I don’t understand.Fear traced cold fingers down Sarai’s spine. “I swear on all the Elsar I know nothing of this. What happened here?”
“Vengeance.” A guttural note underlay the word. “You have proven your point,Petitor.”
“Please believe me, I’ve donenoneof this—” Sarai halted when the woman’s dark irises grew and grew until they swallowed her sclera.Almost like Kadra’s.Terror choked her, burgeoning until her inhales came thick and labored. “What do you see?” she whispered.
“That life is a shared nightmare. And you can always wake up.”
The Guildswoman smiled beatifically, staring at something unfathomably distant. “Have you ever seen so many… eyes?” She heaved a rattling breath and fell face-first into the blood.
She didn’t move again.
A dull buzzing filled Sarai’s ears. She felt herself stagger, turn, and run out of the pool of blood, inhaling deeply in a bid to calm her pulse. But the sight, thesmell. Just like it had been back at Sidran Tower. Her chest constricted to the point of pain, every heartbeat battering against her ribs. Darkness seeped across her vision.
And then, she couldn’t breathe at all.
Blood swamped her lungs. It trickled from her throat to flood the empty socket of one eye and spread questing fingers from her shattered body. A man spoke above her, his mellifluous voice a caress to her dying senses. She knew him, and yet she didn’t. But her heart bled further when he walked away while her mouth gurgled a plea.
“Come back!” she screamed, wondering why her voice worked. “PLEASE!”
His boots were so far—
Footsteps thundered to a halt. “Sarai, look at me,” ordered the same beautiful voice in glacial tones, tearing through terror and memory. Hands gripped her shoulders when she didn’t respond. “Breathe.” A hoarse note this time. She complied. “That’s it. Again.”
Sound blurred as she struggled to get her bearings, sucking in desperate lungfuls of air. The agony in her chest eased with every gasp. Reality returned slowly.
“You’re safe.” Kadra released a low breath when she sagged against him. His arms banded around her like steel. “I have you.”
She realized that she was whispering pleas into his chest and nearly bit her tongue in half in her haste to trap it between her teeth.Shit. I was doing so well for months.She knew what she’d find even before she raised her face to the quiet self-hatred lining his too-severe features.
Her heart ached. She had forgiven him, but he would never forgive himself. “I’m—”
His finger against her lips gently forestalled the words. “You have nothing to apologize for.” With a flick of his wrist, he contained the fire from her oil spill and regarded her gravely. “Come outside.”
She squeezed his hands. “I’m well.” Forcing herself to face the macabre sight, she flinched anew. “Ruin’s blood, what happened here? They look like they were fleeing something, froze mid-scream, and bled out. Yet, they’ve no weapons but that rock.” She indicated the limestone chunk that had broken the Guildswoman’s head. “And the bodies are…”
“Pristine.” Releasing her, Kadra stalked into the bloodbath, uncaring of it soaking into the hem of his robes. “No offensive or defensive wounds.” He pulled down some of their collars and examined their wrists. “No ligature marks or visible attempts at suicide.”
Then how did they die?She stared at the blood lapping at his boots, then took a deep breath and walked over the tiled step holding back the waves. Kadra’s gaze followed her, sharp and tinged with concern, as she approached the newly-dead Guildswoman.I don’t even know her name.
“She was alive when I got here. I—” She drew a ragged breath and steeled herself. Kadra would never ask this of her, but they both knew it was necessary. Forensic information degraded by the second. By the time a Lugen arrived, it could be too late. “I’ll take a look.”
He tracked the frenetic trembling of her fingers. Guilt mingled with quiet pride on his face before he moved behind her and gently steadied them over the woman’s skin. Closing her eyes, she let her magic feel its way into the body’s fraying workings. A second sight of its own.
She came up empty.
To reach into a corpse was to enter an abandoned domus on quicksand. Decomposition threaded through the walls and furniture, and to touch anything was to risk its collapse. She could only observe the slow spoil and attempt to piece together how it had happened. Telmar’s lessons had prepared her well.
Thighs, feet, arms. No damage.Odd welts on her shoulders.A rash?Nothing in the liver or stomach that indicated poison, but traces of what could be a drug.Blood in the throat too. She examined the esophagus.A lotof blood.Hemorrhage?She glanced up at the brain stem.Perhaps a brain bleed.
Shifting her gaze higher, she examined the brain and froze.What in havïd?She rapidly drew down, past the woman’s ribcage and to her heart. Chills pricked up Sarai’s neck, burgeoning into terror the longer she stared at the shredded organ.
Opening her eyes, she relinquished the body in a rush. “Her brain and heart—” She swallowed. “They’re pulverized. Like she had a hundred heart attacks in a minute or her mind fell apart and her body followed suit. There are a few welts on her shoulders and indications that she consumed some sort of drug, but I don’t have the ability to look deeper.Gods!You know what people will make of this. Especially, the Order.” She couldn’t keep the tremor from her voice. “Kadra, she said it was my fault. That a reckoning followed in my wake.”
“It isn’t.” Low and hard, his voice cut through her fear. He considered the woman’s frozen mask of terror before drawing her eyelids shut. A crust of white powder lay over them, visible even through the blood on her face.
Whitesleep. Clan Kader’s most dangerous creation, if she had her history right. Arsamea had been too remote to see any drug-trafficking, so she’d been kept innocent of the numerous ways people induced joy or oblivion. Ten months in Edessa had left her much wiser.
Blazeleaf was ubiquitous and legal, albeit controlled by the Tetrarchy’s dispensaries. Ibez had been banned for sheer potency. But whitesleep, an addictive analgesic rubbed on the eyelids, had aided as many as it had harmed. One of Clan Kader’s last known inventions prior to their mysterious end, it had capitalized on the fact that there were pains that even healers couldn’t pinpoint the cause of, diseases that could only be slowed and not cured. Whitesleep, when diluted, allowed most users to lead largely normal lives. It was the pure version of the drug that was highly addictive. Once hooked, there was no getting anyone off that euphoria. Their bodies couldn’t survive it.
