Cautiously, I gave a soft knock, waited, and when no one answered, I knocked again.

Nothing.

Gerel and Chenda exchanged worried glances. “Try to open it,” whispered Chenda.

I tried to turn the knob, but it caught. Locked.

Gerel shifted us all around so that she stood closest to the door. She tested the knob, as though confirming I wasn’t just terrible at opening doors, and then gave a sharp twist. The door swung open, and the smell hit.

It was a terrible, sick odor, like someone hadn’t made it to the washroom in time. The stink rolled from the front door and knocked all three of us back a couple of steps. “Seven gods.” I coughed. “That’s vile.”

Chenda’s face was drawn with disgust as she pulled her shirt up to cover her nose and mouth. “It smells worse than the sewage holes in the Pit.”

Even Gerel looked ready to vomit, but she just shook her head, silently ordering us to stop talking, and pushed the door open wider.

It was dark inside, but there was a covered noorestone on the wall right beside the door. After checking that the door was shut behind us and the window curtains drawn tight, I lifted the velvet away and let cool blue light shine across the parlor. Empty. Except . . .

Red-brown streaks marred the golden hardwood floor, making a choppy trail into the hall. Gerel knelt and held out a hand for the noorestone, which I gave to her.

“It’s blood,” she said. “Dry now.”

The three of us went from room to room, finding only bloody trails—evidence that something terrible had happened here. The stench of bodily waste grew stronger as we reached the back of the house, and that was where we found them:

Four warriors had been laid out on the floor of the back bedroom. Dead.

There was no sign of Tirta or Elbena, and suddenly I realized what the guards had meant by “raids.”

High Magistrate Paorah had known they were in the city. He’d sent his soldiers looking for the last Luminary Councilor and the false Hopebearer. Now he had them.

We were too late.

CHAPTER FOUR

I STARED AT THE DEAD WARRIORS, SWAYING ON MY feet. They’d been slashed open with knives or swords—some sort of blade—and their bodies dragged through the halls and deposited in the back bedroom. To be dealt with later? Or to lie here and rot?

The overwhelming stink of blood and feces scraped the back of my throat, then slid down until my stomach turned over. I wanted to heave, but not here. Not next to their bodies.

I half stumbled, half ran from the room, threw myself out the back door, and vomited into a scraggly bush.

They were killers, I knew. Monsters, like Altan. They’d worked under him, and they may have been part of the group that destroyed the council house in Crescent Prominence less than a decan ago, but still.