With shaking hands, Ederras set his lantern down on the cellar floor and approached the Black Chest.
It was smaller than he remembered. In his childhood memories, the Black Chest had loomed enormous: an ominous presence in ebony and silver. It had been easy to imagine that it held all the wonders and terrors of his uncle Stelhan’s adventures across the world hidden in its belly.
But when Ederras looked upon it with adult eyes, the Black Chest was just a plain box of dark wood, its bindings simple, its lock ordinary. It was the sort of chest that one might inherit from a seafaring relative and then use to store mismatched silverware and moth-eaten furs. Amid the cobwebbed wine racks in the cellar, it looked quite convincingly forgotten.
It hadn’t been, of course. Whatever his great-grandfather had hoped to hide was likely gone, but he still had to look. To see whatever there was to be seen. A clue, maybe. An explanation. Something to tell him why.
Willing his hands steady, Ederras fitted Lord Tilernos’s key to the lock.
It opened on the first twist. He lifted the lid, holding his breath.
Inside was a jumble of oddments: a case of dead butterflies impaled on silver pins. Kellid hair fetishes. Animal figurines and religious icons fashioned from Qadiran brass or chiseled out of mammoth tusks from the snowbound Crown of the World. The painted likeness of a beautiful, white-haired woman with an icy severity to her face.
Old maps. Older books. A perfume vial of iridescent purple glass. A silver and copper bracelet, its metal tarnished into a hoop of black braided around spotted green, that depicted a serpent and a dragon strangling one another as they fought.
All exotic, all of little value. All, he guessed, intended to disguise the presence of something less innocuous in the collection.
What?
Nothing stood out as visually different, and he couldn’t tell if anything was missing. Ederras drew upon Iomedae’s power, fashioning a simple prayer that would reveal any magical resonances in the chest or its contents.
That, too, proved fruitless. There wasn’t anything enchanted in the Black Chest.
Does that mean it was stolen or that it isn’t magical?
Lord Tilernos had said that Kelvax Celverian had hidden a piece of some terrible relic in his home, but a mere fragment of a powerful artifact might not possess any magic on its own. Further, Ederras didn’t know for certain that whatever his great-grandfather had taken had been magical at all. Maybe its power existed in a more abstract form: a chronicle of damning secrets, or a repository of forbidden knowledge. Not everything that drove people to murder was enchanted.
What had his great-grandfather seized from Citadel Gheisteno?
A smudge of dimness along the inner rim of the upper lip caught his eye. Invisible from the angle at which he’d been previously viewing the chest, it was just the faintest suggestion of a blur from here. Bringing his lantern closer, Ederras craned his neck for a better look.
It was a fingerprint.
Two, actually, pressed close together as someone had gripped the lid to lift the chest open. The lantern’s yellow glow transformed their color to an ill-distinguished brown, but Ederras felt certain that under daylight, that murky smudge would show itself as rust. Or blood. Dry now, fresh then.
Lord Tilernos had been right. The killer had stolen something from the Black Chest.
Ederras let the lid down gently, staring at its blankly curved expanse with unseeing eyes. He had expected, somehow, to feel a glimmer of satisfaction upon confirming his guess. Urgency, maybe. Something.
Instead he only felt hollow. His brother’s assassin had come here, pried open the lid with hands soaked in Othando’s blood, and stolen … what?
There weren’t likely to be any hints elsewhere in the vaneo. Kelvax Celverian had never recorded any of his exploits.
As a child, Ederras had always believed that his great-grandfather was too humble to be caught bragging, and that his father had been close-lipped about the prowess of the family’s paladins because he, who had never been praised for valor, envied their heroism. But it seemed, instead, that Kelvax had been trying to bury his secrets. And while Ederras still believed that jealousy and discontent had twisted his father’s heart, he was beginning to understand some of the other reasons for Lord Abello’s silence.
