“Run through that again,” Ederras said. He was taking the news far better than Jheraal had expected, but then he’d probably had plenty of practice absorbing strange and disturbing information while serving around the Worldwound.
She told him again what she’d found in Rego Cader—the skeleton covered in mold that Havarel had been analyzing, the hellspawn with their hearts stripped away—and finished: “They’re still alive, somehow. The clerics say that they can’t be healed, though. Unless we can restore their hearts, there’s nothing to be done.”
“Can I see them?” Ederras didn’t break stride, but there was a slight hitch in his step, almost hidden by his turn around a fruit seller’s stand. The fruit seller glanced at them, calculating the odds of a sale, and then continued packing up her wares. Nightfall was nearly upon them, and it wasn’t worth the price of an apple to be caught on Westcrown’s streets after dark.
Ederras was a paladin. Even when told there was no hope, he was determined to try. Inwardly Jheraal smiled, even as she kept her expression perfectly neutral.
She had decided that her best play was to treat him like an ally, at least until she had a better sense of who the elder Celverian son was. Given his Iomedaean faith and years of immersion in Mendev’s military, she expected that he would cooperate easily with authority, or would at least pretend to. If he was what he seemed, that cooperation could be invaluable. If not, the pretense would give her time to make a more accurate assessment.
So far, Ederras Celverian appeared to be the genuine article. He carried himself like every other Iomedaean paladin Jheraal had ever met, simultaneously humble and arrogant. She guessed that he was about a decade older than Othando, putting his age around thirty-five. Tall, blond, uncommonly handsome, if a little weathered by his years in the crusade. Scrupulously clean-cut, to the point where she was almost tempted to flick a little mud onto that snowy shirt just to see if it stuck.
But it would have been a mistake to assume too much from that. That the older son of House Celverian was—or had been—a paladin didn’t mean he’d had no involvement in his brother’s death. Righteous believers weren’t always peaceful ones, and the family was known to be on strained terms with one another. That Ederras had been at the Worldwound when Othando died might not mean much, either. Assassins could be hired anywhere.
She didn’t think it was likely that Ederras had been involved, but it was a long leap from “unlikely” to “impossible.”
“Of course,” she said, turning north at the next cross street. “We can go right now, if you’d like. Along the way, perhaps you can tell me why you think your house might have been targeted. Whoever did this was a professional. Why would an assassin come after you?”
“I’ve wondered that myself. It doesn’t make sense. Othando had no enemies, and neither did our house. A hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, we were a power in Westcrown, but no one would claim House Celverian holds much importance today.”
Jheraal paused to let a company of dottari pass. All the guards carried torches in their hands and lanterns tied to their belts: the first to light the pyrahjes that illumined Westcrown’s major avenues, the second in case their torches blew out. One of them hurried a pair of young, tipsy lovers along the cobbled streets, ushering them home, while her companions set their torches to a pyrahje’s oil-soaked base.
The Hellknight waited until the dottari had moved to the next block before she went on. Ahead, the Bladewing Bridge stood limned in torchlight over the dark water of the frieze-lined Canaroden, Westcrown’s oldest and most ornately decorated canal. Much of its beauty was hidden by the night, but the slashes of torchlight showcased small, firelit glimpses of Aroden’s holy deeds and holy guises, which had been carved along the length of the ancient canal. “What if it was the vaneo that was the target, not the people in it?”
Ederras canted his head in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“None of the victims had serious enemies. Nappandi, your guardsman, was sleeping with a wine seller’s wife, but the wine seller had—and still has—no idea his wife was unfaithful. Your hellspawn servants seem to have led irreproachable lives. The worst I could find about either of them was that the manservant occasionally annoyed his neighbors by feeding stray cats around their homes. And Othando, as we’ve discussed, gave no one any reason to want him dead.
“The innocuousness of the dead makes me wonder if we’re not looking at this the wrong way. Perhaps we should consider another possibility: either that the murderer meant to strike against you or your father, as the two of you did have enemies, or that there wasn’t any living target at all. Maybe everyone who died simply had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe the assassin wasn’t acting as a hired killer, but as a saboteur or a thief.”
“Of what?”
