Vanya nodded, and Alida escorted the magician out of the receiving room, closing the door behind her. The windows overlooked a private inner courtyard that was empty for the moment. Vanya stood and joined Soren on the chaise, watching as he slumped low onto the throw cushions there.
“How were you attacked by revenants?” Vanya asked.
Soren let out a harsh-sounding laugh, lifting his arms so that he could press the heels of his palms to his eyes. “Does it matter? Dealing with them is part of the job.”
“You wouldn’t ask to speak with me alone over that. What happened?”
When Soren didn’t immediately answer, Vanya reached for his hands, drawing them away from his face. Soren blinked tiredly at him, the shadows beneath his gray eyes from lack of sleep and pain.
“I was going to take a train from Karnak to Oeiras, but I went to Bellingham instead,” Soren said after a moment.
Vanya tightened his grip on Soren’s wrists. “Why?”
“Did you know your merchants are opting to ship their goods to that city by way of airships rather than trucks or trains, despite the cost? Too many revenants within the House of Kimathi’svasilyetare a threat they don’t want to deal with.”
“I’m aware of the issue.”
He’d been aware for quite some time, but Houses were given legal latitude when it came to governing theirvasilyets. Even the Senate wouldn’t go against that lawful tradition without good reason. The House of Kimathi hadn’t outright banned wardens from itsvasilyet, but the hostility there had been brought up when the border reports were delivered.
“I went because the governor needs more information on the borders there. We’ve lost wardens who get assigned to the area over the last few years. I got off at a way station and drove the rest of the way to Bellingham. I was going to do a grid search, but ended up following a convoy of trucks off the trade road into the plains to a quarry. It wasn’t on any map.”
Vanya knew how the wardens prided themselves on their maps. They had many different types to reference, each kind updated yearly with the reports that wardens brought back. The placement of cities and towns, those still standing and those lost to poison and those rebuilt, were records the wardens religiously kept. “What was there?”
Soren’s expression became stony, lips pressed into a hard white line, even as his eyes stared past Vanya at something only he could see. “There was a laboratory run by a Daijalan engineer. Some other Daijalans were working there as well, along with Solarians. They had debt slaves in cages, and the quarry was filled with revenants.”
Vanya went still, fingers pressed to the pulse point in Soren’s wrists, counting out the rising beats there. “Debt bondage is illegal in Solaria.”
Soren slanted him an unimpressed look. “Borders are lines on a map and legal designations in the courts. Atrocities still cross over.”
Solaria did not interfere with the way other countries did business in their own lands. Solaria had never allowed the banks inside their borders to offer such poisonous, devastating loans to its citizens. Daijal had spent the past few hundred years espousing the merits of such loans and failing to find acceptance for the practice past its borders. Every emperor and empress that had sat on the Imperial throne had refused such business proposals, as had the Senate.
There was no peace to be found in debt bondage.
Vanya knew Solaria had taken in escaped debt slaves over the years, refusing to let the Collector’s Guild operate within its borders. Oh, Vanya was certain they operated clandestinely within Solaria, but if they were ever caught, the bounty hunters were sent to prison. But for such an operation to be blatantly operating in avasilyetspoke of tacit approval and support.
Just not from the Imperial throne.
“Tell me the quarry’s location, and I’ll order the Legion to secure it,” Vanya said.
Soren’s expression became shuttered. “There’s nothing left.”
“What do you mean?”
Soren sighed and tugged his wrists free of Vanya’s grip. “The engineer was in charge of the death-defying machine.”
Vanya blinked. “You found it?”
Soren wouldn’t look at him. “They tried to put me into its chamber, but they didn’t remove all my weapons. I blew it up with a bomb before they could shove me into it. Then I blew up the warehouse and set fire to the revenants in the quarry.”
Vanya wanted to be angry about losing hard evidence of the assumed betrayal by the House of Kimathi, but the chilling knowledge he could have lost Soren was a heavy knot in his gut. He knew the poison fields weren’t easy to tend, that the borders were dangerous even on cleansed land. One of these days, Soren would leave and never come back, and Vanya would live his life wondering where his lover’s bones lay.
“What exactly did the machine do?” Vanya asked instead. He had an idea, but the thought was too horrific to be true.
He wanted it to be a lie.
Soren shifted on the chaise, letting his head fall back so he could stare up at the ceiling. “I think it turned the dead into revenants faster than spores can.”
Vanya stood and began to pace, needing to burn off some of the adrenaline coursing through him. The sheer abhorrence of such a machine was a threat he couldn’t ignore, especially coming from a witness he could trust.
