Chapter 31
Endu’s disguise was simple enough. A blue-and-white Aquunite robe adorned with the symbols of faith on the sleeves and neckline. It might not be able to fool a close inspection but it would do, especially with the high foot traffic in and out of Tellek patch.
Alzhi held her arm as they stepped out of the threads, and into the stream of people moving to and from the village. Red and gold coats mixed in with blue and white robes, as well as the red and brown of lower-ranked Sustained guards brought in to search for survivors.
However, the announcement had said there were none, and in his heart Alzhi knew it was true. This was a punishment delivered to Arico, for daring to speak out against them. The same would happen to anyone else foolish enough to listen to him. The Lord Ascendant had just sent a message as well: there would be no compromise. He would not give a single span of authority in this fight. It could only be victory, or death.
Remembering the Hauld’s order, Alzhi turned aside and headed west towards D’tor’s house. He only knew where it was by Arico’s description, but he’d never met her before. The idea of a dwarf being born to human parents was strange, and she’d no doubt suffered a great deal of abuse just for being short. Still, Alzhi had only ever thought of her as just another stra’tchi. He doubted he could afford to think of her in any other way, not since he’d started working for the Hauld.
Just as Arico had said, her home had been vandalized. A partial symbol had been painted on one wall of her home in white paint. Tentatively, Alzhi opened the door and headed inside. As he’d feared, she was there. Lying contorted on the ground in her own living room. It didn’t take him more than a glance to know that she was gone. Strangely, there were two wooden glasses on the table, and two clay bowls left out. She hadn’t been alone here.
He nodded to Endu, and they split up. She went into the kitchen while he examined the bedroom in the other direction. In his head, he reassured himself that as long as he didn’t touch any of the bodies, he would be fine. The Fever required at least some contact.
Endu apparently hadn’t found anything, and followed him into the bedroom after a bit. Alzhi was still just standing there, staring at the dwarf lying dead in bed. His body was contorted in a similar fashion to D’tor’s, lifeless eyes staring up at the ceiling.
“Another dwarf?” Endu said, clearly startled. She recovered quickly though, and moved closer to look at the body. “Do you know him?”
“It’s M’abor. The performer from Cynnik’s Vagabonds,” Alzhi answered faintly. “I saw him in a play, a few months ago in Barros patch. He was brilliant! The entire crowd cheered him at the end of it.”
“I guess D’tor felt the same way,” Endu said grimly. “Come on, let’s go on to the village. There’s nothing we can do for them now, and I need to examine a human body, not a dwarven one.”
Alzhi held out an arm to stop her. “Wait. We can’t just leave him like this.”
“Why not?” Endu asked, a bit callously. “At least he died happy. Ish. Well, at least he died in bed. There are a lot more out there who probably couldn’t say the same.”
“No, you don’t understand. M’abor isn’t…” Alzhi trailed off for a second. “M’abor wasn’t a navigator. That means someone else brought him here. Probably multiple times over. Whoever helped him was willing to defy the Council’s law against fraternizing with stra’tchi. You and I both know how dangerous that is. If those searchers out there find him here, whoever helped him will be in serious trouble. We have to get rid of the body. We’re right next to the edge here, so threading it should work.”
He moved to pick up the body, and then hesitated. “Is it safe… to touch him?”
Endu gave him a look of exaggerated patience laced with a small smile. “Mi’he, even if he did die from the Fever, he’s no longer contagious. The Fever can only survive in living hosts.”
Alzhi nodded, feeling his cheeks redden. He hastily lifted M’abor—who was thankfully still partially clothed—and then conveyed him over to the threads while Endu put away the extra dishes.
There. M’abor was gone, with no trace that he’d ever come here. Though Alzhi was willing to admit to himself, he’d done it as much for M’abor’s reputation as for the mystery navigator’s safety. The little performer had made a name for himself across the entire city, not just for being born a dwarf, but for taking that and turning it into an advantage on the stage.
From her expression, Endu still didn’t seem to care, but then she’d never seen him perform. And now she never would, which was yet another missed opportunity. Alzhi had hoped to take her to a play now and then, once the movement had succeeded.
Together they made their way downhill, towards the village itself. Even from a distance, they could see bodies littering the ground inside the village square. Fresh corpses, too, not yet stiff from death. Alzhi knew it had become common practice for each patch to report in daily. This must have started sometime last night, after the magistrate’s last report.
