Sarai slung a hand over their shoulder in commiseration. Anek had borne as many slings and arrows as Cassandane had since the Unraveling. Clerics had mocked their identity as a neutralis in sermons across the capital and lambasted them for aiding her during the Unraveling.
“How are you holding up?” She leaned against the frigid wall. “I heard someone leaked the location of your domus to a Cleric.”
Anek scowled. “He woke me at three in the godsdamned morning by roaring outside my window that “amorphous gender is a mark of amorphous morality.” I’ve never been so close to killing a man.” They released a breath through their teeth. “Cassandane’s offered to house me at her tower until I find a new domus.”
Shit.Sarai pulled them into a one-armed hug, and they managed a laugh, muscular shoulders releasing their tension.
“It isn’t all bad. Who knows? I might be able to pull off with her what you did with Kadra.” They snickered at Sarai’s dropped jaw. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t! She’s devastating.”
“Alright, I’ll concede that.” Sarai squinted at Anek, trying to imagine them with Cassandane. Her smile faded at the deep lines that had threaded themselves under their eyes and across their temples. These Clerics spoke so easily of “marks of amorphous morality” without taking any responsibility for marks of indelible pain.
“We won at the Unraveling,” she said quietly. “So, why arewethe ones scrambling now? The Order harasses us without second thought. The Guilds disregard the Distribution Act while their profits bloom. The north riots and starves and suffers from a beetle plague, of all things, yet few here even see them as human. We ask the oppressed to live alongside their oppressors and prattle about ‘mutual respect’ when one side’s beliefs are abhorrent. We try to meet them at the bargaining table for the sake of national unity, while they erode public faith in us. And peoplestillfall for it!”
Anek chipped off a piece of ice with a wan smile. “Don’t take it to heart. That’s the nature of the game. We had no hope of being respected.”
“Then why is Harion?” she wondered. “Can you imagine how easy it would be? Wasting less breath, lesstime. Not having to prove your worth along with doing your job. Not worrying that the smallest crisis could have the public turning on us to elect another Aelius!” She realized she’d said it all in one breath when Anek pressed an ice chip into her hand.
Their eyes held a world of sympathy. “You, my friend, care too much. Don’t let the job become your life. This city will eat your heart if you let it.”
I don’t know how to stop. “It may have already eaten my mind. There’s a memory from months back that I can’t remember without my head feeling as though it’ll burst. It involved someone calling me ‘Death-Summoner’ at the Stones Guild.” She shrugged sheepishly at Anek’s deadpan stare. “I know. I should have mentioned it sooner.”
“I was outside the Stones Guild then too,” they recalled. “It could be stress, unless you’re Godstouched and about to horrify us with some eerie power gifted by one of the Elsar—” Anek stared when Sarai stumbled against an ice block and nearly fell. “I was only joking—oh godsdammit.” They recoiled as a group of vigiles carrying a corpse barged into the ice-room and deposited it atop one of the coffinlike slabs piled around.
Kadra and Cassandane followed, sporting identically dour expressions. Stones Guild and Godstouched people forgotten, dread curdled Sarai’s blood.This can’t be good.
Cassandane’s personal healer and Lugen, Destus, was the last to enter. A steely-eyed man in his mid-fifties, he stripped the corpse after quick examination of the extremities and shut the door to the ice-room. Lightning flared at a flick of Kadra’s finger, latticing from wall to wall until the room gleamed.
“From this point onward, nothing we see here can leave this room.TetrarchHarion will receive word once we solidify a theory, no sooner.” Cassandane folded her arms, speaking through gritted teeth. “I have a feeling this may be at least partially his fault.”
Taking a deep breath, Sarai turned to the body. Eyes bulging out of his head, the man continued to silently scream, rigor mortis having frozen his fear forever. The muscles of his arms had distended in death, purple-gray and splotchy. But what had her stop cold were the circular welts across his skin—pale in the center, with a raised, red, fleshy ring around them. Like a wax seal made of flesh, they dotted his chest, his back, even the soles of his feet.
Is it a pox or a—hold on. Realization struck her like a boot to the face. She could barely hear over the roar of blood in her ears.By the Saints and the Wretched, don’t tell me this is…
Cassandane let loose a barrage of curses so foul that Anek looked mildly besotted. Their smile guttered when they squinted at the welts. “Well fuck.”
“This,” Cassandane pronounced in the hardest tone Sarai had heard from her, “isn’t the first corpse I’ve seen like this in Aelius’s Quarter. There were two others that fell to our errant Tetrarch Harion to investigate. I didn’t expect matters to escalate this grotesquely, or I’d have taken the cases myself.”
Water trailed down the slab of ice and splattered on the ground. She looked up at Kadra’s taut features and sadly recalled the hours he’d spentfrowning over the few reports he’d received from the coalition of northern Praetors, trying to make sense of the paucity of information therein. Their conclusions had been fourfold.
The six-legged cause traveled in swarms. They still hadn’t identified the type. The condition wasn’t airborne. But in the north where it had originated a few months back, it was deadly.
She said it: “The northern beetle plague has reached Edessa.”
The hollow quiet that followed was only broken by the drip of water.
Then, Destus cleared his throat. “I’m afraid so,” he said with all the gravity of a funeral proclamation.
Things seemed to move in a blur after that. Vigiles and gray-robed healers rushed into the ice-room and took the body. Kadra led her outside, lifted her onto her mare, and bid her to meet him at a marketplace in his Quarter for their daily public court sessions, weary eyes tracing her face before he re-entered the fray. She found herself on the road before her mind finally left that ice-room and what they’d learned therein.
Plague. Riots.Inquisitor Blasius’s voice slithered into her head.Omens.
She wasn’t one for superstition. The gods seemed more steadfast than people, and if Death was anything to go by, they communicated directly. Yet… the woman’s words haunted her.A reckoning has followed in your wake.
Plague, riots.Omens?
A Guild-wagon-turned-hearse trundled past her, carrying a mountain of corpses.
“The irony,” Anek muttered, riding beside her. “From ferrying sustenance to death.”
