daughter of flood and fury
Chapter Four
I wake to water on my legs. And a probing sensation, like a finger's touch in my mind, where I never let anyone in. I snap my blind up, concentration focusing in an instant, but the touch is still there.
Ah, you're awake.
I open my eyes to find Nerimes, deep-set sockets gazing at me across a narrow pool, bare legs dangling in the water. The council is arrayed to either side of him, elders from the temple’s branches of seers and theocrats and overseers—traditionalists all. The men who used my father’s death to gain power.
Behind them a marble balcony opens onto night sky, the temple’s waters spilling off the edge. With a jerk, I realize where we are—the Deepling Pool. The holiest room in the temple. The place they performed my father’s last rites.
My gorge rises, even more so when I see Erjuna and the others are not here. We are alone. Which can mean only one thing:
They’re finally getting rid of me.
I lurch from the pool, body screaming in a dozen places from where the boys beat me, and iron hands clamp onto my shoulders. Two overseers stand behind me, the strongest and fastest of the monks, usually assigned to policing and defending the city.
“Easy,” Nerimes says aloud. “You’re among friends here, Aletheia. And I still need you in the pool.” He nods and they push me back down.
Into the pool of their thoughts. I shudder. This is where the council holds its meetings, waterblinds dropped and minds melded in the water for perfect transparency. But tonight the pool has been dammed off so the temple can’t hear the proceedings, a thing they do at only the most serious times.
Like after my father’s death.
“What is this?” I spit, trying again to force the probing fingers out of my mind. I can’t.
“An investigation, Aletheia.”
“Into what? I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Into your heresies, child,” Nerimes says. Mist swirls behind him, blown up from the river that tumbles off the balcony edge to the sea hundreds of feet below. “The council has worried for some time that your father’s heresies extended to you, but it took my visit today to confirm it.”
Anger rises in me, and I don’t bother icing it. Anger is better than fear.
“To confirm what? That I’m a girl, a heresy, and still the best acolyte in the temple? That I’m still heir to the man you had to kill to take the Dais?”
There are hisses around me as the monks suck in breath. Such words are not said lightly in the temple. But I do not mean them lightly. And if I’m going to die here, I will speak my mind.
“I did not kill your father,” Nerimes says evenly. “Look. Though I warn you it may be disturbing.”
He drops his blind. An image comes of my father, but not as I saw him laid out on the stone tables of the kitchens. I know him only by his robes, and the wailing monks and citizens around him as he floats face down in one of the city’s fountains.
I suck in a breath. This was no suicide. This was murder.
Just like I’d thought.
Grief and longing open like a raw wound inside, overwhelming my anger and the satisfaction of being right. I breathe deep, seeking focus, needing to focus. This is no time to show weakness. I manage to ice my feelings and return to my calm as the memory plays out, mind racing.
“So you admit it wasn’t a suicide,” I say, voice steady.
Eyebrows raise around the pool at my internal control. “It was no suicide, child,” one of the theocrats says. “You deserve to know that, at least.”
“So you covered it up?” I ask, eyes narrowing. “Isn’t that like admitting guilt?”
“It is admitting the city’s needs must come before our ideals at times,” Nerimes says, closing his mind off again. “Your father had already made a mess of things, neglecting trade and aggravating tensions with the theracants. News of a murder would have thrown things further into chaos, when what we needed was order.”
“Order,” I scoff. “Lies, you mean, to create an order that would benefit you. And this from the man sworn to uphold the Truth of Uje. Did you at least find the murderer?”
I still think it was them, but I’m curious to hear what they’ll say. If they’ll just admit it.
“There are some truths too dangerous to speak, even now,” a theocrat of the order of seers intones.
So they won’t admit guilt. Frustrating, but it kindles a spark of hope inside: maybe they aren’t planning to kill me. Otherwise, why hold back?
Then another suspicion hits me. “Do you, honored theocrats, even know the answer? Or has he hidden it from you too?”
