The high walls of Citadel Rivad cut a forbidding silhouette. The granite fortress loomed sternly above the ragged rise of the Turanian Hills, standing atop a foundation that had been built untold centuries before, when all this land had belonged to the empire of Taldor. Over the years, the world had shifted around it. One empire had faded and another had risen. Armies had flowed through those gates in rivers of iron and blood. Innumerable storms had battered the walls and flung spiked javelins of lightning against the citadel’s towers.
But the stone had endured. The fortress had endured. And although Jheraal came to Citadel Rivad as an ally, not an enemy, she couldn’t help feeling a pang of apprehension as she rode into the view of its defensive towers.
The first line of sentinels stopped her at an outpost fifty yards from the outer walls. Her credentials were checked politely but thoroughly, her passes examined with a critical eye. They knew who she was, of course, but Hellknights made no exceptions in their security.
Three more times she was stopped at checkpoints before the Rack Hellknights allowed her entry into Citadel Rivad. Never a smile, never an idle word. Always the same correct, efficient courtesy, just this side of chilliness, as they saluted and waved her onward through gate after gate.
She wasn’t the only visitor to the citadel. At the last gatehouse, she passed a Hellknight of the Scar riding out in mithral plate, shield slung over his back and rapier clattering alongside an armored leg. Four vicious gouges cut across the cuirass, continuing up to the gorget, where they vanished abruptly. The original gorget had been ruined past repair and replaced, but by the cuirass’s furrows she recognized the wearer as Ursion Nymmis.
Based in the Taldan city of Cassomir, the Scar was one of the smallest Hellknight orders. It counted fewer than forty members under its banner, and Jheraal doubted there was another knight with such distinctively damaged armor among them. Given how rarely its members worked outside the nations of Taldor and Qadira, there probably wasn’t even another Scar Hellknight in Cheliax.
The pins in the cloak accompanying the knight’s dress uniform—one of several subtle ways Hellknights denoted rank—suggested he’d moved up in the world, which didn’t surprise her. Three years ago, Jheraal had helped him solve a trail of mysterious assassinations that stretched all the way from Cassomir to Egorian, eventually tracking down the wizard responsible. She’d fought at the Scar knight’s side against the necromancer’s beasts of bone and shadow—one of the most desperate melees of her career—but as they rode past one another in Citadel Rivad’s gatehouse, neither offered more than a curt, wordless nod. No Hellknights, in any order, would pause in their assignments for mere socializing. Not even for a comrade who had saved one’s life.
At the gates of Citadel Rivad, Jheraal dismounted and handed her passes to the Rack Hellknights standing guard beside the massive iron doors. The Ennead Star, a nine-pronged black-and-crimson starburst that represented the core tenets of the Hellknight orders, stood proudly on each of the citadel’s great doors. The starburst’s center showed the Rack’s spiked wheel, and another breaker’s wheel encircled the entire design. Above each symbol, smaller wheels crowned the flagpoles flying the Rack’s grim banner.
It made for an intimidating entrance, as it was meant to. After a long moment, during which Jheraal had ample opportunity to contemplate the forked black banners flapping over the citadel’s granite walls, the Rack knights returned her passes and waved her onward. Jheraal took up her horse’s reins and continued afoot.
In the large courtyard beyond the gates, squires and armigers piled books up into towering stacks over hollow cores of kindling. Most of those were old editions of disapproved histories, or texts from prohibited religions. They’d be burned once the sun went down, so the light of the fires carried further. The Hellknights of the Rack were famed for those bonfires, which they called “clarity pyres.” The venoms of the mind poison the body, they said, and fire was its cure. Sometimes they burned the books’ owners along with their texts.
On the other side of the courtyard, a Hellknight of the Chain, clad in manacle-like gauntlets and plate armor worked to resemble coiled chains bound in place with heavy locks, stood watch over a group of shackled prisoners. Jheraal didn’t recognize the Hellknight, but the scenario was clear enough. The Chain knights wore helms faced with iron prisoners’ masks and made it their mission to track escaped prisoners, retrieve runaway slaves, and ensure that none of the criminals consigned to their prisons ever had a prayer of escape. Some of the most dangerous prisoners in the world were kept at Citadel Gheradesca, and none, to Jheraal’s knowledge, had ever gotten free.
