18 Rubble
She was running out of air.
Sarai stuck her nose through the scant gap between the chunk of the city walls crushing her legs and the right half of her torso.
She drew in a shaky breath, blood flooding her throat along with the precious air she drew in.
Her lungs couldn’t expand to full capacity. Don’t think about that. Don’t panic.
It could have been worse. Another slab of wall had wedged between the ground and the mass pressing on her. It kept most of the weight off, or this would have been a repeat of Sidran Tower. She could hold on. Someone will find me soon.
She had clung to that hope for the past ten hours, ignoring the vise of fear and stone suffocating her. The sky wheeled above, pitch-black. Still, she held fast. She had been in a corner of the market when everything went to shit. Rescue would take a while. Screaming would only waste precious air.
Noceo. Between Arsamea, Edessa, and now him, she had learned that being torn apart didn’t make one stronger. It warped her reflection of herself until she no longer understood it.
The worst part was that Noceo hadn’t been wrong.
She wanted power.
She wanted enough of it to set the corrupt, the hateful, and their acolytes ablaze. To force Noceo to his knees and make him scream as he had her. Her vengeance wouldn’t be for the north or south, but for the hapless creature he had proven her to be.
Then, there was Kadra. Her heart felt ravaged. She couldn’t think. Could only lie there as her body fulfilled the last of Noceo’s commands. Remembering everything.
Memory returned to her, slipping softly into place.
Stones Guildmaster Albanus. She almost smiled as his apoplectic figure bloomed in her head after her infamous destruction of his beloved six-thousand-aurei vase.
She’d glanced at the window throughout, noting the eavesdropping Guildspeople passing by in the hope that she wouldn’t give in to Albanus’s bribes. Then—
Sunlight. Noceo watching her outside.
“Try a different corner.”
“Interesting, it didn’t take.”
“You never saw me today. And you won’t notice me again unless I give you permission. I’ll see you soon, Death-Summoner.”
Noceo trailing behind her one evening at Sidran Tower to ask whether she remembered him. Noceo by the gates of Aoran Tower telling her she had surprised him at her Hearing, asking to be let in, for her to ruin Kadra with him.
He’d been careful not to say much on each occasion, evidently suspecting that she had enough resistance to his magic to remember him as with their longer conversation at the Stones Guild. He hadn’t been ready to reveal himself then.
You’ve outdone yourself with this formula, Dalvia, she recalled his amusement in the farmer’s memory. That fucking Bridger wasn’t without blame. She had armored him.
A burn in her lungs warned her that air was growing thin.
Shifting closer to the crevice she was breathing through, she hissed as her broken legs screamed at the motion.
Moving by fractions of inches, she tilted her head for better access to the opening when a boot passed over it.
Voices cursed a blue streak above, their southern accents more pronounced with fury.
Kadra’s vigiles. She closed her eyes upon the burn of tears, relief breaking panic’s hold.
Thank Fortune, Noceo didn’t get to them.
“Over here! Underneath!” she rasped loudly, directing them forward, step by laborious step.
A moment later, exclamations filled the air. The rubble over her vibrated and rose to reveal her stalwart vigiles. She could have cried, but blood rushed to her broken legs, swift as agony.
She clenched her jaw with a curse. “Wrath and Ruin. No, it’s alright,” she insisted as they debated on prying her loose. “Help with the rescue efforts. A healer will find me.”
A group of them stopped by as she said it. They assessed her grimly. “Just the legs?”
“And right ribs,” she wheezed.
“Then you’ve fared better than most.” Soot streaked their skin and their eyes glowed with the reflection of a fire still raging some yards away. “Stay here, we’ll assess the rest of this area and return.”
“Thank you.” She drew a deep breath, trying not to cry once the healers and vigiles left to assist other victims. Trapped in the dark, everything had seemed so inconsequential—her fears that Kadra had lied to her, her foolish insecurities. She had just wanted to get home and sink into his arms.
Smoke stung her eyes. She let them stream, blaming the acrid air when a weary healer came by.
“It was like this during the last strike too,” the gray-cloaked woman said as she gripped Sarai’s twisted left leg and righted it.
Power sped into her palms, mending bone, knotting muscle and skin back together faster than Sarai ever could.
“Smoke and screams. You got a pair of lungs on you. Thank you for the warning.”
“How many dead?”
“Over a hundred. Could have been worse. Your eyes seem well. Still got your ears?”
“They’re ringing,” Sarai admitted.
“I’ll take a look. The burns and lacerations will have to wait.
” She indicated the gashes along Sarai’s torso from where rubble had cut in.
“Too many who need help.” She started on Sarai’s left leg, pulling strength from some deep reservoir that only those who sought to halt Death’s coming possessed.
“Thank you, truly.”
