Doran sighed. “What did you do?”
Now it was his turn to frown. Why did everyone assume this was his fault? He had played a small part in it, sure, but he hadn’t planted the explosives. He would have done his research properly, made sure no one had been left inside the house.
“I didn’t do anything. I sold him something basic, and not a lot of it. He had no idea how much he needed, and he wouldn’t tell me the details, so I only gave him a tiny amount. Two days later, one of the houses in the Gold Quarter goes up. I could see the explosion from here—erm, from my shop, I mean. The smoke stuck around for a while too.”
Levi’s eyes went wide. “I thought you didn’t sell him much?”
“I didn’t. Kult couldn’t have done this much damage with what I sold him alone, but you try telling the authorities that. Selling explosives is against the law, they won’t care if I sold him enough to blow up a whole house or not—they only care that I sold him anything.”
“You said he’d promised you that no one would die,” Doran said, and Ash’s stomach churned. The authorities wouldn’t have cared as much if the building had been empty.
“Yeah. He did. I guess he forgot to check before he planted the explosives. There were three people inside—his competition, the wife, and a child. There’s no one left to inherit the business now. Kult got rid of the whole family, and the other merchants have figured that he was involved, even if nothing official has been declared. I imagine he’s made some well-disguised threats to make sure they know it was him.”
Naavah Ora huffed. “And you still think the deaths were an accident?”
“No. But I didn’t know what Kult was planning when he bought the explosives. If I had, I wouldn’t have sold him anything.”
“Who else sells things like that here?” Doran asked. “I know every store in Alt Võina and none of them sell anything like it.”
Ash nodded. “That’s what I thought. But the guards will be coming after whoever sold him the rest. Kult got nervous and leaked my name—I don’t know why else the authorities would have found out it was me. Officially, I sell only traps, nothing else. He’ll have told them about the other guy, too.”
“We’re going to Z’rasie,” Doran said. “You should be safe if you come with us.”
“Thank you, but I won’t agree to anything until I know why you’re going that way. It’s not like I can’t make my own way there if I wanted to.” A child of Z’rasie always knew his way home.
Doran looked to Naavah Ora, and she focused her pretty blue eyes on him. Mengha, he’d never win an argument with her. “The spirits of the dead are being corrupted to bring war to this world. We have to stop it.”
He didn’t mean to, but he laughed. “Good one, elf! And I take it you’ve seen one of those corrupted dead? Or did their leader tell you his plans personally to give you a better chance?”
Her eyes were calm, but he didn’t miss the cold anger within. “I’ve seen and killed four.”
His gut instinct told him to stop joking. “Let’s pretend for a moment that something like that can happen. What makes you think you can stop it?”
“There’s knowledge in Z’rasie I need. I can use it to stop the corruption in the spirit realm, before it has a chance to spread here.”
He failed to make sense of it all. When he was a boy in Onwwe, he’d been taught to respect the dead and honour their memory. Not once had someone said anything about them still existing somewhere. He wasn’t so religious he prayed every night, but to him the dead were memories, like his parents had taught him. There was nothing else left when people died, no spirit realm to move to for the rest of eternity.
Doran believed her, and he trusted Doran. Anywhere was safer than Alt Võina right now.
“Have you seen those corrupted spirits?” Ash asked Doran. He shivered when Doran nodded.
“I also saw her kill them.”
He sighed. Chasing spirits seemed a lot safer than waiting for the authorities to track him down.
“Fine. I’ll come with you. But at some point one of you will have to explain to me how any of this is possible.”
“Don’t worry,” Naavah Ora said. “I doubt it’ll be long before the spirits find us. You can ask them all the questions you want if you can get them to stop attacking for long enough.”
By nature, humans crave conflict. Often, the conflict they seek ends in blood. I don't condemn them for this—we’re all slaves to our natures, aren’t we?—and this one craved it more than anyone else. Not because he wanted to win. Not because he wanted to rule.
Because he wanted to know.
Chapter 35
Naavah Ora
It felt good to have moss and branches beneath her feet again. The air out here was so much fresher than it had been in Alt Võina; even the birds’ songs seemed more cheerful.
Naavah Ora wasn’t convinced that bringing Ash was a good idea. He was too careless and reminded her too much of Doran. One of them was enough; she doubted she could put up with two like him.
She didn’t doubt his explosives would come in handy at some point. If nothing else, they might provide a diversion. Sometimes that was all you could hope for.
Naavah Ora had never seen anyone like him. The few rare traders who’d come to her village had been Vaskan, a couple had even been from Ceidir. Doran’s skin had been the darkest she’d ever seen, but he was merely tanned from his long hours on the road and exposure to sunlight. Ash was a warm, deep brown, not dissimilar to the milk chocolate a trader had once brought her as a gift. His eyes were deep like a moonless night, and his hair was black like a raven’s feather. Everything about him was dark and warm, when all she knew was light and pale.
The only exception was his personality. He was clever if he had devised and perfected the formulae for his explosives by himself, but his tongue let him down. His lack of responsibility let him down. Whether he’d known that the merchant would kill people or not didn’t matter—it only mattered that he’d sold explosives to someone he didn’t know, without knowing why they were needed.
The merchant had known what he was doing when he triggered the explosion, but Ash was just as guilty.
Ash slowed down until he walked next to her.
“So you’ve really seen a spirit?” he asked. “Someone dead?”
She frowned. She had underestimated how little humans knew about Dunhă. “I have.”
“And they didn’t scare you? Didn’t they look mouldy? You know, decomposed?”
He was like a child, pestering her with his curiosity. “No, of course not.”
“How did they look then?”
“Like glowing shadows of their former selves. Beautiful and sad all at once.”
He frowned. “That makes no sense.”
“That’s because you haven’t seen one.”
It wasn’t an easy thing to describe to someone who hadn’t known about Dunhă until now. It’d be easier to show him, but to allow anyone other than a Suf’afir inside Dunhă would violate her vows, and he wasn’t worth that.