"Execute Cassian Crow."
Toma's order reached all three execution grounds at once.
The believers in the North Gate sewer drew their blades.
The type on Western Printer's Road printed the same sentence.
The dead beneath the cathedral cemetery beat upon their coffin lids.
Cassian had abandoned Toma.
In return, Toma made the entire capital Cassian's execution ground.
The Feather Proxy spread its arms.
Three black threads pulled taut.
The ropes around the twelve prisoners came loose.
The press gears biting Ria's left arm opened.
The cemetery ceiling stopped above Adel's head.
The former leader kept his word.
In return, he took Toma's throat.
Black feathers grew inside Toma's mouth. They pinned down his tongue and wound around his vocal cords. With every breath, a new execution order appeared upon their tips.
"The first order," Toma's mouth said.
"Cut off Cassian Crow's arm."
One hundred believers set blades against their own right arms.
They cut at once.
The proxy's right arm consumed the wounds of one hundred people and swelled black. An arm twice Cassian's length scraped the sewer ceiling.
The hand came down upon him.
Cassian could not evade it.
His backward-bent right arm was crushed between palm and wall. Rejuvenated bone tore through the flesh.
The proxy seized the arm and pulled.
Cassian's shoulder split open.
The arm did not come off.
Eight sins held it on with flesh of eight different ages.
"The second order."
Toma's mouth opened.
"Cut off his head again."
The believers set blades against their throats.
Toma's eyes found Cassian.
His mouth was smiling.
His eyes were not.
Cassian saw the difference.
The former leader owned Toma's voice.
All Toma had left were his eyes and fingers.
His right index finger tapped the stone twice.
The signal that the porridge had spilled at the distribution house.
It meant the order was false.
Cassian raised his sword.
As the hundred believers prepared to cut their own throats, Toma's left hand slipped into his ledger pouch.
He caught one of the feathers growing from his throat.
He tore it out with the flesh.
Black blood poured from his mouth.
"Third," Toma said in his own voice.
"Carry out the first two orders simultaneously."
The believers' hands stopped.
They could not cut their throats while cutting off their arms.
If they cut their throats, they could not finish cutting through the arms.
Each order prevented the other from being completed.
The proxy's right arm shook.
Cassian did not pull free.
He left his crushed right arm inside the proxy's hand and wrenched his body away.
The shoulder came completely out of its socket.
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He drove his sword through the empty space.
The blade rose from the proxy's armpit to its throat.
A diagonal wound appeared across seventy-three believers.
Blood flooded the sewer.
The proxy's wound closed again.
Three believers did not rise.
The former leader's mouth laughed inside Toma's throat.
"Cut again."
"I was going to," Cassian said.
"They will die first."
"They are your followers."
"I never made them."
"They ate and lived in your name."
"I never fed them either."
Toma's eyes narrowed.
Those words were meant for him as well.
Cassian looked at the believers.
Hands that had shared bread.
Hands that had bound the innocent.
Hands that had raised blades to their own throats.
No one could be reduced to a single word.
So Cassian did not reduce them.
On Western Printer's Road, Ria rose with her ruined left arm clutched against her.
The bone had been crushed flat. Her fingers did not move.
She opened the victims' ledger with her right hand.
She read the name of one printer.
"Why you joined the Black Feather Society."
The man kept his mouth closed.
Ria raised the original ration ledger.
"So your two daughters would not starve that winter."
The second name.
"So the guards could not beat your husband."
The third.
"To recover the wages the guild stole from you."
There had been no Cassian at the beginning of their stories.
No black feathers.
There had been hunger, fear, and debt.
One of Cassian's eyes fell from the proxy's face.
In the cemetery, Adel walked among the wounded believers.
"Do you permit the person standing here now—not the name—to treat you?"
Twelve raised their hands.
Adel treated only those twelve.
The rest demanded a miracle from `the dead saint`.
"Adel Venati will save us."
"She is dead."
"You are her."
"No."
Adel denied her own name.
Each time she said it, her face became a little less familiar.
Still, she did not treat them.
She would not touch pain that had not consented and call it salvation.
Words from all three sites reached the believers in the sewer.
The real motives Ria had read.
The dead saint's miracle Adel had refused.
Toma's contradictory order.
The proxy's face split.
The former leader's face emerged a little at a time.
He was an old man.
The names of children who had died without rations were carved into his eyelids. Inside his lips were the numbers of innocent people executed in those children's names.
"Tell them," Ria's voice reached Cassian through the shadow passage.
