20 Reckoning #2
“Magus Supreme Kadra, it’s an honor to serve you.” The curtain to their tent parted. Cassandane’s healer, Destus, dashed inside. His jaw dropped. “I can… leave,” he finally squeaked.
“It’s alright.” She squeezed Kadra’s hands reassuringly. He released her with palpable reluctance and sat down so that Destus could work, grave eyes watching her all the while.
“Whereabouts is the damage?” the healer looked exhausted.
“My spine.”
Destus cast a dubious glance at Kadra’s ramrod straight posture that quickly turned aghast upon seeing the wound. Cutting away the torn fabric of Kadra’s robes from where they had fused to his back, he placed both hands there and closed his eyes.
It had to burn. She was painfully familiar with a healer’s white-hot magic repairing her spine and setting vertebrae back together like salt blocks. But other than deepening his exhales and a furrow creasing his brow, Kadra showed no signs of that agony.
The pain tolerance of a mountain.
Conscious that Destus could still hear them as he worked, she filled Kadra in on what she had seen in the farmer’s memory and during the strike he had made her watch.
“I didn’t think two people could cause this much harm,” she said with a shake of her head. “Dalvia doesn’t even seem to want to.”
“If matters come to a head, it’s because they were boiling for a long time, and no one noticed,” Kadra said. “I spent years focused on Aelius and his scuta. I should have done more for the north.”
Were you avoiding your brother? “You did everything you could.” She recalled their sleepless nights arguing with Guilds over amendments to the Distribution Act and passing mandates that northern mines and quarries could only be owned by collectives where at least fifty percent were northerners.
Why did you work so hard? The question Noceo had asked returned. Why become a Tetrarch at all? Her gaze traveled his tired face. Stubble laced his jaw, the stern line of his mouth drawn tight. There’s so much I don’t know.
Destus suddenly paused in his ministrations, then stepped back from Kadra’s back with a bewildered expression. “Magus Supreme,” he began carefully, “have you noticed any irregularities in your spine prior to this injury?”
Nothing moved in Kadra’s depthless eyes, but she felt the air around them grow colder. “Are there any?” he asked pleasantly.
Deflection. A chasm opened at her feet even as she registered the words as true. How many times had he done this? How much had she shrugged off believing that he would expand on his answers at some point?
“I’m seeing signs of several fractures. Whoever your healer was then doesn’t seem to have mended them properly. Some of your nerves are pinched between vertebrae.” Perplexed, Destus shook his head. “You haven’t noticed?”
“It hasn’t interfered with my work,” Kadra said easily.
Avoidance. But there was something harder beneath his insouciance.
Looking like he wanted to add something, Destus shook his head instead and insisted upon correcting the injuries. “It’s a discredit to the profession leaving a spine in this state,” he argued when Kadra made to speak. “And you saved so many today.”
An hour passed with Destus, Kadra’s features growing increasingly strained, both lost to the intricacies of healing.
Stretching her legs outside the tent, she walked around the makeshift hospital spread out on the grounds of the Grand Elsarian Temple.
Healers ran from tent to tent, pale and wide-eyed.
Clerics somberly administered to the dying.
People sat on the grass sobbing into each other’s arms. The wind ferried blood and death in silent warning to throngs of relatives seeking entry to reunite with their loved ones.
Then, there were the screams.
She sped over to a long cluster of tents after hearing the first. A trio of gray-cloaked healers stood outside, consoling a fourth sobbing one. They straightened at her arrival just as another chorus of caterwauling arose from the tents.
“The people in there, are they…” The question died on her tongue, because of course they were.
“All those eyes!” a woman’s voice screamed from within the tents. “A reckoning comes for Edessa. The sky itself will laugh!”
“Elsar have mercy!” Another shrieked. “No, no! Go away! Please!”
The healers wordlessly parted the tent flaps.
Dread gripped Sarai when she peered in. Two rows of pallets stretched ahead in each tent, the occupants tied onto it with everything the healers had been able to find, including strips of their own tunics.
The madness-struck raved, strained at their bonds, veins jumping in their necks as they screamed of eyes and reckonings.
She spotted a few too-still faces, lips parted in a scream, skin already taking on the pallor of death.
“I think their bodies can’t take it,” the healer who had been crying whispered. “Their hearts and brains are practically pulp afterward. It’s like they were frightened to death.”
