Chapter 1 #3
Cannibalism wasn’t taboo anymore, in places like this. Just another part of survival. When meat of any kind was so rare, and produce even rarer, it was considered blasphemous to let any sustenance go to waste.
Valentina saw it after we did. Her face fell.
“Don’t worry,” she said to the prisoners. “At least we’ll get you out now.”
She said this like it was a given. Just an easy truth.
The prisoner closest to the bars smiled up at me. He held something gold in his hand, wrapped tight in his fist. A necklace of some kind.
I was no true believer of the gods. Yes, when I stood before Shiket, I still felt the overwhelming desire for her approval, her love.
Every mortal felt that way in the presence of the divine, the same way we felt hunger or thirst or sexual lust. Biological impulse.
But I knew exactly what the gods were. Selfish beings.
Still, in moments like this, I thought perhaps I understood the gods. When people looked at me like this man did—like my very existence was a gift. When the gods stood before their kneeling acolytes, did they feel as I did right now?
Like they were choking on the weight of that responsibility?
{No,} Zefiah said softly. {They do not.}
I nudged the lock—a big, knotted, ugly mass of metal. The soulless wailed in the distance. Still far, but getting closer.
“This will take me a minute to hack open,” I said. “You’re a mess, Valentina. Mirie, Marko, go patch her up. I’ll be out in a few minutes.”
I didn’t look up as they filed out of the room. Mirie lingered the longest, and I could feel her eyes on me even though I refused to meet them.
I waited until they were gone, then kneeled before the bars.
“I’m sorry that this happened to you,” I said to the prisoners. “It never should have. I imagine you’ve suffered plenty.”
They whispered excitedly to each other in a language I couldn’t place. I wondered if they spoke Oketian at all. Some rose to their feet, or whatever they had left of them. Most were missing one or both legs.
They looked at me with all the glorious adoration befitting whatever stories they’d heard of me—me, the Harbinger of the Just, the Vindica Ultis, mortal made blessed.
The man reached through the bars and pressed the necklace into my hand. I looked down to see a pendant bearing the profile of Shiket in my palm. The metal was worn over the impression of her face. It had been touched many times in prayer.
It was beautiful, surely expensive when it was first made, probably before the sun’s fall.
But it was not just a pretty trinket. It marked this man as a high-ranking acolyte of Shiket.
It would entitle him to passage, care, and supplies at any church of any god in the White Pantheon.
He was showing it to me to demonstrate his devoutness. That he deserved to be saved.
My throat tightened. I closed my hand around the pendant.
A fresh wave of howls from the soulless cut the air, approaching faster, prompting some of the prisoners to press their hands over their ears.
“I can give you a choice,” I said. “I can leave you here, and you can make your best bid for survival against the soulless. Or I can offer you a quick death. Painless as I can make it.”
The prisoner’s smile faded.
The realization fell over them slowly, and I wanted to look away rather than watch it sink into their skin like blood into sand.
I didn’t. I wouldn’t spare myself from that.
These people would not be coming with us.
They were bleeding even more than Valentina was.
They were slow, and nothing attracted the vampires or their thralls like living, injured prey.
Perhaps they would make themselves useful; perhaps if I let them free, they would go their own way and would not try to follow us.
But I saw the way they looked at me. Like they would follow me to the ends of the earth. And I couldn’t let that happen. Not when I so badly needed a diversion. Something alive and bleeding to distract the soulless while we got our mark and made our escape.
Once, on the second—worst night of my life, someone had gripped my shoulders and told me, You have to save yourself. It was the first time I had held a sword. The first night I had killed. And it had taken me so long to learn that lesson.
But I only learned something the hard way once. These people would only learn it once, too.
I watched their faces change as they realized that I would not save them. That no one would.
Had I looked like that, the night I had realized it?
I offered the man his pendant back. But he just shook his head.
“Keep it,” he said. “Every time you look at it, think of us.”
His voice was raspy with disuse, weak with exhaustion. His accent was thick. But I still felt the anger.
You’d think there would be more of it. You’d think there would be tears. But these days, all that remained was bitter resignation. Like it was all just confirmation of something they had already suspected.
That, to me, was saddest of all.
Everyone always looks at their heroes like that, in the end.