“There are no secrets in the Deepling Pool, child,” Nerimes says.
I ignore him, speaking to the other men gathered, wise and devout men all, even if they are traditionalists. “And are you aware that Nerimes can reveal some parts of his mind while still hiding others? That what you think is full transparency may in fact be deception?”
“Do not foul these waters with lies,” an ancient man from the overseer branch barks. “A partial blind is impossible.”
“You see,” Nerimes says, spreading his hands, “it is as I suspected: the girl has become a heretic, like her father. Even now she spouts impossibilities.”
“My father was no heretic,” I spit. I should stay calm but I can’t stand the sight of this man sitting where my father belongs and insulting his memory. “Or do you think he gave me watersight and not Uje?”
“No, child,” Nerimes says with infuriating patience, “we accepted your strange blessing years ago. Your father’s heresy was obsession with the immersions, with his doomsday fears about the deluge. Even that, we could tolerate—every scholar is allowed his interpretations. But when he began neglecting the city, we could not let it continue.”
“Neglecting it? Serei flourished under my father. His decision to open our doors and offer arbitration and guidance is what made us great. Earned us the name the City of Justice and Enlightenment. Even you can’t deny that.”
Nerimes’ smile is pained. “It is true, your father did an admirable job in his early years. But acolytes miss much, focused as you are on your studies and training. Trade fell apart at the end of your father’s reign, the faithful were growing uneasy of his heretical interests, and the witches’ guild sought to exploit our weakness to finally seize control of the city. It is no wonder the people supported a return to traditionalism once he was gone.”
“It was also flooding convenient you were ready to take advantage of that just as he was murdered.” My voice breaks a little at the last word—despite all this, despite my suspicions, it still hurts to know he was killed. But I can’t think about that now. I bury it in my anger.
Nerimes smiles. “What one calls convenience another may see as providence, child. Uje works in mysterious ways.”
It takes everything I have not to leap across the water and throttle him, much as I know the overseers would stop me. “What you call providence I call corruption. Starting with covering up my father’s murder.”
“And that is why we have brought you here tonight,” Nerimes says calmly. “Not for your past or parentage or even your impossible watersight. It is for the heresies you have chosen.”
“What are you talking about?” I spit, even as fear makes me slam my blind up stronger than ever. Still I feel his perception there, following my thoughts as I think of my disagreements with the temple, then repeating them in the water. My dislike for the politics. My suspicions about my father. And my belief that watersight testing and training should be open to all people, not just men.
Your imagination is again too small, little one¸ he says in the water. Policies can shift, so long as we keep to the spirit of Uje. But politics must be honored, for the temple to survive. And in politics, dissent is the ultimate heresy.
The councilors all nod sagely, as if this was wisdom. I don’t bother to ice the anger that boils up. “Are you all corrupt, then? You would sacrifice the purity of our beliefs for politics? For power?”
“Desperate times,” a councilor intones. “Even half a year later, the city is still unstable. We cannot risk division spreading to the faithful.”
I can’t argue with this. I haven’t been to the city in years. But I know it’s all lies. Feel it deep in my gut. “You’re not killing me because I’m a threat to the city, or orthodoxy or whatever. You’re killing me because I’m a threat to your power.”
Our power is orthodoxy, Nerimes says in the waters. A shame you had to get in the way. We could have used you.
Aloud, he says, “Councilors, have we heard enough? Are you convinced of the girl’s heresy?”
They all nod sagely, and disillusionment steals the fire from my veins. The best seers of the temples, either too zealous or too duped by Nerimes to realize this has been no kind of fair trial. If this is the best the Temple of Uje has to offer, then brand me a heretic.
“So what,” I say, “you drown me now, like you did my father?”
“Now you have a choice,” Nerimes says, unperturbed. “Sex aside, you are an asset to the temple, and still young enough to change. You do not have to continue your father’s heresy, Aletheia. Recant here and now and we will consider your transgression absolved, so long as you defend our orthodoxy going forward.”
