34. Sepulcrum

sepulcrum ~ī, n.

1. a grave, burial place

Jeria messages me in the morning. She’s running a search and decryption on the data the module collected from Dravik’s vis. It should be done in two days. I didn’t tell her about the brain images I found. I don’t know what they mean, but I know they were mine. I rub my collarbone scar, the flesh tight and sore as I walk down to the breakfast table. Dravik is at the table, sipping a cup of tea and reading his paper. He greets me warmly.

“Good morning, Synali.”

I guide Quilliam’s now-healed hand out of the way and pour my own tea. “You didn’t tell me your mother overloaded in Heavenbreaker.”

Dravik’s eyes cut to Quilliam, who shrinks against the wall as if trying to disappear. The prince recovers with a dimmer grin. “I hope that does not dissuade you from continuing to ride.”

“Is she still alive? In that hospital ward with Sevrith?”

His shaking hand hurriedly replaces the teacup in its saucer. “Yes.”

“You said they’re not as gone as we think.” I push at the break in his armor. “Does that mean you think they’ll wake up? Is that why you’re doing this, to save her—”

“You wouldn’t happen to have rummaged in my things yesterday, would you?” The prince’s cut-off burns cold. He knows I know he knows the answer already.

I fire back, “What are you doing to my brain? Sevrith’s chart—”

“It’s not what I am doing to you,” he counters instantly. “But rather what you are doing to yourself by continuing to ride.”

A pit in my stomach clenches. “The more we ride, the more the nerve fluid builds up, Rax said—”

“Rax?” Dravik laughs pointedly. “Whyever are you spending leisure time with the enemy, Synali?”

“He’s the only one who’s given me answers so far.”

“Oh yes, many answers—in the form of death. Do you think Hauteclare won’t notice you lingering around him and take advantage of that? It would be a simple matter to bribe him into poisoning you—or to load him with something to kill you without his knowledge.”

“I told you,” I grit out. “I can take care of myself—”

He snarls for the first time I’ve ever heard—deeper, stronger, more terrifying than my own could ever be. “And I cannot protect you if you give them your weaknesses on a silver platter.”

The lights of the manse choose this ripe moment to flicker out. Quilliam sniffs softly, handkerchief to nose, and sinks farther against the wall, Luna pacing nervously between Dravik and me.

“He’s not my weakness,” I manage to force out. “He’s a tool.”

“I have given you all the tools you need.”

“But none of the instruction manuals.”

The anger in Dravik’s eyes slides closed behind some iron door. “You will not see that Velrayd boy any longer.”

“You’re not my father,” I snarl back. I’m ready for him to cross the length of the table and hit me across the face. Do it. Do it like all the rest.

After a long moment, the prince merely stands.

“You’re right. I’m not your father.” My triumph flares and dies in the same instant. He looks so much older, grayer, more tired as he pulls his coat on. “If I give you answers, will you refrain from seeing him?”

My nod is instant, thoughtless.

He leads me to the hovercarriage, my steps staggered behind—I’m still ready for him to lash out. We sit across from each other in the uncomfortable silence, Dravik watching his cane and me watching my vis, the news scrolling slow: CARGO VESSEL H.R.M.S. ENDURANCE REMAINS MISSING. Soon, the smell becomes ash. The sight becomes a black tower looming halfway between the noble spire and the common ring. I stare at it out the hovercarriage window as we circle high above.

“Why are we at a charnel tower?”

“There are answers here. Your next opponent is from House Westriani—you remember them from the banquet. They run the charnel tower system for the entire Station.”

“And I’m here to have a bit of pleasant tea with them, I suppose.”

A mirthless smile pulls at the prince’s lips. “Your anger is sorely mishandled, but your sense of humor is always intact.”

I can’t help my soft laugh, and the tension over us seems to lift slightly. Our carriage alights not on the polished reception platform but at the foot of the tower, behind the steel rise of a maintenance bunker. Dravik taps his vis but doesn’t get out.

“My associate will be here shortly to show us inside.”

The same associate who cut up Palissa Trask-Hauteclare? No—someone different every time would be the cleanest way to do things, and Dravik is nothing if not clean. We wait. I think. And then I think aloud.