The cost of heroism was seldom borne only by the hero himself. Othando had been murdered and their servants were suffering grievously because, before any of them were born, one of the paladins of House Celverian had joined the crusade against the heretical Order of the Crux. Unquestionably, Kelvax had fought on the side of good, but sixty years later, innocents were dying for what he’d done.
What would be the consequences of Ederras’s own choices? Today, tomorrow, in a hundred years? Who would pay the final butcher’s bill when Ederras was long in his grave?
He couldn’t possibly guess. The question would paralyze him, if he let it.
What he needed to know, here and now, was what Kelvax Celverian had taken from Citadel Gheisteno—and who would have wanted it. That meant he needed to talk to Jheraal, because he wasn’t going to find the Order of the Crux’s secrets in Vaneo Celverian.
He wasn’t even going to find his own family’s secrets here.
After sending a message to the Hellknight investigator at Taranik House, Ederras sought out an Iomedaean chapel for prayer. He needed to unburden his conscience.
There was a small chapel near Taranik House, unpretentious in its service. Once the building had belonged to another faith—the dead god Aroden’s, maybe, or that of some other congregation forced out of the city by punitive taxes and restrictive policies meant to favor Asmodeus’s worship and cripple all others in Cheliax. While the official policies of House Thrune permitted other religions to exist under their rule, they weren’t subtle about manipulating the laws to gut them.
The Inheritor’s faith often reclaimed those abandoned chapels before they could be turned to less worthy purposes. House Thrune might starve its temples and slight its priests, but Iomedae’s worship was rooted too deeply in Westcrown to die so easily. Cheliax had been theirs before House Thrune rose to power, and someday it would be theirs again. As long as they kept hope alive, the powers of Hell would not defeat them.
Ederras held that thought. It warmed him as he stepped onto the cobblestoned path leading into the chapel. A tidy garden hemmed in the humble shrine, drawing a flurry of white and yellow butterflies. He recognized the plants as healers’ herbs: comfrey and feverwort, elderberry and blessed thistle, all of them suitable to serve the Inheritor’s faithful.
In that garden, a young man knelt, snipping prickly seed heads from a furry-leafed shrub and collecting them in a basket. His black hair was tied back in a neat, short ponytail, emphasizing the sharpness of his features.
As Ederras entered the garden, the man stood, brushing cut leaves from his clothing. “May I be of service?” There was a fractional pause, scarcely noticeable, as the gardener registered the finer details of Ederras’s clothing and added: “My lord?”
“Is there a cleric in the shrine?”
“Of course. Mistress Develya is with a petitioner at the moment, however. Would you care to wait in the garden?”
“Certainly.” There was a bench of carved gray stone in the shade of a linden tree nearby. Idly, Ederras turned his attention to the gardener. “May I ask your name?”
“Aedan. I have the honor of serving this chapel as an acolyte.”
“You’re a cleric of the Inheritor?” It was strange to see one of Iomedae’s faithful tending to garden herbs. The crusader goddess’s servants trained for righteous combat; weeding and watering were chores more often left to lay worshipers.
“Not yet. I hope to prove myself worthy soon.” Aedan brushed dirt from his pale cheek. He had the classic Chelish coloring—fair skin, dark eyes, and silk-smooth black hair with a faint sheen of blue—and an aristocratic crispness to his words. “But first, they say, I need to learn humility. The thorns and bugs are meant to teach me patience in the face of provocation. Digging in the dirt is a meditation on the true price of grave-bought glory. Only when I’ve grasped these lessons will I be permitted to turn a blade on anything other than dead flowers.” He flashed a quick, wry smile. “Forgive my impudence. You see why I’m doing penance in the garden.”
“I do.” Ederras had to laugh. “You sound like me, twenty years ago.”
“Then I shall continue to cherish the hope that in twenty years’ time they’ll let me hold a sword.” The young man dropped a last pod into the basket and stood, placing his clippers on top of the seed heads he’d collected. “I’ll see if Mistress Develya is free.”