Give up seeking the truth about my father and submit to their bald power grab, in other words.
“And if I don’t?”
“Then let the Father judge you, as he has all heretics of the past.” Nerimes gestures behind him, to where the river flows over the cliff’s edge. Immersion, coupled with an impossibly high fall. The histories tell of few who survived the Father’s Judgment, and all of them were full seers who had already been Immersed. For an acolyte like me, still unprepared, Immersion almost always results in madness or death.
“That is no judgment,” I spit. “It’s a death sentence.”
“One you do not need accept, Aletheia. Recant your heresy and join us.”
“Never.”
The word is out of my mouth before I’ve had time to think about it, but I know it’s right as it leaves. I would rather die than sacrifice who I am to this man. And maybe there is another way. Maybe I’ll survive the Immersion.
Nerimes sighs. “Then let Uje’s will be done. Overseers?”
The men seize me, and fear threatens my resolve. Fear and disappointment—that they will get away with this. That no one will learn the truth, and they will corrupt the temple worse than they already have. That justice will not be served by the very religion that claims to uphold it.
I almost change my mind. Almost just say the words—simple words, swearing I was wrong, that my father was wrong. That I’ll be a good girl. But I can see the life that would lead to, the constant fear that if I ever let my thoughts be known, ever try to do anything about their corruption, I’ll end up right back here.
Better to get it over with.
“I am no heretic!” I cry as the overseers lift me like a doll. “Councilors, look at what you are doing! What you are letting him do! Search your hearts! Is this justice?”
They stay quiet, a few having the decency to avoid my eyes. Cowards. The overseers carry me to the edge of the balcony, where another overseer waits with a set of ankle weights. Fear pounds like a blacksmith’s hammer in my skull, pushing at my concentration. I push back. I can’t rely on Uje for another miracle here.
Besides, Uje works through human hands.
So I do what I know: I summon the breathing, summon the ice, summon the willpower they’ve taught me over the last eight years. I take my anger and fears and freeze them, then build a wall ten feet thick and a hundred miles wide, behind which there’s nothing but silence and peace.
A place I can think. They are pulling my robes up, unlocking the clamps.
I can’t fight them—even without the weights, without the bruises and the overwhelming amount of opponents in the room, I can’t take an overseer. Not by myself.
I can’t leap off early—even if I survive the fall, going mad will do no one any good.
And I can’t persuade the overseers. They are famously dutiful, and Nerimes was careful to say everything incriminating in the water. An overseer drags an iron weight to my ankle, and loops the chain around it. If they only knew the truth, if they would only believe me--
It comes to me then. I can make them know it.
I drop my blind, summon my memories of what Nerimes said in the pool—about killing me for getting in the way, about the real heresy being dissent. Both overseers are touching my skin, so the water will carry my thoughts.
No reaction: the taller overseer takes the lock, reaching for my ankle.
This has to work! I try harder, pushing past their blinds, pushing the memories into them, willing them to see.
The big one gasps.
The shorter one drops his key.
And in the brief moment they are distracted, the brief pause the truth buys me, I run.
I sprint past the pool and pound my way up the water-covered stairs, grateful for a childhood spent chasing birds and running from bullies. The councilors are shouting behind me, some of them beginning to give chase—I sense them all in the water. The overseers are not among them, likely still shocked by what I showed them. I bare my teeth in a grin. I’m just getting started.
I blast through the auditorium doors and into one of the long temple hallways, marble walls lit with oil lamps. Water runs here too, a finger or two along the floors, and I push my awareness into it, as I did with the overseers. Help! I cry, too rushed to think of something elegant. They are trying to kill me! Nerimes is trying to kill me! And after it I send the memories, the proof he revealed to me in the waters.
There is no reaction, or little—most of the temple is likely asleep. I keep doing it as I veer into the students’ quadrant, the place I know best, the area with the tightest corridors and strangest turns. Nerimes shouts after me in the water: Lies! The girl has been found a heretic, a traitor! Even now she uses ungodly powers to sway you! Faithful of the temple rise up and catch her!
