Aylem, Healing Shrine, 8th rot., 9th day

What greeted me on the dome was not what I expected. Emily was spread out on the dome of the shrine in her sheepskin flying cloak, eyes closed, hands behind her head. Asgotl was sleeping with his back to the shine’s belfry, some 100 hands away at the top of the dome. Twessera was standing by Emily’s head, arms crossed, looking like she had eaten unripened crab apples.

I landed lightly next to the frustrated and unhappy-looking Twessera. The young priestess was glowering at Emily. The displeased grimace on Emily’s face and the dull orange tinge on her aura were all I needed to know. Emily would be difficult this morning.

Twessera looked relieved to see me, “the bundle of trouble is all yours, Great One.”

“I feel like I’m missing something here,” I made a point of smiling with encouragement, hoping to hear what this was about.

"My mistress sent me to bring her back inside," Twessera frowned. Then she surprised me by mindcasting.

*Lisaykos was firm that Emily should come off the roof so I came to get her down. I had to incapacitate her and carry her back inside the first time. Then I took her coat away from her and left her on the lounge in my mistress' study. A few moments later, when the Blessed Lisaykos looked up, the Blessed Emily was gone. That's when we discovered the loose panel in the woodwork in back of the lounge, leading to another passage for Emily through the inside of the wall and up to the crawl spaces above the ceiling. Then the wraiths reported she was back on the roof of the dome. This one,* Twessera pointed a finger of accusation at Asgotl, *brought Emily her the flying cloak. We had no idea Asgotl before now that he could open the door into her room from the corridor.*

“You’re mindcasting, aren’t you?” Emily accused, eyes still closed.

“Yes, Great Bug, I am,” Twessera grumped. I wasn’t sure what the origin of the name was, but her caretakers called her Great Bug when they were unhappy with her.

“Hmph,” was all Emily said in reply.

“Tell Lisaykos I’m with Emily and she can stop worrying, not that she ever will,” I sighed. Lisaykos needed to loosen up around Emily. The little Coyn wasn’t chronically ill anymore.

Twessera made her obeisance and left for the ladder down from the dome on the north balcony. I waited for her to vanish to the other side of the dome before starting to talk. I reminded myself that Emily might be hard to handle this morning. I got ready to listen to everything she said as if I was an observer and not a participant, which was a trick Lyappis taught me to create delays in reacting to what people told me. It was not easy but it worked when I remembered to do it.

I decided to tackle the first thing that bothered me about this situation. “So, what’s your part in this, Asgotl?”

“Vassu, Lord of the Winds woke me up and told me to take care of my prophet today,” Asgotl replied in a neutral voice. Then he sounded annoyed, “He woke me up from a great dream too.”

“Vassu? Seriously?” I didn’t have any reason to doubt Asgotl. He was boastful but he wasn't a liar.

“Yes, I am quite certain it was Vassu. And this time, he told me not to stop to eat beforehand,” Asgotl sounded upset. I would have to ask him about this later. But if Vassu woke him up, this wasn’t some whim of Emily’s or something trivial. Gods didn’t meddle with trivial things.

Then I looked at Emily, at her miserable expression and the one slow tear sliding down her temple.

“I would like to talk to you in private,” Emily said, not moving and not opening her eyes, “somewhere isolated from the ears and eyes of wraiths. I suggest one of those mountain tops or maybe somewhere in the Great Cracks.”

“What’s this about?” My curiosity was aroused.

“Wraiths have ears,” Emily said.

“Asgotl doesn’t have his saddle,” I pointed out.

“If it’s you, he doesn’t need a saddle.”

“What about you?”

“If I’m riding with you, he doesn’t need a saddle.”

“I don’t have my riding clothes on, or my cloak,”

“I know you don’t need them, Aylem. You are impervious to all weather conditions. I will trust you to keep me from freezing to death.”

Emily was right about all those things. I wondered who told her and then I saw the look in Asgotl’s eyes and knew the culprit. That fat lazy traitor.

“Why are you trying not to weep?” I asked Emily.

“It’s something unrelated,” she hurriedly wiped her eyes. “Galt showed me how the slave riot in Surdos started and ended while I slept last night. I’m so angry, I can’t stop the tears. Lord Yutsayyax haup Yuxvos needs to stand trial for thousandfold cruelty, for which the punishment is death.”

“The investigation was indecisive in determining who had abused the Coyn contract workers,” I spoke calmly in face of Emily’s controlled rage. “We can’t question a Lord Holder under compulsion without certain proof. We don’t have that.”

“Screw that nonsense, Aylem,” Emily growled. “Just how long is Foskos going to continue to uphold a broken body of law that the gods want to be done away with? Are you trying to convince me that the courtesy paid to a criminal’s social class is more important than determining the truth about multiple acts of assault and murder? Are you? Is the law for protecting the leeches at the top of society or is it to promote the right things and punish the wrong ones? Well, which is it?

“Do you know how that riot started? It began with one of the farm slaves from Yuxvos that was contracted to Lord Surdos to get in the fruit harvest. The evening before they were set to return to Yuxvos, this slave expressed the wish to stay in Surdos, where he had enough to eat and wasn’t beaten all the time.