The bodies were messy, too. They had contorted as they died, just like M’abor and D’tor. Blood had also seeped from the mouths, ears, and eyes of each victim, much more so than the two back in that cabin. For some corpses, it had even come from fingertips and the skin itself. Endu didn’t seem surprised at their state, so Alzhi just assumed the same thing would have happened to Arico’s friend if she’d been human-sized. Some bodies had contorted so drastically that they’d snapped tendons and bones in the process. Despite himself, Alzhi felt a twinge of nausea. He was trained to deal with grim situations, but none of that had prepared him for the sheer number and state of these victims.
By comparison, Endu might as well have been walking through an empty field for all the concern she showed. Alzhi’s stomach twisted again, in a way that had nothing to do with the bodies. Before Satya’s death, Endu had been a gentle soul. Kind, attentive, supporting, and touchingly devoted to her friends and family. Afterwards, though… she had slowly become this matter-of-fact woman. She was still devoted to him and the boys, but now it was more of a fierceness of defense than a loving connection. All the things that had once shocked her, or frightened her: they no longer mattered. Nowadays, she could now stroll through a village filled with bodies with hardly a second glance.
Alzhi and Endu had sworn to get vengeance together, on the people responsible for Satya’s death, but sometimes he wondered if even revenge would bring back the gentle, radiant woman she’d once been.
She gave a tiny hand signal, indicating one of the mid-sized houses, and they quietly stepped inside. Thankfully there was only one body in here: a middle-aged woman collapsed on the floor. Alzhi locked the door while Endu lifted the woman’s body onto the dining room table and tore open her tunic to get a look at her veins. Alzhi stood by the window, looking out for anyone who might approach. “Did you know her?” He asked quietly over his shoulder.
“Her name was Ianek,” Endu responded evenly, pulling out a sharp knife and cutting into the chest of the corpse. “She used to babysit Veles. She played games with him and Balter to pass the time while I was out tending to people.”
Alzhi could detect no regret in his wife’s voice. No pain from cutting open a woman she’d once called a friend. It was true, he had never been raised in a community like this one—before he’d married Endu, the Ascendant Guard had been his entire life. Still, he had to wonder just how close the two of them had been before Endu had… gone away.
“What I don’t understand is why, though,” Endu continued, as if speaking to herself. Blood oozed out from under her knife, as she laboriously spread the ribs away from each other, breaking them one by one. “I mean, we know the Sustained did this, but why bother poisoning people or inflicting a long-dead disease on them, when they could just line them up and shoot them? They control all information coming from this patch and they’re busy threading the bodies right now, so why bother with the charade at all?”
“Because not all Sustained are the same,” Alzhi reminded her grimly. “I’ve met more than a few who would be just as horrified by the truth as we are. The Council and the penets had to put on a show, not just for the stra’tchi but for their own people as well. It’s like Arico said: they had to make a liar out of him. For their own sakes.”
“Ah-ha!” Endu interrupted him, with the first note of excitement (or any real emotion, for that matter), he’d heard from her all day. “There it is!”
He abandoned his place near the window. “You found something?” He tried not to wince at the bloody mess that was once Ianek.
“Here,” she lifted an organ out of the body and held it up to him. “See that discoloration there? The Blood Fever killed by overheating the body, causing blood to thin to the point where it came out the nose and ears and eyes. It caused significant damage to all internal organs, but this heart is damaged in a very different way. Those lines there,” she turned it around and he could see black trails on the underside, “those are new. And I think I know what caused them.”
“Some kind of poison?”
She nodded emphatically. “A rare one, too. The only poison I know of that could duplicate the effects of the Fever this closely would be nethrit root. It was probably delivered in the water supply. That explains why none of these people were able to call for help. The nethrit in the water wouldn’t be fatal at first, but it would have built up in their systems until they were too sick to even move. Then the navigators who delivered the poison could walk through the village and finish off anyone who was still alive.” She sighed. “Still, whoever did this would need a lot of it to poison this many people. I guess that’s why they didn’t do something like this the day after the Laentana. They’d need weeks or months to grow this much nethrit and refine it.”
“Would the poison kill animals the same way? I heard that animals died of the Fever as well.”
Endu frowned at the change in topic. “Most animals, yes. Chickens and other birds might take longer to die. Why do you ask?”
“It’s nothing, really. There’s just something else Arico asked me to check on, if it turned out to be poison after all.” Alzhi glanced back out the window. The Council had apothecaries of their own who might be able to tell the difference as Endu had, but somehow he doubted any of them had been sent here. The guards would just thread the bodies and call it a day.
