was red-faced and spitting as he shouted at a customer. He jabbed a beefy finger into the customer’s shoulder. “Don’t care about your sob story! We all got problems! Blame it on the pretend emperor!”
Before Yorbel could reach him, the customer grabbed the seller’s finger and twisted it back. “Hands off, you greedy, twisted kehok lover!”
With a roar, the seller launched himself at the customer, and they hit the ground, landing at Yorbel’s feet. Seeing him, the seller’s eyes went wide. The customer twisted to see what had distracted the seller, and then he scrambled back up.
“Is this the best way to resolve your problems?” Yorbel asked in his best teacher voice.
“Uh, um, no, Your Holiness,” the customer said.
“Resolve your differences in a civilized, empathic way,” Yorbel instructed. “Kindness will benefit you both in the end.” He then turned to the recordkeeper. “We have unfinished business, sir.”
As the customer and seller began haltingly to come to an agreement, Yorbel stepped aside with the recordkeeper. He managed to keep from crowing in satisfaction. For the first time in days, he felt more like himself.
“Wish I could keep one of you around all the time,” the recordkeeper said. “People have trouble remembering their best selves in times like these. No offense meant, but wish you augurs would hurry up and find that River-drowned vessel.”
Ignoring the recordkeeper’s comment, Yorbel concluded his business, learning the names of the trainers who owned the kehoks with new souls. Even after visiting them, he couldn’t stop thinking about the fight he’d witnessed—the combatants had blamed Dar.
If the government stasis didn’t end soon, would they all blame Dar? Was Gissa right? Was Becar so fragile that it couldn’t weather a little waiting? Maybe it is, he thought. Maybe stability and peace were flimsy things that had to be nurtured and protected.
Now he kept his ears open as he visited market after market. He overheard hundreds of such anxious conversations: The poor were suffering while the government was suspended. Halted construction projects meant hundreds of out-of-work construction workers. Unsigned trade agreements meant shortages of spices, textiles, and other goods. It was one thing to hear it in the abstract; it was another to see the fear and worry on the faces of men, women, and children. They needed the late emperor’s vessel to be found as badly as Dar did. Yorbel helped whenever he could, soothing tempers and spreading serenity.
A week later, after visiting multiple markets, training grounds, and racetracks, he’d examined so many condemned souls that he felt as if he would never be clean. He felt stained within and without, to the point of worrying about the state of his own aura. He understood better why the council encouraged augurs to keep their distance from kehoks—they feared the spread of the monsters’ depravity. And they hated what the kehoks represented: their collective failure to save every soul in Becar.
The longer Yorbel searched, the more unlikely he thought it was that the late emperor could have been reborn as a kehok. These souls were so shriveled and damaged. If the late emperor had a propensity for this kind of pure evil, then one of the high augurs would have detected it. The corruption he was seeing among these monsters was so absolute that Yorbel knew he’d been naive to think it could happen in a moment.
I’m wasting my time. He should be with the other augurs, scouring the nests and burrows of more pure creatures, instead of wading through the dregs of society while Becar crumbled around him.
But he’d committed himself to this task, and he couldn’t return to Dar and tell him he was probably wrong but that he hadn’t thoroughly confirmed it. He had to be absolutely sure.
Others will search those purer creatures. This task is mine and mine alone.
By the time Yorbel reached Gea Market, it was two days before the first of the qualifying races, and the kehok auction was abuzz with gossip, predictions, and excitement. It was also nearly empty of kehoks. Most had been sold to trainers with wannabe riders.
Worse, Gea Market had no version of Overseer Irin. Their recordkeeper was collecting bets on the qualifying rounds—he didn’t care about tracking the past lives of the kehoks. He cared about which racers were fit and ready for the first set of races. Everyone seemed to be gambling this year, and the whiff of desperation around the season made Yorbel feel sick.
“Apologies, Your Glorious Holiness,” the recordkeeper told him, as he accepted yet