There were three messages waiting for Jheraal when she returned to Taranik House: one from her paralictor, acknowledging receipt of her reports and including a letter of credit to replenish her operating funds. One from Ederras Celverian, asking her to meet with him. And one from Indrath, her daughter, written in the girl’s characteristically large, looping hand. A blob of beige candlewax, deeply pressed with a thumbprint, held it shut.
She wanted to break that seal as soon as she saw it. She didn’t.
Duty first. Indulgence later.
Jheraal pocketed the letter of credit and sent one of the armigers to Vaneo Celverian to inform Ederras that she would be available that evening. She sent another missive to the Asmodean church, requesting one of their clerics to commune with the corpse that Velenne had recently restored. Then she tucked Indrath’s letter into her jerkin, close against her heart, as she carried it back to her quarters to read.
Alone, under lantern light, she broke the letter’s seal and smoothed its creased pages.
Dear Jheraal! Thank you for the book. Do you think the pictures are real? Not real-real, I mean, but drawn by someone who had really been to Ninshabur? Someday I’ll find out. For now I’m still studying, though. Signifer Orielle says I have very good potential, which she hardly says to anybody. Today she let me try a spell …
Jheraal reread the letter twice, savoring each line, then folded it carefully again and put it into the box where she kept all her daughter’s correspondence. Other than her arms and armor, it was the only possession that mattered to her.
Later she would write back. At night, when she could devote her full attention to finding the right words.
First, however, she had to trace that dead Hellknight.
She’d recognized his face, but she didn’t have a name to put to that face, and she had no idea what he might have been doing in Westcrown. When Jheraal had encountered the man, he’d been serving in Citadel Rivad, the Order of the Rack’s stronghold in the Turanian Hills northwest of the city. He’d just been another rank-and-file Hellknight, no one who’d stood out for doing his job particularly well or poorly. If she hadn’t been blessed with a gift for recalling faces, she likely wouldn’t have remembered him at all.
Ordinarily, identifying a man with that much information would have been trivial. She knew his face, she knew his affiliations, and she knew where he’d been based. Tracing his identity should have been as easy as finding an artist to sketch his likeness, then showing his picture to his former comrades. Once that was done, solving the mystery of why he’d died in Rego Cader might not be much harder. It should have been simplicity itself.
But it wouldn’t be, because those comrades were Hellknights. Not only that, but Hellknights of another order. And whatever the dead man had been doing in Westcrown, Jheraal doubted it was anything that his commanding officers in the Order of the Rack would want known.
Above all else, and no matter their order, Hellknights prized three things: discipline, duty, and honor. Those were the basis of the Measure and the Chain, the belief system that guided all Hellknights. The Measure codified their ideals into absolute laws, and the Chain bound them to follow with total obedience, yielding to neither mercy nor fear.
And just as there was no greater sin for a Hellknight than dereliction of duty, so too was there no greater insult than to suggest that one had failed to uphold his order’s honor.
The problem was that the dead Hellknight had unquestionably failed, one way or another. If he’d been threatened into cooperating with the plot to kill Othando Celverian and tear the hearts from those hellspawn, then he was guilty of cowardice. A true Hellknight would have chosen death before dishonor. If he’d been magically coerced, then his weak will was a mark of shame.
And if he had voluntarily cooperated, and had chosen to abscond from his post in Citadel Rivad in order to take part in such crimes, then the disgrace that would fall upon him and his entire order would be unfathomable. A failure of that magnitude reflected not only on the one who committed it, but on all who had a duty to prevent it and had allowed it to happen.
Jheraal didn’t believe that the Order of the Rack would deliberately impede her investigation. She was in the right, according to law and tradition, and no true Hellknight would defy that. Not to protect someone who had potentially brought dishonor upon their order.
But she didn’t think they’d be eager to help her, either. Not until she had amassed too much proof for them to deny.
That meant she might have to begin her investigation outside the walls of Citadel Rivad. Hardly impossible, but more difficult. Potentially much more difficult, depending on how secretive the man and his associates had been.
What are the levers to break the bonds of loyalty? Jheraal’s first teacher had asked that, as almost her very first lesson.
She’d recited the answer immediately and with confidence, having learned the litany well: Anger. Greed. Fear. Guilt. Resentment. Love.
Fourteen years later, Jheraal had seen all the foul fruit that could spring from those seeds, and she still believed her teacher had given her the correct answer that day.
There weren’t seven deadly sins. The traditional litany missed the mark entirely.
