7 Omens
Whose dream had that been? Whose life had she walked in for a few bitter hours?
Sarai opened her eyes to darkness and the echoes of a man being butchered on a warehouse floor. Names, faces, they eluded her now, yet the anguish behind her breastbone felt alive.
Rubbing her aching sternum, she sat up and stilled at the cool stone under her hands.
Tile? Sconces flared one by one in a ring around the ballroom and she knew.
These walls, the hit of this tile against her cheekbones, all of it indelible.
Yet, panic was an echo, and her mind too sluggish to scream.
A burst of wind forced the unlatched balcony door open, knocking it into an object atop a tablecloth on the floor.
It twitched with an agonized moan, and she knew even before she approached the figure, knew the dark stains spreading from her even before she bent toward the badly wounded girl on the ballroom at the top of Sidran Tower.
Her past self stared back, pulling breath through bleeding lips. A laceration split her face horizontally above her mouth, continuing behind her ears. Tullus’s work. Her hair had been shorn by lightning, chunks stuck to her scalp. Brown eyes not gold. Too young to have known this.
Sarai’s throat worked. “This isn’t real,” she whispered. “We aren’t here anymore.”
“We aren’t?” A voice of gurgled blood.
“No, I promise—”
“But what if you’re wrong?” Her younger self sat up in an eerie rush and pinned her with milky-white eyes. Her voice distorted to a raspy hiss, crimson slithering from her wounds. “What if we never left Sidran Tower? What if we’ve been dreaming and screaming all along?”
Panic struck Sarai like a knife when blood dripped from her younger self’s mouth.
Shaking, she stumbled back when the girl reached for her, growing cold when she chased her with unearthly speed. Wind sent the balcony door open again, and Sarai darted through, slamming it behind her. She stilled when the door vanished, her hands closing on nothing.
This can’t be real. Her chest tightened with panic when pinching herself did nothing. Why am I here?
She froze at a footstep behind her, turning in slow degrees and knowing what she would find even before white and silver robes entered the corner of her vision. A too-wide grin split his face like a scar.
“What a shame.” Rot carved chunks from Aelius’s cheeks. “A reckoning has followed in your wake. The gods have spoken and called for our end. The sky itself will laugh.”
She tottered back when he advanced, but the balcony railing behind her felt all too solid, the wind all too eager to howl past her falling body.
What if we never left Sidran Tower? Another step. What if we’ve been here all along?
She screamed.
“Sarai. Look at me.” Hands cupped her face. “Open your eyes. I have you.”
Reality struck in a garbled rush. She woke to her frantic gasps, the last note of a scream still hanging in the air. Sitting up, she let out a ragged sound at finding Kadra’s grim features above her.
“Breathe—” He broke off when she hugged him hard.
“Wisdom’s teeth, I’ve never had a nightmare like that,” she mumbled into his sweat-slick skin. “I’m sorry for startling you.”
“You never need to apologize.” Brow lined with worry, he held her while her pulse slowed its frantic drumbeat, reluctant to allow her out of bed until she insisted that she was well.
She related what she remembered of the dream while they bathed and tucked into the meal Cato had left atop Kadra’s desk.
“Sidran Tower was bad enough, but I felt like I saw someone else’s dream before then.
” She pressed a mug of tea to her throbbing forehead.
“Likely something borne of a long workday, but Elsar only know how I conjured up such explicit details of illegal blazeleaf production.”
A muscle worked in Kadra’s jaw. “Did what you see trouble you?”
Acid burned up her throat at the blurry memory of the boy’s smooth knifework.
And yet, that had been as much a performance as murder.
She couldn’t remember what he looked like, but she’d caught the resigned glance he’d given his father, and his silent acceptance of his siblings’ fear.
She’d seen the same loneliness in Kadra before they had become lovers.
His hard face was oddly closed when she raised her eyes.
“I don’t know if I was afraid of him or for him,” she confessed.
“He seemed so young, and it looked like he had little choice. But someone like that could turn monstrous, if the wrong cause got its claws in him.” She thought of Aelius’s defenders and the Inquisitors of the Elsarian Order.
“Do you think people deserve the chance to change?”
Something utterly bleak swam in the frozen depths of Kadra’s eyes. It was a long moment before he spoke. “They might not.”
Both dreams didn’t leave her mind throughout their descent from the Academiae’s citadel and into Edessa. Her Tetrarch was equally, strangely somber, broad shoulders tensed under some new strain. They’d just entered his Quarter when he exhaled heavily.
