Chapter Six
CHAPTER SIX
The man who’d conversed with the beautiful voice brushed a lock of hair from her face, and sprang back with a scream.
She could guess at how she looked. A bubble of blood burst from her mouth. Cold settled on her broken fingers, moving inward as her life leeched away. The red-eyed god robed in midnight would come soon, a scale in one hand to weigh a soul’s deeds. The few who had managed to Summon Lord Death had written of a sight immeasurable in words, and a voice icier than winter. She wondered if he would be kind. If he’d understand that she had tried so hard—
“Tetrarch Kadra requests your presence.”
Sarai fell out of slumber, slamming her head into the headboard. Disoriented, she scrabbled at the bedposts for purchase, before hitting the ground.
“Is everything alright?” the voice outside inquired. Cato. The coachman. Or Kadra’s manservant. Whatever he was.
“One moment!” Getting nihumb and zosta active, she waited for her scars to disappear before opening the door.
Sarai forced a smile. “Good”—she glanced at the pitch-black sky outside her window—“evening, Cato?” How long had she slept?
Tray in hand, he inclined his head. “Congratulations on your first day as a Petitor. I thought you might prefer to take breakfast in your room.”
She shot another glance at the window. “What time is it? ”
“A little past two.”
“In the morning?”
“Tetrarch Kadra prefers to work while it’s dark,” Cato answered matter-of-factly. “Daylight affords too many opportunities for assassination.”
“I imagine burning people alive probably doesn’t help that.”
“But then who would eradicate the Enniuses of this world?”
“It isn’t a binary choice.” The Tetrarchy made the law. If Kadra disliked it so much, it was well within his power to change it.
Cato’s smile didn’t waver. “Of course.” Taking the robes Kadra had lent her—which stank of Ennius’s pyre—he gave her a new set and a bathrobe. “The bath is to the left of the tablinum . Tetrarch Kadra is outside when you’re ready.”
Once he left, Sarai sank onto the bed, head in her hands. She’d dreamt of the Fall for years, but there’d been something more vivid about these memories, as though Sidran Tower’s proximity had begun returning them to her. Eyes closed, she tried to recall the face of the second man that night and grimaced at the blurry outline her head yielded. I need to see that case record. Perhaps it had his name. Depending on Kadra’s idea of a workday, she might even be able to visit the Hall of Records today.
A long breath whistled through her teeth. By Fortune, I’m so close . Brimming with determination, she scarfed down her breakfast: a roast chicken leg, sizzling in herbs and butter, accompanied with root vegetables and a cup of lemon-honey brew. A far cry from the stale bread she’d filched from Cretus. Wrapping herself in the bathrobe—trying to ignore its similarity to the one Kadra had worn earlier—she crept downstairs and out of his blessedly empty study.
Her jaw dropped when she entered the bath. Gold-speckled tiles encased a pit above which a metal pipe stuck out of the wall, studded with runes for scouring and heat. Reluctantly impressed, she scrubbed herself under a warm jet of water, and donned her robes, tracing the gilded vines twining around the cuffs and branching up to the shoulders .
They could be her attacker’s robes.
Nothing felt real—the job, the comfort, the Hall of Records containing her answers only some tens of miles away. Everything she’d yearned for, and it felt unnatural. Trepidation weighed her steps toward Kadra, and not just because of the Fall. In Arsamea, she’d been guarded, unwilling to show much of herself to anyone who could use it against her. But she’d faltered three times now, as though one look from those penetrating eyes made every bitter word she’d trapped behind her teeth strain to break free.
Approaching the front door, she took a steadying breath. He’s just a man. She gripped the handle and prepared to push.
“I didn’t think you’d be smiling with a Petitor shackled to you.” Cato’s voice was muffled. Her fingers faltered. She pressed herself against the door to hear better.
“The shackle runs both ways,” came Kadra’s mellifluous voice.