“That’s the part I was hoping you’d be able to tell me.” Jheraal altered her course to follow a better-lit avenue rather than venturing down a shadowed side street. While the Hellknight had little fear of the night in Westcrown proper, darkness tended to emphasize certain aspects of her infernal heritage, and she didn’t think it would be helpful to overplay those traits to a paladin. Not yet, at least. “Was there anything in the vaneo that would have been worth killing to steal?”
Several minutes passed before the paladin answered. When he finally did, his reply was slow, as if dragged up from a deep well of memory. “I’m not sure. I can’t think of anything, but it isn’t impossible. Many generations of my family have lived there, and some of them were people of note. Wanderers, adventurers, champions of the faith. It’s possible one of them might have left some legacy I was never told about. The history of my family has been troubled at times.”
Jheraal had heard the same. Not about Othando, who truly seemed to have been a cloistered innocent, but about his father and brother. Both unhappy souls, according to local gossip. “Does that trouble extend to yourself or your father? Do you think there’s any chance that the murders were meant to send a message to one of you?”
“No.” Ederras’s jaw set in a hard line. He stared into the fire-broken night, as if searching for enemies that weren’t there, before shaking away the distraction and falling back into step alongside her. “I don’t think so. My father is an unhappy man, but his misery is all turned inward. As for me …”
“You were involved with rebels as a youth.” She’d dug up the old reports. They had been meticulously prepared; the Thrune agent who had infiltrated the rebellion had done a thorough job of it. The spy’s work had resulted in sixteen convictions, with punishments ranging from fines to execution, and the complete destruction of that seditious group. “I found the records. You knew some of those who were convicted, even if there wasn’t enough to make an arrest in your own case. Could that have been a motive for someone to strike at your family while you were out of reach yourself?”
Again, Ederras didn’t answer for a long time. They crossed the Bladewing Bridge, passing between its grand carvings of sword-feathered pegasi in silence. Rows of torches burned on the bridge’s low walls, their flames reflected on the dark water as liquid feathers of red. Under daylight, the bridge would have been crowded. After dark, it was empty except for the two of them and the canal-guarding condottari who stood watch at either end.
“No,” Ederras said as they passed the last of the condottari. His voice was strained and distant, his face white under the moonlight. “No, that was dealt with before I left.”
That was … fear? No, not quite. But something. The ghosts of the rebellion still haunted that one. Jheraal filed the observation away without reaction. “After leaving, you went to Mendev?”
“Eventually, yes. I didn’t go there first. I tried to find other battles to fight, other wrongs that needed righting. I wasted a lot of time before I finally answered my purpose and went to the Worldwound.” He shrugged uncomfortably. “That doesn’t matter now, though. The crusade will go on without me. I’m here to find my brother’s killer.”
They passed another cluster of torch-carrying dottari and, a few minutes later, a woodcutter’s cart that had broken its wheel and been abandoned by its owner. The cart’s donkey had been removed from its traces, but the wagon bed remained piled high with a full load of seasoned firewood. If the woodcutter didn’t return to the cart at dawn, it was likely that a week’s work might be lost—but no one would brave the dark to steal that wood until then.
Would they?
A scab-knuckled hand lay between the spokes of the broken wheel. Had the driver fallen under his cargo? Or had someone tried to move the overburdened wagon and gotten injured? Puzzled, Jheraal took a step closer. “Hold a moment.”
The hand twitched, reaching across the cobbles toward her. A powerful stench rolled out from under the wagon, reeking of corpses’ curdled innards and the worm-infested mud of week-old battlefields. Yellow eyes, glowing like diseased moons, ignited in the shadows under the wagon.
Not just two eyes. Jheraal counted eight in the heartbeat it took her to slap her mace into her palm. The first of them was already crawling out, tasting the air with its gray, pebbled tongue. “Ghouls.”
The emaciated creature turned toward them as if responding to its name. A hiss of raw hunger escaped between its yellowy-brown teeth. Beside it, a second ghoul dragged itself out from under the wagon. This one wore a thief’s brand, withered and puckered black, across its sunken cheeks. Its belly, like the first one’s, was covered with congealing mud. It must have been lying under the wagon for hours, waiting for darkness to fall and prey to happen by.
