The smell of death surrounded Citadel Gheisteno.
Not the foulness of carrion or the cold, musty breath of a subterranean ossuary, although those were the odors that most people took to be the smell of death. It was the actual scent of dying—of the last, surrendering sigh to escape from a mortally struck body—that enveloped the castle’s barren stones and whistled through its lifeless courtyards.
Every time she walked into the citadel’s dismal aura, Sechel wondered how many of its other visitors recognized that unsettling exhalation for what it was. How many, even among the handful who came to this desolate place, had killed often enough to know that scent? How many had stood close enough to their victims to breathe it in?
Perhaps she was the only one.
There were another dozen deaths in her carrier right now. Sechel shifted the pack on her shoulders. Twelve jewel-like hellspawn hearts, torn out and transmuted by the devilheart chain, beat softly within the case’s padded walls. She could hear their muted murmurings whenever the wind died enough to let that haunting drumbeat through.
Once again, she wondered why her employer wanted them. It wasn’t uncommon for Sechel to be asked to take something from those she killed, but usually it was meant to prove that the target had been slain. An ear, a head, maybe a patch of tattooed skin.
This was something different. Her employer hadn’t given her a single name. None of her targets had been assigned; all had been taken simply because they happened to be available. And because they carried the taint of Hell in their lineage.
Twelve anonymous hearts from twelve nameless hellspawn. That was all the graveknight had wanted, so that was what Sechel had brought. For what he’d offered in return, she would have killed ten times as many.
Citadel Gheisteno feared no invaders. The castle’s gates were wide open, its great portcullis lifted, as they had been on every one of Sechel’s previous visits. She’d been coming to the fortress for over a year, and never once had she seen those massive bars dropped.
Under its immense iron teeth, a single figure waited. He listed steeply to the right, bent as a half-melted candle carved by the wind, yet he stood nearly seven feet tall despite the stoop of his spine. A shapeless, dirt-stained linen wrap flapped loosely about his gaunt form.
Sechel tensed when she saw him. Her fingers tightened on the straps of her pack, although she didn’t slow her step. “I’m here to see the lictor, not you, Ochtel.”
“He is … busy,” the man replied in a breathy, slurred voice. Most of his teeth were missing, and his lips were seamed with layers of scars from having been repeatedly sewn shut and torn free. It left Ochtel’s speech as disfigured as the rest of him. “I will … I am assigned to greet you.”
“I don’t want a greeting. I want to be paid.” Sechel crossed the last few feet of the bridge with a long, swift stride. Impenetrable mist roiled across the chasm. She had no idea whether there was any water under the bridge. That cold, foul-smelling fog had never cleared enough for her to see.
The charred skulls on the Bridge of Memories stayed inert as Sechel passed over them. It wasn’t always so, she knew. The skulls’ fire awakened for those who passed in either direction. It was they who held Lictor Shokneir and his graveknights captive in their castle, for none of the three could stand to face the condemnation of the dead, nor their own memories of failure. For them, the bridge was an impassable barrier.
The Crux-marked amulet that the lictor had given her hung heavy around Sechel’s neck. It was enchanted to protect her, she knew. From the skulls embedded in the cursed bridge, the lesser undead that infested the citadel—even from the lictor’s own aura of life-sapping sacrilege.
Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. She wore it, because she was no fool, but if Citadel Gheisteno was this bleak even when she wore the lictor’s amulet of soot and steel, she couldn’t imagine what its aura of misery must be without.
Ochtel watched her mournfully, never moving. His greasy black hair seemed even longer and more unkempt than it had on her previous visits. It tumbled over the gaping pit where the man’s right eye should have been, not quite hiding the hole. It didn’t hide the slashed scar where his nose was missing, either, or quiet the painful whistling that accompanied every breath he took. “You … will be. But not … tonight.”
Sechel’s eyes narrowed. She took off the pack and whirled it across the floor at the maimed man’s feet. “Why not tonight? I got what he wanted. Twelve hearts. In there. Count them yourself.”
“I … believe you.” Slowly, painfully, Ochtel stooped and hooked the strap of her pack on an impossibly long and bony finger. Ridges of stitching showed around the swollen knuckles of that digit, marking where pieces of Ochtel’s other fingers had been severed and added in. He only had three left on that hand, two on the other, all of them extended to twice their natural length. “But it doesn’t … matter. He wants … more. The work is … difficult … he says.”
“Mine isn’t?” Sechel inhaled deliberately, struggling to master her temper. It was useless to shout at Ochtel. He had no power or influence in this place.
Once the man had been a great druid, but since falling under Lictor Shokneir’s control, he had been reduced to a wretched slave, mutilated in body and mind. His presence in Citadel Gheisteno was meant as a warning to all other mortals who dealt with the graveknight: overstep your bounds, and this is what will become of you.
She was almost too angry to care, though. Twelve deaths—twelve hearts—had been their bargain.
Twelve hearts, and the chain, for her freedom.
