16 Devastation #2
A wintry gust wound around the ground, limiting the audibility of Noceo’s words. Yet, they struck her like a knife. “Welcome to Clan Kader’s manor, Death-Summoner.” Fear curled fingers around her chest when he turned toward the portal. “Shall we?”
She coerced air into her lungs and stepped forward. A gleam lit Noceo’s calculating eyes when she hesitated at the edge of the Bridge. “It’s perfectly safe. I won’t ask Dalvia to close it on you. There are better ways to kill you than a bisection via portal.”
She grit her teeth and returned his smile. “Attempt anything you’d like. Death and I are old friends. The consequences will be more yours than mine.” Turning from the hint of fear that crawled over his face, she crossed the Bridge. The air warped around them.
And they were gone.
A ferocious mountain wind whipped up the ankles of Sarai’s trousers. Intricate iron and steel gates yawned open ahead, the bars parting like jaws. And there stood Clan Kader’s compound, richly lit in the approaching twilight.
Unlike the south’s penchant for marble, the north favored brick. Clan Kader, it seemed, favored both. A central brick-and-marble domus glowered down at them, crowned with elaborate domed cupolas. Fire had gutted a large swath of the house but the facade still stood.
Twelve pilasters framed the wide entryway, boasting carved approximations of the Elsar, the minor pantheon of the Naaduir, and monarchs past on their capitals and entablatures.
More windows than she had fingers and toes shone in the moonlight reflecting off the snow, some long-blackened by soot.
To the left rose a tower that looked eerily like Kadra’s abode.
No, she realized with shock, a replica of it.
Noceo followed her gaze and smiled. “What do you think of the addition?” He traipsed past the front gate, the leisurely walk of a nobleman unlike his brother’s elegant prowl.
“Unoriginal.”
“Well, we couldn’t let Drenevan have all the fun.
” Noceo indicated the land past the domus.
The Clan seemed to have somehow flattened a portion of the broad mountaintop, roads branching like capillaries from the main artery they walked on to direct wagons to warehouses in the distance.
“Acres of blazeleaf fields there, so I really wouldn’t recommend running.
These mountains are ours. Show her around, Dalvia. ” He sauntered off.
A mass of brilliant snow twitched to Sarai’s left. Gods, I didn’t even see her there.
“Please follow me,” Dalvia addressed her feet before slowly, almost hopefully, raising her head. One look at the tightly leashed anger in Sarai’s eyes, and she dropped it back down with a blank smile.
Oh. Sarai stilled at the bittersweet familiarity of that motion. How many times had she offered the same smile during the past months of verbal abuse during trials, during her years in Arsamea? Why did Dalvia sport the same look like a second skin?
There was a lifelessness to her that seemed to have burrowed bone-deep a long time ago.
Sarai recalled her silent tears in the farmer’s memory at the wanton destruction in Komis.
And the Am Semni Institute saw to boil beetle plague victims that still had some hope of survival. Those aren’t the actions of a killer.
Wondering how Dalvia had ended up tethered to her circumstances, Sarai trailed her into the manor’s wood-paneled interior, past a dizzying series of once-opulently furnished rooms. Now, they all wore the same patina of ash, mold sprawling across the ceiling.
Rotting decadence. Noceo seemed to have left the place as a mausoleum.
But does he hate it, to let it fall so into despair?
Dalvia silently took her around the mansion. Dead staircases and hallways passed in succession until they reached the base of Noceo’s replica of Aoran Tower.
The climb to his study was a long one. Kadra left the upper echelons of his tower to Cato and a vast library of ancient tomes and legal jurisprudence. Noceo apparently insisted on residing at the very top. Her feet ached by the time she was deposited outside an oaken door.
He lounged against it in a gray-green uniform that appeared to be Clan garb, looking strangely paler than she’d seen earlier. He’d removed the veil shielding his face too.
Noceo bu Kader. He didn’t look as much like Kadra as she had initially thought.
His gray eyes looked silver without the white veil to offset them.
His skin held the waxy pallor of someone who rarely saw the sun, which lent his features an almost ethereal fragility.
His was the sort of rosy-lipped face that bards spoke of when they described princes in foreign lands and titled gentry.
Only his serpentine eyes ruined that illusion.
They fixed on her with immense amusement.
“Please, come in.” He inclined his head to the chair across his desk. “I apologize for the threats, but you didn’t leave me much choice. The next time you notice an enemy make a slip of the tongue, Death-Summoner, do keep it to yourself.”
