“I would. I am honour-bound to respect my word.”
Whatever answer she had hoped to hear from him, that wasn’t it. Confused feelings of disappointment and bitterness bubbled into her mind; she fought them back. “It … it would take you at least four days to make the round trip again. And you’ll waste time finding another witch to consult, and …” Semras paused, searching for excuses. “And the corpse will have decomposed by then. You will … waste so much time,” she repeated lamentably.
“I will waste it for you,” Inquisitor Velten murmured. “I gave you my word, and I broke it. You deserve to go home. You deserve to get away from this mad, violent world of mine.”
Semras didn’t want to go home—she had a coven sister to save, and …
He had a lover.
Was she the witch of Yore accused of killing a man? Was all this done in her name? All of Semras’ sufferings and trials and wounds—a tribute of Estevan’ love for Nimue?
It did not matter. Saving a coven sister—any of them, at any cost—was all she needed to keep going.
It had to be. They were all she had.
“I’ve come so far, I might as well see it through to the end,” she said, smiling tentatively at him. “What do you say? I’d rather go on with the investigation. What about you?”
Estevan studied her. “So you choose this.”
“… Yes.” Her smile widened and quivered. “Yes, I do.”
The City of
Artificial Suns
II
Chapter 16
WithouttheVenatorguardsand their oppressive numbers, the rest of the trip went by quickly.
Semras rode on her gelding surrounded by the protection of Estevan and his knights. With every league they got closer to the gates, more and more travellers filled the road, forcing them to slow down to a trot.
The witch’s white hair and yellow eyes gathered a lot of attention from the thickening crowd. Faces turned on her passage—glances of mistrust and alarm, but also of curiosity and delight. These came mostly from the younger generations who must have never seen or heard of witches before; still, their interest didn’t target her alone.
Inquisitor Velten rode through the crowd just as he had in Bevenna four days ago. Head held high, he ignored both the reverence and, to her surprise, the hostility thrown at him. Themas had told her about the waves of protests against the Inquisition’s influence, but she hadn’t expected to see them displayed so openly.
In spite of it, no one contested their priority. Wagons and carriages stopped to give them way, and their small group navigated through the torrents of men, women, and children accompanied only by their trailing gazes. Soon, she couldn’t take notice of them anymore; for far beyond the edge of the human sea, Semras saw the city-state of Castereina for the very first time.
It awed her.
It shocked her.
Vast curtain walls of wine-coloured stone surrounded a city of contrasts. Separating the upper inner district from its outer ring, their impressive span encircled the throat of the vast hill the city sat on in a tight, suffocating grip. At their feet, buildings of red and white stones pressed into each other, crashing against the walls in a rising wave.
Beyond it all, the sharp spires of a main keep reached for the skies. The ancient fortress, turned into the heart of the sprawling city, loomed from a steep cliff overlooking the coastline. From there, the sea stretched over the horizon toward the Al’Andakkad Empire, its shorelines lying just far enough that Semras couldn’t see them from where she watched.
How men, blind to the Unseen Arras, could have crafted a city so intricately married to the landscape, Semras didn’t know. Perhaps there was truth to the old legends of a kingdom founded by a witch queen here, some thousands of years ago.
If they were, then the Deprived had stolen its bones and desecrated its primordial beauty in the name of expansion. Castereina poured out of its curtain walls and onto the surrounding land like a blight. While the stone and plaster facades of the inner districts remained relatively clean, their red brick neighbours on the lower ones looked devoid of any architectural elegance.
Human overpopulation had even tainted the fields surrounding the city. Stacked in concentric rows, an overabundance of buildings grew between golden fields. Columns of smoke emanated from wide, tall chimneys peppered around.
It felt polluted, dirty. Dead.
Inquisitor Velten led them toward a gate further east from that withered land, past a large bridge of metal bent in ornamental shapes she had never seen the likes of before. Hours after Semras first saw the walls, and long after the sun began its slow descent, they crossed it. Sweat ran down her spine at the creaking of steel against steel, and she exhaled in relief once they left it behind.
Beyond, a large stone arch marked the entrance to the upper districts of Castereina. The crowd here had thickened into a dark, writhing mass, pushing and pressing one another to get closer. Two large banners featuring the blazon of Castereina’s ruling dynasty—a horned hare over a striped shield—billowed over their heads, guiding them toward the open gates. There, guards in dark tabards checked each traveller and their papers by the blinding light of sconces before funnelling them through or sending them away.
