31. The same thing from the inn

Chapter 31: The same thing from the inn

Lyra didn't sit. She stood just inside the doorway with her arms wrapped around herself, shaking, and it took her three tries to get the first sentence out at all.

"I followed him," she said. "Last night. I followed Kael."

Mikaela pulled a chair out from the table, slow, like sudden movement might spook her. "Okay. Sit down. Start from the beginning."

"There isn't a beginning, there's just, he comes by, he's been coming by more, checking on the kids, and I got tired of him thinking I don't notice him watching me so I followed him instead, I wanted to see where he actually goes when he says he's just doing rounds." Her hands twisted together, knuckles white. "He went to the home. Late. After Elara was asleep. He didn't go in the front, he went around back, through the fence, the broken part, and I thought, I thought he was going to do something, I don't know what I thought."

"Did he?" Mikaela asked.

"No. I mean I don't know. I lost him near the shed and I was scared to get closer and then." She stopped. Pressed the heel of her hand against one eye. "And then this morning there's another one. A boy. Tomas. He's five. He was laughing at breakfast, he was fine, he was throwing porridge at Finn like always, and then he just, he stopped. Mid laugh. Just stopped and sat there and hasn't said a word since, hasn't moved, he's just staring at the wall like there's something on it only he can see."

Her voice cracked on the last word and she pressed both hands over her mouth like she could shove the sound back in.

"I didn't know where else to go," she said through her fingers. "I saw you both today, with the kids, I saw how Finn wouldn't shut up about you for an hour after you left, I saw how you," she looked at Eto, "how you let them climb all over you like you were a jungle gym and didn't complain once. I don't have anyone else. Elara's too old to chase anyone through the dark and Kael, I don't even know if I can trust Kael anymore, so I came here. I'm sorry. I know it's a lot to ask."

Mikaela glanced at Eto. He hadn't moved from where he stood near the window, arms crossed, jaw set, and he gave the smallest nod.

"We'll follow him," Mikaela said. "Tonight."

The night sat cold and wet over Torak, clouds low enough to smother the moon, and Kael left the guardhouse a little past the second bell with his collar turned up and his eyes moving.

Mikaela and Eto stayed a full street back, ducking into doorways whenever he slowed, and slow he did, often, glancing behind him at every corner like a man who already knew someone might be there and hadn't decided yet whether he minded.

He led them clean across the city, past the market square gone dark and empty, down through the narrow lanes where the buildings leaned close enough to touch, and by the time the children's home came into view he'd stopped checking his shoulder altogether, moving with the certainty of a man who thought he'd lost anyone following.

He didn't go in the front. He went around, same as Lyra said, through the broken slat in the fence, careful with it, easing it aside without a sound.

Eto and Mikaela pressed themselves against the outer wall a few dozen feet off, watching him cross the dark yard toward the shed.

Bram's shed.

Kael crouched low at the wall of it, angling himself to see through a gap in the boards, and went still there, watching whatever was inside.

"He thinks it's Bram," Mikaela breathed, barely a whisper. "He's not the one doing this. He's trying to catch whoever is."

Eto didn't answer. His eyes were on the rooftops instead, on the dark line of them against darker sky, and something in his chest had already gone tight and cold, the same feeling he'd had outside the inn two nights back, right before the world came apart.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Inside the shed, faint through the boards, Bram's voice muttered on, low and rambling, words too soft to catch.

Kael leaned closer to the gap.

The sound hit without warning.

It came from above, from nowhere, a wave of pressure that didn't so much strike the shed as erase it, wood and stone flying outward in a spray that turned the whole side of the building into shrapnel. Kael vanished into it, thrown forward through the wall he'd been peering through, gone into the rubble and the dark before either of them could shout his name.

Eto hit the ground a heartbeat later, the edge of the blast catching him sideways and driving the air clean out of him, and he rolled twice across packed dirt before he stopped, ears ringing, vision swimming white at the edges.

Mikaela went down harder, thrown clean off her feet, landing in a heap against the fence with her breath knocked out of her in one ragged gasp.