Pride, without resentment, never led anyone to murder. Gluttony and lust could be sated without crime. Sloth tended to prevent violence, if anything. But fear, guilt, and corrosive jealousy, the sins seldom cited by the priests—those could drive an honest citizen to kill.
As could love, which few people considered a sin at all. But it was deadlier than any of the others, because love could carve a space for treachery where nothing else would. Love of country, of political ideals, of imagined virtue—those could erode loyalties and divide otherwise impregnable hearts.
Which of those might lead a Hellknight astray?
Any of them could. She’d seen them all over the years. But some were more common than others.
Anger she discarded immediately. Anger led to tavern knifings and bloody rages between lovers. It had spurred some of the ugliest crimes she’d seen in her career, but it burned too hot to have produced something like this. What she’d seen in Rego Cader were the leavings of a crime planned and executed in cold blood.
Fear and greed were possible, but unlikely. It was a Hellknight’s honor to embrace death in the service of duty, and to accept hardship and privation as tests of strength. Some always failed in those ideals, but not many.
Love seemed improbable as well. The life of iron discipline imposed by the Hellknight orders left scant opportunity for that delicate flower to flourish.
That left guilt and resentment. And those two could be fertile ground indeed.
Some Hellknights were killers without conscience. But many weren’t, and not all of them could put their personal guilt aside when carrying out orders that seemed too harsh for reason. That shame could simmer for years, boiling just beneath the surface, only to erupt at some tiny provocation. Jheraal had seen it many times, and she wondered if perhaps the reason the dead man’s teeth had been eaten away by so many reckonings was because he’d punished himself over and over in futile attempts to expiate guilt over some long-ago wrongdoing.
Or it might have been resentment. Hellknights’ honor could be prickly. Many were acutely sensitive to any insult that cast doubt upon their discipline or dedication, and slow to forget such slights. Although their doctrine emphasized subservience to one’s order and the negation of individual vanity, the Hellknights were a warrior elite. From their first days as armigers—cadets who hadn’t yet been recognized as full Hellknights—they were drilled in stoic dignity and the proud refusal to show fear, weakness, or pain. It was impossible for them to avoid arrogance entirely.
And where there was pride, there was the potential for that pride to be wounded.
Could that have been what drove the dead man out to Rego Cader? The need to retaliate for some festering grievance?
Against whom? Not the hellspawn, at least not personally. Jheraal had found nothing in the histories of those poor souls that suggested any reason a Hellknight would bear a grudge against any one of them, much less all three.
But against hellspawn as a race … maybe.
She was turning that thought over in her head, trying to find an angle that might allow her to approach the Order of the Rack without betraying her intentions, when a knock sounded at her door.
“Come.”
It was one of the armigers, a boy of sixteen or seventeen years, with brown hair and thick, expressive eyebrows. “A message, Hellknight Jheraal.”
“What is it?”
“Velenne Thrune wishes you to know that she has found something in the ruins of Rego Cader. She requests your presence at once.”
The message wasn’t entirely unexpected. After they’d left Havarel’s workshop, the diabolist had asked Jheraal to show her where the Hellknight’s bones and the heart-thieved hellspawn had been found. Although weeks had passed since that initial discovery, Velenne had wanted to stay behind to continue searching for clues in Rego Cader, and Jheraal had neither the authority nor the inclination to stop her.
She hadn’t expected the diabolist to find anything, but she wasn’t surprised to be wrong. “Did she want me to come alone?”
“She didn’t say. There is a … dog, however. To lead you there.”
“Show me.”
Vhaeros was waiting on the street outside Taranik House. He sat in the shade to the building’s side, watching the flow of passersby on the street with a silent intensity that was eerie to behold. The Hellknights posted at the door watched him carefully, well aware that the gray beast before them was no dog.
“You’re here to show me something?” Jheraal asked the wolflike fiend.
Standing, Vhaeros gave his tail a lazy wave that was, she felt, less a wag than an indifferent acknowledgement of her presence. The gray dog sauntered into the crowds, ambling with an exaggerated lope that was surely meant to convey his boredom with her slow two-legged walk.
“Do you talk?” she asked the dog when she thought no one was in earshot. The street traffic was thinning steadily as they passed northward through Rego Crua, and the noises of livestock being penned and put through the slaughterhouses would easily cover conversation.
The dog flicked a pointed ear in her direction. A low huff escaped him, almost a laugh, but he didn’t look back.
