CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Mikael sprang up and turned to face the priest, but the man was gone again. The river flowed by in its hurry to get down into the city, carrying Ramanet away.

“I was waiting for you to get out of my way, Mr. Lee.” A dozen feet back from the shore, Elisabet rose from a crouch, her pistol in her hand. She had managed to don her jacket somehow and had it almost completely buttoned. She dug a cartridge out of a pocket and calmly reloaded. “The body, Mr. Lee,” she said. “I’ll watch the girl.”

Under her guard, Mikael stood and surveyed the river. Already yards downstream, a pale shape floated on the surface of the water. It was only a matter of time until the air buoying the body escaped and it sank.

Mikael ran along the bank until he could see the body more clearly. It snagged on something under the water and stalled in its passage. Mikael waded out and grabbed an arm.

He hauled the body out of the water and turned it over on the bank. Ramanet’s dark eyes gazed up at the cloudy sky, all his elegance gone. His mouth hung slackly open. A small hole, almost centered on his forehead, oozed dark blood. Another bullet had torn through his shoulder. Mikael guessed that was his own lousy shot.

Mikael stared at the dead man for a second, thinking that Ramanet had been right in a way. Everything they’d attempted had failed because of Elisabet. Despite everything he had done, all the bloodshed, now he was just another corpse on the bank of the river.

He checked one last time to make certain the man was dead, hoisted the body over one shoulder, and carried it up to the path where Elisabet and Shironne waited for him. He wasn’t certain which of the two was holding the other up.

He laid Ramanet’s body on the ground at Elisabet’s feet. Shironne slipped out of Elisabet’s grasp and knelt next to the body. Realizing what she intended, Mikael squatted across from her. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“The longer I wait, the more the memories will fade. I didn’t think to look for it before.” She caught her lower lip between her teeth, looking exhausted. “If he knows how to save Kai . . .”

Mikael took her hand and laid it against the dead man’s cheek.

•   •   •

Shironne felt herself falling through Ramanet’s mind, as if the shelves that had held everything in place had failed, falling haphazardly about like a ruined library. This was death, the loss of control of everything that made up one’s mind.

But she found what she was looking for, the years-ago memory of Gajaya Ramanet watching his father sacrificing on the bank of the river. The centenary sacrifices—a hundred dead, one for every promised year of power. And then the shooting started. He’d seen his uncles, his cousins, cut down by an unseen army. When his father fell, he knew they’d failed, and he fled back across the river.

After that failure, he needed something special to catapult him into a position of power. Nothing came until the day he was asked to question a Larossan spy, and he found that elusive lever. The spy had seen scars whose pattern Gajaya remembered all too well.

And the woman who bore them could only be one who’d escaped the death his clan had spread along the border. She was a marksman, with an old rifle. That woman was why his father had died in shame on the bank of the Sorianas River.

Shironne sat down among the disordered books, searching through them for the truth of why Ramanet had pursued this path of death. She found a thousand motives written in those pages, some strong and others pallid, a maze of self-deceit and frustration that led back to the simple fact that his family name had been ruined, and this was his way of trying to mend it.

And finding a missing Ramanet girl—one who had to be descended from Nyassa, his cousin who’d shirked her duty and fled across the river to escape an unwanted marriage—that had to be a sign that his god approved.

Shironne set aside the man’s book of his god, a book that was mostly a book about himself. Her own perception of the true god probably couldn’t stand too close an examination, something she should consider later.

She looked instead for his more recent decision, whom to kill and when, and tucked that information away within the pages of one of her own books so she would remember it for the colonel. She found a book with everything Ramanet knew of the poison he’d used on Kai, what he’d perceived as an improvement on his father’s plans. Snail poison, imported from the drowning islands far to the south.

That was what she’d come after, wasn’t it?

Then she looked into his book that delineated everything he knew about his powers, the history of his clan, and how they’d used their powers through the centuries. It was likely half legend and half lies, but she took that information and hid it deep inside, to view someday when she felt more ready than she did now. She wasn’t sure that day would ever come.

For a time she simply remained there in his dead mind, watching it crumble about her, the wood of the shelves rotting and collapsing. It was tempting to stay there to watch it all crumble down until it was dust and, after a few days, was nothing. But she pulled away, imagining that she wrapped her hand around her focus, and threw herself back into the real world, where Mikael waited and worried.

Shironne drew her hand from the cooling flesh under it. “I’m done.”

•   •   •

“Why are you not injured?” Deborah asked Mikael in a vexed tone. “Usually you show up with blood all over your face, dear.”

Three coaches had arrived by that time, dispatched from the fortress as soon as the sentries received the message Mikael had relayed via the cab driver. A dozen lanterns cast a glow about the area, illuminating a bustle of activity. Sentries wrapped the three priests’ bodies under the watchful eye of the Family’s battle master. Mikael directed him to where he’d left the driver whose nose he’d broken, uncertain whether the man was alive or not. He was simply too tired to care.

The doctor had patched up Elisabet first, judging her the worst off. Deborah crouched next to Shironne now, bandaging her cut ankle. Shironne sat mute under the doctor’s ministrations, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She’d been quiet since her foray into the priest’s mind, not ready yet to tell Mikael all she’d learned. Mikael thought he understood; he never told anyone everything about his dreams. It was too personal.

“Is Kai going to be all right?” Mikael asked.

“We’re not certain,” Deborah said. “Jakob is with him.”

“Shironne says you have to keep him breathing,” he told her. “If he keeps breathing, he should live.”

“I suspected that might be the case, but I’m glad to have it confirmed, dear.” Deborah used a clip to secure the bandage about Shironne’s ankle. “We have ways to do that. Kai’s tough.”

“You must not have wanted to leave him.”

She licked her lips. “His father and sister are with him, and all the twenty-fours want to sit with him. They don’t need me there. At least here I can be doing something.”

Mikael spotted Colonel Cerradine emerging from his own carriage. Cerradine grimly surveyed the bodies now laid out on the ground. As Mikael came near, he flicked a blanket back over the face of the priest, Ramanet.

“Is this him? Are we sure?” Cerradine asked, frowning.

“Yes, sir.” Mikael squatted down across from him. “Shironne read his memories, sir, but she’s really too tired to—”

“Is she hurt?” Cerradine interrupted.

“She cut her ankle,” Mikael told him. “She’ll be fine.”

He shook his head. “Her mother is going to kill me,” he muttered. “Did she find out why he . . . why David’s dead?”

“Ask her later, sir, not now. She’s done too much already.” Past wanting to argue, Mikael headed back to the coach.

Inside, Elisabet leaned against the bolsters, Deborah next to her. Elisabet had a mild concussion after all. Mikael had no fear that she wouldn’t survive it. What did scare him was learning that Elisabet had shot past his head when she couldn’t even focus her eyes properly.

Shironne waited for him next to the coach, sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees. In the light of the lanterns, she looked half-asleep already. Some people did that—fell asleep after a crisis. Mikael reached down, helped her up, and lifted her into the coach. He settled next to her across from Deborah. Shironne’s fingers wrapped around his, and her head drooped against his shoulder.

“I think it would be wise to get you cleaned up before your mother sees you, Miss Anjir,” Deborah told her.

“Yes, ma’am,” Shironne said, her eyes drifting shut.

Mikael put his arm around her, only to keep her from falling off the seat. He felt too worn and filthy to sleep. Shironne, evidently, did not.