“I’ll be sure to,” she grit out.
Noceo gave her a reproving look. “We really needn’t be enemies.” He spread his hands wide, encouraging her to look around.
His high-ceilinged study held all the ornamentation she had expected in her first meeting with Kadra.
The furniture, from the oak desk to the cushioned chairs and the bookcases holding strange instruments and vials, was perfect in design and polish.
This wasn’t the same wealth she saw in the south—loud, desperate for attention.
Clan Kader had nothing to prove and only sought to swallow more.
Unlike Kadra’s desk and its daily mountains of petitions, Noceo’s sported several bound sheaves of parchment written in a precise, exacting hand.
Richly embroidered tapestries hung where blank spaces of wall would have shown, detailing the Clan’s family tree, and its heraldry—a silver shield with a chalice at the center and a safsher above it, the curved blade dripping blood into the cup.
Below it was the Clan’s motto in the ancient tongue, Violentia nervus potestas.
“Violence is the sinew of authority,” she translated.
“Drenevan always did take that seriously,” Noceo mused. His eyes brightened when she neared the instruments on his shelves. “I’m sure you’ve realized by now that we’re brothers.”
She felt every word like a dagger. Her mouth went drier than the Xārōmand Desert. Damn it, Kadra. But perhaps this was what had put that turbulence in his eyes when he’d left her in the north. This might have been the truth he had promised to give her. She didn’t want to hear it from Noceo’s lips.
“What do you want with me?” she asked, low and careful.
He seemed to digest that as if he wasn’t sure. “I don’t want to harm you. It’s a rare woman who wouldn’t turn on Drenevan after all the harm he’s done. He left you to die post-Fall, nearly got you killed at the Unraveling, persistently hid his past from you, and still gets to use you as he wishes.”
She waited for her magic to tell her he was lying. It didn’t. “Kadra died out of guilt.”
“Does it matter?” Noceo looked curious. “Death-Summoner. You could have asked for anything. It’s a shame you asked for him.
Do you know that a godly incursion on the mortal plane leaves a mark?
Summoning used to be forbidden by the Clerics for that reason.
It leaves the area where the Summoning occurred vulnerable to other gods. Apparently, they can be a ghastly lot.”
She sat across from him. “It wouldn’t have changed my decision.”
“It seems not,” he said ruefully. “But I have you both to thank for everything playing out as it has.” He steepled his fingers.
“Even before Drenevan’s destruction of our home, Clan Kader always operated from the shadows, believing we didn’t have the strength to challenge the Tetrarchy.
But you came along and got two Tetrarchs killed, practically all by yourself.
” His shrewd eyes gleamed. “I’d been working my way up the Order for years. Thank you for the impetus to act.”
A cold tingle began in her fingertips. “I saw you that day at the Stones Guild, didn’t I? Why the subterfuge?”
“I was intrigued,” he said with a sheepish smile that could have been charming had something bitter not glimmered in his eyes.
“What happens now?” she asked through gritted teeth. “Will you turn me into a puppet?”
“Drenevan’s the one who’s always been able to get people to do anything. He’s never needed magic. I have to Coerce people.” Noceo sighed. “You’ve seen the results. He’s Magus Supreme. I’m not. Which of us do you really think holds power?”
Odd. Her magic registered what he was saying as true, yet it was a soft, numb creature in comparison to the clear gongs of sound that normally rang in her chest. Perhaps Telmar was right, and Noceo’s power could be her equal and opposite. Yet, he had wiped the memory of their meetings before.
“Am I here for you to blackmail Kadra?”
“Oh.” He looked chagrined again. “No, he’s due to fall any day now in Edessa. I don’t need to dangle you over his head. No.” He stood, leaning over his desk to peer at her. “You’re here because I want you here.”
An invitation to a tower, and a man who wanted her there for reasons she couldn’t fathom. I’ve been here before. With Kadra.
She had a sinking feeling as to what Noceo was going to say but couldn’t halt the precipitating question. “Why?”
“Because we want the same thing,” he said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.
At her incredulous snort, he hummed thoughtfully.
“It is a difficult thing, Death-Summoner, to see things in others that they don’t in themselves.
Like the fact that love is not enough for you.
” He rounded his desk and perched atop it to stare down at her. “Like the fact that you crave power.”
The breath in her lungs suddenly burned. “Like hav?d I do.”