“The slaves had just been turned over to their Yuxvos overseers who didn’t bother to give them any dinner after their last day of work spent packing up the last of the fruit. They were tired and they were hungry, and now they would not be fed. They doubted the overseers even brought food for the overnight walk home, which was supposed to start the next morning.

“Then the discontented slave said he’d rather try biting the charm gem off his hand like the Impotuan slaves than go back to Yuxvos. He said he had nothing to go back to. His one surviving daughter had been selected for the breeding farm. He tolerated it, since he had no other choice, right up to the day that she disappeared. He searched the grave pits and found her. She had been rip-raped by a Cosm, Aylem. Don't look away. You know it happens, Queen of Foskos. Every goddamn fucking Cosm in this fucked-over world knows it happens and you all look away. You pretend it doesn't happen. Look at me Aylem. Don't you dare look away.

“You know what the injury looks like after a Coyn female is rip-raped by a Cosm, Aylem? Do you? I've seen it with my own eyes too many times. The wall of the vagina gets ripped and the penetration continues further inside to rip and tear the colon and the womb. Some prefer entering the rectum instead if they are too large for the vagina, with the same results. This is an act no Coyn woman ever survives, Aylem. Every single one dies from bleeding to death in a gush of piss and feces and blood.

“So this Coyn father of a rip-raped Coyn daughter took the charm gem in his teeth and tore it off, and then he died from the convulsions that followed, bleeding from his ears and foaming at the mouth. And that’s why there was a riot in Surdos, Aylem. All those Yuxvos slaves decided right there that they would rather resist and be killed than wait to be killed anyway. So that’s why I can’t stop crying, you overgrown idiot. I...I…”

By now, I was on my knees in front of her in concern. For a softspoken person like Emily, her volume was loud. She was sitting up, pounding on the red copper sheathing of the dome, kept from tarnishing by magic. Her fists struck with such force that she made the dome boom. I could tell that she was injuring her hands, but she was so upset she couldn't feel it yet.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaah!" she screamed her anger and frustration into the morning air, covered her head with her hands, and collapsed sideways into a sobbing ball of misery. I had no idea how to deal with an Emily who had gone and lost the plot. Uncontrollable and irrational were not adjectives that one usually applied to Emily. For lack of anything better, I reached out and put her to sleep.

I picked her up and carried her up to where Asgotl was watching. “Any suggestions, old friend?” I asked.

“That was worse than one of her flashbacks,” he said. “I had no idea Galt had visited her dreams last night. Aylem, what she described: that’s beyond horrible. I had heard rumors, but to hear it told this way, I might not sleep tonight. You can not ignore this, Queen of Foskos. This can not be tolerated.”

"I know, I know, but what can we do? The rules for questioning a Lord Holder…,"

“Are obviously also broken,” Kamagishi’s voice said from the shadows inside the belfry. “Can you find better proof or some new evidence based on what Emily just said, Lord Usruldes?”

A bass-pitched voice with no body replied from above me: “I’ll have a crew at the grave pits this evening. If I can find just one death by rip-rape, we’ll finally have him. I never thought to search the legal breeding camp. We’ve been trying to find an illegal one. What an oversight on my part! But if we can find proof of cruelty at the grave puts, then we’ve got the grounds to put him in the Well of Galt for falsifying his records.”

“How long have you been here?” I asked Kamagishi and the invisible Usruldes.

“I heard Emily blow up just now,” Kamagishi frowned. “I had this feeling, you see, that I needed to be at the belfry, so here I am. Damn precognition. I was enjoying a cup of tea and chatting with Senlyosart and Losnana when the need to come here hit me.”

Usruldes appeared seated on Cadrees, who was perched on top of the belfry. “I am here because you are here, the king is here, the princess is here, and Emily is here. I’ve been chasing Emily all morning. I asked her last season not to go through the walls and crawl spaces, and she said she would refrain. She usually follows the requests I make of her, but not today. That means she had a reason to break that promise."

“Lord Usruldes,” I had to ask, “you said you might finally have enough to send Lord Yuxvos to the Well of Galt? How long have…?”

“Imstay and I have been investigating Lord Yuxvos and Lord Kas for over five rotations,” Usruldes shrugged. “The Holy Irralray already has cordons of her priestesses set up around their main estates. We can move instantly if we need to. We hoped we would get sufficient evidence out of the riot in Surdos. The odd thing is that every single Yuxvos slave that night was dead by morning yet we know some of them were alive after order was restored. They died by blunt trauma, but we don't know how or who did it. The mystery is still keeping Fassex up at night because she feels her shrine failed in its investigation of the riot.”

“I had no idea you were investigating,” I admitted. “I think I am pleasantly surprised to see Imstay acting behind the scenes this way.”

“Yes, he’s finally grown up and is taking his role as a king seriously,” Usruldes said and I could hear the smile he was making under that mask of his. “Regardless, what are we going to do with the distraught Emily? I think putting her back to bed in her bedroom is not the right move here. She probably wants a lot of distance between her and Cosm right now, which probably explains her desire to be on the roof with her griffin partner in crime within reach for a quick getaway.”

“Damn, you are probably right, Lord Usruldes,” I admitted. What were we going to do with Emily?