From the layers of old whip scars on their backs and the welts of lost collars around their throats, Jheraal guessed that the captives in the courtyard were slaves who’d tried to run and had been recaptured, and who were now bound back to their former masters. Most likely those masters were in Westcrown, and the Chain Hellknight was overseeing the return of the slaves to their rightful places.
Jheraal took no joy in the slaves’ suffering, but their fate was none of her concern. As she passed the stables, Jheraal handed her horse’s reins to an unsmiling armiger. The steely song of combat echoed from a smaller yard to the right, loud enough to make her battle-tested destrier flatten its ears in protest, and she turned to watch.
Under the hard eyes of Kassir Voidai, Citadel Rivad’s Master of Blades, a would-be Hellknight was testing himself against a devil. He was black-haired and golden-skinned, suggesting ties to the Dragon Empires of the far east, and he was being sorely tried.
To be an armiger was no easy task—even that level of acceptance within a Hellknight order required a candidate to embrace the Measure and the Chain, and to endure years of rigorous study and self-mastery. Yet to win the armor and title of a true Hellknight, a candidate had to slay a devil in single combat—and had to earn that victory under the eyes of a sworn Hellknight.
A single witness sufficed in times of necessity, but when an armiger took the test in one of the citadels, the formal rituals of ascension called for more. The courtyard for this test was lined with Hellknights of the Rack. Men and women in heavy black armor, its design made to resemble flensed musculature, watched without expression as their young trainee fought for his life against a crimson-skinned, heavily muscled fiend.
Jheraal paused in the archway, remembering her own test. The fiend she’d faced had been similar to the one that the Rack armiger was squared off against: a squat, glaive-wielding devil with a scraggle of blood-soaked beard that left dark streaks glistening across his bare scarlet chest.
Her long-ago opponent had blistered her ears with infernal curses and threats, trying to rattle her nerves. This one, however, fought in silence. So did the armiger, tight-lipped and determined despite several minor wounds that dotted his leathers with blood. There were no battle cries, no shouts of pain or pleas for mercy that would never come. Only stoicism, fierce determination, and skill.
This one will succeed. Jheraal only needed to watch a few minutes to see that. There was skill behind his sword and steel in his spine, and the young man didn’t flinch when the devil leered close enough for the blood-crusted tendrils of his beard to caress his cheeks obscenely. The youth answered with a thrust of his longsword, drawing the devil’s blood.
She left the armiger to his battle, removing her helm as she continued through the interlocking yards of Citadel Rivad. It wasn’t until she’d passed through another shaded stone arch and back into the sunlight that she finally found the Hellknight she’d come to see. Or, rather, he found her.
“Well, if it isn’t my favorite scourgey hellspawn. Hunting criminals in Citadel Rivad, are you? Close your eyes and throw a rock, you’ll hit a dozen.”
Jheraal turned toward the familiar voice. Only one Hellknight in the entire Order of the Rack talked like that. “Merdos Rasdovain. They haven’t drummed you out of the order yet?”
“Ha! Far from it. I’ve been promoted. It’s Paralictor Rasdovain now.” Merdos came down one of the enormous staircases that swept up from the citadel’s formal entrance hall. He hadn’t changed much since the last time Jheraal had seen him, other than a few more strands of gray in his red-blond hair and the new pins of steel and gold on the shoulders of his flayed leather cloak to go along with his increase in rank.
Although he was over thirty, her old friend still seemed almost too boyish to be a proper Hellknight. There was a spring to his step that no weight of formal armor could diminish. His blue eyes glinted with mischief, and his open, broad-nosed face always seemed on the verge of cracking into a smile. It was a jarring contrast to the harsh, fanatic asceticism that surrounded him.
Part of that was calculated, Jheraal knew. Merdos’s good humor was invaluable in convincing the common people of Westcrown to trust him. He could find witnesses, win their confidence, and persuade them to testify openly before magistrates when no other Rack Hellknight could coax a word out of entire neighborhoods.
But it was genuine, too. He truly did care for his people, both the Hellknights and armigers under his command and the Wiscrani they were charged with safekeeping. He could be as merciless as any Hellknight when necessary, but he didn’t let that hardness define him. It was why Jheraal had always liked him, and why she had hoped to find him here. Merdos was the only Hellknight in the Order of the Rack that she could trust with her current task.
“Did they give you an office with that promotion?” she asked.
