It took Jheraal another full day to finish exploring the Order of the Rack’s stockpile of evidence from Citadel Gheisteno.
She had to make her own catalog of what she found, recording her discoveries as they came. The shelves held more dusty crates of instruments that she now guessed were surgical tools used to extract the hellspawn’s hearts, not torture implements as she’d first thought. Later those tools had been replaced, Jheraal knew. But in the beginning, when the Hellknights of the Crux were refining their designs, the tools had apparently seen frequent and grisly use. Next to them were boxes of personal belongings: clothing, boots, wedding rings and mourning lockets, dolls and toy animals stitched out of worn fabric.
Initially Jheraal assumed that those were the private possessions of the Crux Hellknights, although she was puzzled by the children’s toys. When she found the yellowed ledger that explained them, however, her heart sank.
The boxes didn’t hold belongings taken from dead Hellknights after Citadel Gheisteno’s fall. They held the things that Lictor Shokneir and his underlings had taken from the prisoners they’d killed.
Year after year, the ledger’s entries tracked across the brittle pages, listing forfeitures as substantial as courtesans’ jewelry collections and titles to ships or buildings, and as small as a farmer’s worn pair of boots. According to the Order of the Crux’s records, all those items had been seized from the condemned.
That was a violation of every Hellknight order’s code, and further evidence that damned the Crux as heretics. Of course prisoners could be executed, and often were. Of course their possessions were forfeit when that happened. But those possessions were supposed to be assigned according to the law. In cases of theft, the stolen goods had to be returned to the victim. In cases of injury, the wrongdoer’s valuables were to be sold and the coin used for clerical spells that might heal the victim’s wounds. If the victim was dead, then the killer’s possessions would be sold to pay for a funeral.
Only in the rarest instances were a criminal’s belongings forfeited directly to the Hellknights. Any other rule created too much temptation to arrest and convict people in service to greed, not the law. Yet the Order of the Crux, if their own records were to be believed, had practically been looting its victims’ pockets before they stopped swinging on the gallows.
It made Jheraal’s skin crawl to read through those pages. She had dedicated her life to the Hellknights because she believed that their strict adherence to the rule of law was the best and fairest way to balance the competing interests in society. She hadn’t always been perfect in upholding those ideals, but she’d tried. She had always tried.
The Crux hadn’t.
What Jheraal found in those ledgers was not merely evidence of theft from the dead, but an attack on the very essence of what it meant to be a Hellknight. They suborned the law to their own desires. All their other crimes were almost secondary to that.
Almost.
On another unlit shelf she found a heavy book, bound in drab brown, with no name on its cover and no title on its spine. In its pages, set forth in a clear strong hand and signed by Lictor Shokneir himself, she read words that took the breath out of her lungs.
The creatures known as ‘hellspawn’ represent a profound perversion of natural law. Their infernal heritage poisons their souls. Evil is bred into them, blood and bone, innate to their beings as it is to devils.
Yet that very same taint may prove their salvation. For evil is not the only flower to blossom from the seed of devils. There is obedience to the law as well.
Jheraal closed the book. Her hands were shaking on its cover. She watched them as though from a great distance away, observing the fine white scales across the backs of her fingers, the larger pebbled scales on her knuckles and wrists, the sharp claws that dug into the book’s dull brown leather.
There was nothing human about those hands. Nothing, and everything. Five fingers, a palm, a thumb. The power to wield a sword or wrap a bandage.
But not, according to Lictor Shokneir, the power to choose.
His words broke open an old, unhealed pain. All her life, Jheraal had struggled to know how much of a shadow her heritage cast over her soul. The blood that ran through her veins, the heart that thumped in her chest—they weren’t like those of ordinary mortals. Hell was her inheritance, and Jheraal had spent three decades trying to understand exactly what that meant.
How much was she her own person? Was her will as free as those of elves and humans and halflings? Or was it a wagon with a crooked wheel, always veering to the side unless she constantly forced it straight?
Was she destined to darkness?
Had she doomed her daughter to the same?
