Reign of the Shattered Throne: Even Gods Must Kneel

Chapter Seven: The Lower City

The lower city of Adair's Reach had been a farming town twice in Kael's lifetime, in the years between the wars when the fields still grew something other than tent poles, and he did not tell Serai that until they were already three streets into it, walking past the same kind of makeshift shelter architecture he'd grown up inside of a hundred miles from here.

"You know this place," Serai said. It wasn't a question. She'd gotten good in the two weeks since the granary, at reading the specific stillness that came over him in certain kinds of rooms and certain kinds of streets.

"I know the shape of it. Every border province builds the same city eventually, once the wars are done taking whatever they came for." He kept his eyes forward, the old habit of a man who'd learned that looking too long at ruined things made other people nervous, made them ask questions he didn't have tidy answers for. "This one's from the second Levant campaign, I'd guess. Maybe fifteen years old, by the state of the tent canvas. Long enough that the children born in it have never known anything else."

The lower city sprawled along a dry riverbed at the edge of Adair's Reach proper, tents and lean-tos and the occasional stubborn half-built house crowded together under the shadow of the temple district's high, clean walls a half mile north that had never once, in Kael's memory, needed rebuilding, because the wars that flattened border provinces like this one always seemed to know precisely where the line was between land worth protecting and land that could be spent.

"Divine law says every province falls under a domain's protection," Serai said, quietly, watching a woman haul water past them in a cracked clay jug that had clearly been repaired more times than it had any right to survive. "I used to believe that meant something. That a farmer here was owed the same consideration as a merchant in the capital, because the god's mandate covered both of them equally."

"It does cover both of them equally." Kael's voice had an edge in it he didn't fully try to hide. "Equally doesn't mean the same. The mandate protects the license, the temples, the trade routes, and the chain of oaths that keeps magic metered and taxed. It was never a promise about the people standing underneath all that. When a war comes through a province like this one, the gods don't lose anything that was ever actually theirs to lose. They lose farmland. They can always get more farmland."

"That's a very bitter way to describe divine providence."

"I fought in the third one." He said it flatly, the way he said most things about the war, because flat was the only register he'd found that let him say it at all. "Second Levant took my father's fields. The third one took the men I served with and most of what was left of the province by the time it ended. I watched the temple in my own hometown issue a formal blessing on the peace treaty three days after they signed it, the same temple that never once sent so much as a healer down to the camps while the fighting was still going. I learned the shape of divine law a long time before I ever touched that shard. I just didn't have proof yet that it could be made to answer for any of it."

Serai didn't say anything for a while after that. When she finally spoke, it wasn't sympathy, which Kael was grateful for; he'd had enough sympathy from people who didn't understand what they were being sympathetic about, and it had never once helped. "That's the first time you've told me why," she said instead. "Not what happened in the vault. Why you kept the shard instead of dropping it and running the second things went wrong."

"I didn't have time to decide anything in that vault."

"No. But you've had three weeks since, and you're still carrying it." She looked at him directly. "That's a decision too. You just keep pretending it isn't one."

The Bound Priest found them an hour later, in the narrow lane between two rows of tents where there was nowhere to run that didn't mean running through someone else's home.

He didn't look like a threat at first, a man in temple grey, unremarkable, the kind of minor clerical enforcer every district kept a handful of to handle the small disputes too petty for a real magistrate. It was only when he raised his hand, palm out, and the air around it thickened into something with weight and edges, that Kael understood what he was looking at: not a priest carrying a god's authorization on paper, but a priest carrying it in his actual flesh, a portion of borrowed divine sanction burned directly into the man's bound hand like a brand that had grown roots.

"Kael Ashworn." The priest's voice had a strange doubled quality to it, his own words riding underneath something with more weight than a man's throat should have been able to produce. "By the authority vested in me by the Third District's Sanctified Court, you are ordered to surrender the sacred instrument in your possession and to submit to lawful—"

Kael didn't wait for the rest of the sentence. He'd learned a long time ago that giving an authority figure time to finish a formal declaration only ever benefited the authority figure, and he closed the distance before the priest's raised hand finished gathering whatever it was gathering, driving a shoulder into the man's chest before the bound sanction had a chance to fully form.

It wasn't enough. The priest staggered but didn't fall, and the air around his hand cracked audibly, a sound like a whip snapping somewhere just behind Kael's ear, and then something invisible and considerable struck him across the ribs, the same ribs still bruised from the vault, he registered distantly, through the white flash of pain and threw him sideways into a tent wall hard enough to bring the whole structure down around him in a tangle of canvas and someone's cookware.

Serai was already moving, and what she did next was not, strictly speaking, anything Kael had known she could do.

She threw a fistful of the dry riverbed's grit directly into the priest's eyes, an old, undignified trick, nothing divine about it at all, and precisely because it wasn't divine, precisely because it was the kind of thing no bound sanction had ever been built to anticipate, it worked exactly as well as it would have on any ordinary man. The priest flinched, genuinely flinched, human reflex overriding borrowed authority for one crucial half-second, and in that half-second Kael got his feet back under him and did the only thing his training had ever really been good for: he ran the wrong direction on purpose, cutting sideways between two collapsed tents instead of straight down the lane, forcing the priest to choose between two targets separating in opposite directions.

The priest chose Kael. It was, Kael would think later, probably the correct tactical choice; he was the one carrying the shard, but it meant Serai got clear, and it meant the priest's borrowed strength went into chasing a soldier through a maze of guy-ropes and cookfires instead of catching an oracle standing still in the open.

He didn't outrun the man. He wasn't faster, wasn't stronger, and had nothing but a knife too small for the job and a shard he still didn't fully understand how to use as a weapon rather than a question. What he had, in the end, was the lower city itself, fifteen years of families who'd learned, the hard way, exactly how much protection divine law actually extended to people who lived under a temple's shadow instead of inside its walls, and who did not, when a bound priest went crashing through their homes chasing a stranger, feel any particular obligation to make his job easier.

A trip rope, strung low between two tent poles for reasons that had nothing to do with Kael at all, caught the priest's ankle at a dead run.

He went down hard, the borrowed sanction in his hand discharging wild and sideways into an empty stretch of canvas instead of into Kael's spine, and by the time the man got his feet back under him, Kael was three lanes away and gone, ribs screaming, one hand pressed hard against the shard in his coat as if the contact alone might tell him something useful about how badly he'd just lost this fight.

He found Serai waiting for him at the mouth of the lower city, near the dry riverbed where they'd first walked in that morning, the only landmark either of them had actually stood at together, and the only place he could think to look. She was breathing hard but unhurt, and neither of them said anything for a long moment except to confirm, with their eyes, that the other one was still standing.

"Divine sanction," she said finally, once they'd put enough distance behind them to risk speaking above a whisper. "Not the god itself. A priest wearing a piece of one, like a glove."

"I gathered that when it threw me through a tent."

"It means the temples don't need to send a god after you. Not yet. They can burn a fraction of one into a mortal hand and get most of the same result, at a fraction of the cost, and they can make as many of those as they have priests willing to carry them." She was quiet for a moment, and Kael could see her doing the same grim arithmetic he was already halfway through himself. "Which means this isn't going to be the last one. It's going to keep being this smaller, cheaper, and more of them until we're either strong enough to stop caring or careful enough to stop getting found."

Kael pressed a hand against his ribs and didn't answer right away, because he didn't yet know which of those two futures he actually believed was coming, and some part of him—quiet, honest, and not entirely welcome—suspected it might end up being neither.