Ythras’s men eyed his and Sarai’s robes with faint interest. Vigiles in the north tended to be a smaller force, handpicked by their Praetor to assist with crime and emergency efforts. Ythras had amassed himself a sizeable quantity in the hopes of taming Komis to his hand. A fruitless effort.
“So, that’s where Clan Kader lived,” Sarai whispered with a wide-eyed glance at the Drust Mountains looming above the city. Jagged teeth against a sunset-red sky.
Hearing that name from her lips felt like a blow. Against his will, he followed her gaze to the imposing manor halfway up the centermost mountain.It’s still there.He’d hoped that the people of Komis would have picked it clean.
“What a home,” Sarai murmured.
“Great evil resided there.” Méherre looked contemplative.
“But it died out eleven years ago, didn’t it?” Sarai murmured. “A lightning strike.”
He had never so fully understood what it meant to be between a rock and a hard place.
Méherre’s smile guttered right as Ythras let out a bray of laughter. “Nothing dies in the north. It merely takes another shape, ice to water.”
That, Kadra mused, was the same bitter conclusion he had reached.
Life hadn’t improved for those here, despite the coin he had poured from his coffers into schooling for impoverished youth and improving the structural safety of insulae, apartment blocks, in the city’s poorer districts. There was no defeating the underworld, only cutting off its heads. He should have beheaded more.
Ythras led them down streets that steadily grew more dilapidated. Insulae tottered a fraction more with every strike of their mounts’ hooves. Snow curdled on the pavement, stained with bodily fluids. The air reeked of desperation.
The Praetor stopped by a wooden barricade erected mid-street around which more vigiles stood guard. “Only a few volunteers in there,” one reported before the group transferred their regard to him and stiffened.
“Magus Supreme and theElsar-Summoner,” he caught one whisper and glanced at Sarai to see how she enjoyed the title. His brows knit at the flash of pain in her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” he murmured.
She rubbed at her temples with a grimace. “I’ve been getting these odd headaches whenever I hear…” She sighed. “I think I’m just tired. My memory wasn’t that stalwart to begin with.”
He made a silent note to ensure they rested soon.
“Try not to make a mess when you’re there,” Ythras grumbled as his vigiles parted portions of the barricade to let them through. “My men have better things to do than clean vomit.”
Kadra gave him a cursory glance that doubtless conveyed his familiarity with Death and stepped through the gap in the wood, gratified when Ythras looked ready to swallow his tongue.
Two steps, and he went motionless. Sarai clapped a hand to her mouth.
Death had taken this narrow street. Crimson crusted within grooves in the snow-covered roads. It had frozen as spatters and desperate handprints at strange heights on the walls of surrounding insulae. Diagonal crosses marked boarded-up doors into the apartment blocks. The dried ochre drips leaking out underneath spoke to what had become of the buildings’ inhabitants. Bloated bodies formed towers atop thatched wagons, half-open mouths leaking rot. Those bringing out the corpses were equally ashen, bundled against the threat of disease.
His gaze wept over theotherbeings that populated this stretch of road. Fanged arms and coiling tentacles lashing the wagons and prodding at the dead. Entirely disparate from the misty miasma that draped the madness-struck in Edessa. He exchanged a grim glance with Sarai. The north’s beetle plague was not the same macabre thing that had swept the capital, yet it was far worse for its curability.
“They boarded up people to die,” Sarai whispered.
“A contingent of lightning magi would have saved them all,” Méherre grit out, looking close to tears. “No wonder no one’s allowed in here.”
Ythras scowled. “Once a swarm sets in an area this densely populated, there’s little we can do. These people might have had a chance in Edessa, but we’re spread thin trying to save the rest of Komis.”
Icy fury balled in Kadra’s chest at the weak excuse. “These peoplehada chance, Praetor. The coin I sent you should have assured it.” Raising a hand when Ythras made to ramble about the economics of disease, Kadra indicated the bodies atop the wagons. “Have any of your dead been found in clusters? Any survivors speaking of laughing skies, eyes, or a reckoning?”
Ythras’s sidelong glance bluntly questioned his sanity. “Why would anyone speak of eyes?”
Fair point.
“Where do you treat the victims who have hope of recovery?” Sarai pulled her gaze from an infected child being lowered from a window.
Ythras’s ill-concealed scoff said that he didn’t think there was such hope. “The Am Semni Institute. Clanlady Dalvia sees to them.”
The shock of hearing that name after years froze Kadra’s tongue to the roof of his mouth. “She’s here?” The words left as a growl that had Sarai glancing at him askance.