“In Rego Crua?” Ederras’s sword had ignited with white fire, driving back the shadows and earning snarls from the emerging ghouls. The paladin moved to stand beside her, taking up an angled position to guard her back without needing a word. There was no fear in him. Only a restrained eagerness for the fight, like a hunting hawk waiting to be loosed on its prey. “What are they doing on this side of the wall?”
“At a guess? Trying to eat us.” Despite the radiant sword blazing in their faces, the ghouls weren’t retreating. Jheraal hadn’t really expected that they would. Ghouls were notorious slaves to their appetites. Nothing but death deterred them from the chance of a feast. “Be careful. Their claws can paralyze.”
He nodded absently, barely seeming to hear her.
The fourth and final ghoul emerged, dragging itself up from mud under the wagon’s belly. As soon as the latecomer got to its feet, the first one attacked.
Jheraal met it with a swing of her mace. The ghoul’s face crumpled under the spiked steel like an eggshell meeting a mallet. Its skull collapsed from nose to spine in a single continuous crunch, and the body dropped stinking at her feet. She kicked it away, both to get rid of the smell and so the carcass wouldn’t trip her underfoot.
The thief-branded ghoul leaped at her side, trying to take advantage of the Hellknight’s distraction. Jheraal met it with an armored elbow, smashing the spiked plate into its teeth. Squealing through bloody froth, the ghoul fell to its knees and scrabbled away.
The other two, wary now, circled around the Hellknight in opposite directions. Snarling and feinting, they stayed out of her mace’s reach, trying to bypass the steel-clad hellspawn to reach the man beside her. Ederras wasn’t wearing a penny’s worth of armor. He probably looked like an easier target.
He wasn’t. The paladin called upon Iomedae to aid him, and spectral golden fire blazed in a sudden ring around him. The wave of divine power rolled outward with Ederras at its core, and where it touched the ghouls, they burned.
Dead flesh went up in blinding, smokeless flame. Dead bones tumbled to the ground, bounced off the cobblestones, and were incinerated before they clattered down again. Even the stench of the dead was purified by the Inheritor’s magic.
The two that had been circling toward him had just enough time to freeze, eyes wide, before the magic took them. The one that had been crawling away from Jheraal, clutching its ruined face, screamed as Iomedae’s blessed fire seized its legs. Swiftly the golden flame leaped along the ghoul’s body, consuming it from thigh to throat. Its gargled wail died as abruptly as it had begun, for in less than the space of an eyeblink, there was nothing left to scream.
Jheraal lowered her mace. Its spikes were spotless. The prayer had consumed even those small scraps of skin.
The Hellknight went to the wagon, peering under it for any sign of where the ghouls had come from or any victims they might have left behind. There was nothing, only rutted mud. Probably they’d come from Rego Cader and found a breach in the wall somewhere, then hidden here until the sun went down. She’d have the rundottari look for cracks or gaps in the morning.
Straightening, she raised a scaly eyebrow at Ederras, reassessing the man. “I’d heard stories that you fell from Iomedae’s grace.”
“I did.” He didn’t meet her gaze. The fire on his sword vanished as he sheathed the blade. “The Inheritor forgave me.”
“So I see.” An understatement. Jheraal was no expert on matters of religion, but she knew enough to recognize that a paladin capable of destroying three ghouls with a single prayer was not a novice in his faith.
If Iomedae showed Ederras such favor, then he probably wasn’t her murderer. The goddess of honor and righteous valor wasn’t likely to grant her blessings to a man who hired assassins to kill a harmless younger brother. Whatever else was troubling his conscience, it wasn’t this.
Jheraal hooked her mace’s haft back into its carrying loop. “Let’s go.”
As they resumed their march northward, the golden line of torchlight that fringed the wall around the Obrigan Gate began to wink into view occasionally, whenever a gap between the inward-leaning roofs of Rego Crua’s poorer homes allowed. Higher yet, the moon shone silver and serene.
Their course was taking them past the Pleatra, Westcrown’s massive slave market. At this hour, the auction blocks and blood-spattered testing grounds were empty, but the communal cells that ringed the market echoed with muffled moans and prayers. While valuable slaves were usually given better quarters, unskilled laborers and arena fodder were almost always consigned to the communal cells, frequently in conditions that made the city’s prisons seem luxurious. Unsold slaves could spend days, weeks, even months in those cells, waiting for a buyer to take an interest and praying that their next home wouldn’t be worse.