Speaking of whom, it wouldn’t be long before they came here too. He grabbed the edges of the tablecloth. “We need to go. Get cleaned up, while I wrap her tightly so no one can see she’s been cut into. Regardless of my rank or your disguise, that would draw attention to us. They might start asking questions I can’t answer.”
It took the tablecloth and several bedsheets actually, to wrap up the body and the blood to his satisfaction. With Endu’s help, he laboriously carried the body up the hill to where the others were being threaded.
Usually the threading of a body was a ceremonial affair, just like the funerals their ancestors had held in ages past. Here though, there was no ceremony. No dignity, no moments of reflection. Just people being disposed of in the most convenient way possible. It was no different than how he’d destroyed M’abor’s body, but at least that had been for a purpose. To these people, it was just another chore. After they placed her on the ground, one of the Ascendant guards touched Ianek’s body and it disappeared right into the threads. Alzhi caught Endu’s eye and could tell she was thinking along the same lines he was. These people deserved better—far better than this.
-.-
Arico was exhausted. Merely arranging this meeting had taken a lot out of him, given that the patches were all over the city and couldn’t communicate with each other. Even with the methods he’d shown them over the past weeks.
Then Jaas had been kidnapped, or whatever it was that had happened to her. He still couldn’t wrap his head around it. Why wouldn’t she tell him what was going on? He’d never kept anything from her, certainly not when it came to the cause.
With a twinge of guilt, he realized that wasn’t entirely true. He could have told her about the prophecies on day one if he’d wanted. There were also a few other things about his past that he could share with her, things she’d probably want to know.
And then there had been this poisoning! He’d strongly considered keeping her in the dark about that as well. After confirming what had really happened to his friends, Alzhi and Endu had returned here. Alzhi had immediately returned to his undercover work, but he’d given Arico the bad news about D’tor first. For once her isolation hadn’t been a boon to her. How many more blows could they keep taking?
Despite his grief over Tellek patch, and his outrage over it, Arico’s thoughts kept sliding back to Jaas’ and Sabra’s disappearance. Arico had been born to this role. He’d been trained and conditioned for it his entire life, because he’d been born a navigator… as well as for other reasons he couldn’t even admit to himself just yet. Jaas had just been dropped into this situation, though, without any warning at all. Was it any wonder she might not be as dedicated to the cause? He wanted to trust her, but with stakes as high as these… he wasn’t sure he could. Mercifully, she wasn’t here right now. He really didn’t need the distraction.
Back to business. He gave the accommodations one final sweep before heading out to the threads. They were crude, but should be good enough for an informal meeting like this one. Most of the people who’d agreed to meet had refused to go to one of their neighbors’ patches. There was a lot of distrust among them, and not just stemming from the Ona tournaments each one had won and lost.
Each patch had its own way of doing things. They all had their own customs, philosophies… dialects. Everyone in Patchwork spoke Vasrah, but over the centuries the language had changed for each individual patch, especially the stra’tchi ones. Arico could understand them, but it took effort. Jaas was a different matter: she’d navigated the different speech patterns as easily as he moved through the threads. If he needed her to broker an agreement between just these twelve patches, how in Aquun’s name was he supposed to do the same for the rest of them without her? Shaking his head, Arico tried to focus on the matters at hand.
At least things had worked out so far. Mayors and Bosses alike had eventually agreed to meet here at Atsekka patch, the closest thing in the city to a neutral location. That was probably because it was full of abandoned old-city houses that were really of value to no one. Ancient crumbling buildings filled up every corner of the patch, with deteriorating streets as their only boundaries.
That would also make it more difficult for anyone to spy on the meeting. Arico knew that there were Ascendant Guards who’d been assigned as watchers out there, in places all over the city. Fortunately they didn’t have the numbers to watch everywhere all at once. Thanks to Alzhi, the movement’s few navigators had been able to move around unnoticed so far.
Arico hoped their luck held up.
All twelve patch leaders and their aides knew where to be in their own patches, and when. It took only seconds for him to snag them, two by two, and deposit them back in Atsekka patch. They responded predictably. Because the only navigating they’d ever done had been to and from New Day celebrations, they’d never spent any time actually inside the threads themselves. Just like Jaas had at first, they took it in with awe as they examined the empty white space between patches. Arico didn’t bother to change his form from the kingfisher he usually portrayed. It wasn’t like he was trying to keep anything from these people. Just the opposite, in fact.