Several minutes passed before Aedan returned. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but the petitioner she’s tending is in greater need than I’d realized. It may be best if you return another day.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Ederras asked. “I have some skill in the healing arts.”
“You’re very kind to offer. The matter seems to be well in hand, though. It’s just that it will likely take Mistress Develya the rest of the day to finish her spells, and she’ll be exhausted afterward. She isn’t a young woman anymore. I’m sorry. I hope your need wasn’t too urgent.”
“No, not really.” Ederras rose to go, then hesitated.
Ordinarily, he would never consider making confession to an acolyte. The hierarchy of the faith was clear, and for him to set his sins before a novice was nearly as absurd as a duke offering penance to a stable hand.
On the other hand, the acolyte didn’t seem to know who he was, whereas any senior cleric in Westcrown certainly would. He might get a purer sort of truth from Aedan, in that case, while also maintaining his privacy. “Maybe you can counsel me. If you feel comfortable advising those in need—”
“I would be honored,” Aedan said, eyebrows shooting upward in surprise. He ushered Ederras to a small room just inside the shrine. It smelled of fresh lavender, sun-warmed resin, and the lemon oil used to polish the wooden floors. A round table sat in its center. The table held a devotional book and a soapstone tray, upon which a ceramic pitcher and three cups sat. Three mismatched chairs surrounded the table, none new, but all painstakingly repaired. Everything was simple and of humble make, but immaculately clean.
The acolyte closed the door. “What troubles you?”
Where to begin? With his guilt over Othando’s death? His worry about the heart-stripped hellspawn? His sorrow at seeing Westcrown still bowed under House Thrune’s yoke fifteen years after his own failed rebellion? Should he ask this young apprentice how to navigate the mysteries of long-dead Citadel Gheisteno and his great-grandfather’s secret treachery against the Hellknights, or how to capture an assassin who took his victims’ hearts but not their lives?
What could he ask a budding priest who hadn’t even been initiated into Iomedae’s full mysteries yet? Already Ederras regretted his suggestion. Most of his secrets were too deadly to share. What burden could he possibly set on Aedan?
“I need counsel about an old lover,” he decided.
Aedan nodded solemnly, his dark eyes lighting with eagerness as he steepled his fingers and leaned forward. This, it seemed, was a subject he felt comfortable addressing. “How so?”
“Fifteen years ago, I was involved with a young lady in Westcrown. I was—I was infatuated, to put it bluntly.” We were in love. “It didn’t go well. She had … other commitments, other allegiances, which she kept hidden during our relationship. I would never have allowed myself to become involved with her if I’d known, but of course that’s why she hid them from me. Eventually, a friend forced me to confront the truths I didn’t want to see, and the lady … betrayed me. Badly. There was … I did ugly things. Afterward, I left the city for many years, as did she.”
“But you’ve returned. Obviously.”
“Yes. So has she. And she wants to rekindle some part of what we had.”
Aedan sat back in his chair, quietly surprised. “After she betrayed you?”
“Because she betrayed me, I think.” Because I almost killed her, and that one has a shard of Zon-Kuthon embedded in her soul. It hadn’t surprised him to learn that Velenne had become an emissary to the shadow-sworn nation of Nidal after she’d left him. That entire country worshiped Zon-Kuthon, the mutilated Prince of Pain, and it seemed a natural haven for her. “But perhaps for other reasons as well. I don’t know what those might be, exactly, but she doesn’t seem to do anything unless it profits her somehow.”
“Ah.” The acolyte frowned intently, working it through in his mind. “Do those differing allegiances remain a conflict between you?”
“Yes.”
“Can you reconcile them?”
“I don’t think so.” Ederras poured a cup of water with a shaking hand, holding it carefully until it stilled. When the last ripple had smoothed, he lifted it to his lips and let the water’s coolness wash away his agitation. “I wouldn’t know where to begin, and I doubt it would be wise to try. But she has me trapped. I need her help. I can’t afford to offend her station. And yet I can’t be near her without going mad.”
