Page 63 of The Moon Blessed King
Endura is nothing like Altas. Its towering outer walls are made of bright white stone, with watch points capped by canvas tarps. The gates are barred shut, but they are battered and bruised. Worse yet, the chips of wood pressoutwardsfrom the gates, as if someone has tried to break them down while still in the city. Tried, and failed.
There are bodies lining the ground along the walls of Endura. As if one by one, people had climbed all the way to the top and, in desperation for the gates never opening, pitched themselves over the edge. No one has come to tend to these corpses; they have been worn raw by the elements and left out to rot.
Cat climbs off his horse. He pays little attention to who takes control over it or how. Both Partho and Elician call after him, but he crosses the distance to the bodies at the foot of the wall. They are of all different sizes and lifestyles. Some clothing is well tailored, some of poor make and quality. The people are young and old. There is nothing that shows an all-encompassing similarity – nothing, that is, save the very clear evidence they were inside Endura when the gates closed.
He hears footsteps behind him. He asks, without looking: ‘Can you—’
‘No,’ Elician replies, cutting off the question before it can take shape. ‘I cannot feel their souls in the water. None of them. They don’t feel dead or lost…they feel likenothing.’
The Alelunen army is nearby.ThatCat can sense very well. He hears them, smells the smoke from their cooking fires. There were sentries in the distance as the Guard approached the city, quickly vanishing behind a hill to alert their commanders of their arrival. Those sentries must have seen the bodies strewn along the ground. And still, nothing has been done for the dead.
Alelune does not care for the intense rituals of Soleb. They do not tear at their hair or cry out in grief. They do not create ceremonies to read the names of the dead or speak the lives and loves of the deceased. But their bodies are never left to the open air without even the slightest respect. All the dead of Alelune, save the fathers of Reapers, are buried so the earth may reclaim the bones and new life can grow. It is a fate made beautiful by the eventuality of it all, one shared between Alelune and Soleb despite their disagreements.
Death begets life, Elena had said once in the days that followedFransen’s death at Kreuzfurt.To live, something must die. There is no life without death. And there can be no death without life. After all, you cannot die if you never lived at all.Death is precious. As is the life that comes after.
‘Why didn’t they…do something?’ he asks. ‘Bury the bodies, show them care – anything?’
‘Fear of contagion,’ Elician replies.
‘These people didn’t die from the plague.’ Their necks are broken, faces crushed. They must have dived off the top of the wall, without care of the hard earth down below. They were fleeing from it, perhaps. But it was not what ended their lives.
‘Those soldiers wouldn’t have known that, and it wouldn’t have been safe for them to get close enough to find out.’
Cat knows that makes sense. But all he can see is clear and vivid evidence that so many people…were abandoned right when they needed care the most. ‘Why would they jump?’ he asks. He glances back at the Guard, holding formation and doing a formidable job of not openly staring at Elician and Cat crouched by the bodies of the dead.
Elician frowns up at the top of the wall, brows pinched tight and nose crinkled in consternation. ‘We should see what’s inside.’
‘We cannot leave them like this,’ Cat says. Elician winces. He glances at the doors to the city.
‘We should see what’s inside first,’ he replies.
‘But—’
‘Please?’
Cat does not want to leave them. But Elician starts walking away, and Cat follows, glancing back at the heaping masses and wishing he knew a better path forward. Partho calls out to them, keeping the Guard where they are and approaching on his own. But Elician ignores the captain. He walks to the tower doors of Endura and slams his shoulder into them, but they are too heavy to be opened by one man alone. ‘Help me with this?’ he asks.
‘The quarantine—’ Partho interjects as he draws near, but Cat ignores him too. He leans his shoulder against the doors and pushes hard. He slams his shoulder into it at the same time as Elician. Nothing. Brute force will not make these doors yield. There must be another way.
Stepping back, Cat looks at the doors proper. The wood is thick, heavy and built with purpose. There are some breaches – someone on the inside has attempted to hack their way out. But the holes are not large enough to crawl through. He rests his palms against the hard wood, trying to get a sense of its build. Its construction.
‘There’s something on the wood,’ Cat says as Elician throws himself at the barrier with an increasingly rampant fury.
‘It’s a fire lacquer,’ Elician says.
‘Fire lacquer?’
Elician’s shoulder slams against one of the doors again. It jars his body, and the door seems perfectly content to let him keep throwing himself at it for all eternity. ‘A paint’– another harsh attempt to bully his way through – ‘used…to keep anyone from burning it down.’
Oh. Then that’s simple.Cat pulls off his glove. His bare hand presses against the wood and he closes his eyes, memorizing the slip of the lacquer against his fingers. ‘Step back,’ Cat requests. It is subtle, but there, infused deep into the wood. Separate but not separate. Ever present but not really apartof the wood itself. He breathes in. He breathes out.
Break, he commands, slapping his hands against the door. He can feel the whole frame shudder beneath his touch. Elician lets out a gasp of air, and then he is pressed tight against Cat’s back. His palms rest on the door on either side of Cat’s, and when he breathes out, Cat can feel his own command snapping through the structure before them. Not breaking, no; Cat already broke the chains and bonds that tied atoms and molecules together. The lacquer has torn itself apart from the inside out, shedding its protection as it desperately tries to make other bonds, other connections. Hydrogen snapsfrom nitrogen, which snaps from oxygen, and as each atom comes spinning and shattering apart, Elician hisses at them all toburn.
The flash fire is so bright that Cat flinches away from it. He jerks into Elician’s chest, squeezing his eyes shut as heat licks at his skin and threatens to consume them both.Die, Cat thinks, and the fire flies in the opposite direction, back towards the wood, back towards the only fuel it has left, a fuel made of snapping bonds that cracks and snaps as new bonds are made and systematically destroyed.
It is over in moments.
Partho curses – ‘Where in the name of thegodsdid you learn to do that?’ The Guard’s perfect discipline splinters just long enough for a few startled words to pass between them. Cat pays none of them any mind.