Ever since she’d been old enough to understand that she was different from the other children, Jheraal had circled around that mystery, never knowing its truth. She had become a Hellknight in part because she believed the discipline of her order would strengthen her resolve against whatever taints and temptations were embedded in her ancestry. And while Jheraal didn’t believe that her destiny had been written before her birth, or that Indrath was cursed with an inborn taint of evil, she was also painfully aware that she could never be sure. Not completely.
Even if she was, the rest of the world wouldn’t be. It hurt to be reminded of that. Yes, the Order of the Crux had been heretics. They’d been criminals, outcast, their false beliefs crushed and cast out on the refuse heap of history.
But before that they’d been Hellknights, and they had believed her kind was cursed.
The ghostly thumping of the boxed hearts reverberated in her ears. She knew why some of them were gray, and wished she didn’t. She knew why some of them were pink, and that was worse. Almost as soon as she’d found them, Jheraal had returned the jewel-like hearts to their crates, and the crates to their shadowed shelves, but their spectral pulses had surrounded her the entire time she’d been working in the evidence archives of Citadel Rivad.
Why had the Order of the Crux singled out and slaughtered all those hellspawn?
Steadying her inhuman hands, Jheraal opened the lictor’s book again.
She had to know.
“It was called the devilheart chain,” Jheraal told Ederras as they walked together along the sculpture-hemmed canals of Westcrown. It was very early, and the Hellknight had just come off the long ride back from Citadel Rivad. Her eyes were gritty with sand, her mind was bleary, and the familiar weight of her armor felt clumsy and ill balanced. She turned her face into the wind, letting its coolness cut through her stupor.
“That’s what they used to tear out the hearts?” the paladin asked. He seemed preoccupied and oddly tense. His eyes stayed on the canal water, glass-smooth at this hour and largely undisturbed except for the birds that splashed in the shallow puddles on the stairs at the water’s edge.
“Yes. It was meant to purify them, in a way. To separate the devil part of them from the rest, and to bind all that infernal taint into their living hearts.”
“Why? I have difficulty imagining that Lictor Shokneir cared about doing that for the hellspawn’s benefit. What did he get out of it?”
“Slaves.” Jheraal’s mouth twisted distastefully at the word. “He had them declared criminals and their lives forfeit. Then he chained their spirits as slaves. Their mortal natures made that possible, and their infernal tendency toward order made them easier to bind.”
Ederras raised a golden eyebrow and looked up from the water, curious despite whatever distraction had him so moody. “That offends you? You were quick enough to tell me to ignore the prayers of slaves at the Pleatra.”
“That was different.”
“Why?”
Jheraal ran a clawed hand through her hair, trying to find the words. She shifted her helm under an armored elbow, seeking steadiness in the grim steel. After a moment, she shook her head. “Because they were stealing.”
“I don’t follow.”
“In Citadel Rivad, there were ledgers where the Order of the Crux recorded all the things they stole from criminals they condemned. They didn’t pay restitution to victims. They didn’t offer compensation for thefts or provide funerals for the families of the murdered. They kept what they confiscated for themselves. They stole. It was wrong—a violation of the law that they were sworn to uphold. What they did with the hellspawn was worse. They weren’t just stealing coins. They were stealing souls.
“Most of those people were ordinary citizens. The scrolls of condemnation listed what they were accused of, but most of the crimes were either petty or highly unlikely. Some of the accused were just children.” Jheraal’s lip curled in disgust. “Even if they were truly criminals, that wasn’t the penalty for their offenses. If they were supposed to have been fined, they should have been fined. If they were supposed to have been branded, they should have been branded. If they were supposed to have been hanged, they should have been sent to the gallows.”
Pages upon pages of names. Jheraal scowled, remembering. “None of them faced a sentence that began to compare to what they suffered. Having one’s heart torn out and one’s soul bound past death is not a permissible punishment for any crime, however heinous. Therefore sending them to that fate was illegal. What the Crux did wasn’t in service of the law. It was just another theft.”
Ederras let out a disbelieving little laugh. He stooped and skipped a small rock across the canal, watching its ripples until the last of them died. “That’s what bothers you? Not that they tore the hearts out of innocent people and enslaved their spirits, but that they did it without … what? A proper hearing? Notice?”