He’d brought Endu in first, to serve as a welcoming party for the attendees. She ushered them away from the threads as they arrived, and when he’d retrieved the last of them, led the way to the meeting place.
It wasn’t much to look at, but it made up for that by being more secure. The squat one-story building was heavily built with reinforced walls, and he’d surrounded it with improvised traps as a sort of warning system. Arico had read in the old records that this building had once been a bank vault in old Vasiriah. There was only one entrance on the street level, and Atsekka patch had no sewer access, so they could have at least relative safety inside.
Arico was just glad the dwarves had finished their ‘renovations’ in time for this meeting. They’d dug dozens of tunnels in patches all over the city, but that was all underground, and relatively safe. In this case, they had been forced out into the open for short periods of time. It was a violation of the peace treaty keeping them safe, but the Hauld had ordered them to go ahead with it anyway. That risk itself underscored just how much importance the Hauld was placing on this meeting.
As for comfort, Endu had done what she could. Chairs specially made for human size had been brought in from the Enclave, and the long stone table in the middle of the large room was covered with a woven tablecloth and dotted with baskets of fruit. The smoke from any kind of fire would have been a dead giveaway, so she’d sealed off the old fireplace to keep in the heat, and lit candles in strategic places through the room. Arico smiled. Leave it to Endu to know just how to set people at ease. Part of a healer’s gift, no doubt.
When they had all gathered and been seated, he finally took his place at one end of the table. “Thank you all for agreeing to come here. I hope we’ll all find the risk to be worth it,” he began quietly, in the morning gloom.
After everyone had been introduced, Arico deemed it was time to give them the bad news. He pulled out the announcement parchment Alzhi had brought him, and read it aloud. Predictably, a noise of dismay rounded the table as Arico finished it. He knew how they felt, and he’d had more than a day to adjust to the news. But they needed to know, if they were to make an informed decision about where to go from here.
He quickly raised a hand to quiet them. “Part of this is true. Tellek patch has been wiped out. The rest of it is a lie, though. It wasn’t the Blood Fever that did this—no one has contracted the Fever in centuries. If you doubt that, just remember that over the past two weeks I’ve visited each and every one of your patches and spent many hours talking to your people. Up close and personal with many of them. If I really was a carrier, then at least some of your patches would be feeling the effects of the disease by now. But since this came as a surprise to you, I’ll assume your people are still healthy and whole.”
He gave them a moment to think about that, and they exchanged glances down the table. They might take his words at face value, but the Fever had been so devastating… killed so many people. Even to this day the mere mention of it was enough to bring back that same paralyzing fear. Arico took a breath and continued, hoping to break up that fear with more information.
“No, the Council knew I was from Tellek patch. My friends were poisoned like vermin just because they happened to be from there, too.” He shook his head. “I don’t expect you to take my word for this. That’s why I asked each of you to bring an apothecary with you. If two of you and your healers will agree to come with me to… what’s left of Tellek patch, I’ll show you that it wasn’t the Fever. I ask that you come with me, as neutral witnesses.”
The leaders exchanged glances and murmurs across the table. Some of them—those who’d shown the greatest reluctance to come here—looked vindicated in their suspicions, and shook their heads at him, but eventually two different leaders volunteered. Arico breathed a careful sigh of relief. One of them was Drakos Bloodeye, his old ‘friend’ from the Deathwatch patch, and the other was Mayor Aldwith from Sakkas patch. One leader who was feared, and another who was trusted. That should make things easier.
The others stayed behind to discuss this latest development while Arico led Endu, the patch leaders, and their apothecary assistants to the threads and joined hands with them. A minute later he was back home again. It was late in the evening and the sun had just set, but he could still see the outline of their old cabin, abandoned now for several weeks.
“Come on,” he said quietly. “I have a friend covering for us from within the Ascendants, but we can’t spend long here without being noticed.”
Instead of the cabin, he led them to the barn behind it. The old floorboards were just as creaky as ever, and the stalls were empty. No sound—not even birds, could be heard from the nearby village.
Choking back his memories, Arico slowly lifted a loose board covering a root cellar in the back of the barn. She had always come here when she was sick or injured, probably taking comfort from the close quarters. Sure enough, Tula was inside, curled up in her old spot under the floor.
“I want you all to witness that we found her here, this way, before we take her back for testing,” he said firmly. It was important that everyone knew the goat’s body hadn’t been disturbed. He waited for them to agree before nodding to Endu. She and the apothecary from Deathwatch patch, Velya, carefully pulled Tula’s body from the earth and wrapped it up in a white cloth.
