He hasn’t noticed.“I left him alive for questioning.”
Gaius’s face cleared. “Oh, he must have preferred death to that and offed himself.”
“Hmm.” Kadra strode outside. A pyre sizzled by the domus, the two bounty hunters’ corpses stacked on top.
It could have been suicide. But he hadn’t dissipated the lightning cage, and the similarity was too dangerous to ignore.A knife through his chest. On his knees. Half burnt. For all his vigiles’ regard for his safety, they’d forgotten that he’d died in the same position. Their enemy had sought to remind him. And they had been here tonight to do so.
His mouth curved.They’re coming out to play. He ran through the listless faces he’d sighted in the den, searching for familiarity, for someone who wanted to oust him badly enough to murder innocents.Where were you hiding?
Gaius stared at the pyre morosely. “Things are getting bad.”
“They are.”
“Nine years, I’ve worked for you.” His gaze was steadfast. “I saw a young man who truly fought the world, when I only dreamt of doing so. I’ve never regretted it. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”
Kadra raised an eyebrow. “We may soon be on the receiving end of rotten produce.”
Gaius shrugged.
A smile tugged at Kadra’s mouth, fading only at the hiss of the pyre before them. Memory warped the rising smoke into a gray, iridescent river, circling around an infinite dock, no hint of land on the horizon. His first sight upon death. He’d been one of countless dazed souls on a dock, despairing at his end, ready to sell what was left of his soul so the woman he’d lost would survive the battle he had left her. And she’d not only won, but had taken him from Death.
Black yawned within the pyre, spiraling outward in a haze that defied sanity. Arms and teeth twisted from the void, clawing for the dead hunter. He twitched upright on the pyre, realizing that the afterlife had found him. His mouth widened in a silent scream. Teeth tore at his body.
At Gaius’s concerned look, Kadra ceased to watch. His right-hand man and Sarai had fiercely guarded his secret.Godstouched.
Resurrection had made a million pinpricks into the fabric of his reality. Other worlds bled in, altering what he knew and replacing it with a vast unease at how much he didn’t. He’d glimpsed battlegrounds future and past, hands and teeth where there should have been none. But it was stormfall that had become deeply unsettling, the skies split by a large many-fingered hand of smoke, lightning arrowing down from it like punishment.
The gods were real, and he made do with that knowledge as he did with having known death—by not dwelling on it. He had no hope of piety or atonement. But perhaps, as Sarai insisted, the ten hells were for worse men. Even if he couldn’t think of many.
Firelight glinted off bronze robes at the corner of his eye. He acknowledged Cassandane with a tilt of his head as she took in the pyre.
“Infected drugs,” she said without preamble. “You and I both know that there’s only one place where whitesleep’s been manufactured since its inception.”
Komis. A curl of disquiet tugged at him. It couldn’t bethem. They’d vanished in the aftermath of his destruction of the Clan. He had found no trace of their new lives or identities, and Komis’s entrenched drug network had gleefully inherited the Clan’s clientele. Yet, he couldn’t ignore the possibility.
“We kept our focus on Aelius and Tullus for too long. Something grew in the north during our distraction.”
Dread sank into Cassandane’s face. “You think that whoever manufactured this batch of whitesleeppurposefullyinfected it with beetles?”
“There’s a chance.” It would mean a visit to Komis to trace the manufacturer once Sarai called for him. Kadra’s spine stiffened at the thought. Dismissing the resultant pain streaking down his back, he mounted his horse and steered it toward Aoran Tower.
Cassandane followed him west, looking drawn. “I wish I could say that I’d thought of the north, but our problems always felt greater.”
That had always been the point of tension between both halves of Ur Dinyé. Consecutive iterations of the Tetrarchy had considered the sending of goods under the Distribution Act as the start and end of their obligations. So, the north had turned to more dangerous powers for protection.
“What do you make of Clan Kader?” Cassandane wondered. “They got the country hooked on whitesleep and vanished in the same week.”
“The land’s well rid of them.”
“A mysterious end, though. Tetrarch Othus frequently went north eleven years ago, didn’t he?” Cassandane looked faintly uncomfortable, as most did when bringing up his foster father. “I wonder if he crossed paths with them.”
“He could have.”
And he had. For all his flaws, Othus had understood that the north wasn’t to be ignored. Only he had seen that the fault lines threading the country could someday create a chasm of no return. Which meant that his sharp, discerning Petitor could see it too. Would she still choose him after that?
“Temperance’s heel, that’s a foul look you’re wearing.” Cassandane whistled. “May Sarai call on you swiftly. Gods only know what she’s found up there.”
Blazeleaf smoke seemed to flood his lungs, the familiar burn like a phantom limb. For the span of a heartbeat, he almost sawtheirfaces, reminding him of what she could find, of who he’d been.