“Without the authority of law,” Jheraal said firmly. “It makes all the difference in the world. The law, and only the law, distinguishes the executioner from the murderer. The Order of the Crux chose to ignore that.”
“I suppose we agree on the important part, at least,” the paladin said. Straightening, he continued down the stone-paved walkway. The high towers of Westcrown Island receded behind them as the path curved away from the canal, turning toward the busier, more vibrant commerce of Parego Spera.
Here, the streets were alive despite the early hour. Shopkeepers were setting the day’s fruits and vegetables onto dew-damp wooden stands. Baker’s apprentices dodged through the streets, cradling covered baskets of warm bread, to make their delivery rounds. As the night receded into misty morning, the people of Westcrown took down the burned-out remnants of the pyrahjes that had warded off the terrors in the dark. Freed by the safety of sunlight, they resumed the normal rhythms of a city.
“So we know the Order of the Crux made this devilheart chain,” Ederras said, “and we have some idea why. But we don’t know what it’s doing in Westcrown, or who’s using it. As far as I’m aware, Lictor Shokneir remains shackled to his citadel, and no one’s reported an undead knight in a shroud of poisonous mist to the local dottari. I think we can reasonably conclude that someone else is using the chain.”
Jheraal nodded in assent. She moved her horned helm to her other arm, wiping away the dew that had collected on its steely brow. The mist that rose from the canals was so dense that mornings in Westcrown could be like walking through clouds. “I believe it’s the same one, though. The chain was stolen from Citadel Rivad, and the dead Hellknight we found in Rego Cader had been assigned to guard the archives where it was kept. Presumably he stole it, handed it to an accomplice, and was then murdered, most probably by the same accomplice.”
“Do you have any leads on that accomplice?”
“Maybe. The Hellknight had a sister in Westcrown. She might know something about his associates, or might even have been involved herself. I plan to visit her tomorrow. And you?”
Ederras didn’t answer immediately. He glanced back, she noted, to the white spires of the Iomedaean cathedral behind them on Regicona. “I spoke to the widow of a Hellknight who’d been part of the march on Citadel Gheisteno. She told me that the Order of the Scourge captured the devilheart chain—although she didn’t know that name for it—and wanted to destroy it. But they didn’t, because House Thrune ordered that it be preserved. Awful as it was, they wouldn’t give up its power.”
“Didn’t you tell me that your great-grandfather stole it?”
“Not exactly. He stole part of it. Maybe it was a small part. Enough to keep the device from working, but not enough that anyone would miss it. Anyway, that’s not the point. House Thrune wanted it before. Presumably they’re still interested now. So what happens if we find it?”
“You’re worried that Velenne joined our investigation because she wants to seize the chain? That her goal is to reclaim it for House Thrune?”
The paladin nodded slightly. His jaw worked through a knot of tension. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? Why else would she be here?”
Jheraal shrugged. The sun was rising high enough to slant its light through the surrounding buildings. She put her helm on and lowered its visor to shade her eyes. “Maybe she was telling the truth. Maybe she came to see you. Don’t you have spells to reveal lies?”
“I do. And they’re easily countered by other spells, which it’s safe to say Velenne knows.” He skipped a second stone into the canals. This time his frustration made him throw it too hard, and the rock vanished with a glurping splash. “I couldn’t catch her in a lie last time, and it cost my friends their lives. What will it cost if I let her deceive me again?”
“How should I know? That’s up to you, isn’t it?”
Ederras tipped his chin, flushing slightly as he acknowledged his fault. “I’m sorry. I’m dwelling on my own small concerns. This must be much harder for you. Learning that the Order of the Crux preyed on your kind can’t have been easy.”
“It isn’t.”
“Is there any way I can help?”
“We can stop whoever’s stolen the chain. That would be the obvious answer.”
The paladin ran a hand across a low stone balustrade overlooking the water. The pillars were of an older style, predating the Thrune Ascendancy. They were worked into simple, graceful vaselike forms, without the ostentatious ornamentation that later designers favored. “Of course. But I meant to ask whether there was anything I could do to help you.”