The maimed druid offered her a shaky, lopsided shrug. Bloody bubbles of saliva popped at the corner of his mouth. His voice cracked with the strain of speaking for so long. “Nothing … attaches to your refusal. There will be no … penalty … if you go. Only … that what was promised … will not be given.” With the same agonized slowness of motion, Ochtel turned back toward the Citadel’s looming doors. “The lictor … left one other thing. A vision … for you.”
“What do you mean, a ‘vision’?” Sechel stole a glance upward. Forty feet over her head, a single window in the blackened fortress glowed with crimson firelight. That was no torch’s glow, she knew, nor that of lamp or lantern. It roared and died in wracking waves, fluctuating from bonfire to eclipse and back.
That was Lictor Shokneir’s presence, and the agony of his curse. It was a vision, and a terror, that she had no wish to see.
“Come.” Mercifully, Ochtel didn’t try to explain further. Instead, he receded into the shadows, beckoning with his three-fingered hand for Sechel to follow.
She did so reluctantly, eyeing the portcullis as she passed beneath its heavy spikes. Behind her, the moat and drawbridge melted into indistinct blurs, veiled by the fog and shadow that blanketed Nidal.
Ominous as that landscape was, it didn’t compare to Citadel Gheisteno’s interior. In the emptiness of its unlit halls, Sechel’s footsteps sounded tiny and forlorn. The weight of its stone walls pressed down on her so tangibly that she wondered whether that was the reason Ochtel had been crushed into a permanent, sideways stoop.
No tapestries softened the citadel’s grimness. There were no paintings, no mirrors, no silk-upholstered furniture against its walls or soaring frescoes on its ceilings. Only drafty black stone, coated in a constant layer of soot, stretching its march onward in every direction without the slightest hint of relief.
They saw no one else in those corridors. The stale chill in the air, long undisturbed by living lungs, told Sechel that no one was there to be seen.
It didn’t surprise her. More than half a century ago, after the other Hellknight orders marched upon and slaughtered the Order of the Crux, Citadel Gheisteno had been torn down over the bones of its defenders. The fortress she walked through had risen mysteriously from the ashes and crumbling stones of the original citadel, supposedly overnight, and Sechel had never entirely believed that it was real.
Deadly, yes. But not real.
Ochtel stopped before a bare wooden door that embodied all Sechel’s doubts about the nature of Citadel Gheisteno. It was a door out of nightmares: plain wood, a tiny barred window, a hefty ring of hammer-dented iron. That ring was worn smooth on the bottom curve where it had been grasped by thousands of hands over the years, even though it was impossible that so many should have used it during the citadel’s short existence.
But there it was, perfect as the iconic image in a sleeping mind.
“Your … vision. In there. Of what … could be.” The mutilated druid lifted a broken hand to the door. His face was empty of emotion under the shaggy fall of his black hair.
Sechel scowled and yanked the door open, covering her fear under a show of impatience.
A single mirror stood in the windowless room inside. Black cloth draped its glass, but the round silhouette was as distinctive and recognizable as the dungeon door that led to it. It, too, seemed to be a thing that had been imagined into existence rather than having been made by mortal hands.
Wishing that she could shake off the persistent sense that she was walking through someone else’s dream, Sechel strode to the mirror and snatched the black drape from its face.
In its glass she saw herself … but not as she’d ever really been.
The reflected eyes that stared back at Sechel were blue, only blue. They didn’t show the whirling motes of viridian light that spun through her living irises. Sandy hair fell to her shoulders in relaxed waves, not the bone-hard spikes that she shaved back weekly. Her fingers didn’t end in soft, scarred nubs where she’d pulled out her Hell-given claws. They had nails, human nails, weak and white and ordinary.
Everything about her was ordinary, even the tears that welled hot in her eyes at the sight. In the mirror’s glass, she was human. Only human.
Shaken, Sechel put the cloth back over the mirror and retreated from the room. It wasn’t real. It was only a vision, as Ochtel had said. Her eyes were flecked with the legacy of devils. Her fingers were stubbed and scarred. And stained with so much blood.
Gently, even reverently, Ochtel drew the door shut as the hellspawn dashed her tears away. The druid stood there, passive as a tree, until she turned on him. “Lictor Shokneir can make that happen? Not just a vision. He can make it real?”
Ochtel’s head moved in a tortured nod. “That is … his promise. If you meet … his price.”
Sechel’s lip turned up in a half-conscious snarl. Deep in her bones, she didn’t know if she believed that Lictor Shokneir truly had the power to purify the taint of Hell from her flesh. It was too convenient a promise, too mesmerizing a lure. The world wasn’t that generous with her kind.
But what if she was wrong? What if he could do it? Was it worth the risk of throwing away her heart’s desire because she doubted?
“What does he want?” Sechel asked.
“More … hearts. And. There are … hunters on your trail. Three … in particular. A Hellknight, a paladin, a binder of … devils.”
“He wants them shaken off the track? Killed?”
Ochtel shook his head. Gingerly, as if he was afraid of it falling off if he moved too vigorously. Maybe he was. “He wants … you … to bring them here.”