4 Horror #3
She stepped out of the blood and slumped against the wall once his footsteps faded. That was the thing with Kadra. He never second-guessed her decisions. If she said that she would wait with a slew of corpses, he’d believe her capable of it. The trouble was that she was doing it for him.
Death had returned Kadra as whole and hearty as she had wished.
Yet, the god had made no promises that he wouldn’t be haunted.
She could fathom only one explanation for what she kept seeing in his eyes.
She was no stranger to the piercing weight of that gaze, but this recent emptiness she kept sighting held something akin to madness.
Kadra had spoken little of what he’d seen in the afterlife, and she would no more push him to speak of that torment than he would ask her of the Fall. She could only wait until he was ready. Until then, leaving him with the dead felt wrong.
Hours passed in a slow bleed. Cassandane’s vigile station was a four-hour ride from this lonely stretch of farmland, and Kadra had to notify his station and Harion’s too.
Needing to stretch her legs after the second hour, she wandered the horreum, finding rooms decked in Aelius’s white and silver, including a miniature shrine to him as the Naaduir of Invention.
She snorted. If Aelius ended up elevated to the pantheon of minor gods for anything, it would be corruption.
She took to loading grain sacks onto the wagons outside as per the allotments to the north that she’d memorized from the Distribution Act. Dawn suffused the sky, as she finished. She rolled her shoulders and flinched at a stab of agony in her temples.
I’ll see you soon, Death-Summoner, a garbled voice murmured. Both memory and challenge.
Gods, like I’ve the time to dig into this.
Tugging at her braid in frustration, she stalked into the horreum’s ice-room and rested there until her skull eased its throbbing.
She was going to have to ask Anek to Materialize this bit of memory and put her at ease.
Likely just a threat by someone visiting the Stones Guild that day.
Wisdom only knew why her mind kept fixating on it.
Hooves clopped outside, accompanied by raised voices. She raced out to find Kadra, Cassandane, Anek, and a group of vigiles and Lugens tethering their steeds. The tang of blood had worsened over the hours, and the air reeked of death. Horses and vigiles alike eyed the horreum with mute fear.
Cassandane looked defeated. “I almost don’t want to know,” she muttered after a good minute of silence. “We put out one fire at the Hearing—Tibi gratias ago for that by the way, Sarai—and here comes another. I hear you found whitesleep on one of them?”
Sarai exchanged a glance with Kadra. “Yes, but it might not be the cause.”
The hollows under Cassandane’s eyes deepened. She tried for levity: “Well, how bad could it be?”
“Gods and Saints, preserve me!” A vigile ran out of the horreum, stark white. “Elsar, save us all!”
Cassandane contemplated the heavens for a moment. “Being a god,” she finally said, “seems an enviable job. They don’t have to answer. I do.” She strode up the steps and went in, muttering under her breath. Kadra followed, after a parting brush of his thumb over Sarai’s wrist.
Wincing at the litany of shrieks that followed as vigiles and Lugens found the dead, she went to the wooden gates into the compound. An audience had already begun to form beyond, farmers pulled from their crops by the screams and hooves thundering down their normally placid stretch of road.
Her chest tightened. This could undo everything. All the goodwill she’d built after the Hearing could dissipate like smoke.
Shoving the gates shut, she rested against them and recalled how Kadra had uncharacteristically chosen not to burn them down. He knew that they were open. She let out a long breath. There’s no denying it, is there? And he still wouldn’t confide in her.
Violent retching startled her out of the reverie. Red curls almost touching the ground, Anek doubled over and vomited some more onto the mud. A host of echoes told her that other vigiles and even a few Lugens were doing the same.
“What,” they gasped, heaving again, “in all the fucking hells,” another heave, “is that?”
“I don’t know,” she said quietly.
Anek threw up their hands and the last of the contents of their stomach. Patting their back, Sarai led them to the ice-room where they sucked on ice chips until they felt well enough to speak.
“I’ll agree that this is more than just whitesleep. The amount of blood—” They broke off with a shudder. “It’s no natural death, but I know of no weapon that could do that to so many at once.”
“The Guildswoman I spoke to said that a reckoning follows in my wake and the very sky would laugh.”
Anek rebuffed both notions with a shake of their head. “Of course she’d try to blame you. I saw their little shrine. These people are largely Aelius’s cultists. I wouldn’t put it past them to follow him to the afterlife and pin this on you as a final middle-finger salute.”
“If that’s true, then there’s a vile poetry to them faking their suicides as murders when their Saintly Tetrarch did the opposite.
” She leaned against the ice-room’s frigid walls.
“Did we handle them wrong? Should we be leaving them to their conspiracies and hatred when they could burgeon into homegrown insurrection groups in the future?” She shifted awkwardly when Anek cut her a startled look.
“Look at where we are! They’re dead, and we still have to fret over how they could upend the land. ”
“We can’t very well round them up like pigs for slaughter. They’ve a right to freedom of movement and speech too. Even if they use it for shit like this,” Anek added darkly.
Sarai slung a hand over their shoulder in commiseration. Anek had borne as many slings and arrows as Cassandane had since the Unraveling. Clerics had mocked their identity as a neutralis in sermons across the capital and lambasted them for aiding her during the Unraveling.
“How are you holding up?” She leaned against the frigid wall. “I heard someone leaked the location of your domus to a Cleric.”
Anek scowled. “He woke me at three in the godsdamned morning by roaring outside my window that “amorphous gender is a mark of amorphous morality.” I’ve never been so close to killing a man.
” They released a breath through their teeth.
“Cassandane’s offered to house me at her tower until I find a new domus. ”
Shit. Sarai pulled them into a one-armed hug, and they managed a laugh, muscular shoulders releasing their tension.
“It isn’t all bad. Who knows? I might be able to pull off with her what you did with Kadra.” They snickered at Sarai’s dropped jaw. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t! She’s devastating.”
“Alright, I’ll concede that.” Sarai squinted at Anek, trying to imagine them with Cassandane.
Her smile faded at the deep lines that had threaded themselves under their eyes and across their temples.
These Clerics spoke so easily of “marks of amorphous morality” without taking any responsibility for marks of indelible pain.
“We won at the Unraveling,” she said quietly.
“So, why are we the ones scrambling now? The Order harasses us without second thought. The Guilds disregard the Distribution Act while their profits bloom. The north riots and starves and suffers from a beetle plague, of all things, yet few here even see them as human. We ask the oppressed to live alongside their oppressors and prattle about ‘mutual respect’ when one side’s beliefs are abhorrent.
We try to meet them at the bargaining table for the sake of national unity, while they erode public faith in us. And people still fall for it!”
Anek chipped off a piece of ice with a wan smile. “Don’t take it to heart. That’s the nature of the game. We had no hope of being respected.”
“Then why is Harion?” she wondered. “Can you imagine how easy it would be? Wasting less breath, less time. Not having to prove your worth along with doing your job. Not worrying that the smallest crisis could have the public turning on us to elect another Aelius!” She realized she’d said it all in one breath when Anek pressed an ice chip into her hand.
Their eyes held a world of sympathy. “You, my friend, care too much. Don’t let the job become your life. This city will eat your heart if you let it.”