“Do you think she intends to exploit you? Your title? Your faith, perhaps?” The delicacy of Aedan’s tone suggested that he was trying to tread carefully around the issue, but his pointed glance at Ederras’s sword said he knew full well that his visitor was a paladin, whether or not Ederras wanted to announce it openly.
“She has no need of my title. As for my faith … no. She was always careful to protect me in that way.” It was peculiar to remember that, but he was certain that it was true. When they were lovers, Velenne’s counsel had always guided him toward the righteous path. Up until the very end, Ederras had never suspected that she’d had blood on her own hands.
Not back then, anyway. Afterward that had changed. For both of them.
“But your beliefs are not compatible.”
“She is … very loyal to the crown.”
“Ah. Still, if she has such influence over you, then you must have some over her.”
“You must,” the acolyte insisted. “She came back, you said. She was the one who sought you out.”
“What if she did? Why’s that important?”
“Because it means you have an opportunity. You might, anyway.” Aedan sat straighter, holding Ederras’s gaze earnestly. He sounded cautious but excited, like a scout who thought he’d glimpsed a way out of an ambush. Only a possibility, but hope. “What if you could convert her?”
“What?”
“Change whatever allegiances conflict between you,” Aedan said patiently. “The harms of the past cannot be undone, so one must look to what good can be worked in the future. The Lady of Valor teaches us that love breaks the chains of the soul. Is that a possibility? Even distantly?”
“I have no idea.” He’d never considered it. If the acolyte had any inkling who they were discussing, Ederras thought, he’d never have suggested it either. The idea of wresting Velenne away from her loyalties was more than a little absurd. She was a woman of formidable will and fierce intelligence, and if she was sworn to Asmodeus, then he hardly expected to coax her from that infernal lord. Better—and safer—to assume that her oaths were sealed in iron. Better to treat her like a devil herself.
“Is it not worth trying? If you truly cannot avoid her, then why not glean some good from what can’t be changed? Should you fail, nothing is lost. Perhaps she might even soften in small ways, if not absolutely. But should you succeed, think of what might be gained! Why close off the possibility before you try?”
“It’s impossible.” But even as he said it, Ederras found himself drawn to the idea. What if he could win her over? What if, knowing what she was, he could change her?
Be careful you aren’t making excuses for temptation.
But he didn’t think he was. Not yet.
“Consider it,” Aedan urged. “I can’t tell you what to do, of course. But you asked for counsel, and that is mine. Consider it.”
“I will,” Ederras said, standing. “Thank you. That might be the answer I needed.”
An hour before nightfall, Ederras went to a trattoria near Taranik House, where Jheraal had indicated she would take her evening meal after she’d finished her other work for the day.
The Hellknight was sitting alone at a bare wood table in the back of the crowded common room, halfway through a meal of coarse bread and stewed fish in white sauce. A flask of water sat before her. There was no wine.
She nodded in greeting as Ederras joined her. A white-aproned halfling waiter, almost invisible amid the press, materialized beside their table. “Your order, my lord?”
Ederras glanced at the slate board hung high on one wall, between narrow shelves of wine bottles and ornamental plates. “The lamb, please.”
“Of course. Wine?”
“Yes.” He didn’t bother specifying what he wanted. The trattoria offered only a nameless red and a nameless white, and with lamb roast the servant would certainly bring red. Those who were more particular about their pairings would bring their own bottles.
The halfling bowed and vanished again. Jheraal chuckled. “This place not quite up to your standards?”
“There were times by the Worldwound when I’d march two miles through the snow to get a hot meal,” Ederras said. “I’m not about to complain if the wine selection here wouldn’t make a Jeggare swoon.”
“But you notice. You can’t help but notice. Birthright matters.” The Hellknight hid a smile behind a lifted soupspoon.
