34 Untethered Consequence
There was an inherent violence to the process of Death, no matter now benign. A stoppering of a heart, an expulsion of life through a breath. The sight before him lacked that elegance. It was turmoil, hatred, and glee, enacted without conscience.
Young and old, most lay half rotted in their cells, eyes and portions of their nostrils missing.
They may not have been beyond hope before this place, but they were now.
Those with eyes had begun slowly swiveling to them, taking in the newcomers with the hungry interest of the delirious.
Invisible to everyone else was the gaping maw at the end of the hallway.
Arms with teeth rising from the floor to tear into all in their path.
Ten fucking hells. I should have seen it.
Dalvia had learned the same lessons at the same knee that he and Noceo had.
She had watched them deceive and butcher throughout their childhood and been taunted for her inability to do the same.
Yet, he had hoped that one of them had emerged sane from Clan Kader’s manor.
Instead, she had used his guilt and thoroughly insulated herself from suspicion.
“She was never helping these people.” Sarai vibrated with rage beside him. “She brought them here as cattle.”
The beetles stirred at the timbre of her voice, and she clapped a hand over her mouth as a small cloud rose in the air in search of prey.
Their yellow venom sacs quivered eagerly.
He strode in front of her and Anek and placed a finger to his lips just as one of the infected spotted him.
The man opened his mouth. A stream of nonsense came from his throat that other prisoners echoed, shoving at their cell doors.
Kadra closed his eyes on a curse when they clanged open. Anek mumbled a horrified plea to the Elsar as a group of infected tottered out of their cells.
“She didn’t lock the doors.” Noceo sounded as though he were in shock. “By the gods—”
“Help me break down the door,” Sarai bit out as more infectees began racing forward with surprising speed. “We don’t have time for fatalism.” She gripped his sleeve. “Kadra—”
“I’ll hold them off.” His hand covered hers. She squeezed it, terror flaring in her golden eyes for a second before she steeled herself and ran upstairs with Noceo and Anek, slamming her weight into the door.
This would be unpleasant.
A wave of infectees neared. Delirious and half dead, they ran at inhuman speeds.
He raised a hand, fingers swiping the air. Pressure dropped like an anvil within the hallway. A net of lightning stretched over the doorway, dividing him, the beetles, and the infected from Sarai, Anek, and his brother. He sank into the familiar liminal calm of anticipation before a fight.
A man approached, eyes unseeing. Kadra moved.
He kicked out at the closest one and sent him into another, gliding behind them to snap their necks in seconds. With the crook of a finger, lightning flared in his cramped quarters and arrowed through their corpses with precision, reaching ghostly, white-hot fingers for the others just beyond.
Fiery tendrils sank into each one, twisted through their skin and up to their screaming mouths. At least ten dropped to the ground within. Thick, branching burns bloomed red under their skin before their eyes rolled back in their heads and went unmoving.
That seemed to enrage the rest. Feet thudded toward him.
Avoiding the teeth-laced arms on the ground, he incinerated a swarm of beetles with a lazy flick of his wrist, dispatching another group in a flash of heat and burning flesh.
Behind him came the desperate smack of boots, elbows, and bodies against wood.
“Stay back you both. I might have it,” Anek yelled.
Waves of pressure coiled and uncoiled in the cellar as he razed everything that approached. Shrieks tore into the air, skin slid from flesh, smoke stung the air. Blood ran down the divots of the tiles. And a crack snapped through his focus. The door was down.
“Kadra!” Sarai yelled.
He dissipated the shield over the doorway in one breath, sprinted through it in the next, then re-erected it. Bodies howled as they struck the lightning barrier. He could do nothing else. They were too far gone down Death’s road to pull back.
He ran up two steps at a time and found Sarai and the others bruised from their exertions but otherwise unharmed. The doors into the Institute parted and Méherre stumbled in, blood dripping from a deep head wound. She frenetically pulled them shut behind her.
“Wisdom’s breath!” Anek ran to her. “What happened?”
“The Elsar only know. Someone knocked me over the head and the next thing I knew, I was outside.” She thrust a shaking hand at the doors. “We can’t leave. Beetle swarms everywhere.”
“Dalvia.” Dread tautened Sarai’s voice. “What do you want to bet that Edessa’s under siege by a god right now?”
Convenient. Dalvia had always been a step ahead. She had known they were coming to the Institute.