“What I and everyone else at the Aequitas saw begs to differ.” The mild-mannered coachman had shed his skin. Whoever Cato really was, he spoke to Kadra as an equal. “She disobeyed you. People are saying that you only accepted her as your Petitor to make her pay for it. And those aren’t even the more unsavory theories.”
Please don’t tell me they think—
“A few fools think you’re interested in her.” Cato confirmed her fears.
“Interesting.” Kadra sounded unperturbed.
“Drenevan, why is she here? Weren’t you going to run her off before the Robing?”
I was right . But then why hadn’t he gone through with it? Hells, he could have easily let her perish in the storm.
Kadra seemed to be mulling over his answer. Moments passed before he spoke. “I changed my mind.”
What?
“Why the hells did you do that?” Cato’s reply echoed her bewilderment.
“She’s dangerous.” Her pulse surged at the dark menace in his response .
“ Certo , to us!” Frustration edged Cato’s voice.
“She’ll be useful.”
“She despises you,” Cato said firmly. “You have to admit that your nature won’t convince anyone to choose you.”
“If not, we’ll leave her to the wolves. Her decisions are her own.”
The hairs at the nape of her neck stood on end. Cisuré’s fears were well founded. Whatever these men had planned for her wasn’t anything as benign as doing her job. She retreated inside Kadra’s tablinum, wondering if it was too late to flee.
She waited for the front door to open before exiting, pretending she’d been about to leave. She forced a placid smile at Cato as she passed.
Who is he? Either Kadra allowed his coachman to berate him, or the rumors of him never having taken a lover weren’t true. She grimaced. Wisdom and Wrath, Cato’s over twice his age .
Icy wind ribboned around her when she stepped outside. The two moons painted swaths of cloud in blue and iron gray, highlighting Kadra’s profile as he saddled a horse. Her horse. Caelum looked quite pleased to be nibbling on Kadra’s grass as he made short work of securing the black-and-gold saddle.
“Good morning.” Kadra glanced over his shoulder, dark hair brushing his collar.
Her breath stuttered. “Good morning.” She kept her tone curt. Politesse was all he’d get from her. “ Tibi gratias ago for bringing Caelum. And for the saddle.”
Black eyes roved over her before he extended a hand. Her heart pounded as she realized he was offering to help her into the saddle.
“I can manage.” She quickly put some distance between herself and that callused palm.
Settling onto the new saddle, her eyes widened at the sleek leather stretched over a sturdy frame, a far cry from the Arsamean contraption that had rubbed her tailbone raw on the journey to Edessa.
“I take it you like it.” Kadra mounted his horse with a faint smile, and she suddenly wished she could burn him and the saddle .
She’ll be useful , he’d said, as though she were a knife he planned on wielding. Fishing out her last aureus from her coin pouch, she tossed it at his back. He caught it without looking and turned to her with a raised eyebrow.
“Like I said,” she said with her most insincere smile, “I don’t like being in debt.”
A glint in his eyes before he pocketed the aureus. “As you wish.”
There goes my last coin. Telling herself it was for the best, she followed him out of Aoran Tower and watched as the gate and the tower’s front door vanished.
So these were his infamous wards. She patted the air and came up against an impenetrable, invisible wall. That’s a complex bit of illusion magic. Nihumb provided a blanket concealment of her scars but didn’t prevent anyone from feeling them. Kadra’s wards blocked even touch. She reached for her key, and the gates and Aoran Tower’s door reappeared when she gripped it. How powerful is he?
She eyed him warily as they followed the cobblestone path. “Are you an illusion magus?”
He didn’t seem to mind the question. “No.”
“But Cato is,” she guessed. “He isn’t your coachman.” She waited for him to lie, but Kadra pulled in a satisfied breath as if he were pleased that she’d seen through the act.
“He was married to this quarter’s previous Tetrarch. He prefers to keep it a secret that he lives here and,” a wry note entered his voice, “he’s a good cook.”
Truth . So Cato was the real talent here. Kadra was only powerful in title. Ha!