“You’re not doing enough already?”
Ederras paused, studying one of the carvings with closer attention than it warranted. She’d stung him, she could see, although he tried to brush it off. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
Jheraal sighed. She leaned against the whitewashed wall of a nearby house. A window opened on the second floor above her, and a head poked out. Probably the owner or a house servant, ready to tell these loiterers to leave.
Whoever it was, he or she withdrew immediately upon glimpsing the Hellknight’s armor. Jheraal didn’t even have time to register a face. “I apologize. I’m tired, and I’m being unfair. But my personal feelings have nothing to do with our investigation.”
“What does that mean? That you’re not allowed to have personal feelings? Does your order expect you all to be automatons inside your armor?”
“More or less.” Jheraal let a wry smile surface briefly through her weariness.
“Well, I don’t. I’d like to think that we’re friends—or headed that direction—and that you’d tell me if something were troubling you, whether or not it has anything to do with our investigation.” Ederras glanced up from his study of the balustrade, his blue eyes guileless. “You don’t have to bear your burdens alone.”
“You really believe that, don’t you?” Jheraal marveled. “You really do.” She looked away, watching a brown-speckled bird splash in a puddle. The bird ruffled its neck feathers and threw glittering droplets up on its wings, then made a little hop and flew away. When it was gone, she exhaled a soft breath, staring at the empty step where it had been. “There was a time—a long time ago, long before I became a Hellknight—when I would have given a great deal to find that kind of friendship.”
A silence fell between them, not quite uncomfortable but not far from it. A small, flat-bottomed boat floated by on the canal. It sat low in the water, heaped high with crates of fruit, jars of wine and oil, and other sundries destined for some wealthy household on Regicona. Opposite the rower sat a second man, hard-eyed and unsmiling. His knuckles were permanently swollen, and his ears were lumpy as unfinished pastry, signifying a lifetime of rough-and-tumble brawls.
He was security, obviously. Protection against the risk that someone might try to steal his employer’s apples and oil jars. Not a grave risk, in the richer parts of Westcrown, but one substantial enough to be worth paying a guard to avoid.
The man with the battered ears looked around, incurious but professional, as his rower pulled him past. Jheraal watched him in turn, thinking about all the different meanings that ‘security’ took in the world, and all the different ways people tried to obtain it.
When both the skiff and its attendants had turned around a bend in the canal and vanished behind a greening garden wall, Ederras cleared his throat. “You have it now. Friendship. If you want it.”
“That easy?”
“It doesn’t have to be that hard.”
“Maybe not for you. It’s never been easy for me. Even before I became a Hellknight, I spent most of my time … lonely.” That was understating it, but Jheraal didn’t feel like trying to explain the full depth of her isolation. Not to a man who had been highborn, handsome, and virtuous all his life. She didn’t hold those things against the paladin—he had no more chosen his blessings than she had chosen to be born without them—but she knew he could never understand.
Another boat floated by, this one not a skiff but an adel: a barge covered by a silk canopy painted with cavorting fiends. Its rowers were a pair of strapping young men who had, like carriage horses, been chosen for their matched builds. One wore the laughing mask of comedy. The other wore the plaster grimace of tragedy. Both of their masks featured devils’ horns and pointed goatees. A plump woman in a yellow silk dress lay prostrated on a heap of satiny pillows behind them, a young girl fanning her and holding a wilted sachet to her nose. The angle of the boat concealed the woman’s face, but her tower of elaborate curls was crumpled on one side, and there were wine stains about the bottom of her dress.
An opera diva returning from an assignation. A noblewoman would have been more discreet. Her adel would have lowered its canopy to conceal her identity altogether, and would never have been that garishly decorated. But a singer or an actress, particularly one whose star was beginning to sink, might want to fan the flames of gossip. One way to do that was to keep a boat so distinctively designed that it was easily recognized across Westcrown’s canals.
Ederras had seen the adel as well. A curious play of emotions crossed the paladin’s face as he watched it float past. He was staring at the canopy paintings and the devil-masked rowers, not the insensible diva on her silken throne.