Ederras was spared having to make any reply by their waiter’s return with a platter of roast lamb and potatoes. A second Halfling carried a tray with a decanter of deep red wine, almost purple, and two silver-rimmed glasses. The glasses were considerably finer than the wooden cup sitting next to Jheraal’s elbow. As soon as the food was laid out, and the paladin indicated with a nod that nothing more was required, both halflings retreated noiselessly.
“They could teach my scouts a thing or two about stealth,” Ederras observed, cutting into the roast. It was dry, and the potatoes over-salted, but he’d told the Hellknight the truth: after his time in Mendev, a middling meal in Cheliax was an unimaginable luxury. He tilted an empty glass toward her, offering a pour. “Maybe I should suggest a training camp in Westcrown.”
“Mayor Arvanxi would be delighted.” Jheraal waved away his offer with a white-scaled hand and finished her fish stew. She pushed the empty bowl aside, and the halfling servants made it vanish in a twinkling. “Your message said you had something to talk about?”
“Is this place safe?” The trattoria had become even more crowded since Ederras had entered. Patrons were packed elbow-to-elbow, and the constant din of conversation made it hard to hear Jheraal across the table. Adding to the chaos, a quartet of minstrels had begun singing on a raised dais near the largest of the commons’ three fireplaces.
“Anyone who cares enough to eavesdrop through this noise would have to be using magic. Anyone who cares enough to use magic would find a way to spy on us wherever we went. Is it that sensitive?”
“It might be.” He relayed what Lord Tilernos had told him and what he had seen when he unlocked the Black Chest, although he was careful to skirt around using any names or identifiable details. By the time he’d finished telling the tale, Jheraal’s scowl was deep enough to show the tips of her pointed canines.
“You think your great-grandfather had something belonging to those heretics?”
“I do. I hoped you could help me find out what.”
“Maybe.” The Hellknight raked her hair back behind her goatlike horns. “I think I’ll have a glass of that wine after all.” She quaffed it in a single motion, thumping the empty glass down like someone who’d spent a lifetime drinking among soldiers. Probably she had. “I can look into it. Won’t be easy. People get more closemouthed about the secrets of the dead than their own. But—yes, I’ll try. It’ll give me something to do while I wait for our killer to strike again.”
“What?”
“Another crop of hellspawn turned up in Rego Cader. Same as the last. Hearts gone, bodies breathing. I’m planning to follow up with background investigations tomorrow, but I don’t expect to find much. I think they were just targeted because of their ancestry, not because they knew anyone or did anything. But it’s possible that their friends or family might have glimpsed the assassin, so that was going to be my next line of inquiry.” She stared at the empty glass, looking tired.
“That’s not what I meant. You’re waiting for the killer to attack more victims?”
Jheraal breathed a soft, whistling sigh through her fangs. “I don’t like it, but I haven’t thought of a better plan. Velenne says her dog can track our killer, but only if the trail is fresher. I’m hoping to find a quicker way, but I don’t have one yet.”
“I see.” Ederras finished his own wine. He lifted the decanter, offering what remained to Jheraal, but the Hellknight shook her head, so he poured the last of the dark red for himself. Dregs swirled and settled at the bottom of the glass. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“There might be. Your great-grandfather didn’t go out there alone. I wonder if it might be useful for you to pretend you’re looking to research his past deeds. Writing a biography for the glory of your house and faith, that sort of thing. Might open a few doors that’d stay closed to me.”
“It’s worth trying,” Ederras agreed. “I might be able to get a few names from L—from the friend I saw today.”
Jheraal’s amber eyes crinkled in mirth at his near slip. The trattoria had grown dark as night fell around its windows, and the Hellknight’s eyes had begun to glow with their own inner fire. “Should I ask Velenne to go with you? She might be able to persuade the ones who don’t find your credentials as impressive.”
No, Ederras almost said, before he thought back to Aedan’s suggestion.
Did he really want to try redeeming a diabolist?
That diabolist?
“Yes,” he decided.