This elicits more of a response. I push my own memories in again, into the minds of all in the temple, proving Nerimes’ guilt. A boy stumbles from his room, a fifth-year, and I slip past his sleepy grab. Another comes, a stocky teen in my class, grim-faced behind his staff. It’s like sparring all over again, his thoughts easily read through his blind, but I don’t have time for theatrics. He swings, I snatch the pole, kick him in the throat, and keep running as he collapses behind me.
More come, stumbling from their rooms, filling the common areas, trying to stop me, a few looking sympathetic. I dash past them all, pursuers racing behind me, only fighting those I must.
There are overseers chasing me now too, men still loyal to Nerimes, apparently unmoved by my pleas. They are gaining. Fast as I am, it’s no replacement for their strength and size, or for the brutal training that overseers follow, to keep the upper hand in the streets.
I burst into the training hall to find it filling with students, more than I can take, more than I can get around. They run for me and I cut left, taking a narrow stair into the kitchens. I sprint through them in near-darkness, relying on my memories of the place.
The dry silence is eerie, after all the shouting in the water, but I know it can’t last. The kitchens don’t extend all the way to the gates—but they do open onto the city, I realize. The delivery doors, built into the hillside on the edge of Old Serei. I turn that way, running blind, neither watersight nor light in the empty kitchens to guide me.
I dash out into the laundry chambers, water dripping here. It’s abandoned, though I hear shouts behind me. For the first time, I think maybe I will make it.
Splashing through the waste troughs, I am briefly reconnected in watersight. To Nerimes. You cannot run from me, he is saying. Where can you go, the city? The city is ours, the overseers sure to find you. Turn yourself in now and save yourself the pain.
I reach the doors, shove them open, cool night air rushing in. I’d rather die, usurper, I push back into the water, along with the damning memories of him, just once more. If there were any good men here, this temple would rise up and pull you down.
Then with pursuers hard on my heels, and the only life I’ve ever known vanishing behind me, I run out into the night streets.
Ah, you're awake.
I open my eyes to find Nerimes, deep-set sockets gazing at me across a narrow pool, bare legs dangling in the water. The council is arrayed to either side of him, elders from the temple’s branches of seers and theocrats and overseers—traditionalists all. The men who used my father’s death to gain power.
Behind them a marble balcony opens onto night sky, the temple’s waters spilling off the edge. With a jerk, I realize where we are—the Deepling Pool. The holiest room in the temple. The place they performed my father’s last rites.
My gorge rises, even more so when I see Erjuna and the others are not here. We are alone. Which can mean only one thing:
They’re finally getting rid of me.
I lurch from the pool, body screaming in a dozen places from where the boys beat me, and iron hands clamp onto my shoulders. Two overseers stand behind me, the strongest and fastest of the monks, usually assigned to policing and defending the city.
“Easy,” Nerimes says aloud. “You’re among friends here, Aletheia. And I still need you in the pool.” He nods and they push me back down.
Into the pool of their thoughts. I shudder. This is where the council holds its meetings, waterblinds dropped and minds melded in the water for perfect transparency. But tonight the pool has been dammed off so the temple can’t hear the proceedings, a thing they do at only the most serious times.
Like after my father’s death.
“What is this?” I spit, trying again to force the probing fingers out of my mind. I can’t.
“An investigation, Aletheia.”
“Into what? I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Into your heresies, child,” Nerimes says. Mist swirls behind him, blown up from the river that tumbles off the balcony edge to the sea hundreds of feet below. “The council has worried for some time that your father’s heresies extended to you, but it took my visit today to confirm it.”
Anger rises in me, and I don’t bother icing it. Anger is better than fear.
“To confirm what? That I’m a girl, a heresy, and still the best acolyte in the temple? That I’m still heir to the man you had to kill to take the Dais?”