“Queen Astrix—you see her, don’t you? That’s who you talk to. Who you look at.”

There’s quiet, the hovercarriage humming below us and the charnel tower spewing smoke above us. He’s unreadable and then very suddenly readable: a sagging of his shoulders.

“I don’t know what I see. I’m mad, remember?”

“But—”

“Please, Synali, stop asking about her. It hurts. Surely you understand why.”

Of course I understand. I just thought—he’s older. As far removed from the event as he is…I thought—hoped—time had healed it for him. That it would heal for me. But a girl who will die after she wins the Supernova Cup has no time to heal, does she? She dies with her wounds still open.

A short woman in a work tunic and bonnet emerges then from the bunker, smiling thinly at the prince and not at all at me. The prince gets out of the carriage neatly, and I follow. The woman curtsies. “We should hurry, sir. The last shipment is about to leave.”

Dravik nods. “Lead the way.”

We follow her inside; old steel walls, the white lights of someplace clinical, the smell of rust. The woman leads us swiftly down long and winding hallways, and I can’t help but notice the distinct lack of security—no guards, no camera drones. Always? Or just for us? A priest passes in full regalia, a projection scepter glowing orange in his hand. He bows to us, touching his forehead. The woman bows back. Dravik smiles. I watch. Whatever this place is, the church clearly sanctions it.

And then we walk into the room the priest just left.

It’s less of a room and more of a cavern kept blisteringly cold. Ventilation fans roar dully, stacks of metal containers the size of tramcars packed in floor-to-ceiling—a cavern kept full. Thin pathways twist between the containers, people in medical scrubs with vis clipboards circling endlessly. They murmur, confer with one another, open and close the containers to check inside. A flash of light into one container catches skin—long, glittering frozen. Limbs.

My feet stop.

“You seem to be flush this week,” the prince says amiably. The woman’s grin is resigned.

“Yes; tourney violence is always a seasonal tribulation for us. You can imagine how bad it gets during the Supernova Cup—syphilis, alcohol poisoning, dust overdoses, brawl wounds… The Low Warders succumb to their vices readily, it seems.”

My blood boils at the way she says it. I make it one step forward—Dravik’s deceptively strong arm juts over my chest.

“Have they been branded for transport yet?” he asks, smile so big it slits his eyes.

“We’re marking the last few batches, yes”—the woman looks at me warily—“then they’ll be ready for shipping.”

My mind keels—thousands of bodies must be in here. Thousands, all from Low Ward—all being shipped somewhere else. Not burned like they should be, not burned out of respect like we believe is happening. Another container slots open—torsos with their heads all missing heads all missing heads all missing and I can’t breathe anymore. The urns in the charnel towers, the urns people visit to see their loved ones… The woman points at a container being projection-etched by a drone; two House sigils side by side in bright, arrogant color. One is orange and charcoal gray—a crow with two heads—and the other is an unmistakable dragon in purple and gold. Westriani and…Ressinimus.

Dravik keeps his eyes on the woman. “Am I right in assuming these containers are for the king’s garden?”

“Yes. We ship to the various other House gardens on weekdays, but Saturday is the king’s shipment.” She pauses judiciously. “They’ve been sanitized, of course.”

“Of course,” Dravik agrees with a chuckle.

My fingers claw in Dravik’s sleeve. The green lawns of every noble manse I’ve seen, the beautiful flowers, the tall white trees I marveled at—the grass at the banquet below my bare feet. Below their gilded feet are people. They don’t burn them. They use them. Mother’s urn… Mother is…

“Ho! Who let these rats sneak in?” A voice pierces like a proud trumpet as a familiar man appears—a blacklight halo on his forehead, hair like fire, my insides on fire. Olric. He hasn’t changed since the banquet where he almost strangled me. His jaw is still like rock, his rider muscles more evident in a bejeweled jumpsuit.

“I’m terribly sorry about this, Sir Olric.” Dravik bows to him. “But my rider here was quite eager to meet you again before your match tomorrow.”

I’m the excuse. Olric’s fire brows narrow on me; my ice eyes narrow on him.

“And why’s that?” he asks with his brass voice.

