The Many Shades of Midnight by C M Debell

Author:C M Debell [Debell, C M]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-02-01T06:00:00+00:00

21. ESAR CANTRELL

Three days hard riding brought them to Cadria, Lankara’s easternmost city and one that had made its wealth through the cloth trade rather than mining. That alone was enough to make Esar nervous—of all places, this part of Lankara was an unlikely region to be affected—and they doubled their scouts all the way there. Alyas sent them out in all directions, looking for signs of how the plague had reached this remote region.

In Cadria, Nicor’s authority got them an interview with the garrison commander and an escort to the affected villages. The man had been wary at first, his gruff exterior hiding a shock that Esar could empathise with, but after he learned what they had seen at Grey Rock, some of his caution disappeared. He was no longer afraid they would think him mad.

“Lucky that patrol was out there,” he said for the third time. “Wouldn’t normally have been. What is it? What happened to those people?”

Alyas patiently explained, again, what little facts the official version contained. The garrison commander shook his grizzled head. “Makes no sense.”

“This makes no sense,” Alyas agreed as he stood in the centre of the devastated village a day later, the ash of its funeral pyre marking streaks up his boots and on his clothes, flecks of it settling in his hair.

That was an understatement. Nothing was right about this. Close to a hundred people had lived in this village. It was the largest of the three that had been destroyed by the contagion and its creatures—Esar could not bring himself to think of them as the villagers—and it was as far from any mining operations as the others had been. There was nothing to connect them except proximity. They were not even linked by the corruption of the land.

The company knew what they were looking for now, and Alyas had their people scouting all around this place, looking for signs of where it had come from and how it had spread. They had found nothing. It was as if it had sprung out of nowhere in each village and that didn’t just not make sense. It wasn’t possible, not if everything they knew so far was right. And as uncomfortable as those facts were, this would be worse.

“They could be dumping the waste somewhere nearby,” Esar suggested. It was the only explanation that might fit, but they had been looking for that too, and unless ‘somewhere close’ was under the villagers’ beds, he couldn’t see how that could be it either.

Alyas gave a non-committal shrug. “Everything suggests they are disposing of it outside Lankara, probably outside Hantara and Flaeres as well, if we can believe Gaemo. And about this I think we can. He has good spies. No, there is something wrong here.”

He moved towards the centre of the village, where reports from the terrified survivors suggested the disaster had begun. There was nothing there except blackened earth and the charred remains of the little wooden shrine. Soldiers from nearby Cadria had set the fire days ago, before the company had arrived.

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