Merdos raised an eyebrow, taking her meaning immediately. “They did. I’ll show it to you, if you don’t believe me.”
“Seeing is believing.”
The paralictor swept a hand up the staircase, mimicking a courtier’s grand gesture. “Then come, and I’ll make a convert out of you.”
His office was small, spare, impersonal. The only natural light came from two east-facing windows that were crisscrossed with iron bars despite their height and the narrowness of their apertures. Panels of dark wood covered the walls. They depicted the Order of the Rack’s spiked-wheel insignia, alternated with carvings of criminals being brought to justice and seditious writings piled into pyres.
“It’s a bit gloomy,” Jheraal observed, clicking her clawed fingertips on a corner of his desk.
“Never said it wasn’t. I promised an office, but I never said it was a nice one.” Merdos closed the door. His voice dropped and lost its levity once they were alone. “What brings you to Citadel Rivad? You surely didn’t ride all the way out here to congratulate me on a promotion I won three months ago.”
“A promotion I didn’t even know about?” Jheraal snorted. “No. Congratulations on that, but no. I came because I need access to certain records. Accurate records.”
The emphasis did not go unnoticed. The Order of the Rack was entrusted with keeping—and, when necessary, concealing—true accounts of all that transpired under their watch. Common sentiment held that the Order of the Rack destroyed all disfavored ideas that came into its grasp, regardless of their merits, and that only fawning, Thrune-approved propaganda survived its pyres.
While popular among the order’s enemies, these beliefs were far from accurate. The Order of the Rack indeed bottled up truths that were too dangerous for the populace to hear. But it seldom destroyed them.
The truth was too valuable a weapon to lose. A fact that might be inconvenient in one age could easily become indispensable in another, as anyone who held power long enough eventually learned. Nothing shattered lies and heresies more conclusively than the truth; nothing dispersed rabble-rousers’ exaggerations more quickly. Accurate information was the first, best, and sometimes only antidote to the myriad poisons of the mind.
The Order of the Rack understood that better than anyone. Its Hellknights, accordingly, were tasked with maintaining the discipline of information—which meant, in part, that they hoarded secrets the rest of the world had long forgotten.
They weren’t quick to share those secrets, though. Merdos was her one chance to break through the Rack’s wall of silence, and Jheraal wasn’t sure their friendship would go that far. Not if whatever she was trying to find was as lethal as she’d begun to suspect it might be.
Merdos’s brow creased. “Records about what?”
“The Order of the Crux.”
“That seems a bit historical for your interests, doesn’t it? It’s been more than fifty years since those pretenders were crushed. I’d think they were out of your jurisdiction.”
Jheraal sighed. “It’s not them I’m trying to track down. I just need to know what happened around the time of Citadel Gheisteno’s fall. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important, Merdos. I have reason to believe those records could be relevant to my current investigation.”
“The killings at Vaneo Celverian?” He laughed at the startlement that crossed her face. “Don’t look so surprised. Knowing other people’s business is my job. So you believe there’s some connection between Citadel Gheisteno and that unpleasantness?”
“I’m not sure. I do think there’s a connection between the Rack Hellknights here in Citadel Rivad and the murders in Westcrown, though.”
Merdos’s smile vanished. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am. Unfortunately.” She described the Hellknight whose body they’d found in Rego Cader, watching Merdos closely as she detailed the dead man’s build and features. When a wince of recognition passed across the paralictor’s face, so fleeting that Jheraal would have missed it if she hadn’t been watching for a reaction, she knew her guess had been on the mark. He’d known the man.
“His name was Hakur,” Merdos said. “We’d thought he deserted. His last assignment was serving as a guard in the library collections. He’d served honorably for years, but recently he’d been … troubled. That happens, from time to time. His superiors thought that perhaps a few weeks of quiet in the archives would help. Evidently not.” He shook his head, grim-faced. “Does anyone else know?”
“Not yet.”
“I would be grateful if you could keep it that way. At least a little while longer.” The paralictor paced across his office. There wasn’t much room for it. Three short strides, and he had to turn around, adding to his barely contained agitation.
Jheraal leaned against a wall, giving him as much space as possible without being obvious about it. The wall carvings jabbed her back, but she refused to shift her weight away. Doing so would have been an admission of discomfort, and beneath her dignity. “Do you know if he had any friends outside the citadel? Any family? Lovers?”