When it was gone, and its ripples had smoothed away on the canal, he turned back to the Hellknight. “Do you want to change that? Do you want a friend?”
“I … I don’t know.” It was surprising to realize that, but once she’d said the words aloud, Jheraal knew they were true. “I don’t know that I’ve ever really had one. Even with my old comrades during my mercenary days … there were always some walls between us. Small things, easy to overlook when we were fighting, impossible to bridge when we weren’t.” She thought of Merdos, and how even their association came with a certain amount of professional caution.
Ederras regarded her with open surprise. “You’ve never had anyone that you trusted completely?”
“Not in the way you mean. The Measure doesn’t encourage such sentiments, and even before I became a Hellknight, it would have been … complicated. The closest I ever came was just a different kind of lie.”
“How so?”
“Back when I was a mercenary, I found something that had belonged to a dead bandit. A hat.” When she closed her eyes, she could remember it exactly. It had appeared as a green hood embroidered with grapevines in glittering gold thread. The wool had been soft and scratchy against her skin, the golden grapevines smooth as satin. “It had the power to change who you were. It wasn’t just a disguise or some spell-woven mask. The hat changed everything. Your voice, your scent, the way your skin felt when touched. As soon as I realized what it was—what I had—I ran away from the company. I couldn’t risk them taking what I’d found, and I wanted the chance to start over. As someone else.”
“You stole from your employers?” Scandalized amusement creased the corners of the paladin’s eyes. Jheraal could read his thoughts as plainly as if he’d spoken them aloud: it was inconceivable to him that she, a duty-bound Hellknight, had once been selfish enough to snatch a treasure and run.
“I was a different person then,” she said. “And I wanted to see what life was like without the curse of my blood.”
“How was it?”
Jheraal rolled her shoulders wearily against the wall. The early morning left this side of the building in shade, and the whitewashed stone retained the night’s chill. It crept through her armor, stiffening her bones, but she was far too tired to move. “You don’t realize what a burden you’ve been living under, as someone different, until it’s gone. It’s like … a shell of stone that grows over you, bit by bit, each increment so tiny that you don’t notice it. Maybe it’s meant to protect you from the world, and maybe it even does, but the weight of carrying that shell around for years will crush you into the dirt, no matter how strong you are.
“When I put on the hat, all of that weight just vanished from me. I didn’t have to carry around that shell anymore. I didn’t need it. I wasn’t different. No one stared at me. No one whispered. Shopkeepers didn’t tense when I came through their doors. Guards didn’t glower when I walked past. And I felt so unbelievably free, so light, as if every step I took might launch me into the sky. The air was sweeter, the water cleaner, the whole world a sunnier place.”
“Why did you give it up?”
The Hellknight breathed a sigh through her small, curved fangs. They’d gotten to the point of her story—the reason she’d begun telling it in the first place—and she found herself hesitating before plunging off that precipice. She’d never whispered a word from this part of her story to anyone. It had been a secret for so long, and the weight of that secret had grown immeasurably over the years.
She was tired. It was time to let go.
“Because I found someone that I could trust. Someone I could open myself to without fear of judgment or rejection. I fell in love, which was something I hadn’t ever really thought possible. You might be shocked to hear this, but there aren’t that many men interested in courting six-foot-tall scaly hellspawn. Most of the ones who do, they don’t really want you. They want a fetish. An object. Not a person. I’m not interested in that. So I thought it would never happen for me. And it didn’t, until I found that hat.
“Even more impossibly, he loved me back. But, as I said, it was all founded on a lie. Our entire courtship took place behind that mask. I didn’t dare remove it, not for an instant. He never knew who—what—I really was. But in other ways I was truer and more open with him than I’d ever been with anyone in my life. That was the closest I’ve ever come to having a friend, I think. And then it all just … went away.”
Ederras frowned. Not at her. It was inwardly directed, that frown. About something else entirely. But he shook it off, whatever it was. “What happened?”
