In fright.
In her mind’s eye, she saw their gaping mouths anew, bulging eyes weeping blood.
“Like they died of fear,” she whispered aloud, and something seemed to whisper in the back of her mind.A laugh?Her trembling hands vibrated faster.
They were running down the hallway. She followed it to the end, where it widened into an unremarkable dead end. Four tiled steps led up to a storage room, piled high with sacks of assorted grains. She stared.That doesn’t make sense.The room was too small to have fit all those Guildspeople which meant…
A hidden room. And if it wasn’t here, and wasn’t an offshoot of the hallway, then that left…below. She examined the four steps into the room, kneeling to take a better look at the tile. A handle in the bottommost step gave it away. She tugged and all four steps came up and away from the floor. A blood-smeared staircase led down into the horreum’s depths, the nose of each step stained like the teeth of a serrated knife. Down, down, all the way at the bottom, she could make out a hand, reaching for help that had never come.
She stared at that gaping maw. This had been the true scene of the crime.
“And they deserved it,” a voice noted in her head with a trace of laughter. “You all might.”
Sarai stilled, aware that she was sucking air in at frenetic speeds. When had her breathing grown so harsh?
Something creaked from within the staircase’s bowels. She peered over the edge and froze as the hand at the bottommoved. It clawed an inch forward, then another. The beginnings of a matted head emerged at the base of the staircase. Half the head, then the entire thing. Her breath came faster. Hoarse. The neck tilted up, slow and fluid, and pinned her with its—half a head. A nose and teeth smiled. Terror made her its quivering instrument, drumming at her throat.
A hand clamped over her eyes, another drawing her up—when had she gone halfway down the stairs?—and back into the hallway. Citrus met her senses, and she sagged.Kadra.
He steadied her back against his chest. “Breathe,” he murmured against her ear. “That’s it, Sarai. Let it out. I have you.” He made her take a few more shuddering breaths before removing his hand from her eyes. “There’s no one here but us. Remember that when you look down.”
Heart in her throat, she dared blink. Her vision cleared, and she found a bloodstained staircase before her. There was nothing at the bottom.
“I saw…” She stepped back, suddenly chilled to the bone. “This god is really starting to irk me.”
Tamping down her nerves, she strode downstairs before she could halt herself. Her pulse thudded with every step.
Death had long come and left this place. The miasma of rot hung heavy and putrid in the air. A spark from Kadra’s free hand lit the sconces bracketing the walls. She flinched.
A small lake of now-dried blood swamped the stone tile floor, embedded in the crevices between divans, the odd sack of whitesleep, and crates ofibez.
“This is no cellar,” she whispered.
“Anibezden.” Kadra withdrew an amphora from an open crate with mild amusement. “Where does the Grains Guild find the time?”
Ur Dinyé had banned the dangerously potent mix of fruit, spices, and wheat years ago for its near-hallucinogenic strength.Looks like the Grains Guild were secretly distributing it.And imbibing it.
The dead here perched upon sofas, bottles smashed beside them, jaws agape in the same screams their compatriots had made on their way to the afterlife. Rot oozed from their decaying flesh, dripping black onto the ground. She steeled her spine against a shudder.
“It began here.” Kadra’s piercing gaze raked over the dead with disinterest.
Fear raked long fingers across the back of her neck. “They were drinking their way through a crate. A few were rubbing on whitesleep. Then, someone started raving. They would have chalked it up to intoxication at first.”
“Until fear took hold.”
“Then, they ran, like they thought that what was causing the madness was infectious.”
“In their eyes, it would have been. The more their compatriots fell to it, the more they must have believed it to be a disease or contaminated drink.” Kadra moved toward a corpse at the corner of the room, examining theibezbottle beside him.
“But that doesn’t match what happened at the Aequitas.” Sarai’s boots scraped over a thick layer of dried blood. “All the madness-struck there weren’t imbibingibezor whitesleep.”
“Hmm.” He leaned against a crate and studied the tableau. An imperceptible shift took place in the line of his shoulders.
She followed his probing stare to a body frozen half out of its chair. “What do you see?”
“A devouring.” His face darkened. “This god enjoys carnage.”
Ibez-drinkers, whitesleep users, the spectators at that marketplace, the crowd at the Aequitas, what did these groups have in common for the god to choose to take them?