There are hisses around me as the monks suck in breath. Such words are not said lightly in the temple. But I do not mean them lightly. And if I’m going to die here, I will speak my mind.
“I did not kill your father,” Nerimes says evenly. “Look. Though I warn you it may be disturbing.”
He drops his blind. An image comes of my father, but not as I saw him laid out on the stone tables of the kitchens. I know him only by his robes, and the wailing monks and citizens around him as he floats face down in one of the city’s fountains.
I suck in a breath. This was no suicide. This was murder.
Just like I’d thought.
Grief and longing open like a raw wound inside, overwhelming my anger and the satisfaction of being right. I breathe deep, seeking focus, needing to focus. This is no time to show weakness. I manage to ice my feelings and return to my calm as the memory plays out, mind racing.
“So you admit it wasn’t a suicide,” I say, voice steady.
Eyebrows raise around the pool at my internal control. “It was no suicide, child,” one of the theocrats says. “You deserve to know that, at least.”
“So you covered it up?” I ask, eyes narrowing. “Isn’t that like admitting guilt?”
“It is admitting the city’s needs must come before our ideals at times,” Nerimes says, closing his mind off again. “Your father had already made a mess of things, neglecting trade and aggravating tensions with the theracants. News of a murder would have thrown things further into chaos, when what we needed was order.”
“Order,” I scoff. “Lies, you mean, to create an order that would benefit you. And this from the man sworn to uphold the Truth of Uje. Did you at least find the murderer?”
I still think it was them, but I’m curious to hear what they’ll say. If they’ll just admit it.
“There are some truths too dangerous to speak, even now,” a theocrat of the order of seers intones.
So they won’t admit guilt. Frustrating, but it kindles a spark of hope inside: maybe they aren’t planning to kill me. Otherwise, why hold back?
Then another suspicion hits me. “Do you, honored theocrats, even know the answer? Or has he hidden it from you too?”
“There are no secrets in the Deepling Pool, child,” Nerimes says.
I ignore him, speaking to the other men gathered, wise and devout men all, even if they are traditionalists. “And are you aware that Nerimes can reveal some parts of his mind while still hiding others? That what you think is full transparency may in fact be deception?”
“Do not foul these waters with lies,” an ancient man from the overseer branch barks. “A partial blind is impossible.”
“You see,” Nerimes says, spreading his hands, “it is as I suspected: the girl has become a heretic, like her father. Even now she spouts impossibilities.”
“My father was no heretic,” I spit. I should stay calm but I can’t stand the sight of this man sitting where my father belongs and insulting his memory. “Or do you think he gave me watersight and not Uje?”
“No, child,” Nerimes says with infuriating patience, “we accepted your strange blessing years ago. Your father’s heresy was obsession with the immersions, with his doomsday fears about the deluge. Even that, we could tolerate—every scholar is allowed his interpretations. But when he began neglecting the city, we could not let it continue.”
“Neglecting it? Serei flourished under my father. His decision to open our doors and offer arbitration and guidance is what made us great. Earned us the name the City of Justice and Enlightenment. Even you can’t deny that.”
Nerimes’ smile is pained. “It is true, your father did an admirable job in his early years. But acolytes miss much, focused as you are on your studies and training. Trade fell apart at the end of your father’s reign, the faithful were growing uneasy of his heretical interests, and the witches’ guild sought to exploit our weakness to finally seize control of the city. It is no wonder the people supported a return to traditionalism once he was gone.”
“It was also flooding convenient you were ready to take advantage of that just as he was murdered.” My voice breaks a little at the last word—despite all this, despite my suspicions, it still hurts to know he was killed. But I can’t think about that now. I bury it in my anger.
Nerimes smiles. “What one calls convenience another may see as providence, child. Uje works in mysterious ways.”
It takes everything I have not to leap across the water and throttle him, much as I know the overseers would stop me. “What you call providence I call corruption. Starting with covering up my father’s murder.”