Kadra’s lips twitched like he’d read her mind. “Cato forms the wards, but I sustain them.”
Her smirk vanished. “Magic pooling?”
Only extraordinarily powerful magi could siphon off some of their power for another magus to use. Even then, the subsequent drain was said to feel like being hit by several sacks of grain .
“Naturally.” Kadra raised a hand, sleeve falling back to reveal an obsidian armilla with every rune alight. Her skin crawled. She recognized yaris for fire and a few other runes for lightning formation and manipulation, but the rest were a terrifying mystery.
Wrath and Ruin. Just how powerful is he to sustain those wards every single day without keeling over? Lips pressing shut, she followed him to the Aoran Tower Gate. Every brush of his gaze sent shivers down her limbs. Her attacker, a Tetrarch . And there wasn’t a hav?d thing she could do about it.
Steel scraped against stone, punctuating her bitterness, as the Gate drew open. The bleary-eyed vigiles stationed there bowed low to him and eyed her with disapproval.
“Morning, Tetrarch Kadra. Will she be accompanying you?”
“At all times.”
Her head snapped to him. Biting her tongue, she waited until they were out of earshot before turning to him.
He cocked an eyebrow. “Is there a problem?”
There hav?d well is! How was she to search his home or visit the Hall of Records? “I may be from the north, Tetrarch Kadra, but I doubt that Petitors here are normally glued at the hip to their Tetrarchs.”
He dropped his voice to a conspiratorial rumble. “Perhaps that’s why the previous ones are largely dead.”
Her pulse jumped to the speed of lightning. He’s already given himself an alibi. If she died, he merely had to point out that he’d accompanied her on the job and done everything in his power to help her. Any suspicion directed at him would evaporate before her corpse was cold.
“I see,” she whispered. “Because their deaths were a matter of oversight, and you would undoubtedly be innocent if I died.”
A slow smile spread across Kadra’s face. He leaned across the scant distance between their mounts, his lips to her ear.
“Naturally.” The word brushed her cheek. “Because if I wanted to kill you, Sarai of Arsamea, you’d already be dead. ”
Truth. Air stuck in her throat when he drew away, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from yelling that he’d failed four years ago. Without a backward glance, Kadra spurred his horse to a gallop. And as Sarai followed, she could only wonder what torture he had in mind for her this time that was worse than death.
An hour later, Sarai reluctantly concluded that Kadra’s Quarter wasn’t the cesspool of violence that she’d expected. She’d taken brief stock of it the night before the Robing, but they ventured deeper, where raucous whoops sounded from bazaars in full swing, their entrances draped in jeweled fabrics and signs dictating that mounts, pets, and, occasionally, children, weren’t allowed entrance. Laughing women clung to inebriated men, their artfully lined eyes hard.
Most bowed as Kadra passed, eyes averted in respect—or fear? Others waved, some drunkenly raising a bottle, all to which he inclined his head. The people love him , Harion had said. The Elsar only knew why.
Clouds blanketed the capital, Praefa and Silun all but obscured. She shot the sky a glower at the memory of her dash for safety with Kadra scarcely over a night ago.
“We won’t see stormfall for a few days yet,” his voice broke in.
She jumped. By Ruin, how did the wretched man know exactly what she was thinking? “I’ll be prepared this time.”
“Garden follies aren’t so easily found in Edessa,” he said blandly, and she, once again, debated the merits of strangling him. “The storms tend to arrive at night.”
“Sounds like quite the wrench in your regimen.”
“Mine?”
“Working from two in the morning to noon,” she said coolly. “Most people fear the dark for what it hides. It’s a rare man who avoids daylight.”
A glimmer of laughter in his eyes. “It’s easier to see my enemies at night. As you said, it’s a rare person who skulks in the dark. ”
Damn him . He had an uncanny ability to turn words on themselves, to invert and recenter meaning. As befitting a politician. Unable to think of a retort, she lapsed into sullen silence.
