Shit.Sarai closed her eyes on a groan as Verentia followed, looking eerily smug.She seemed like the sanest Inquisitor at my Hearing. How had it come to this?
Noceo bowed. “You needn’t worry, pretty Cassandane, we’ll keep you as interim ruler until I finalize my restructuring of the country. Now,” he swiveled to Sarai and offered a short bow. “Coming?”
For the world of mockery that question held, Noceo seemed ill-at-ease. Sweat trailed from his hairline, matting what she could see of the shoulder-length hair tied at his nape. The white cast to his features hadn’t dulled even over six hours after his orchestration of the Aequitas’s ruin.He’s weak.
She slanted a glance at Kadra and found a similar strain around his temples.They both are. This wasn’t a battle she could risk now with their audience. She caught Méherre’s eye, praying that the other woman could spirit them away quickly, but she had paled, staring at Noceo with pure loathing and something darker, raw.
Had they met before?
Verentia cleared her throat, indicating the sea of blue behind her. “If you don’t come willingly—”
“She won’t,” Kadra’s icy voice cut through hers. “If your vaunted gods ordained you to take her from me, then by all means,try. Take a step toward her. Test your faith against me.”
Power surged from him in a rush that sent the hairs at Sarai’s nape to full mast. The air around him seemed to seethe and glow. Verentia muttered a fearful prayer, shrieking of Dark Elsar, but what wholly, utterly stupefied Sarai was the large bone-white claw at the tip of Kadra’s left forefinger.
Her chest drew tight.Kadra, what did you do?
The soot-streaked faces of the crowd around them lost their tension in favor of awe, but a blue-robed wave pushed past them to advance toward Kadra.
Swords drew. The crowd surged. And she felt it then, a strange twist within the cavern of her chest that told her to make them quiet. To enmesh her hands in their eye sockets and crash their skulls together, break them apart. End this game of greed.
She didn’t know where she’d gotten a dagger from, but it was in her hands. She felt herself take a shaky step forward when Harion shoved her to the right.
“What in the Elsar’s names are you doing? Run!” he hissed, indicating Méherre’s figure by the Aequitas. The air split to reveal a thin road.
“She’s getting away!” Verentia shrieked, elbowing her own priests in an effort to reach Sarai.
She ran. Screams, light, bodies. She wanted to tear off her skin, force the world to a stop. Plague, riots, omens. She had nothing. She was saving no one. She wasrunning.
Then, someone started laughing.
Long, loud, and full of utter disdain, yet dulcet and so,soloud that the peals drowned out the fighting and the crowd. And she got her wish. The world quieted.
Mouths worked like bellows, parting and closing. Bodies went faint. Crimson wormed into the lines of Kadra’s hands as he slammed the hilt of his sword into a battling priest’s head. The laughter redoubled when a score of priests fell to their knees, scraping their hands over horror-struck faces. Verentia collapsed in a dead faint.
Slowly, as though manipulated by a strength that wasn’t her own, she followed their gazes north, past the tents, the Aequitas, up to the sky.
Where a black sun gleamed.
Her mouth parted, tongue frozen like the sludge in her veins.Not a sun.
A large black eye blinked over Edessa, the sclera entirely obscured.
And the sky was laughing.
Clarity struck him as their warped tangle of evidence and clues sorted into smooth web strands. Thousands dreaming of the same visions and the same doom. A power he had never heard of.Broad.
Hemorrhage. Pulverization of the head and brain. A mechanism of action that seemingly didn’t require the culprit’s presence.Vague.
Murders done by whitesleep in the north, by unrepentant victims of pain who had all had the same realization that they could. Beetles gone mad to feed on human flesh.Unearthly.
Then, Sarai. Dreaming of the Fall, dreaming ofhispast, eyes glazed even now.
There is someone here who shouldn’t be, Wrath had said.
Someone.
The corner of Kadra’s lips rose in an icy smile as the sky continued to laugh. Cassandane and Harion yelled their terror to more uncaring eyes blooming dark above them. The answer was so simple as to be absurd. The fools of the Elsarian Order had gotten it right after all.
