Vakrez stepped past Lazmet and, avoiding Akos’s eyes, put an arm across Akos’s back. Akos was startled by how strong Vakrez was, the older man lifting him almost to his toes as they walked together on the narrow stairs. The wind wailed so loud Akos couldn’t have heard him if he had whispered right in his ear, so the two men climbed in silence, Vakrez pausing every time he noticed Akos’s breaths getting labored.
After a while, the steps got bigger and flatter, cutting a winding path into the mountainside. They were made for oracles, not athletes, after all.
The sun was setting, and the snow sparkled in the light, glinting as it blew across the stone. It was a simple enough sight, and one Akos had seen thousands of times, growing up. But he’d never loved it as much as he did then, at the helm of a group of invading soldiers, on the verge of murder.
It was over too soon. They made it to the top, where a few sparse trees covered their approach, bent and curled from the constant wind. Akos had to stop at the top step, and Lazmet waved the others toward the door as Vakrez held him upright.
He was just standing on his own again when Vakrez pivoted, his broad frame shielding Akos from Lazmet’s view.
“Whoa,” Vakrez said, “get your legs under you, boy.”
And he hiked up some of Akos’s layers, shoving a blade under the waistband of Akos’s pants and covering the handle with a sweater.
“Just in case,” Vakrez said so quietly it was almost lost to the wind.
Akos didn’t intend to use a blade, but he appreciated the gesture regardless.
The smell of Hessan incense nearly made Akos fall apart. It was herbal—almost like the medicine his mom had force-fed him for his chronic cough when he was a kid, but not quite—and spicy, stinging his nose once it wasn’t numb from the cold anymore. It smelled like a dozen Bloomings, and handfuls of after-school visits spent waiting for Sifa to be done meeting with someone in the Hall of Prophecy, and afternoons of snickering at the youngest oblates, who stared at Eijeh and blushed right after he grew from a child to a teenager. It smelled like home.
Akos joined the soldiers in shedding some of his outer layers, though he was careful to protect the blade Vakrez had given him every time he raised his arms. He wound up in just one sweater, dark blue and soft, and kept his multiple pairs of socks on. They were keeping his too-large boots where they were. Sweat dotted the back of his neck; he felt warm air on it when he took off his hat. His legs still felt like jelly from the climb, or maybe that was anticipation of what was next.
“You’ll want to disable the power in the building before you do anything else,” he said to Lazmet. “There’s the main power source and a backup generator. Take the bulk of your soldiers to the main source, it’s on the other side of the building and you’ll run into temple guards that way. The backup generator is close, and nobody guards it.”
He took out the crude map he’d drawn of the temple—just the path from the back door to the maintenance room in the basement was marked on it—and stuffed it into Lazmet’s hand.
“You only labeled one of those two on here,” Lazmet said, looking the map over.
“Yeah,” Akos said. “I have to keep some things back, or I can’t hold you to your end of the deal. I’ll take you to the backup generator myself.”
He wasn’t surprised when Lazmet didn’t get angry. That would have been a normal response—you get in a person’s way at a crucial moment, and they get angry. But Lazmet wasn’t normal. He wanted his world to interest him. And Akos thinking two steps ahead clearly did.
This must have been how he crafted Ryzek, Akos thought. His disapproval came in the form of horror after horror, eyeballs in jars and people lying on their own blades. But when a person did finally make him proud, even if the reason disgusted them, they wanted to do it again. And again. And again.
“Commander Noavek, you’ll take the platoon to the main power source. You and you—” He pointed to two soldiers—one dark-skinned, his coarse hair pulled back, and the other slim and yellow-haired, her skin almost as pale as Akos’s. “You’ll come with us.”
It wouldn’t be easy to get this done with two soldiers with them, Akos knew, but there was nothing he could do about it, no way he could insist that Lazmet come with him alone without making the man suspicious. If he had to get them all killed, he would. He had already gone crashing through his own ethics in every possible way. What was another mark on his arm?
The cool metal of Vakrez’s blade pressed to Akos’s back as he walked. He led the small group down a stone hallway, past the memorial of oracles past, where a long line of names were etched into a flat slab of stone. His mother wouldn’t write her own until she foresaw her own death, which was the curse all oracles had to bear.
At the end of the hallway was a lantern that glowed faint pink, the result of faded hushflower powder. He turned right there, guiding them away from the Hall of Prophecy. He thought it was safe, leading them through the dormitories of the oblates who lived at the temple, but he had miscalculated—at the end of the row of doors was a young woman with her hair piled high on her head, yawning as she tugged her sweater back over her shoulder.
Their eyes met. Akos shook his head, but he was too late—Lazmet had already seen her.
“Don’t let her run,” he said, sounding bored.
The yellow-haired soldier streaked past Akos with her blade outstretched, black strings of current wrapped around her clenched fist. She thrust with one arm and caught the girl with the other. A sick gurgling sound came out of her mouth, a scream aborted before it could even take shape.
Akos shuddered.
Tell me your mission, he repeated to himself as he tasted bile.
To kill Lazmet Noavek.
“Stay here,” Lazmet said to the soldier in a quiet voice. “Make sure she doesn’t make noise. And that no one else interferes.”
Swallowing hard, Akos kept going, past the girl, wheezing now with what was left of her life, and the soldier, wiping her bloody blade on the seat of her pants.
It was a clear night, so the moon, still rising to its full height, glowed through the narrow windows they passed. There were still scars in the stone walls from the Shotet siege that happened before Akos was born. He remembered running his fingers over them when he was a kid, stretching high over his head to touch the violence he hadn’t yet seen.
That violence lived in his blood, not because he was a Shotet, but because he was a Noavek. The great-grandfather who had been a mediocre blacksmith and a vicious killer. The grandmother who had murdered her own siblings. The father who put a vise around the city of Voa. The brother who twisted and warped Eijeh.
It would end here. Now.
Akos reached the door he was looking for, had been looking for since they first landed. It didn’t lead to a backup generator. There was no backup generator for the temple, a fact that had caused trouble during more than one snowstorm, forcing them to host a small pack of oblates in their house until the wind died down.
No, this door led to the courtyard where the hushflowers grew. A small field of deadly poison, right there in the temple.
Akos opened it, gesturing Lazmet inside.
“After you,” he said.
Akos stepped in front of the soldier before he could follow Lazmet into the courtyard, bringing the door swinging behind him. The move had surprised the man; he didn’t even object as Akos slammed the door between them, and turned the bolt so he couldn’t get in.
“If your intention was to trick me into poisoning myself, your timing is off,” Lazmet said.
Akos turned. The hushflowers—the ones he had been counting on to make this easier, their poison blooms capable of felling Lazmet even if he, Akos, couldn’t—weren’t there. Their stalks were empty. The flowers had already been harvested.