Page 114 of Sonnets and Serpents
With that, the noble knight puffed into a tiny brown rat.
After learning Kerem was a murderer, the smartest action would have been to call for help and try to escape. Instead, Silas willingly followed him out of the Yamakaz and away from all its guards and fortifications. After everything that had gone wrong, he couldn’t help clinging to a sliver of hope that Kerem had a good explanation for what he’d done, that if Silas just listened, he’d find the misunderstanding.
He finally understood why Eliza had been so stubborn after the shipwreck. Better to cling to a fragile hope than to embrace a nightmare.
And he’d already lost everything else.
His former professor led him into a series of tunnels beneath campus. They pointed toward the ocean, and soon enough, Silas heard the distant crash of waves, echoing dully against the rock walls. The narrow tunnels opened into wide caverns, some of which must have led to caves in the cliffside.
They stopped in a low-ceilinged but expansive cavern. Natural rock structures had clearly been used as tables, some still bearing abandoned cups or surrounded by chairs. Notes had been scrawled in chalk across the rock walls. As far as research rooms went, it was more atmospheric than anything on campus.
Kerem set his lantern on a table, correcting an overturned cup like a wayward student. Silas thought of corrected essays, of afternoons in lecture hall, of the surge of pride he felt whenever Kerem noted his contributions in class. Mentor and murderer—Silas could not reconcile the two identities in his mind.
It was like trying to understand his father all over again.
“It began with a dream,” said Kerem, his voice echoing surreally in the cavern. Lantern light flickered across the rock walls. “First, a dream of achievement. My grandfather raised me, and he believed in experimentation and potential. Everything was an achievement waiting to happen. I was ten years old whenmy magic activated, and he encouraged me in every exploration of it. He paid for my education. I saw an open world, with nothing barred to me.”
Silas’s eyes roamed the white letters across the walls, but his mind focused on Kerem’s voice.
“That dream dissolved, running like sand through the hands of Cronese slavers.”
One by one, Kerem shuttered three sides of the lantern, throwing the cavern into deep shadows. The remaining light illuminated only one cavern wall, jagged rock cut deeply by trickling water over the course of time.
“Eight years I spent being sold from one wealthy family to another, a snake on display, transforming for their entertainment or suffering the consequences in blood. I had only one dream left to me. A dream of escape.”
In the echoing shadows, Silas felt the walls pressing in.
“I thought once I achieved it,” Kerem said quietly, “I could go back to where I was before. But the world never turns backward. When I finally came home, I’d grown from child to adult, and it was home no longer. My grandfather was gone. I had no family, no friendships, no path forward. Even my magic—forever damaged.
“Freedom, which should have been everything, was nothing.”
Silas pressed one hand to a dark wall, leaning his weight off his throbbing leg. A deeper pain pulsed beneath.
He knew what it was like to lose a home.
“Another ten years of struggle,” said Kerem, “advancements and accolades, a professorship and a name for myself. Yet I could never forget what had been taken. It was time for a new dream.”
He turned the lantern, throwing its focused light onto a different wall, white with chalk. Even at a distance, Silas could distinguish three sets of handwriting woven together.
“A Stone Caster, Fluid Caster, and Affiliate, all coordinating magic. A project with almost zero chance of success, but I had nothing to lose.”
Silas spoke at last, his voice hoarse. “Iyal Havva did.”
The wire frame of Kerem’s spectacles cut shadows like scars across his face. “I predicted the Artifact creation would draw out a single bone, that he would survive the process, however painfully. Havva thought so as well, and he agreed to that sacrifice. We planned for it. I never imagined the true result.”
“Is that why you felt guilty and took his body home?” It would have been smarter to dump it in the ocean or pass it to the graveyard like the other magic users, though the thought made Silas ill.
A tic passed through Kerem’s jaw. “That was Mazhar’s sentimentality. Since Havva was our collaborator, Mazhar insisted his death be known and his sacrifice respected, even if no one knew the truth. I never should have agreed. It cost me the Artifact after I’d already begun experimenting with it. A monumental setback, especially when I failed to capture the thief.”
It was a wonder Ceyda had survived. If she had. Silas prayed Gill had been able to find and help her in the healing hall, that her presence there wasn’t simply one more lie.
“How did you recruit Havva and Mazhar? You just knocked on another professor’s door and asked him to offer up one of his bones for your secret project?”
Kerem shook his head, as if disappointed in Silas’s reasoning. “Initially, I carried a hatred of Cronith. Of the slavers who sold me, the people who purchased, the government that refused to outlaw a barbaric practice as long as it stayed limited to foreigners rather than its own citizens.
“But it was my own country that was most to blame. The shackles I wore that damaged my magic were not made inCronith but in Pravusat. It was Pravusat’s black market that allowed them to be created and smuggled into dangerous hands. It was Pravusat’s lawlessness that allowed me to be captured and sold in the first place, and it was Pravusat’s selfishness that turned a blind eye to the outcome.”
Eliza’s voice echoed in Silas’s mind.What is wrong with this place? No one cares.