“A sister in Westcrown. I can give you her address.” Merdos stopped pacing. “What was he doing in Rego Cader? Was he captured? Did he actually desert the order?”
“I don’t know. That’s part of the reason I’d like to see the archives. Knowing what Hakur was doing during his last days here might help me piece together what happened to him, and why.”
The paralictor nodded, unhappy but satisfied. “I’ll show you where he was assigned.”
The secret libraries of Citadel Rivad were dark, dusty, and densely packed. Although the rooms were enormous, their vaulted ceilings lost in shadow, only a cramped warren of tunnels was accessible from the ground. Overloaded shelves and unmarked boxes crowded in on every side, leaving gaps so narrow that Jheraal had to walk sideways to fit through. Enchanted lamps cast a steady, bluish illumination at the end of each row, but the clutter was so thick that the light invariably failed before reaching the centers. Sometimes it lasted only a few feet.
Still, there was more than enough to show Jheraal that while this part of Citadel Rivad might be formally designated “libraries,” the spaces more closely resembled evidence rooms. Mostly the shelves held stranger things than books or scrolls: bones, religious icons from outlawed cults, bottles with poisonously colorful, unlabeled contents. She saw a wand with a baby’s skull impaled upon its handle, and another made of clear, hollow glass beside it. The glass wand was filled with what looked like fresh-spilled blood, and within it swam a dozen tiny leeches, none longer than the smallest of Jheraal’s fingernails. Each of the leeches had a shriveled, eyeless human face.
And all these things, hideous and horrible and unexplained, hemmed her in so closely that she had to pull her elbows close to her body to keep from knocking them onto the floor. Even when she made herself as small as she could, her shoulders brushed against them constantly.
The Hellknight didn’t consider herself claustrophobic, but the secret libraries were threatening to change her mind. “This is what Hakur was supposed to guard?”
“Hakur and eleven other Hellknights. Yes.”
“Why does this place need a dozen guards? How would anyone even know where to find anything in order to steal it?” Jheraal plucked at the cloth covering a nearby box. Under it was a stack of flat brown leaves covered in curling script that seemed too miniscule to have been penned by any human hand. An ugly, squat stone figurine sat atop the leaves. It looked like a toothy, cross-legged frog, or perhaps a demon of some kind. Blood, apparently wet and fresh, stained its broad-toed feet. She pulled the cloth back over it, wondering what the Order of the Rack had seen in those leaves and that statuette that warranted locking them away.
“There’s an order to the collection. The Rack would leave nothing so disorganized.” Merdos’s smile, likely meant to be wry, was cold in the blue-tinted light. “But it’s deliberately obscured.” He pointed to a shelf three rows down. “Anything we have pertaining to Citadel Gheisteno will be there. Or in that general area. It might be moved around a bit.”
Jheraal nodded. “How long do I have?”
“This is dated for a week.” He handed her a small scroll: a pass authorizing access to the secret archives, signed with his name and affixed with the seal of his rank. “I can’t imagine you’ll need longer.”
“A week.” She tucked the scroll into a belt pouch, hoping it would be enough.
Merdos started back toward the stairs. Paper rustled as he moved. The library’s books and papers were piled so high around him that even the small motion of turning around threatened to knock mountains loose. “You owe me a favor for this one, Jheraal. A big favor.”
“And here I thought I was doing you one.”
“Time will tell,” he said, leaving her to the gloom.
When his footsteps had receded up the staircase, Jheraal ventured down the row he’d indicated. Its shelves bowed under the weight of dust-cloaked crates. They’d been hastily built, the nails angled in carelessly and hammered with enough force to splinter the cheap wood. Old stains, greened and faded by time until she couldn’t tell blood from mud, smeared across their sides and bottoms.
If there really was any secret order to the jumble, as Merdos had claimed, Jheraal couldn’t see it. The boxes’ markings were indecipherable, and she couldn’t find a catalog or list of their contents anywhere on the shelves. Sighing, she resigned herself to going through each of the crates by hand.
The first few boxes held nothing of obvious interest. Blades, saws, scalpels, retracting hooks. Braziers for cautery tools and stained glass jars for holding blood. Torture implements, she assumed, kept to prove that the Order of the Crux was as red-handed in that respect as any other Hellknight order. Some were curiously made, with blades shorter and stouter than most of the similar implements she’d seen, but none of them stood out otherwise.