“Ready a portal to Komis, Méherre.” He pushed the hospital doors open against the Bridger’s exclamations and welcomed the rush of winter air.
Light from nearby braziers mirrored off snow and into his eyes, providing rich contrast to the thick crimson swarms undulating like waves between the evergreens, venom sacs bulging.
Some had already swallowed a few fleeing northern vigiles.
“Ruin’s tits, we’re fucked.” Anek skidded to a halt behind him, rucking up snow. “There must be thousands! Tens of thousands?”
Given the speed of their approach, they had all scented the blood Kadra had just spilled in the cellar. No matter.
His jaw clenched as he channeled more power into his palms and balled them into fists.
Roving air currents warped to his command.
The pressure dropped dangerously low. Sarai pressed her hands against her ears in discomfort when her eardrums popped.
As the first wave of beetles neared, he brought both hands down into the snow.
Shield upon golden lightning shield flared around them like fishing nets, radiating cruel barbs outward.
The insects sizzled and fell, unable to penetrate the weave.
Venom sacs burst yellow onto the snow. Veins corded in Kadra’s temples as he kept up the barriers through assaults from every angle.
A sea of red grew beyond their circumference. Then, long moments later, came quiet.
Kadra carefully dissipated the shields. The ground before them looked like scarlet, iridescent snow, rife with beetle carcasses. He turned to the dumbfounded group behind him. Noceo and Méherre had gone white.
“I’m never living in the north,” Anek whispered.
Sarai inclined her head with quiet awe. “Magus Supreme.” Her smile faded when Méherre made a frustrated sound.
“I can’t Bridge you into the city.” Lines bunched on her forehead as she strained. “Shit. It’ll have to be the city walls.”
It had begun then. Kadra lifted the edge of his sleeve and examined the crimson runes on his armilla. Sarai followed his gaze and paled.
“You fought a storm only hours ago too. And now this.” Red threaded her eyes. She’d lost weight over weeks of exhaustion. “I didn’t see it,” she confessed tautly. “I overlooked her entirely.”
Kadra sighed at the knowledge that he had been no different in his preoccupation with remorse.
Wrath had said as much, weeks ago. “Regret can be a dangerous thing for a mortal. It blinds them to the present in favor of 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 believe should have existed.”
As Sarai was so fond of saying…
“I may have an overblown sense of guilt,” he mused.
“Finally, you see it.”
“Stop blaming yourselves and leave some self-hatred for the rest of us!” Anek yelled. “I felt sorry for her too!”
Méherre cried out in pain. A portal slit the air, a thin sliver taking too long to widen.
Sarai eyed it with dread and pressed her and Kadra’s clasped hands to her chest. “If the worst happens,” she whispered, “it has been the greatest of honors.”
He tipped her chin up and caressed the underside. “Every day meant everything,” he said softly.
Her eyes grew wet. “Be careful.”
Noceo lifted a few vials from his satchel. “Anyone want these first?”
“Fuck no, I’m not touching anything she’s made.” Anek flinched at the sound of screaming from within the portal. It broadened enough for them to enter. “Elsar preserve me,” they muttered to the sky with heavy irony before walking in.
Face tight, his brother followed.
Kadra entered with Sarai’s hand in his. A black wind swallowed them. Their feet left the ground. Gold eyes found his before black closed around them and spun, hurtling them into the center of a whirlwind.
He dimly heard Sarai’s scream. Her hand tore from his grasp, his roar of her name lost to the howl of air and flashes of color. Other faces whipped around them, hapless within the same fury. Sight and sound blurred in a tumultuous shriek until his feet hit the road.
His sight cleared.
And he knew where he was.
Rain struck cobblestone with bitter fury and pelted the body at the base of Sidran Tower. She twitched, mangled fingers inching forward in an attempt to hoist herself upright before realizing that it was fruitless.
Kadra knew pain. Its corners and tunnels had ceased being a mystery to him in childhood. But in this, he, who had borne the pain of a cracked spine for a decade without complaint, was rendered in agony.
He approached her as he had then and knelt, brushing a waterlogged strand of hair from her face. A harsh breath sawed from him. As the years passed, the memory of Sarai’s original face had faded long before he’d met her again. Now, he would never forget.
Half of her was pulp. The rest quietly pleaded with him for mercy. Brown eyes, hollow cheeks. “Please,” half her mouth slurred, the rest broken against cobblestone.
