His features went bloodless. The subsequent silence was a knife between them. Jaw tight, he took a sharp breath when a portal split the air outside the horreum. Dalvia emerged and started at the sight of her.
Noceo composed his features into an admirable blank mask and took a step forward. “You shouldn’t have been wandering about alone, Death-Summoner.”
“Is she?” Kadra stepped out of the night behind her.
This should be good.
Lightning was easier to summon in Edessa’s wet cold, the thick humidity wafting off the lower floor of the horreum especially conducive to building a charge. It sizzled around Noceo in a sinuous web. He showed no signs of pain; they had both known it too well.
“Let’s manage this without the theatrics, this time.” Kadra examined Sarai’s features, wiping the blood from her lips to pin his brother with a homicidal smile.
Cool amusement filled Noceo’s eyes. “By all means. You—”
Kadra flicked a finger. The lightning cage shrunk to seize his brother in brutal coils. Noceo screamed as tendrils sizzled up his torso. Once, there had been a time when he had done everything to protect his brother from this fate at Clevsin’s hands. Yet, it had come to this. Dalvia froze like a trapped animal, breath coming fast.
“Did you really think that you were my equal?” Kadra wondered conversationally. “You needed hostages to keep us on an even footing at the Aequitas.”
“Ever the show-off!” Fury and fear seeped from Noceo in waves, voice flooding with power. “Stop this. Now!”
The world warped around Kadra, the command trapping his head in a vise much stronger than that at the Aequitas. Blood vessels burst behind his eyes, flooding his vision with crimson.Damn.
“You threw us all away,” Noceo croaked, skin peeling from the burns on his neck as he stumbled toward Dalvia. “Now you play the martyr.”
Is that how you’ve chosen to remember that night?Eleven years and a few spare months separated them from the past. A chasm had broken open in his chest when he had forged a path down the mountains, evergreens standing in silent nighttime vigil to witness the end of the only friendship he had known since childhood.
“Ithrew nothing away,” he bit out, surprised at the hoarseness that coated his voice. “Did you forget that so easily?”
Noceo’s bitter snarl morphed to faint bewilderment. As if he’d stepped into one of the worlds Kadra saw at the edge of his vision, and could neither make heads nor tails of it. A sickly flush darkened his cheeks. “But you…” he tottered.
Movement flashed. Dalvia planted herself in front of his brother as a shield, supporting his sagging weight. “Don’t,” she said quietly. “Please just let him go. You know as well as I do that you’ve a greater threat at hand.”
Kadra considered her, trading a resigned glance with Sarai. “Your choices are your own. But I’ll ask you again. Do you wish to leave?”
Anguish and something older, pained, coagulated in her eyes. Too loud for indecision but too muffled to be a choice. A scream that didn’t know its way out. “Let us go.”
A bitter thing, sentiment. He nodded. The air immediately split. Snow blew in to catch on his hair. He glimpsed the manor beyond where Noceo would undoubtedly lick his wounds. Dalvia looped an arm around the suddenly mute man’s shoulders and drew him in, stopping when he disengaged from her and staggered onward. She paused at the mouth of the portal, a dark silhouette veiled in flurries, hands at her sides. Komis, its harsh mountains, and fierce ice couldn’t touch her. She was pieces to the wind and would never put herself back together. The past and this manor had caged her, and she believed in nothing outside those bars.
He waited by the portal for a breath. A final question, because Wrath did have him right, and the past fettered him. He would never know how much of this he could have changed.
She walked on. The portal closed behind her.
He entered the horreum with Sarai. There was no speaking of doom to those who sought it. His woman, his people waited.
He would avert theirs.
Despite her exhaustion and anguish, all thoughts of Noceo fled her mind as she stepped foot in the warehouse again, parting with Kadra at the same fork she had during their first foray here, over a month ago under the dead of night.
There were places, the Elsarian priests said, that were tainted by the dead. Lands, homes, woods, and streams once unblighted, but now, forever altered by the brutality of the acts that had occurred within them. Death took all who came to him, but some weren’t so eager to leave. They sat, festered, demanded until the place of their end took on a fearful new life, and through it they lived and lived and ate all that crossed their path.
Perhaps it had happened here too. An odd lethargy took her as she strode into the warehouse. Her feet seemed to know the way as though she had walked it a thousand times since. Sconces flared to life as she walked. She didn’t question the light.
A left, another turn, and the hallway where she had found the dead stood bare, pristine but for the odd fleck of blood on the wall.
Closing her eyes, she sank into her memory. When she resurfaced, it was to blood pooling on the ground past the tiled step running across the hallway.Strange. Why a step in the middle of an otherwise flat hallway?She had been too preoccupied with the dead and the Guildswoman split in two to pay it much heed. Now, she crossed it and crouched.
Around seven inches tall and practically invisible without the blood lapping at it. A precautionary measure, perhaps? Or something to trip upanyone who entered this portion of the horreum, to make them stumble, drop whatever they were carrying.A trap, an obstacle, a marker. Regardless of the step’s purpose, its presence indicated only one thing. A secret.
She tapped against the tile, pressing this way and that before relinquishing it to stride further down the hallway. The dead had been arrayed here, frozen in flight.