The domii and storefronts on either side grew smaller the farther they got from the Academiae, shifting from opulent marble to cement. A wall began on one side of the road, sloping up to end in a parted gate. Moonlight glinted off the stately buildings beyond, mercifully not liveried in Kadra’s colors, unlike the vigiles dashing across the grounds, eyes heavy with fatigue. At the center of it all rose an oblong structure forming a three-sided square: the vigile compound, a central hub in every Tetrarch’s Quarter to which their vigiles reported. The soldiers oversaw prisons, manned patrols, and coordinated disaster efforts during stormfall. They also didn’t like her much, if their scowls were any indication.
Dismounting, Kadra tilted his head toward a smattering of smaller structures across the grounds. She wrinkled her nose at a pungent odor that worsened as they neared a domed building. Acrid, it sat somewhere between a rotting animal and a spoiled batch of Cretus’s wine.
“What in all the Elsar’s names is that stench?” she finally spluttered.
“The morgue.” Kadra swept past her, unaffected. The door scraped open, unleashing a blast of putrid air. Sarai clapped a hand to her mouth as her breakfast rose to her throat.
“Tetrarch Kadra, why are we at a morgue?”
“For Jovian of Edessa.”
She tried not to gag. “What about him?”
“Four months ago, he was found dead in his study, pinned under several bookcases.”
“What piques your interest after all this time?”
Her emphasis prompted a dark smile. “Jovian was one of last year’s Petitors.”
She halted. “What?”
“The very last to kill himself.” A sconce backlit his face in washes of umber. “Pulverized so badly, his own brother barely recognized him. ”
He could have been discussing the weather for all the emotion he showed. Trepidation wrapped bony fingers around her ribs. Why was he starting off her first day by showing her a Petitor’s corpse? Is this a threat?
With great effort, she kept her voice from shaking. “If he killed himself, then why are we here?”
Kadra didn’t elaborate, striding past several corpses perched atop medical tables. Lugens pored over the disarrayed maps of the bodies, trying to intuit the cause of their demise. On the fringes of the room, young healers-in-training carefully cut into organs, rinsing their hands to make notes on their structures. Quashing the ache of her younger self’s dreams, she followed Kadra.
A hard-nosed woman with salt-and-pepper hair rose at his approach.
“Tetrarch Kadra.” She bowed low. “Whom did you come to see today?”
“Jovian.”
Surprise flickered across her face. “Of course.” She turned frosty eyes on Sarai. “Lugen Geena.”
“A pleasure to—” Sarai blinked when Geena walked past her.
Well, then . She could almost hear Harion snickering that he’d told her so. Irritated, she followed Geena and Kadra down a flight of stairs at the back.
The bustle and clatter of Lugens and metal implements faded, replaced by the quiet of death. A chill hung in the air, ice sealing the cracks in the stonework. The stairs culminated in a short hallway leading to a snow-crusted door, which Geena unlocked.
“He was placed on ice as requested,” she said. “The body is exactly as we received him, which is to say, there isn’t much.”
The door scraped open, a glacial blast rushing out from the gap. Ice encased the narrow chamber within, massive blocks rising from the ground like frozen coffins. She focused on a shapeless form atop one, and her heart dropped. Jovian.
The first thing she saw was a finger, severed at the second knuckle. Bone peeked through the nail, pointing toward the remnants of a hand. Trying not to vomit, she followed the hand up to Jovian’s shattered upper arms, the fragments of ribs hanging from a broken chest. Gods. What had happened to ruin his hands so horribly? If she didn’t know better, she would have thought this was— She froze.
Slowly, she dragged her gaze to Jovian’s face. The eyes shoved into their sockets, the chin buried somewhere in his neck, lower jaw unhinged in a scream that had ended violently. Her breath fanned out shakily. Because there was only one explanation for the mangled hands and missing face, while the back of his skull was in one piece. Because people always threw their hands out at the end, in the vain hope of easing their collision with the ground.