“Fine,” Jheraal muttered. “I can see you don’t. Not if you went to that much trouble working out other ways to communicate your contempt.”
Vhaeros swished his tail again and continued northward. He wasn’t heading toward the Obrigan Gate, she realized, but to another point, five blocks away, in the high wall that separated Rego Crua from the rest of the city.
“Where are we going?” the Hellknight asked.
The gray dog gave her an amused look over his shoulder. His jaws parted in a canine grin as he trotted toward a pile of discarded planks heaped at the end of an alley that backed onto the wall.
As Jheraal followed him into the alley’s shadows, the gifts of her infernal blood caused a golden glow to appear in her vision, clearing the darkness from her sight. With its aid, she could clearly see the crevice in the wall, just large enough for a crouched person to slip through, that the boards and planks masked from casual view. It would be tight, but she thought she could get through without removing her armor.
Vhaeros didn’t wait. With one last wave of his tail, the gray dog bounded through the crack, leaving the Hellknight to curse and clamber through after him.
On the other side, the ruins of the Dead Sector rose like crumbling tombstones over the city’s fallen greatness.
It was only early afternoon, but Jheraal felt a chill of apprehension as she brushed dirt off her palms and stood. There was little risk that shadowbeasts would menace them. Not with the diabolist and her pet devil present. But there were other threats in Rego Cader, and some of them—especially the strongest and fiercest of Westcrown’s condemned criminals, who’d survived the Dead Sector and each other long enough to gather in savage bands—held a burning hatred for any symbol of Thrune authority.
Jheraal didn’t fear any of them in a straight fight. But she also didn’t expect that they’d be foolish enough to try that. Ambush was a real danger.
Scanning her surroundings continually, she followed Vhaeros down the pocked, weed-choked roads into Rego Cader.
They passed through desolate squares where trees grew through gaps in the flagstones and birds nested in the shelter of abandoned market arcades. Occasionally Jheraal glimpsed some fragment of Westcrown’s lost finery, startling as a tatter of gilt lace in a robin’s nest: a religious mosaic veiled by climbing ivy, shards of jade-green celadon scattered amid the leaf litter, a single stained-glass window shining beneath a fringe of stone at the top of a shattered tower.
But nothing living, and nothing threatening, until at last they came upon Velenne.
The diabolist sat on a tilted slab of stone outside the beige marble pillars and vine-clad arches of a ruined bathhouse. She stood and closed the book she’d been reading as Vhaeros and the Hellknight approached. “I’m pleased you could join me.”
“What have you found?”
“Another group of victims.” She pointed to the bathhouse entrance with her book. “All hellspawn. No fungal skeleton this time. Go, look for yourself.”
Jheraal didn’t move. “How did you find them?”
“I didn’t. Scavengers did. They’re always crawling through these ruins looking for scraps to eat or barter. I had Vhaeros find a few of them, and then I asked them whether they had found anything of interest these past several weeks. Much more efficient.”
“I’m sure they were delighted to cooperate.” Jheraal had some guesses as to how Velenne might have persuaded those scavengers to be forthcoming.
“Eventually.” The dark-haired woman smiled pleasantly. “Anyway, one of them spotted a group of prisoners being led into this area by a Hellknight. She supposed that they’d been condemned, so she and her comrades lurked in wait, intending to strip the corpses—or, if necessary, finish them off—after some other menace brought them down. What the scavengers found when they went back, however, frightened them so badly that they didn’t even rob the dead.”
“And that’s what’s in the bathhouse?” Jheraal glanced at the entrance again. It was a gap of blackness framed between green-garlanded marble, entirely unrevealing.
“Yes. According to the scavengers, these hellspawn were brought into Rego Cader eight days ago. Therefore the Hellknight they saw cannot be the one whose bones you found. Either our killer had another contact among those Hellknights, he is one himself, or he stole the armor that belonged to the skeleton you found. In any case, I haven’t disturbed what’s left of the victims. I thought you’d want to see them in their original state.”
“I do,” Jheraal said. Lowering her head, she stepped into the darkness. The golden haze of her infernal vision took hold once more, comforting in its familiarity.
The abandoned baths smelled of moss and mud and mineral salts. The archway opened to a split foyer that branched right and left. Marble friezes, chiseled away in places by vandals and thieves, showed men in various states of undress on the right, women on the left.
Jheraal went left. After descending a short flight of scalloped stairs, she came to a series of cavernous, empty basins that had once allowed the poorest Wiscrani to enjoy the luxury of warm and cold baths, and which were now home to rats and scuttling vermin. Enormous cobwebs, ghostly in her magical sight, billowed over the doorways and cloaked the vaulted ceilings.