“Fear. Just … fear.” She trailed off, mystified by her own confession. Jheraal knew the measure of her own bravery. There was no battle she’d run from, no peril she couldn’t face. Except that one. Half a lifetime, and that hadn’t changed. “I didn’t know how he would respond to the truth. I didn’t dare find out. The way he looked at me, the way he spoke to me … it was too precious. I couldn’t risk losing it. Maybe he would have accepted me as I really am, and maybe he wouldn’t, but I couldn’t face the chance that it would ruin what we had. So I ran. I never told him anything. I just disappeared. Because I was that afraid. That ashamed.”
Jheraal exhaled, closing her eyes in an attempt to escape the intensity of that old emotion. It didn’t work. It never worked. Even now, so much later, thinking about that time set her temples to pounding in shame and confusion. “After I left him, I threw away that enchanted hood. I joined the Hellknights, so I’d never have to be that vulnerable again. Embracing the Order of the Scourge gave me a different kind of armor. A different shell. One that I could bear honorably, and that left me enough room to breathe.”
The paladin’s frown deepened. This time it was at her. She saw him sort through his questions, put some aside, settle on one. “Do you regret it?”
“Sometimes. I don’t think there’s any way not to regret that decision, whichever way you choose. But if you’re asking whether I would decide differently, if I had it to do again, the answer is no. I’m as much a coward today as I was then. Maybe more so.”
Ederras studied her armor in silence, following the web of deep, ridged scars that the armorer had cut into the steel. Most of the marks evoked the scars of lash and scourge, as befit the Hellknight’s order, but there were claw gouges and the puckered stars of tooth punctures as well, and the rippled, shiny sheets that followed burns. A thousand imagined wounds, more than any living bearer could have survived, marched across those blackened plates.
“I don’t believe,” he said at last, lifting his gaze from the armor back to Jheraal, “that you are, or have ever been, a coward.”
You have no idea. She bit down on the protest. It had been an unthinking reflex, and it wasn’t fair.
Would it hurt so much to have a confidant? A friend? Remembering Indrath’s father had brought back a pang of nostalgia. Jheraal had been happy, then, and had been glad to have someone she could trust, even if only partway. Did it make her weak that she wanted to have a friend again?
Or was the greater cowardice in keeping her secrets, and refusing to confront uncomfortable truths?
She decided to test it. “I have a daughter.”
Ederras’s eyes widened. “You do?”
“I do. Fathered by the boy who only knew me with the hood. I never told him about that, either. Her name is Indrath. She’s fourteen now. Bright, vivacious, full of adventure and love of life. She lives at Citadel Demain, and thinks I found her as a baby in a basket somewhere. She knows none of this. No one does, officially, though I suspect a few of my superiors have figured it out.”
“She doesn’t know? Your daughter?”
Jheraal shook her head. She lifted a hand, flexing her clawed and scaled fingers as she brought them out of the wall’s shadow into sunlight. It was an inhuman hand. A monster’s. She waited until she was sure Ederras had seen it, and then she let it fall back into the shade. “The curse doesn’t show in her. She can pass. I won’t take that from her.”
“Do you think that’s what she really wants?”
She heard the care in his voice. The caution. The unspoken questions that hovered beneath the surface of the one he’d voiced.
“I don’t know,” Jheraal admitted, “but I do know that I’m not willing to shatter the simplicity of Indrath’s childhood to find out. Maybe that’s cowardice, too. Or maybe it’s understanding of how profound a gift it is to live with uncomplicated allegiances. Indrath’s life will have challenges and hardships. I can’t protect her completely. But I can protect her from that one, at least. I can give her a life free from the curse of my blighted blood.”
Whatever the paladin thought, he didn’t say anything. After another moment, the Hellknight pushed herself away from the wall. The morning was wearing on, and there was still much work to be done.
Ederras fell in beside her. They walked together in silence for a while. Then, as they turned a corner, he ventured a quiet question: “Is it worth giving up a mother?”
“Yes,” Jheraal answered without a trace of hesitation. “Yes, if the mother is the cause of your curse. Then it’s no sacrifice at all. Only a blessing. That’s what it means to be a hellspawn in this world, with or without this devilheart chain.”