The pity in his eyes intensified. “I learned much about people as a Cleric and gathered the rest as a Praetor. They don’t change.” Saying it seemed to deflate him. “Killing the rapacious is no crime. You’ve done it yourself. It’s a shame that you quieted after the Unraveling. You had better options than trying to earn a fickle public’s respect.”
She stared. “Options that would have likely led to imprisonment for tyranny.”
Disappointment snuck into his expression. “A pity then, that the good waste their time fearing that they’re evil, and the evil waste no time at all.” With a chastening arch of his eyebrows, he bowed and left.
She stared into her bowl of congealed oats for a long moment, conscious of Méherre’s silent scrutiny and the vigiles—who’d likely heard everything—muttering awkwardly at their table. Her spoon rose and dipped in. She tasted nothing.
Mass death in Edessa that could have been caused by the boil beetle plague. Larvae had entered the city via tainted whitesleep sacks. But that didn’t explain the madness-struck folk and their shared hallucinations.
The plague had originated in the lower, less-cold portions of the north and come out of nowhere.
Murders via whitesleep in the icy, upper-north without any connection to whitesleep but the same black sclera in the culprits as in Edessa’s madness-struck.
Death, beetles, whitesleep.All affecting different parts of the country in different ways. All at once. And the puzzle was still incomplete. There was something beyond this, weaving everything together. Or someone?
Didn’t you bring this on us, northerner? Our hourglass runs low. A reckoning has followed in your wake. The gods have spoken and call for our end. The sky itself will laugh.Junia and the dying Guildswoman’s words repeated in her head until her spoon clattered into an empty bowl. She watched an intricate hourglass of iron sand empty at a corner of the inn. Sal Flumen was too cold for Ur Dinyé’s traditional water clocks.
Our hourglass runs low.What would happen at the end?
Wind curled around her ankles, and she realized that she’d wandered outside. A nexus of streets unraveled from the adjacent town square, and she followed one that sloped up in the distance. Something struggled in her chest with every step, a new, bitter bird beating at the bones of its cage. Her thigh burned when she reached the road’s abrupt end at a platform overlooking the Kaycakh Mountains.
Thousands of miles away, the mountain range that also served as Ur Dinyé’s land border with Errigal seemed startlingly close. Size would do that. Bigger things drowning out all others, like the towns in the Kaycakh Mountains’ shadow being invisible from the platform. Or the north’s tribulations being invisible from Edessa.
“I did this all wrong,” she said to the ice coating the branches of nearby pines like Errigalese glass sculptures.
Florus was right. She had pulled back after the Unraveling and tried to defend and make herself palatable to people who’d never be satisfied. She had merely felled a tree at its trunk. The roots ran too deep to purge, and law, government, and manners had no answer to such quiet, insidious cruelty. She could either dig out the roots, godsdamn the consequences, or fight everyday to keep them from sinking deeper. Florus had chosen to happily accept the former.I wasted too much time on the latter, didn’t I?
The cage in her chest snapped open at that silent admission. Pain roved free like a hungry beast, gnawing itself without a target.
A crunch of snow before Méherre’s gaze speared her profile. “You really aren’t what I was expecting.”
“Were you hoping for a sly social-climber or a naïve blowhard?”
“Finally. Some spite.” A tiny smile ghosted across the Bridger’s face. “You’re starting to see it. People are foolish. Trying to appease them only makes you join their ranks.”
Sarai laughed quietly. “I thought if I proved that the rest of the Tetrarchy had their interests at heart—”
“You could achieve what no politician ever has?” Méherre leaned back against the platform’s wooden rails. “National unity is a dream, Sarai.”
A flicker of curiosity penetrated Sarai’s numbness. Méherre hadn’t addressed her or any of the vigiles by name since their journey had begun as though intent on keeping distance between them despite her general frankness.
“Was I foolish for dreaming?”
“Only if you choose not to wake up. You can’t convince these people. Take the matter of those scuta. An obvious crime with obvious culprits. There was no real murder mystery after a point, was there? But you still had to go through the tedious process of proof, because the world doesn’t ask evil to explain itself, but they will askyou. The same holds true here. The south, its people, and its Guilds know what they’re doing to the north, and they don’t care so long as they can take our metals, oils, ores, and rock.”
Méherre tucked a curly forelock back from her brow in a surprisingly graceful gesture before angling to face Sarai. “Let me make this plain. I didn’t offer you my aid because I care about the south’s woes. Your madness-struck people mean nothing to me. I’m here because I wanted you to aid the north. And now that I know you mean well but lack power, I will aid you too. But understand that there is no saving everyone. Sometimes, the only way to preserve most of the herd is to kill the diseased. And if the gods are doing that for us with these whitesleep murders, I see no reason not to embrace it.”
True,zostauselessly informed Sarai when her mind already knew it. Wind seemed to rattle through the spaces in her ribs. Méherre silently waited as she digested each word, turning them over in the hopes of finding something that she could contest and failing every time.
After a while, the Bridger angled her head toward the Kaycakh Mountains. “Over five centuries ago, they say a demon walked this land. A god, broken and twisted into pure malice, then trapped in a human body.”
She recalled Cassandane recounting the same story months ago when she’d learned that the Metals Guild had put out a bounty on her head. Those felt like simpler days now.
“The Scourge.”
“And the woman who was mistaken as the Scourgemaster, who would spell his doom. They gave Ur Dinyé a story of love and war that became legend and even influenced our runes. Naiya and Ríukhen, respectively for “heart” and “strength,” were their names.” She leveled a thoughtful look at Sarai. “You used those runes when Summoning Death.”
“I know how the story ended.”
