The Stars Askew Read Free Page A

given up without a struggle.
    Kata felt a familiar pressure building within her. She took a flask from her bag and swallowed some of the medicine that kept her seizures at bay. Without the precautionary medication, the fits came at moments of stress and left her incapacitated for hours. Now her mouth was filled with the pungent taste of dirt and ul-tree roots. She gagged, steadied herself, and returned the flask to her bag.
    Delicately, using the edge of her knife, she lifted as many of the black specks from under Aceline’s nose as she could. She looked around hopelessly for a vial, then placed the knife carefully onto the nearest massage table. Then Kata began to scrape some of the blackened powder from the floor with her second knife, until she had recovered a thick curl.
    Rikard pushed his hair back with his hand. “The thaumaturgists must have killed each other.”
    â€œI suppose they knew the same thaumaturgical formulae,” said Dexion. “A burning conjuration. Like two gladiators who strike at the same time, each mortally wounded the other with the same spell.”
    Kata agreed. “They probably dispatched Aceline first. One held her down; the other did the strangling. But afterward they fought. It must have been this one I heard falling when I pressed my ear to the door.” Kata pointed to the heavy thaumaturgist near the entrance. “Maybe he was making his last effort to escape.”
    Kata took in the rest of the room. A glorious mosaic depicting one of the Eyries of the Augurers decorated the far wall. The rocky pinnacle rose into the sky, breathtakingly thin against an azure sky. Through a window, an Augurer could be seen seated in the center of a room, her wild hair waving in the air. With one black and piercing eye she stared toward the viewer as if inviting them in, as the line of Augurers had invited citizens of Caeli-Amur and Varenis since the time of the ancients. Around the pinnacle, the griffins circled in the sky, their feathered wings beating against invisible drafts, their eagle heads rearing up proudly.
    The mosaic covered the arch of the roof above, the tiles there becoming first the light blue of the sky, then the dark blue of night. On the wall behind them, the mosaic depicted Caeli-Amur, a thousand little glittering lights in the night. At its center stood the door with its ruined latch.
    Leaving Dexion and Rikard to guard the room, Kata slipped out and searched for an attendant. There seemed to be none working—perhaps they were gone for good—so it took her a few minutes to find a storeroom, which had already been ransacked, presumably after the uprising. She snatched two vials, returned to the room, carefully dropped the tiny specks into one vial, and screwed its lid back on. Kata then scraped the blackened powder from the second knife into the second vial.
    There was a rattle at the door, and Dexion opened it. Ejan strode into the room and surveyed the scene with his usual Olympian cast. Tall, glacial-eyed, and with white-blond hair in a city predominated by olive-skinned and dark-haired people, it was ironic that he had become the preeminent seditionist leader. He stood out, and he used this fact to his advantage. Kata had never liked the man’s calculating, machinelike mind. She felt that if she ever touched him, she might find his skin cold like ice. The vigilant leader built those around him in the same mold: a collection of lieutenants ready to take any action. Even those who had begun with a touch of softness, like Rikard, soon took on the harness of a hammer.
    Ejan’s bodyguard, Oskar, stood behind him, straight like a flagpole. Scars from the House wars ran across his arms, and a long scar ran in a jagged line from forehead to chin on the left side of his face. Kata knew him immediately as a pragmatist, one of the philosopher-assassin schools that had remained aloof from events, mercenaries for hire. Oskar possessed the same cold distance