“Four oak bookcases and a dagger to the chest.” Geena’s voice seemed distant. “Why would he choose to die this way?”
This wasn’t the work of any bookcase. Sarai’s hands shook. This is …
“A fall,” a beautiful voice pronounced.
Kadra was staring at the corpse, face grim. The air in her lungs was suddenly scalding as a single realization crystallized.
He did it.
Her. Jovian. And very likely all the other Petitors. Harion was right. It wasn’t suicide. Kadra had killed them all.
“But he was found in his study.” Geena looked bewildered.
“He didn’t die there.” Kadra examined Jovian’s broken legs. “He fell to his death.”
“Tetrarch Kadra, I beg your pardon, but a body has to fall at least a hundred feet to look like this,” Geena stammered. “No building in this Quarter is that high—”
“Aoran Tower,” Sarai whispered. A prickling at the back of her neck told her that she had Kadra’s full attention. “Sidran Tower. Lisran Tower. From what I’ve seen, the Academiae’s towers are the highest points in Edessa. Well over a hundred and fifty feet.”
“And not one magus noticed a Petitor falling off?” The Lugen scoffed.
Sarai steeled herself. “No one saw the Sidran Tower Girl fall either. ”
“Don’t bring that dead guttersnipe from gods only know where into this,” Geena snapped. “Petitor Jovian was someone of standing . He mattered.”
Sarai was suddenly the temperature of erupting lava . “I don’t think standing determines if someone matters.”
Geena snorted. “Look, I understand that you northerners don’t know how things work, but we Lugens investigate the dead, and Petitors handle the living. And it’s my professional opinion that Jovian was crushed to death under four bookcases …”
A dull buzzing filled Sarai’s ears. You’re wrong. Clenching her shaking hands into fists, she tried to breathe, failing which she searched for a blade nearby, anything sharp to impale the man who’d brought her here to show off a kill . She found only ice.
What if it isn’t him? hissed the black part of her Kadra had roused. Why would he throw you off and have you healed afterward? If he’s been killing Petitors and disguising it as suicide, then why leave only you alive?
Because no one would believe me , she retorted. But her fury faltered. Kadra was too wily to risk a loose end. Especially when a Petitor could drag out her scant memories of that night and identify his voice.
It doesn’t make sense. She stared at Jovian’s ruptured eyes, realizing what had made Kadra’s companion retch at the sight of her. How had the healers even put her back together?
“Why do you think that he fell from a tower?” Kadra cut in.
“Because …” Her voice dwindled to a croak.
The ground teetered. Jovian’s corpse elongated into shadows that fled to every corner of the room. Kadra’s voice was a dulcet blur. She dug her nails into her arms. Not here. Not now. Not in front of them.
“He …” she tried again, only for the word to end in a wheeze.
Something clamped onto her wrist, firmly propelling her forward and out of the room. Warmth returned to her fingers in a painful rush as the door swung shut. She released a tight breath. Her vision cleared .
The grip on her wrist registered first. She followed the large hand circling it until the shape before her settled into the harsh planes of Kadra’s face. Shit .
Before he could speak, she cleared her throat. “His hands.”
He raised an eyebrow. She kept her face blank as his eyes dug into hers.
Finally, he let go. “Explain.”
Rubbing her frigid skin, she temporarily forced her suspicions aside. “If Jovian was crushed to death by those bookcases, he would have faced a short distance to the ground. There’d be evidence of internal bleeding or asphyxiation, bruising on his back from the bookcase’s weight, not this”— she swallowed—“pulverization. That requires height and gravity. Like he … splintered on impact. Someone would have noticed if that happened in public—everyone probably saw his face at last year’s Robing. But his body could go unnoticed for much longer in the Academiae. It’s less busy there, and I haven’t seen any building that rivals the towers for height.”
Kadra leaned against the icy walls. “And how is it that a man who fell from a tower was found in his study under four bookcases?”