“And that is why we have brought you here tonight,” Nerimes says calmly. “Not for your past or parentage or even your impossible watersight. It is for the heresies you have chosen.”
“What are you talking about?” I spit, even as fear makes me slam my blind up stronger than ever. Still I feel his perception there, following my thoughts as I think of my disagreements with the temple, then repeating them in the water. My dislike for the politics. My suspicions about my father. And my belief that watersight testing and training should be open to all people, not just men.
Your imagination is again too small, little one¸ he says in the water. Policies can shift, so long as we keep to the spirit of Uje. But politics must be honored, for the temple to survive. And in politics, dissent is the ultimate heresy.
The councilors all nod sagely, as if this was wisdom. I don’t bother to ice the anger that boils up. “Are you all corrupt, then? You would sacrifice the purity of our beliefs for politics? For power?”
“Desperate times,” a councilor intones. “Even half a year later, the city is still unstable. We cannot risk division spreading to the faithful.”
I can’t argue with this. I haven’t been to the city in years. But I know it’s all lies. Feel it deep in my gut. “You’re not killing me because I’m a threat to the city, or orthodoxy or whatever. You’re killing me because I’m a threat to your power.”
Our power is orthodoxy, Nerimes says in the waters. A shame you had to get in the way. We could have used you.
Aloud, he says, “Councilors, have we heard enough? Are you convinced of the girl’s heresy?”
They all nod sagely, and disillusionment steals the fire from my veins. The best seers of the temples, either too zealous or too duped by Nerimes to realize this has been no kind of fair trial. If this is the best the Temple of Uje has to offer, then brand me a heretic.
“So what,” I say, “you drown me now, like you did my father?”
“Now you have a choice,” Nerimes says, unperturbed. “Sex aside, you are an asset to the temple, and still young enough to change. You do not have to continue your father’s heresy, Aletheia. Recant here and now and we will consider your transgression absolved, so long as you defend our orthodoxy going forward.”
Give up seeking the truth about my father and submit to their bald power grab, in other words.
“And if I don’t?”
“Then let the Father judge you, as he has all heretics of the past.” Nerimes gestures behind him, to where the river flows over the cliff’s edge. Immersion, coupled with an impossibly high fall. The histories tell of few who survived the Father’s Judgment, and all of them were full seers who had already been Immersed. For an acolyte like me, still unprepared, Immersion almost always results in madness or death.
“That is no judgment,” I spit. “It’s a death sentence.”
“One you do not need accept, Aletheia. Recant your heresy and join us.”
“Never.”
The word is out of my mouth before I’ve had time to think about it, but I know it’s right as it leaves. I would rather die than sacrifice who I am to this man. And maybe there is another way. Maybe I’ll survive the Immersion.
Nerimes sighs. “Then let Uje’s will be done. Overseers?”
The men seize me, and fear threatens my resolve. Fear and disappointment—that they will get away with this. That no one will learn the truth, and they will corrupt the temple worse than they already have. That justice will not be served by the very religion that claims to uphold it.
I almost change my mind. Almost just say the words—simple words, swearing I was wrong, that my father was wrong. That I’ll be a good girl. But I can see the life that would lead to, the constant fear that if I ever let my thoughts be known, ever try to do anything about their corruption, I’ll end up right back here.
Better to get it over with.
“I am no heretic!” I cry as the overseers lift me like a doll. “Councilors, look at what you are doing! What you are letting him do! Search your hearts! Is this justice?”
They stay quiet, a few having the decency to avoid my eyes. Cowards. The overseers carry me to the edge of the balcony, where another overseer waits with a set of ankle weights. Fear pounds like a blacksmith’s hammer in my skull, pushing at my concentration. I push back. I can’t rely on Uje for another miracle here.
Besides, Uje works through human hands.
So I do what I know: I summon the breathing, summon the ice, summon the willpower they’ve taught me over the last eight years. I take my anger and fears and freeze them, then build a wall ten feet thick and a hundred miles wide, behind which there’s nothing but silence and peace.