He cupped her cheek with a hand that shook. His heart choked in his chest when she leaned into the touch. She felt solid, broken. Fury sharpened his bloodlust. This god knew his weakness well.
An unnaturally large shadow loomed over them and blotted out the scant moonlight.
He didn’t turn around. “Is this real?”
“In life, I was Time’s acolyte,” a melodious voice spoke behind him. “I can make it real.”
Anguish threaded through the cracks in his heart.
A dark blue-green foot touched the ground in front of him.
He raised his head to the goddess standing beside Sarai.
Her black hair floated in defiance of the rain.
Bone-white horns gleamed like blades, and eighteen eyes surveyed him with cold amusement, twelve pupilless orbs scattered across her shoulders and clavicles, four on her cheekbones, and two human ones.
He had an idea of who she was now. “Faragathe, Wretched Seer of Sleep. The one who’s been trying to crush my skull.”
“You’ve a hard head. And you owe her,” she said with a hard glance at Sarai’s body. “So much pain could have been avoided this night, if you’d placed her life above your petty gains.”
“What will undoing it cost me?”
“Everything.” Her teeth gleamed as sharp as Wrath’s.
“You and your city for her future. We should understand each other better than most, Godstouched. The objects of this world do not matter. Cities rise, fall, and burn. It’s all a day in the life of a god.
Let this one go, and I will spare your woman.
She will have the life she should have had. You have my word.”
“Will that life be real?” he asked, voice clipped and hard.
She laughed. “You of all people should understand how very variable reality is. But she will be happy. Tragedy will not find her.”
And neither will I. He understood the cost.
Thunder roared around them. Sarai’s mouth worked under his hand. “Please don’t go,” she croaked.
Heat built behind his eyes in a way he hadn’t known since childhood. He wiped a trail of blood from her chin. Wrath had been right. Everything has a price. Even regret.
His guilt had allowed Dalvia and this goddess to rake their claws into Edessa.
“You owe her, acolyte of Wrath.” the goddess said.
“I do.” Everything he was and all he had become. Bending, he pressed a chaste kiss to Sarai’s forehead. His hand fell from her face. It took everything he had to stand. The storm seemed to stutter as he did. Sarai’s body briefly vanished before returning. She has me in a dream.
Faragathe’s human eyes hardened. “Will you walk away from her again?”
“I’m walking to her.”
“How?” she asked curiously. “You’re in my realm.”
A menacing smile parted his lips. “Not yet.”
Her eyes flared. She opened her mouth, jaw unhinging to reveal a swallowing darkness. He sent a burst of power to his left hand. The claw Wrath had gifted him burst from the tip of his index finger. The bastard knew.
When Faragathe lunged, he cut through the dream imprisoning him with a slash of his hand. Reality bled from the rift, two worlds superimposing. A snarl of pain, then the goddess and Sarai’s body vanished.
Stormfall still roared around him, that nameless eerie hand of smoke manipulating the sky with delight. He stood on the Academiae’s grounds outside Sidran Tower amid hundreds of people shrieking. Drenched, they rocked back and forth on the ground, trapped in Faragathe’s nightmares.
A familiar roar caught his attention. Cassandane strode across the Academiae’s grounds, directing people to drag as many as they could indoors. Sighting Kadra, she groaned in relief.
“I would thank the gods, but I’m a little furious at them right now,” she yelled above the rain. “Did that teal goddess try to cut you a deal too?”
“She did.”
Cassandane glanced at him standing under Sidran Tower and winced in understanding. “I see. Where are Sarai and Anek?”
“I have a guess.” Kadra grabbed a screaming magus by the collar and shoved them into the tower. “Can you hold the Academiae?”
She wordlessly pointed at Cato, Telmar, and to Kadra’s surprise, Harion, who were dragging insensate people inside as the storm raged. With a grim nod, Kadra sprinted inside Sidran Tower, almost slamming into Noceo on the stairs.
His brother looked inches from collapse. “I figured she would be—”
“Upstairs.” Kadra took the steps at a run up to the fifth floor where Aelius had held many a convivium until Sarai’s fall.
He tore the portrait of a former Magus Supreme from its nail and pressed the depression beneath it.
The wall parted and revealed a black hall, dusty with disuse, and a staircase to the upper level from which Sarai had fallen.
Breathing hard, he ran up the final set of steps, Noceo behind him.
And there she was.