“You trying to win a staring contest? Fancy yourself a rider? Pardon me for saying so, but you don’t look like one.”
“One moment, and I will answer all your questions.”
The seller quit talking.
He focused again on the kehok. Gently, he sifted through the shadows until he saw the shape: a human with evil threaded through her soul, who had done terrible things, who had—
He pulled his mind back from the maw of darkness.
It didn’t matter what this kehok had done as a woman. She hadn’t been the late emperor.
Yorbel left the seller without answering a single one of her questions.
By the time he had completed testing all eight kehoks in Seronne Market, the sun had eaten the day. The sellers were tossing thick black sheets over the kehoks’ cages, shielding them from the night. Other vendors were closing their stalls.
Of the eight, five were not new souls. The other three had been, respectively, a murderous woman, a traitorous man, and a former child whose soul was so twisted that it had made Yorbel physically ill to view. He’d vomited behind a barrel.
Viewing all eight in one day had left him drained. It was more than he’d ever tried to see at one time, far more tiring than reading auras of ordinary people.
He made his way to the bakery that the kind man had told him about and purchased a bag of sausage-and-onion rolls. He’d planned to visit two markets a day, but he’d be lucky if he reached the second before all the inns closed for the night. He wouldn’t be able to view their kehoks until morning.
At this pace . . .
He didn’t want to think about what that meant. Or about how much he’d be slowed if any of the kehoks with new souls had been sold, which they likely had been. He’d been lucky here, in that all the new or untested kehoks were still at the auction, but that wasn’t going to be true everywhere he went.
I’ll work as hard as I can, as fast as I can, he promised himself. He could do no better than his best. But telling himself that didn’t help. He was beginning to feel an urgency he hadn’t felt before. This wasn’t so much an adventure as a race. And that held a certain irony, seeing how kehok-racing season would be starting soon. Because then the countdown would begin.
Two weeks. Can I visit them all that quickly?
For Dar’s sake—for the empire’s sake—he hoped so.
He caught the final ferry toward the next town with a market large enough for an auction, Strak. It was as crowded and odiferous as the morning ferry, but this time he was so weary and frankly odiferous himself after spending the entire day in the muck by the kehok cages that he didn’t notice. He let the sound of the evening bells sweep over him and tried deliberately not to see any of the auras of the fellow passengers.
Landing near Strak Market, he disembarked, paid an innkeeper for a room, slept until his head quit aching, and then repeated the day. This time he was not as lucky: Strak Market had only three new-soul kehoks, but two had been sold. He obtained the buyers’ addresses and visited two of the three training grounds before he ran out of daylight.
He finished his visits the next morning, continuing with the same lie he’d told Overseer Irin in Seronne Market. The only surprise was how easily the lie was accepted.
Except it wasn’t a surprise. People wanted closure. So hiring an augur to find the shame of your family was, apparently, far more common than Yorbel ever imagined. Though it pained him each time he told the lie, no one questioned it.
Midday, he took the ferry to Esmot Market. He decided to wear his augur robes and display his pendant, since the explanation for his presence had proved so plausible. He paused to speak with the recordkeeper when he heard a disturbance between the cages—raised human voices, not kehok screams.
The recordkeeper, a squat, sweaty man whose name Yorbel had already forgotten, heaved a sigh. “Third time this week. Can’t even keep the troublemakers out. ’Cause it’s everybody these days.” He waddled toward the shouting, which was starting to set off the kehoks.
Yorbel followed, smoothing his robes and straightening his shoulders. He felt almost excited. At last, here was an action he could take that wasn’t morally problematic!