"Tell them what?"
"That you will save them."
"That would be a lie."
"I know."
Ria looked at her left arm.
"But to break one promise, they need another."
"There is none."
Cassian pulled his sword from the proxy's chest.
The believers' wounds stopped for a moment.
They looked at Cassian.
They waited for their savior's answer.
Cassian spoke.
"I will not save you."
The proxy's face hardened.
"I will not take your wounds in your place."
One believer asked, "Even if we die?"
"Die."
"Even though we died because of you?"
"It will be recorded as my sin."
"Then our names?"
"I will not eat them."
Fear entered the believers' faces.
They had accepted the wounds to become a part of Cassian.
They believed he would eat their sins and names and keep them inside himself.
Cassian denied them even that reward.
Love turned to hatred.
The first believer threw a black feather to the floor.
"Bastard."
The second removed the rope from their throat.
"You used us."
"I was the one who used you," Toma said, coughing blood.
The former leader's mouth tried to stop him.
Toma tore out another feather.
"That man never owned us."
A third believer threw a stone at the proxy.
Belief broke.
The wound in the proxy's chest opened.
This time, it did not disperse into anyone.
Cassian pushed in his sword.
The ribs spread apart.
There was no heart inside.
Thousands of rolled execution orders were beating in its place.
Cassian pulled them all out.
The former leader's mouth screamed.
"Without us, they will starve again!"
"I know."
"The imperial house will return and steal the children's bread!"
"That too."
"And you will still kill me?"
"Because the orders you wrote remain."
Cassian fed the execution orders one by one into the former leader's mouth.
The order to hang an innocent copyist.
The order to cut off the well keeper's head.
The order to burn the accountant.
The order to bind witnesses with the same hands that had fed children.
Paper filled the throat.
The former leader could not swallow his own orders.
Cassian caught his jaw.
The teeth beneath Cassian's nails bit into bone.
"Read."
The man with a mouth full of paper read the first sentence.
Blood and ink ran together.
The second.
The third.
The thousandth.
Each time he read one of his own orders to the end in his own voice, the proxy's body thinned.
The final sentence was the order he had given Toma.
`Cassian Crow shall be executed through the mouth of the traitor.`
The former leader read the last character.
Cassian pulled out his tongue.
The sword entered the mouth.
It came out through the back of the skull.
The proxy's body collapsed into black feathers.
Only the former leader's mouth remained impaled upon the blade.
Cassian shook the sword.
The mouth fell to the sewer floor.
Toma tore the last feather from his throat.
A hoarse voice came from the hole in his vocal cords.
"You handed me over."
"I saved three places."
"Was I cheaper than three places?"
"At the time."
Toma opened his ledger pouch.
Inside was the betrayal ledger Cassian had made him write.
The names of seventeen comrades.
Safe houses.
Ration warehouses.
Families.
Toma set the ledger on fire.
"What are you doing?"
"Raising my price."
Cassian could have put out the fire.
He did not.
Toma let the ledger burn to the end.
Cassian's secret-police list became ash.
The locations of four ration warehouses vanished with it.
That night, all three copycat execution grounds collapsed.
On the flooded printing street, Ria recovered a single sheet of wet paper.
It listed the believers who had cut their arms at Toma's command.
All thirty-one names bore the same cause of death.
`For loving Cassian Crow.`
Ria scraped away the type one letter at a time.
The original sentence appeared beneath it.
`Obeyed to preserve the family's ration allotment.`
It had not been love.
Their bowls for tomorrow had been held hostage.
Toma looked at the register.
"I still fed them."
"That only makes your crime more precise."
Ria pasted the thirty-one names inside empty bowls.
The children who lined up the next day could read why their bowls were empty.
They recovered the original ledgers of nine noble patrons.
The northern war contact route opened as well.
It was a complete victory.
Thirty-one believers died from the dispersed wounds.
Four relief stations closed.
The next morning, more than one hundred children stood in line with empty bowls.
Those who had loved Cassian's name now cursed it.
Curses lasted longer than love.
Toma placed one black feather before Cassian.
"Give me the next order."
Cassian looked at him.
Toma added,
"This time, as a bargain."
The iron door to the northern war contact route opened.
Beyond it lay a snow-covered circular dueling ground.
Marchesa Bell stood at its center.
A sword in one hand.
Aaron Bell's orphanage ledger in the other.
She pointed the sword at Cassian.
"The way you killed my brother."
Every exit from the snowfield closed behind iron bars.
"This time, try to save me."