She found nothing else. Turning back, she returned to the entry foyer and chose the branch on the right.
This time, her search ended almost immediately.
The hellspawn were piled into one of the old baths on the men’s side. Their limbs were tangled over one another like trees in a deadfall, spilling over the basin’s marble lip. Their upturned faces stared sightlessly at the mossy ceiling, empty-eyed as dolls. A spider had woven a tented web between two of them. The dry husk of a moth lay trapped in the strands that crossed the hollow of one man’s open mouth. Jheraal brushed it away carefully, more disturbed than she wanted to admit by the warmth of his breath puffing over her hand. Then she pulled them out, one by one, and examined what their killer had left in the bath.
There were five victims: three men, one woman, and a girl of six or seven with mottled, toadlike yellow skin and, under her curly brown hair, the large orange ovals of tympanums on either side of her head.
All of the victims were maimed like the ones she’d found earlier. Gaping holes plunged into their chests, showing where the hearts had been carved out of their living bodies. Their clothing had been crisped to flaky black lace around the entry wounds, but there was no soot on their skin and flesh. Only the smooth, clean ripples of cautery.
And around those fatal, impossible holes, every one of them still breathed. Insensible, trapped in a nightmare without waking, they lived.
All five victims were hellspawn who showed their tainted blood openly, but that was the only thing Jheraal could see that they had in common. Two of the men wore the coarse, sweat-stained clothes of common laborers, but the third was dressed in the velvets and stiff brocades of an affluent merchant. A blocky gold ring weighed down the smallest finger of his left hand. Their killer hadn’t even bothered to rob him.
The woman wore a plain silk dressing robe and no jewelry, but her hair had been curled into a polished, ornate coiffure, and her hands were soft as baby’s skin. Whoever she’d been, she hadn’t been poor.
The child was the hardest for Jheraal to examine. That could have been Indrath.
She made herself do it, though. Duty demanded that she look.
The girl’s attire held few clues. A cotton smock, simple but well made, with smudges of dirt that might have been picked up in Rego Cader and might have predated it. No shoes, but no calluses on her feet, either. There was webbing between her toes, and they were long and thin like a frog’s. Her only jewelry was a little band of yellow stones around one finger. Glass and tin, maybe, or golden sapphires in platinum—Jheraal wasn’t familiar enough with jewelry to tell.
But someone had loved that little girl enough to give her a ring to make her feel beautiful, and she had loved them enough to believe them and wear it.
The Hellknight blinked back tears as she walked out of the bathhouse. For a moment she paused in the darkness, struggling to pull her mantle of stoicism back on, before she let herself emerge into the light.
“It appears to me that someone’s hunting hellspawn,” Velenne said. “That whatever happened in the first group of victims, it might not have been sufficient. That our killer—if we wish to use that word—is continuing to seek new victims. Would you agree?”
Jheraal nodded. Once. Curtly. She didn’t trust herself to speak.
“Then we’re not trying only to solve murders that have already happened. We’re trying to stop a predator on the hunt.”
“How?” The word burst out more vehemently than Jheraal had intended. She struggled to regain control as the diabolist raised an eyebrow at her. “We don’t have enough information. We don’t know who’s doing this, or why, or how.”
“We know that the killer returns to Rego Cader to dispose of his victims. That’s something, if not much. And we may have a chance to catch another lead, with luck.”
“Vhaeros is a very good tracker. Eight days is too long even for his nose to follow, unfortunately, so this trail is too cold. However, if this Hellknight comes back again, and if the scavengers’ information comes to us more quickly, then we’ll be able to track where he goes afterward—and where he went before.”
“But then we have to wait for him to find more victims. Probably kill them, too. I doubt your scavengers will be able to get a message to us quickly enough to stop that, even if they’re willing to cooperate.”
“They will cooperate,” Velenne assured her with perfect serenity. “Oh, yes. They’ll help. You are correct, however, that we’ll have to wait for the killer to return before we can act.”
“How many will die when that happens?” Jheraal’s fists tightened in helpless frustration. She didn’t look at the bathhouse entrance. Couldn’t. “Three the first time. Five this time. What’s next? Seven? Ten? Twenty? You just want to wait and find out?”
“Do you have a better alternative?” the diabolist asked.
“No,” the Hellknight said. “Not yet.” But I will.