“Oh, I don’t know”—I clench my teeth—“but victory doesn’t taste as sweet without seeing the loser’s face first.”

A flicker moves in his jaw like an instinct to bite. Every gut feeling in me screams to keep eyes on him no matter what—if I look away, he’ll strike. His family does this—orchestrates it all. His family gave my mother’s body to the nobles to use as fertilizer.

Olric’s laugh never reaches his eyes as he jerks his thumb to the containers.

“Victory? A bastard like you doesn’t win. You fail. You bleed. You rot. When I kill you tomorrow in our match—slip up and hit too hard—that’s where I’ll put you. Stick my lance in your head and your head in a nice little container.”

The woman at his side looks nervous. My nails in Dravik’s arm nearly pierce cloth. The prince’s unmovable smile suddenly carves bigger.

“It seems we’ve overstayed our welcome, Sir Olric. We will infringe on you no longer—good day.”

Olric breaks faster than we do, his hand shooting out like a tungsten vice on my forearm, palm hot all over, and my body goes cold like the banquet again, my throat aching; he could crush me, break my arm as easy as breathing, just like he tried to crush my windpipe. Dravik’s fingers on his cane tighten imperceptibly, but Olric rips me forward and I have no choice.

Forward.

I stagger, hard and unforgiving and a familiar thing from men; I can smell the corpses on him. Stay still, no flinching—none of them deserve your fear. Olric uncaps a blacklight marker and slashes it across my arm: a signature. A mark. A brand on a piece of meat. His grin is all jaw, all teeth.

“My autograph. Forgot to give it to you last time.”

Only then does he allow me to rip away. Dravik’s sudden hand on my back guides me. The hall echoes my numb footsteps, the door to the corpse cavern closing behind us. I scrub at the blacklight ink frantically with my other sleeve, but it doesn’t budge.

“The urns in the charnel houses—” I blurt.

“Filled with animal ashes,” the prince answers softly.

I was right, but it’s a hollow rightness. “How many people know about this?”

“Just a few: the leaders of House Westriani; their employees, kept on tight leashes; the head gardeners of each House estate; the church’s archbishops. And Father, of course.”

His father the king. The yellow grasses, the withered trees of Moonlight’s End I wake up to every day… He’s refused the fertilizer. That’s why his garden is dying.

“The Mid Ward farms, the parks—”

“Mid Ward is self-sustaining. The containers are only for noble gardens.”

Breathe in coal, breathe out fire. “They had no heads.”

Dravik smiles joylessly. “Curious, isn’t it? Those are the only containers I’ve never been able to track—they’re very thorough about wiping the transfer records of that particular body part.”

“What do they do with them?”

“My best guess is that they bring them somewhere below the artificial ocean.”

“Why?”

The prince opens the door, pale sunlight and the acrid smell of char wafting in. Those ridiculous Beldeaux rumors I heard about the king feeding urchins to a monster beneath the noble spire come flooding back—it can’t be. At the very bottom of the noble spire is…

The artificial ocean.

But what’s beneath that? There shouldn’t be anything—just exotic fish and such. Why would they want the heads? For the skull? The brains? The holes in my brain, in Sevrith’s, in every rider’s… The silence whirls and howls around me, and then the prince breaks it.

“I hope this is a reminder, Synali.”

A reminder—the nobles kill us. A reminder—they use our bodies like cattle, like fertilizer, like fuel. A reminder—the nobles are nobles, and we are something else. A new burn licks at my chest, flames on old scorch marks reigniting older ash.

“Consider me reminded, Your Highness.”

Rax pings me. I do not open it.

Olric’s autograph does not wash off my arm. But it does scrape off.

Luna’s whine echoes in the marble bathroom. I wrap gauze around the bleeding and pick the robot-dog up. It lets me for the first time, and I bring it to the bed and fall asleep with it in my wounded arms, the metal becoming slowly warmer against my body.

Heavenbreaker’s high, soft voice echoes in my mind, humming a song I know—a lullaby Mother used to sing. She made it up. It’s a lullaby the steed couldn’t know unless it was once her, or me…or unless it has seen my memories, too.

Fear tries to grab hold of me, but the notes wash me clean.