You know why . She dared meet his gaze and found steel within. Careful. She still had no proof of his involvement. Yet, fire crawled up her throat when she glanced at the door behind which Jovian rotted.
Pretend it’s a theory. It’s just a theory. She unfettered her tongue. “I imagine that a death on the Academiae’s grounds would be … undesirable.”
“Meaning someone concealed his suicide to preserve the Academiae’s reputation?”
“I never said his death was a suicide,” she whispered.
A stillness graced Kadra’s face, as though she’d surprised him, and he was perturbed by it. Withdrawing from the opposite wall, he approached her, bending until their faces were level.
“Petitor Sarai.” His voice was silk. “That’s a dangerous theory.”
She didn’t move. “Danger doesn’t change the truth. I used to climb snowgrape vines for a living. I … know what a fall looks like. And I don’t think he wanted to die. ”
His face tightened. “Agreed,” he said softly.
The door to the ice room with Jovian’s corpse scraped open. She hurriedly stepped away from Kadra as Geena emerged.
“I thought Arsameans slept in snowdrifts. Didn’t think the cold would be too much for you,” she scoffed. “How would you like me to record the death, Tetrarch Kadra?”
“A fall. The suicide was staged.” His tone brooked no refusal.
“ Homicidium? But—” Geena halted when Kadra glanced in her direction. “ Certo . Should I do the same for the other one?”
Other one? Sarai’s heart halted. “There’s another corpse like Jovian’s?”
“Tullus’s Petitor two years ago.” Kadra started up the stairs. “He apparently walked into a bull pen and was trampled to death.”
Truth. Another mangled corpse. Another method of disguising a fall. But if Petitors were falling off the Academiae’s towers, then … what happened to me never stopped .
It wasn’t just her and Jovian. Someone was killing the Tetrarchy’s Petitors.
“Why?” she whispered. The question echoed up the stairwell to Kadra, who gave her an inquiring glance. She ran up to him. “Why are you only investigating this now ? If there’s another body like Jovian’s, then there’s been a killer behind some of these supposed Petitor suicides for years! And you only formed a theory of death for Jovian today .”
“I didn’t.”
“We agreed that it was a fall just minutes ago.” Inches from the main landing, the stench of death choked her. “Wasn’t that the purpose of this little jaunt?”
Geena’s eyes nervously darted between them as he drew an inch closer.
“No, Petitor Sarai.” His voice sank low, and she swallowed. “I’ve visited this corpse on nine occasions to hear the same explanation of death by bookcase from nine different Lugens.” The barest smile brushed his lips. “No one has shared my hypothesis. Until today. ”
Truth. Frozen, she stared numbly as he straightened and vanished upstairs.
“And I kept saying it wasn’t a fall!” Geena covered her mouth in horror. “Do you think I offended him?”
“I doubt it,” Sarai muttered. Kadra evidently didn’t take offense to much. Ungluing herself from the stairs, she paused when Geena caught her elbow.
The Lugen looked uncomfortable. “How did you know it was a fall?”
She flinched. “The hands.” She stuffed hers in her pockets, hiding joints doomed to eternally tremble. “There’s no hiding the hands.”
Departing the morgue, she drew deep gulps of fresh air. At the entrance to the vigile station, Kadra mounted his horse and steered it to face her.
“Ready?” The strange stillness she’d glimpsed in the morgue was back in his eyes.
Her gut tightened. Kadra’s just a man , Cato had said, but she couldn’t afford to believe it. Ur Dinyé’s most notorious Tetrarch was a formidable strategist, a powerful magus, and, above all, a manipulator who could warp a situation to his advantage in a blink.
But he must have a weakness. She’d keep her head down and her guard up throughout this investigation or whatever charade he was conducting. She’d arm herself with his secrets. And he wouldn’t see her coming when she ruined him.
Mounting Caelum, Sarai faced the monster who could be her assailant. “Ready.”