Eto was up before the dust had settled.

He didn't think. There wasn't room for thinking, not with the shed a smoking ruin and Kael nowhere among the wreckage he could see, and he looked up, jaw already tight, blood already running warm down the side of his face from a gash he hadn't felt open.

The figure stood on the rooftop above what was left of the shed. Black robed. Perfectly still. Watching.

He ran.

He didn't call out, didn't roar, just moved, boots tearing through the wreckage and out across the yard, vaulting the low wall in one motion and hitting the alley beyond at a dead sprint, eyes locked on the shape above him as it turned and began to move along the rooftops, unhurried, almost lazy, like it knew exactly how fast he could go and had already decided it didn't matter.

He was faster than it looked. He closed the gap building by building, breath tearing hot in his chest, blood in his mouth from a bitten cheek, and for one stretch of three rooftops he was close enough to see the fabric of the robe shift in the wind, close enough that his hand came up, reaching.

The figure turned.

It raised one hand, unhurried, almost bored, and the sound that came off it this time wasn't a wave so much as a fist, a single concussive blow that took Eto square in the chest and threw him backward off the roofline entirely.

He crashed through the wall of the building behind him in an explosion of brick dust and splintered lath, tumbling through what had been someone's bedroom, through a table, through a wardrobe that shattered under him, and came to rest finally against the far wall in a heap of plaster and blood and ruined furniture, the whole room spinning slow around him.

He didn't get up right away.

His ears rang with a high thin whine that swallowed every other sound, and when he finally forced his eyes open the ceiling above him swam in and out of focus, cracked clean across from the impact, dust still sifting down through the dark like snow.

He got one arm under himself. Pushed. His whole chest screamed at the movement, something in there wrong, cracked or worse, and he made it up onto his knees before his vision greyed out entirely and he had to stop, head hanging, blood dripping steady off his chin onto the wreckage below.

Footsteps pounded somewhere outside, fast, familiar.

"Eto!"

Mikaela found him there a moment later, climbing through the hole he'd made in the wall, and the sight of him stopped her dead for half a second before she was moving again, dropping to her knees beside him, hands going to his face, his shoulders, checking for the worst of it with a kind of frantic thoroughness that shook worse than her voice did.

"Say something. Please, just, say something so I know you're." She screamed in Keth.

He didn't.

He let her pull him upright instead, leaning heavy on her while his legs found their footing, and his eyes went past her, out through the hole in the wall, up to the rooftop where the figure had stood.

Empty. Gone without a sound, same as before.

A lantern light bobbed toward them across the yard, and Elara appeared at the edge of the ruined shed a minute later, still in her nightgown, shawl thrown hasty over her shoulders, her lined face pale and stricken in the lamplight.

"What's happened," she said, breath short from hurrying. "What in the world has happened here, is anyone."

She saw Eto then, blood dark down half his face, and her hand went to her mouth.

"Oh, dear boy."

Mikaela answered for him, voice still unsteady. "There was an attack. The same thing from the inn. It hit the shed first, then it went after him."

"Kael." Elara's eyes swept the wreckage, searching. "Kael was here, I heard, one of the children said he'd seen him come round the back earlier."

They went back to the shed together, what was left of it, Elara's lantern throwing long shaking light across the broken boards and scattered stone, and they searched it corner to corner, kicking aside splintered wood, calling his name into the dark.

There was no body.

There was no blood, no boot, no scrap of guard's uniform caught on the wreckage, nothing at all to say a man had been standing there when the wall came apart around him. The rubble sat empty and silent, as if Kael had simply been erased along with the shed itself, plucked clean out of the world without leaving so much as a mark behind.

Eto stood in the middle of it, unmoving, blood dried black now across his jaw and down the front of his ruined shirt, dust still clinging pale to his shoulders. His eyes moved once, slow, across the empty space where Kael should have been lying, then up, to the black rooftops, to the silent unmoving night that had already swallowed everything it meant to.

He didn't speak.

He didn't move.

He just stood there in the wreckage, staring at nothing, and the night gave nothing back.