A place I can think. They are pulling my robes up, unlocking the clamps.
I can’t fight them—even without the weights, without the bruises and the overwhelming amount of opponents in the room, I can’t take an overseer. Not by myself.
I can’t leap off early—even if I survive the fall, going mad will do no one any good.
And I can’t persuade the overseers. They are famously dutiful, and Nerimes was careful to say everything incriminating in the water. An overseer drags an iron weight to my ankle, and loops the chain around it. If they only knew the truth, if they would only believe me--
It comes to me then. I can make them know it.
I drop my blind, summon my memories of what Nerimes said in the pool—about killing me for getting in the way, about the real heresy being dissent. Both overseers are touching my skin, so the water will carry my thoughts.
No reaction: the taller overseer takes the lock, reaching for my ankle.
This has to work! I try harder, pushing past their blinds, pushing the memories into them, willing them to see.
The big one gasps.
The shorter one drops his key.
And in the brief moment they are distracted, the brief pause the truth buys me, I run.
I sprint past the pool and pound my way up the water-covered stairs, grateful for a childhood spent chasing birds and running from bullies. The councilors are shouting behind me, some of them beginning to give chase—I sense them all in the water. The overseers are not among them, likely still shocked by what I showed them. I bare my teeth in a grin. I’m just getting started.
I blast through the auditorium doors and into one of the long temple hallways, marble walls lit with oil lamps. Water runs here too, a finger or two along the floors, and I push my awareness into it, as I did with the overseers. Help! I cry, too rushed to think of something elegant. They are trying to kill me! Nerimes is trying to kill me! And after it I send the memories, the proof he revealed to me in the waters.
There is no reaction, or little—most of the temple is likely asleep. I keep doing it as I veer into the students’ quadrant, the place I know best, the area with the tightest corridors and strangest turns. Nerimes shouts after me in the water: Lies! The girl has been found a heretic, a traitor! Even now she uses ungodly powers to sway you! Faithful of the temple rise up and catch her!
This elicits more of a response. I push my own memories in again, into the minds of all in the temple, proving Nerimes’ guilt. A boy stumbles from his room, a fifth-year, and I slip past his sleepy grab. Another comes, a stocky teen in my class, grim-faced behind his staff. It’s like sparring all over again, his thoughts easily read through his blind, but I don’t have time for theatrics. He swings, I snatch the pole, kick him in the throat, and keep running as he collapses behind me.
More come, stumbling from their rooms, filling the common areas, trying to stop me, a few looking sympathetic. I dash past them all, pursuers racing behind me, only fighting those I must.
There are overseers chasing me now too, men still loyal to Nerimes, apparently unmoved by my pleas. They are gaining. Fast as I am, it’s no replacement for their strength and size, or for the brutal training that overseers follow, to keep the upper hand in the streets.
I burst into the training hall to find it filling with students, more than I can take, more than I can get around. They run for me and I cut left, taking a narrow stair into the kitchens. I sprint through them in near-darkness, relying on my memories of the place.
The dry silence is eerie, after all the shouting in the water, but I know it can’t last. The kitchens don’t extend all the way to the gates—but they do open onto the city, I realize. The delivery doors, built into the hillside on the edge of Old Serei. I turn that way, running blind, neither watersight nor light in the empty kitchens to guide me.
I dash out into the laundry chambers, water dripping here. It’s abandoned, though I hear shouts behind me. For the first time, I think maybe I will make it.
Splashing through the waste troughs, I am briefly reconnected in watersight. To Nerimes. You cannot run from me, he is saying. Where can you go, the city? The city is ours, the overseers sure to find you. Turn yourself in now and save yourself the pain.
I reach the doors, shove them open, cool night air rushing in. I’d rather die, usurper, I push back into the water, along with the damning memories of him, just once more. If there were any good men here, this temple would rise up and pull you down.
Then with pursuers hard on my heels, and the only life I’ve ever known vanishing behind me, I run out into the night streets.