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to the man a short time ago! Less than an hour, if even half that!
    Spoke to the man…and threatened him in the process before several witnesses…
    “Aye, you recall him, I see. Yes, young Uldyssian, the honored emissary of the Cathedral was found with his throat cut open…and ’tis your knife jutting out of the gap made!”

T HREE
    Uldyssian had never paid much mind to the interior of the Guard building. It was one of those places the farmer passed constantly, but, as he had never been arrested for drunkenness or fighting, there had been no reason for him to ever enter it.
    But now he sat in one of the two barred rooms in the back quarter. To reach them, visitors—and prisoners—had to enter an inner wooden door and walk down a short corridor. Uldyssian, sitting in the first cell, felt entirely cut off from the world. A worn wooden bench acted as chair, table, and bed. Uldyssian had lived here for four days now, two days in which his farm had been left all but unattended. The crops needed weeding and irrigating and the animals had to be cared for. Mendeln had promised to see to everything, but Uldyssian feared that his brother was not up to such a task on his own, especially while also worrying about his elder sibling. Moreover, while the earlier storm had, ironically, blown itself out fairly quickly and with little violence, the clouds had remained over Seram since then and Uldyssian feared that another tempest—and perhaps a greater one—might follow. The farm had been fortunate the first time, but a second assault might throw it into a turmoil from which it could not survive.
    He knew that the farm should have been the least of his worries. The situation involving the murders had grown even worse than Uldyssian had imagined it could. With both victims members of the leading sects, Dorius had felt compelled to send word to Tulisam, where the Cathedral and the Temple had a permanent presence. He had requested that representatives from one or both come to help oversee the matter. The two surviving missionaries had ridden along with those messages, supposedly in order to give testimony to their particular masters. In addition, while the headman continued to promise Uldyssian that all would turn out well in the end, he had insisted that Captain Tiberius keep the son of Diomedes locked up for that time, lest there be some question as to Seram’s notions of justice for the victims.
    Uldyssian remained dumbstruck by what had happened to the second missionary. According to a more detailed story told him later by the erstwhile Guard commander, the Cathedral’s emissary had been found on his back, his face contorted in what Tiberius freely called “absolute” fear and the farmer’s knife—upon whose wooden handle Uldyssian had made his mark—thrust deep into the rib cage.
    Compared with the corpse that he had discovered, the second body had barely been touched. That, however, made the crime no less terrible. In fact, no one could recall such a multiple tragedy since the plague had swept through…the same plague that had taken Uldyssian’s family.
    Serenthia came to visit him each day, giving him hopeful word from many others unable to do the same. The consensus by those who knew him was that Uldyssian was utterly innocent. Achilios had already blackened the eye of one man who had suggested otherwise.
    As Uldyssian sat with his head in his hands, he thought not of himself, but of Lylia. She had not come to him once since his incarceration, not that he had expected her. Indeed, the farmer hoped that she would continue to stay away, lest she somehow be drawn into the madness. Soon, he kept promising himself, soon he would be released and then the two of them could meet again.
    If she even remained in Seram…
    Thought of never seeing the noblewoman again fueled Uldyssian’s already tremendous anxiety. His entire life seemed to have turned into some nightmare. He had not even felt this way when his family had died,