The wind turned, carrying the slaves’ prayers. Jheraal saw the paladin’s fists clench in response.
“Those aren’t your worries,” she said. “Those aren’t your griefs. If you let yourself be distracted by the things you can’t help, you’ll lose sight of the ones you can.”
Ederras shook her words away, but he relaxed his hands and kept walking. Together they circled around the spiked gates of the Pleatra’s main entrance, their shadows crisscrossing and melting into one another as they passed the ever-burning lights of its watchtowers. “Is that what you tell yourself so you can stand to live in this empire of devils?”
“It’s what I tell myself because it’s true. The world is full of sorrows and injustices. Each of us is given the power to remedy some of them, but no one has the power to cure them all.” She nodded to the arcaded walls of the Pleatra, receding in the shadows behind them. Each of the columns supporting its arches had been carved into the likeness of a slave. Men and women, humans and halflings. Porters, field laborers, dancers, scribes—all the slaves who supported Imperial Cheliax on their backs and brows. “Everyone has a place in the empire. Everyone has the protection of its laws. We are civilized here, Ederras Celverian, which is more than can be said for much of Avistan. Do you think those slaves would trade the Pleatra for the mad terrors of Galt? For the Worldwound?”
“Some would. Some did. I fought beside them.”
Jheraal shook her head in disbelief. She had forgotten that Iomedaeans could be so foolish, sometimes, thinking it was worth bringing down the pillars of civilization if that meant everyone could stand equal amid the rubble.
It wasn’t worth the argument. She wanted to win his trust, not a point of philosophy. He could think what he liked, as long as he cooperated.
The pungent smells of tanneries and slaughterhouses surrounded them as they continued north through Rego Crua. Here the streets were less well lit, and fewer of them had pyrahjes. Ordinary oil-burning lanterns, far dimmer, filled in the gaps, leaving large swaths of darkness between each uncertain oasis.
Past the Pleatra, they saw far fewer dottari on patrol. No one watched to ensure that the people of Rego Crua kept to curfew. Yet the streets remained empty because here—unlike in the wealthier central districts of Parego Spera—the peril was real and immediate. Here, people died to the dangers in the dark.
Jheraal hadn’t realized how tense she was until they finally reached the Obrigan Gate. Ederras had, however, and he broke the silence as they crossed the archers’ field leading up to the wall. “Are the shadows still so deadly here?”
“Thirty-four deaths since the beginning of the year,” she said. “Documented ones, that is. The disappearances are harder to track, and no one counts the dead in Rego Cader.”
“Is the Midnight Guard still supposed to be protecting them?”
“Yes.”
The paladin’s snort carried years of resigned contempt. “I’m glad to know they’re as effective as ever.”
Jheraal didn’t answer, but privately she shared his disdain. The Midnight Guard, a loose cabal of Nidalese shadowcallers and Chelish wizards, was supposed to stand watch against the dangers in Westcrown’s nights. Since its inception, however, disturbing rumors had swirled around the organization. Many believed that the Midnight Guard concealed its own murders behind trumped-up tales of monsters in the dark, and that any reduction in the number of deaths that Westcrown suffered was due to the curfew that kept its citizens inside, not the sinister wizards who claimed to be protecting them.
As little as she cared for the Midnight Guard, the Hellknight wasn’t about to breathe a word of those seditious thoughts to a former rebel. Instead, she strode to the nearest of the Obrigan Gate’s sally ports and rapped an armored hand against its steel-barred wood.
“Who comes?” a voice called out.
“Hellknight Jheraal of the Order of the Scourge, and Ederras of House Celverian.”
The sally port opened. Inside, a stout dwarf with a coiled braid of raven hair piled atop her head raised her lantern to shine over their faces. It was a formality. Jheraal knew the dottari had recognized her immediately. With her white scales and sharp horns, she cut a distinctive figure. “Hellknight. What brings you to the Obrigan Gate?”