Sarai pressed her fingers to her temples, trying not to give in to the pressure building behind her eyes. Nearly a month away from Edessa and she’d been too late. She had nothing in the way of aid for these people. No culprit. No cure.
What was it all for?
She could only thank the healers and ask them to continue their watch. Leaving, she merged into the dazed crowd. Heads turned at her approach, questions struck her like arrows, asking why this had happened.
She fought a wave of anger. She had her own questions too. On why they’d fallen for petty, manufactured squabbles and made her life a hell the past several months. But propriety dictated that she didn’t sling arrows back when people were grieving. Propriety was a shackle at times.
“What should I have done?” she finally asked. “Should I have told you all to kneel to Noceo? Should I have abdicated as Petitor? What could I have done to stop him?”
“Nothing,” Anek’s voice announced crossly.
“Get out of my way. I have more to contribute than ill-placed blame.” They elbowed to the front of the crowd and took Sarai by the arm, dragging her back toward Destus’s tent, visibly trying to gather their words.
“We may all need to go into hiding for a bit,” they finally said flatly.
“I just spotted a contingent of Clerics amassing at the back of the Elsarian Temple with Verentia issuing orders. She seemed surprised at Noceo’s appearance, but I wouldn’t put it past her to ally with him. ”
A sustained scream built in Sarai’s head, and she almost wished she could shriek to the wind as the madness-struck were doing. “Where do we go?”
“Fuck. I don’t know.” There was no anger in their response. Only a deep, wrung-out hopelessness. “I didn’t think we’d see another day like the Unraveling for decades.”
“I don’t know if the Unraveling ever stopped.” Sarai choked down her anger upon sighting a group in white and silver.
Anek’s gaze lingered on Aelius’s acolytes and dismissed them. “Noceo’s our threat. I studied Coercers briefly at the Academiae, and they’re extremely rare. His level of power is unheard of. There isn’t a recorded Coercer in history that’s been more than an Eighth-Tier, and he was easily a Twelfth.”
“Not naturally, he isn’t. He’s using something.” She filled Anek in on the formula he had spoken of and thought back to Noceo’s quivering fingertips when he had held her hostage earlier. “He pushed himself to his limit to pull this off.”
“Which means he could never have made good on his threat to raze Edessa. For once, Harion got it right. Destroying the Aequitas was a ploy. It’ll keep everyone here cowering so they don’t challenge the coup when he isn’t half as powerful as what your Magus Supreme pulled today.”
“Put that way, it sounds hopeful.”
“And he’s using stimulants,” Anek marveled.
“Dangerous idea those. They force a body’s Thresholds open to draw upon unlimited quantities of power, but risk draining the user’s lifeforce too.
” A frown edged their lips. “He wants this badly. And we have Dalvia to contend with too. A Bridger and a True Illusionist. Gods, what a combination. We’ll have to be careful that she doesn’t turn her face into one of ours. ”
Sarai couldn’t fathom regrouping or wrap her mind around the magnitude of the disaster they faced. The Tetrarchy had just been overthrown. The number of madness-struck might move past the thousands to tens of thousands.
“The entire country’s acting possessed.” She explained the eerie whitesleep murders that had swept the locales there and the odd dreams she’d been having.
“I keep wondering if Verentia’s calls for me to have an exorcism have some truth to it.
” She recalled Noceo being strangely concerned for her over that weeks ago and cursed. “I don’t understand anything.”
“Magic, life, gods, all incomprehensible things. Do you know that our truth-telling abilities originated in the land of Ilohe?” Anek wove through the crowd, ignoring the questions thrown at them.
“Over there, they don’t even have to Probe.
Apparently, the magi only need to ask and their voices force the questionee to spill everything in great detail.
They’re called Hypnotics. Sound familiar?
” At Sarai’s start, they nodded. “We aren’t that dissimilar from Noceo. He should be very afraid of it.”
They were almost back at Cassandane’s tent. She halted by the crossed cloth flaps guarding the entrance. “Do you think we can defeat him?”
“Someone will.” Anek sounded certain of it. “If Edessa disliked you, think about how badly they must dislike him.” They left with a wink before she could so much as stammer a response.
Mouth hanging open, she managed an exhausted laugh. I suppose there’s that.
The flaps behind her parted. “The Magus Supreme is fully healed,” Destus announced proudly, looking inches from fainting.
Relief spread in her chest. “Thank you. Especially for correcting his older injuries. That must have been painstaking work.”