There wasn’t anything revelatory about proof that the Order of the Crux had used torture. Nearly every major power in Cheliax did that. It was widely known that House Thrune even sent some of its royal executioners to Nidal so that they could study the most sophisticated techniques devised by the church of the pain god. Far from hiding the fact, they extolled it across the continent, so that all would know what it meant to break the laws of Cheliax.
Nothing in there could explain what had happened at Vaneo Celverian. Nor could it explain the five hellspawn who’d turned up, weeks later, in the ruined bathhouse of Rego Cader.
Jheraal moved on, extricating another crate from a high, overcrowded shelf. She pried off its splintered lid, lifted up the sackcloth under that, and then stopped dead, the breath caught in her throat.
It held bones. Ten sectioned sternums and frontal ribcages, sawn out like bony breastplates and stacked one atop another, neat as saucers in a cupboard. The next crate held more, and the next beyond that. Jheraal pulled them down one after the other. When she finally ran out of boxes of bones, she was surrounded by more than a dozen of them, holding the remains of nearly a hundred people.
Most of them looked human, although a few had the stouter proportions of dwarves or the slight, small bones of halflings. One partial skeleton was the milky green of jade. Another was striated with scarlet ripples like tongues of living flame.
Whether or not they showed their infernal heritage that plainly, however, the Hellknight knew that not one of the ribcages in those boxes had come from an ordinary person. Their condition made that clear. All of them, every last one, had a smooth-bored gap in the bones, cauterized neatly at its edges, where something had burrowed into that person’s chest and ripped out his or her living heart.
What did this? Why?
The bones offered no answer. Jheraal traced the polished rim of one ruined ribcage, marveling at the molten smoothness of the bone, even as she shivered inwardly at the clinical horror of it. Then, numbly, she began stacking the boxes back up on their shelves, because the rows were too cramped for her to move otherwise.
When the last of them had been replaced, Jheraal rested her forehead against a bare spot on the shelf, hoping that the cool wood might leach away some of the heat that pounded behind her temples. The hellspawn she’d found weren’t the first victims. The bones proved it. Someone had done the same thing at Citadel Gheisteno, decades earlier.
Was that the Order of the Crux’s heresy? Was that why they were stamped out of existence?
The bones didn’t answer that question, either.
With luck, however, someone else would. The fall of Citadel Gheisteno remained within living memory. Some of those who had marched against the fortress could still speak of what they’d seen.
It was Ederras’s task to find them, though, as it was hers to investigate the archives of Citadel Rivad. Returning her attention to her duty, Jheraal stooped to the next pile of unmarked boxes.
There were only three left in this section. Two were large, one small. Jheraal pulled out one of the larger boxes and lifted its lid, then pulled aside the layers of sackcloth and brittle straw that cushioned its contents.
Jewels gleamed amid the straw. Dozens of them, each the size of a large apple. Some were dull and gray. Others were pink and pale as dewy roses. Cautiously, with quick, light touches, Jheraal brushed their shining surfaces clear.
A ghostly throbbing reached her ears. The Hellknight bent closer to the straw-cradled jewels, unsure what she was hearing. Then she pulled back abruptly, eyes wide in the blue-tinted gloom.
The stones were beating like hearts. Not all of them. Only the pink ones, never the gray. It was only a faint echo of the true sound, as muted and distant as the roar of waves trapped in a seashell—but it was there. She was certain of it. Those jewels held heartbeats. How and why, she couldn’t begin to guess, but there was no doubt in her mind as to what they were.
Jheraal’s hands shook as she replaced the lid and returned the box to its rightful place. Tense in anticipation, she pulled out the second large crate, and took only a moment to confirm that it, too, was filled with row after row of cabochons, rose pink or lifeless gray, nested in decades-old straw. Again, the rosy ones thrummed with spectral heartbeats, while the dull ones made no sound. The box’s jewels drummed in an unearthly chorus from the moment she revealed them until she replaced the lid on their crate and pushed it back onto its shelf.
The last box sat between them. It weighed almost nothing in her hands as she pulled it out. The smudged tracks of fingerprints showed as clear streaks in the dust on its pinewood lid.
Filled with foreboding, Jheraal fitted her fingers to the tracks of whoever had gone before, and lifted up the dust-cloaked lid.
The last box was empty.