“Sarai—” He broke off at a sharp scream down the road.
Feet drummed against cobblestone coupled with the staccato snap of doors being flung open.
Dawn was still new to the horizon, bleary-eyed folk roused by the ruckus and emerging from their front doors with confusion.
Riding toward the source of the sound, she stilled at the pandemonium flooding the streets.
Throngs jostled each other, running from an unknown evil. Others vomited onto the road, trembling fingers pressed to their temples.
“Magus Supreme Kadra!” one wailed upon spotting him. “The plague! It’s here!”
She went cold, urging her mare into a gallop.
Frightened faces blurred; the screaming rose in volume as they neared the marketplace in which she had adjudicated with Kadra only yesterday afternoon.
Pale-faced and trembling, his vigiles had formed a wall around it, but there was no hiding what lay within.
Corpses. Limbs splayed, eyes crusted with whitesleep, mouths agape in variations of agony.
Seated, clustered, as though awaiting Kadra’s judgment, they were frozen dolls draped in crimson.
And on every face, the same circular wax seal–like welts, and a seething wave of glistening creatures, gnawing endlessly into exposed flesh.
Time seemed to ebb slowly as the small lake of blood traversing through snow dripped onto the road, patterned with equally scarlet boil beetles. Every sound deepened, heightened.
A rough rustle of fabric as she and Kadra dismounted. Dull shrieks echoing upon their entry into the marketplace. Her hoarse exhale fogging out when his irises seemed to grow impossibly wider, turning his piercing eyes into something unrecognizable, other.
What do you see? Fear sank fangs into her bones, pulling her from the stupor. She stepped in front of him to break his line of sight and pretended not to notice his startled blink.
Bile butted the back of her throat when a larva squirmed out of a man’s ear and fell into a clump of snow. Barely a day ago, she’d told the marketgoers here not to worry. She’d assured that godsdamned agromagus that all would be well. Now, here they were, overrun with beetles. How?
She dimly heard Gaius report that he had confirmed with the magi on the city walls that no one had seen a beetle swarm approach. That left only one other explanation: infectees, like Lucanus, had brought them into the city.
“We’ve a few survivors, but they’re badly infected.” He indicated a cluster at the back of the marketplace that she hadn’t noticed amid the horror of the corpses. “They seem to have taken a few whitesleep rubs too many. Couldn’t get much sense out of them.”
Kadra’s eerily blank gaze drifted over to consider the group.
“I’ll go to them,” she forced out before he spoke. If anyone noticed what she and Gaius already had, then the land would implode.
“There are beetles everywhere.” Gaius’s voice quaked. “Best to wait for a healer, or this could take you too.”
“I’ll be careful. They could die before a healer arrives, and we’ll have no answers then.” She worriedly sought Kadra’s eyes and loosed a breath upon finding them back to their knife-sharp intensity.
A crease formed in his brow when she strode past him to the infected survivors.
She felt the weight of his stare between her shoulder blades and wondered if she should have admitted that she knew of what kept distracting him or asked why he’d said nothing for eight months.
But right now, it was a crisis too many.
Ignoring the blood-flecked ground and its miasma of rot, she knelt beside the snow-covered figures, rocking back and forth in the throes of visible agony.
“What happened here?” she whispered.
Only one woman turned to her. Sarai stilled, recognizing the plaintiff from the plague case.
Welts patterned Junia’s face, her eyes crusted with remnants of whitesleep powder.
“Our hourglass runs low. A reckoning has followed in your wake.” Her pupils engorged to swallow her irises. “The sky laughs at us all.”
Sarai’s hands quivered even worse at the familiar words. Dream-Aelius, the horreum’s dying Guildswoman, and now Junia all saying the same thing. “What sort of reckoning?”
“Alllllll the lightning. And so many eyes.” Vessels burst in Junia’s own scleras.
“Gaius, she needs a healer!” Sarai yelled.
Across the marketplace, he spread his hands with a helpless look at the gray-cloaked group retching into the snow and looking in need of medical aid themselves.
“It was just a bit of whitesleep,” Junia whispered in a burst of clarity. “Why did it come to this?” She dissolved into a fit of laughter.
Numb, Sarai tottered upright. Blue robes billowed at the corner of her eye, and her teeth clenched at the Cleric elbowing his way toward the tableau while proselytizing to an ever-growing audience about the need for an exorcism of a certain servant of Ruin.