Twenty-four hours had passed since the massacre. It had been justice, but it was still a massacre. Shortly after I resurrected, we bathed the small kids in the huge bathroom downstairs and put them to bed. Then the four of us wrapped the bodies of Derog, Lasa, and some other guy Reynald had killed upstairs in canvas we found in storage and carried them down to the basement. It was backbreaking work, and I was deeply grateful most of Derog’s employees had helpfully run to confront Reynald in the pen. Now we had a row of anonymous bodies swathed in cloth and trussed up with rope. Reynald had been scarily efficient at wrapping them up and I was too chicken to ask where he had acquired that particular skill.
Once the corpses were handled, we took long baths, scrubbed ourselves clean, and fell asleep, or in my case passed out into a black dreamless hole.
In the morning, we fed everyone and cleaned up most of the blood. Some traces of it were still there, too faint to see. Removing the blood completely was almost impossible, but Clover had found some kind of powder that was probably a quicklime variant, so we made do with that. She also insisted on stripping all the linens off the beds and boiling them with detergent in this massive pot we found in the laundry area in the courtyard. Apparently, this was a common thing, because the pot came with three-foot-long wooden tongs for stirring the boiling laundry.
While she boiled linens, Reynald and I took stock of Derog’s blood money. Most of Derog’s cash was with a banker and out of our reach. The small safe in his room yielded us two hundred nomas, the equivalent of two gold grests, probably the purchasing capital, household budget, and payroll. Reynald had used some of it to buy a lovely boat, which was now parked at our dock. Tonight, he would make the corpse run.
I had settled in the office to look through Lasa’s ledgers. I’d cried after the first one, then I went numb, and now I was angry. It was a cold, crystallized kind of anger and it grew out of me like an iceberg. At some point Clover asked me if I wanted dinner. I thanked her and told her no. I couldn’t stomach any.
The bells of the North Tower tolled, distant. It was ten pm. Outside the window, night had fallen.
The ledgers lay in neat stacks on the desk. The worst of Kair Toren documented with annotations in Lasa’s fluid, perfectly legible handwriting.
In my senior year of high school, we had to write a book report on a favorite novel or series. I did mine on The Rise of Kair Toren. After I submitted my outline, my teacher asked me why I picked that book series and not some other, so I told her all about the characters, their conversations, their funny moments, the plots they brewed, and the tragedies they lived through. The magic, the beauty, the horror. Everything. I told her I had reread them three times, because everything was falling apart in Rellas, and wading into that darkness again and again kept my anticipation of justice fresh. The reckoning was coming, and I would relish it. I couldn’t wait to see the bad guys fall and my favorite characters—the few who had survived—get their happy ending.
I remember she smiled and asked what would happen if the third book never came out. And I, high on my teenage horse, told her that it had to come out. Things had to be fair. Karma was a bitch, she was sharpening her scythe, and there would be a harvest.
I graduated, went to college, grew up, and learned that life wasn’t always fair. Sometimes there was no third book. No resolution no matter how many times you reread or how hard you wished for it. It gnawed at me. I just couldn’t let it go.
In fact, thinking back on it, those books had shaped my path through life. Somewhere between those rereads, I must’ve subconsciously decided that I would make sure the nightmare unfolding in Rellas wouldn’t repeat itself in our world. That’s why I’d started out in criminal justice. Except that I overdosed on reality in my first year by reading too much about the terrible things human beings did to each other. I realized that it was smothering me, so I chickened out and switched to political science. Teenage me thought Rellas was as dark as things could get. Post-criminal-justice me knew better.
Lasa’s ledgers were as bad as the worst of my real-world crime reading. They were made of human suffering. Pages and pages filled with matter-of-fact stories about children abused, sold, and butchered in secret.
But if Derog was still alive and I had somehow stolen those ledgers, I could have taken them to the Justice Chamber, and the royal prosecutors would have ripped the slavers apart. Derog knew this. He paid his bribes and hid his dirty dealings by writing in code, pretending to be a legitimate businessman, and paying his taxes on time. He didn’t do flashy spending. He didn’t draw attention to himself. He didn’t parade around in black, red, and gold with a sour pout on his face because people didn’t jump to do his bidding fast enough.
No, for all the heinous shit Derog had done, when compared to Ulmar Hreban, he was definitely small-time.
Someone rapped their knuckles on the doorframe. I turned in my chair. Reynald stood in the open doorway.
“Come in.”
He came in and sat in a chair, throwing one leg over the other. He looked fresher somehow. Like a man who, after enduring restless nights for weeks, had finally slept till morning.
“Rough reading.” He nodded at Lasa’s ledgers stacked on my desk.
“Like swimming through a sewer.”
“Is there anything in there about Matheo?”
I passed him a ledger with a knife in it. I’d needed a bookmark and that was the only thing handy.
He took the knife out, looked at it for a moment, set it on my desk, and read the entry. It was very short.One puppy, fourteen weeks, mother didn’t survive. Shipped to a southern buyer.Code for “We stole a fourteen-year-old boy. We killed his mother. We shipped him south.”
Reynald raised his gaze. “Puppy?”
“Derog paid taxes. He pretended to be a livestock trader. Dogs and cattle.”
“What does this mean?” He pointed to a small star by the entry.
“Special request. He didn’t grab your son at random. Someone paid him to do it. There is another thing. If you look at the other entries, the buyers are identified by initials or code names. ‘Southern buyer’ doesn’t appear again anywhere. Why southern buyer? Why so generic?”
“Someone targeted Matheo,” Reynald said.
“Do you have any enemies I don’t know about? Can you think of anyone?”
He shook his head. “All of my enemies are dead. No, it has to be Silveren.”
Silveren was the Lord Commander of the Redeemer Knights. The books didn’t spend much time on him. He was fanatically devoted to the Order of the Redeemer and would do just about anything to help it thrive. When Hreban rose to power, Silveren put the military might of the Redeemer Knights behind him, hitching his wagon to the only horse willing to help him draw ahead.