“I’d like to check on my guests.” Jheraal squinted in the lantern’s glare as they entered. “Has there been any change in their condition?”
“None,” the dwarf replied. She locked the door behind Jheraal and Ederras, then opened the inner door that led into the fortified gatehouse. “But come, see for yourself.”
The rundottari hadn’t moved the three hellspawn from the cell Jheraal had chosen, although someone had brought in clean straw and wool blankets. All three lay limp on their makeshift beds, eyes vacant and breathing slow. Their clothes were no dirtier than they’d been on the first day. It seemed the hellspawn couldn’t sweat or soil themselves. The pinpricks she’d made in their fingers had healed, though. Whatever magic gripped these unfortunates had transformed them into something like waxen dolls, perfect in their repose.
Making an inarticulate noise low in his throat, Ederras pushed between Jheraal and the rundottari. He knelt beside the insensible hellspawn, touching the hands of the Celverian house servants. The Hellknight wasn’t surprised to see the light of a healing prayer surround the paladin, nor was she surprised when, a moment later, it died without effect.
“I told you the clerics couldn’t heal them,” she said. “Without their hearts, it’s impossible.”
Ederras shook his head helplessly, staring at the faces of the people he’d known. “I had to try.” Straw pricked at his knees, and his fine white clothes were stained with dirt, but he didn’t seem to notice. She could almost see the guilt wracking the man as he looked upon the eerie holes where the hellspawn’s hearts had been.
That wasn’t the look of a killer. His reaction confirmed Jheraal’s growing opinion of his innocence. Either Ederras Celverian was an actor to put every member of Westcrown’s theater companies to shame, or he hadn’t had anything to do with this.
“We tried to feed them,” the dwarf said, standing outside the iron-barred cell door, “but the gruel wouldn’t go down their throats. Water, either. Durotas Tuornos was concerned that we’d choke or drown them, so he had us stop. They don’t seem to need it, anyway.”
“I won’t hold you from your duties any longer,” Jheraal said.
Acknowledging her dismissal with a nod, the rundottari stepped back into the hall. “You can lock it when you’re done.”
“You keep the key to their cell?” Ederras asked, straightening from his crouch after the dwarf had gone. “Don’t you trust the rundottari?”
The Hellknight leaned against the niter-streaked stone wall, crossing her gauntleted arms. “I trust Durotas Tuornos more than I’d trust any other durotas in this city, but that doesn’t extend to every rundottari in his command. Some of them might see an opportunity in these hellspawn. Some might see a threat. Both of those things can be dangerous. Better if no one besides the durotas and myself has a key to their cell. Keeps them safer.”
“That’s important to you?”
“It is.” Jheraal pushed her hair back behind her horns, weighing the moment. She thought she had a good enough measure of Ederras to make her play. Not an appeal to authority. Not Chelish authorities, not for this one. But an appeal to justice, and a little righteous anger … “These people were law-abiding citizens of Westcrown. They paid their taxes, they didn’t make trouble, they lived their lives as good people. They had family, friends. They didn’t invite this upon themselves, and they didn’t deserve it.
“Even if they had, it wouldn’t matter. The rule of law is supposed to protect everyone. But maybe, I’m inclined to think, it should have protected them a little bit more.” Stepping into the shadows, she fixed the paladin with an unearthly glare. From the slight golden tint to her vision, Jheraal knew that her infernal blood was showing. Her eyes glowed like the fires of hell when she called upon the legacy of her devilish ancestors—and right now, she wanted them to. “It offends me, personally, that the law failed some of its most vulnerable citizens. It offends me that people who lived ordinary lives were put through unimaginable horror. It is wrong. I brought you here so that you could see the profundity of that wrongness for yourself. Your brother wasn’t the only victim. He might not even have been the most important one.”
“Do you think the law in Westcrown is strong enough to see justice done?” Ederras tipped a hand toward the insensible hellspawn. “There’s magic at work here, and it’s powerful. It isn’t always easy to bring the powerful to justice in Cheliax, as you surely must know. What makes you think the throne will let you drag the culprits into the light? How do you know they won’t just protect their own?”
“Because they gave the case to me,” Jheraal said. And knew, from the grudging respect that crossed the paladin’s face, that her answer had won her a measure of trust.