The healer nodded brusquely, confirming that all was well with her ears and fixing up her right lung and cracked ribs. “The legs will be shaky for a bit until your rebuilt muscle acclimates to use.” She paused a moment. “Don’t mean to pry, but that’s what you look like?”
Sitting up, Sarai sighed. She’d run out of magic while trapped under the rubble, and her scarring was blatantly visible. “For better or worse,” she admitted.
“Here, all we have is worse.” The healer patted her arm before racing toward a shrill scream.
Winded, Sarai rested her head in her hands and took a deep breath.
The damage was so much worse than she had imagined for the past hours.
Sections of Komis’s city walls had struck the marketplace like spears, sparing no one in their path.
The rubble hid the worst of the bodies, but here and there were patches of peeling flesh, a hand, something that may have been a head.
Fire reigned over the market’s entrance where the strike had come in.
The blisters on her burned palms popped when she clenched them at the memory of Noceo’s amused smile. “Fuck!” she screamed, the roar of wind and fire stealing the word as though she’d never spoken. She may as well never have. She had no power.
Forcing herself to stand, she wobbled to the closest support—part of the tavern that the Wines Guildsmen had delivered to.
The rest of it had exploded, the amphorae that the tavernkeeper had paid for bleeding through the floorboards.
The sight snapped something in her—the same dangerous muscle she had used the day she’d killed Aelius.
Today, she had no such available target.
Yet. She raised her eyes to the manor in the Drust Mountains.
Then, returning to the rubble, she shifted smaller stones, uncaring of the scrape of rock over her blistered palms. A few northern vigiles approached, and she stiffened, preparing to eviscerate them if she so much as heard a word about what a “woman’s job” was.
But disaster forced even idiocy to one side.
Together, they forced aside the debris, dragging corpses and people alike to the straw mats set outside the market so they could be counted, mourned, or joyfully reunited.
The latter occurred far less often than she hoped.
When morning came, the market had been fully excavated, the city wall remnants rolled outside Komis’s borders. Those who still had some chance at life were piled onto wagons and sent to the Am Semni Institute despite Sarai’s protests that they might fare better with a healer’s attention.
“Clanlady Dalvia has a boatload of healers up there,” a northern vigile informed her sternly. “The hospital also treats plague victims, but you won’t find people here being choosy.”
She’d had no choice but to watch the injured being taken away. They won’t believe me. Komis evidently placed great faith in Dalvia’s talents. Sarai simply couldn’t reconcile that charity with the woebegone woman she had seen act as an accomplice to Noceo’s Coercion. Is this her idea of atonement?
“Every vendor is accounted for.” Another man sliced a line through the last name on his roll of parchment. “Gods, the Guilds should die for this.” He looked Sarai’s way as he said it.
For once, it wasn’t them. “The Guilds will pay for what crimes they’ve committed.”
“They never do,” a woman bitterly scoffed, kneeling by one of the wounded. “The south and the Tetrarchy care nothing for us, why would they vindicate us now?”
Others took up the refrain, spitting questions at her like debris. She let them pelt her and bounce off, knowing their ravaged faces and soot-smudged eyes gleamed with the desperation to hurt. Beside her, Kadra’s vigiles tensed in preparation for a fight.
I’m so fucking tired. Why couldn’t they see it? Why didn’t they even try to look beyond the sphere of their existence to understand the greater forces puppeteering them toward ugliness?
“By the Elsar and Naaduir, I’m not your enemy!” she finally broke in.
“She isn’t.” An ash-covered Méherre waded into the fray, glowering at those fencing Sarai. “The few seconds of warning you gave us made a difference.”
Drawing Sarai aside, she surveyed her wounds with a tight exclamation. “Fucking Noceo. Is anything else broken? Are you ready to leave? I have firm instructions to bring you back to Edessa.”
“Please.”
“There are only a few designated spots within Edessa where Bridgers can bring people in, but Cassandane mentioned that they’d be at the Aequitas, so I’ll take you there.
” Méherre pricked her finger and pressed the blood to the same curving rune Sarai had seen Dalvia use in the farmer’s memory.
The Bridger closed her eyes, brow creasing in concentration.
Power exploded to life by the still-burning entrance to the market, raising the hair on the back of her neck.
The air glistened like a heat mirage before splitting to reveal the base of a familiar, unnecessarily large statue.
Inhaling deeply, she and Kadra’s vigiles stepped through the portal. The world spun in a blur of color and wind for all of a second. Then, she was on the other side, the north’s chill replaced with the milder bite of an Edessan winter. And a clanging in her ears.
Pressing her hands over them, Sarai gaped at the people racing toward the Aequitas over the sunstruck field.
Kadra, Cassandane, and Harion’s vigiles had visibly abandoned all hope of orderly entrance and shoved people through the main doors.
The emergency bells Cassandane had set up across the city jangled cacophonously.
“What’s happened?” she yelled to a passerby.
“The Elsarian Order’s staging a coup!”
Oh shit.