moved with languid grace, broad shoulders loose and eyes alight at what he saw waiting in the dark. They had reached the landing when a blur of quiet steps launched at them.
Three men. Holding back a flinch, she gripped one’s wrist before they neared Kadra, closed her eyes and sliced. Tendons snapped beneath his skin. The knife fell from his suddenly nerveless fingers.
“What the fuck?” He snarled as a wretched gurgle came from his companion.
Kadra’s sword emerged through his gut with a glide of crimson.
She took advantage of the man’s brief distraction to grip his throat and limit blood flow through both carotid arteries.
He slumped with a strangled moan. A thud behind her said that the third man had met his end.
“Bounty hunters.” Kadra indicated the bronze hunters’ pins on the bodies. “Noceo.”
“Anyone else?” She peered into the dark hallway ahead.
“No.”
A dull languor washed over her as he wiped his sword and sheathed it. The stretch of tile ahead seemed to grow wider. Something shifted in her chest the longer she stared, telling her to walk onward, that answers waited for her within the black.
Come closer and you’ll see it.
She stepped forward when a hoarse gasp sounded to her right. Flinching, she stared at the bounty hunter she’d just downed. His face contorted in the dim light, sweat droplets bulging at his temples.
“No,” he whispered. “No, no. There’s so many. Stay away!” He jackknifed upright with a scream. “All these eyes! STOP!”
Chilled, she shrank back as he screamed.
Cold curiosity flared in Kadra’s eyes, something otherworldly turning them luminous. “Smoke veils him.”
Her heart thudded so hard that blood rang in her ears. “As it did me when that eye appeared above the Aequitas?”
He raised his head. “As it does now, Sarai.”
Realization struck with the force of a lightning bolt. She almost sank to her knees as it registered.
Kadra smiled darkly. “You see it too.”
Mouth dry, she swallowed. “Ibez, whitesleep, catastrophe, the only thread they have in common is unconsciousness. The moment anyone falls comatose—”
“This madness takes them,” Kadra’s piercing gaze ignored the bodies at his feet to find the dark ahead and look far beyond. “I may be killing them too quickly,” he mused. “Maiming seems the better course.”
She gave him a reproving look. Leaving the raving man to his torment, they moved down the hallway and into the wide hall where patients were kept. Their shrieks reached them first. Bound to their beds, they ranted in hoarse voices, pupils narrowed to pinpricks with fear.
She wondered if Dalvia saw a similar sight in Komis at the Am Semni Institute.
Granted, her patients were lucid and would have some hope, so long as the boil beetles could be displaced from their bodies before they tunneled too deep into their organs.
But there was nothing easy about seeing people in pain.
“Why the fuck are there bodies on the godsdamned floor?” Harion’s roar came from the landing.
Sarai sighed. “He’s awful enough that I’m glad he’s on our side. But he’s loud.”
Steps came down the hallway before Cassandane entered, mouth flattening into a grim line. “Your brother’s apparently making an announcement in three days on the dissolution of the Tetrarchy.”
Stunned, Sarai tottered against the desk. He’s actually doing it.
She turned to Kadra and paused to find him looking amused. “He’ll regret that soon.”
Anek whistled, Méherre and Harion behind them. “I’ll say. Word at the Academiae is that no one has any idea what to do with him seeing as he’s of no use during stormfall.”
Harion snorted. “People won’t abide a useless leader.”
Méherre gave him a speaking look.
“Very funny,” Harion said sardonically. “But this is all terrible for everyone’s bottom line. The Guilds are excellent for business, but your idiot brother isn’t. If I’m going to suck any toes, they had better be on powerful feet.”
Anek’s brows rose in unison with everyone else’s. “I’ll leave you to that fetish. Why don’t we target that Bridger of his? Clanlady Dalvia. Jumps at her own shadow.”
Cassandane’s gaze slitted. “Women like that sicken me. She’s a Bridger and True Illusionist. She could have melted into a crowd, altered her face, and found freedom. Instead, she plays the trembling victim to Noceo’s usurper.”
Sarai thought back to the way the men in Aelius’s Quarter had spoken of Dalvia and Kadra’s comments that she cared for Noceo. “Some cages aren’t so simple. And she’s done much good at the Am Semni Institute.”
Méherre looked faintly startled. “She’s flawed, of course,” the Bridger said slowly. “But freedom probably seems less tolerable for her in a country constantly at odds with itself. It could be that she wanted the power to reshape it so that everyone was truly free.”
Cassandane sank into a visitors’ chair, pouring herself a glass of water. “That doesn’t excuse her complicity.”
“Everyone in this room has blood on their hands.” Méherre shrugged. “To have power is to lose the moral high ground. There will always be someone to argue that you could have used it better.”
The lines in Kadra’s brow deepened. “The north would be right to say so.”
Sarai squeezed his hand at the tinge of guilt in those words. He absently kissed her knuckles, prompting Anek to gape and accidentally bring her foot on Cassandane’s instep at the uncharacteristically affectionate gesture.
A barrage of stifled curses later, Cassandane massaged her smarting foot. “Still, by the gods, it isn’t as though we didn’t try to curtail the Guilds’ abuses. We—”
A fleeting sense of familiarity struck Sarai, like she’d stumbled upon a fragment of a grander whole just within reach. She gripped it, stared, and stilled when its meaning coalesced. “I think I have it!” She cut off a startled Cassandane. “Power. Morality. Abuse.”
“Are we composing poems?” Harion muttered.
“There’s a pattern here after all! If we look at this from north to south, Sal Flumen to Edessa, then…” She widened her eyes meaningfully. Anek looked bemused.
A broad smile broke the firm line of Kadra’s mouth, the same dark knowledge dawning in his eyes. “Well done.”
Beaming, Sarai rapidly detailed their discovery that unconsciousness was a prerequisite for being madness-struck. “So, I think—”
“Let’s see if I have this right. It doesn’t matter how they fall unconscious, but once they’re there, they go mad.” Harion scowled. “Does this god hate drugs?”
“No.” Kadra pulled in a satisfied breath. “They hate people.”
Every head swiveled toward him. Midway through her water, Cassandane choked. “What?”
Anek blinked. “I never thought I’d have something in common with our tormentor.”
Méherre stared thoughtfully at Kadra. “Why do you say that?”
“The whitesleep murders centered around abuse.” Kadra propped a booted foot against the wall, reclining into the shadows. “The boil beetle plague asked for the south to behave morally toward the north.”
“And the first set of madness-struck victims were members of a powerful Guild, operating a secret ibez den,” Sarai finished. “I’m willing to bet that we’d find more than a few unsavory deeds if we investigated our madness-struck victims. This god hates a very specific kind of asshole.”
Anek crossed their arms. “A strong sense of justice in a god?”
“And a mechanism of unconsciousness and hallucination. What could go wrong?” Harion sourly muttered.
“Will it be enough to narrow them down?” Méherre wondered.
The gleam in Kadra’s black gaze said that he thought it would be.
Brimming with excitement, Sarai spared only a brief look down the hallway as the others chatted excitedly of cornering a god.
A dark tendril seemed to reach out from the floor, lengthening a neighboring shadow.
Gripping Kadra’s hand, she ignored it and let the darkness seethe behind her.
Soon, a voice whispered in her head. Soon.