They walked the rest of the way to Taranik House in silence.
Around them, the morning warmed toward day, and the life of the city rose into full, buzzing bustle. The drivers of donkey carts cursed one another vigorously when they crossed paths at intersections, each refusing to give way to the other. Flower-sellers, pie vendors, and peddlers hawking luck charms and love potions crowded the approaches to the major bridges, chanting their wares to a steady stream of passers-by. Alchemists sold luminetti—small glass pendants that could be opened and shaken together to create an hour’s worth of light—along with more exotic concoctions.
As the squat bulk of Taranik House came into view before them, Ederras paused. “When we first met, you mentioned that you’d looked up the old records from—from my indiscreet youth.”
“I did. I thought it was important to know who you were.”
“Can I see them?”
The Hellknight chuckled. “You don’t already know what you did?”
“I know what I did. That doesn’t tell me anything about what the reports say, though. If it wouldn’t be too much of a favor—”
“It’s fine. It’s an old investigation. The convictions are well past appeal, the sentences long carried out. The records have been public for years. I’ll have one of the armigers deliver my copies of the reports to your vaneo. Keep them if you want. I don’t need them anymore.”
“You’re not going to ask why I want them?”
“Because everybody likes to see their name in print?” She laughed at his expression. “No. I try not to ask questions about favors. Not unless I have to. Havarel’s taught me that excessive curiosity is rewarded only with headaches.”
Two stone-faced Hellknights saluted and stood aside at the doors as Jheraal approached. Before either she or Ederras could announce their arrival, a female signifer in a ridged steel mask and flayed leather cloak stepped out to intercept them.
As a spellcaster in the Order of the Rack, the signifer didn’t wear the heavy plate that the other Hellknights did. Although her armor was as ornately spiked and precisely fitted as theirs, it was far lighter, more ornamental than functional. Instead of the Rack’s standard sleek helm, she wore a black steel mask that concealed the upper half of her face, hiding everything above the tip of her nose. “Hellknight Jheraal. You’re needed immediately at the Obrigan Gate. Something’s happened to your prisoners.”
Jheraal’s mood changed instantly. The tips of her teeth showed in her frown, and she didn’t correct the signifer’s mischaracterization of the hellspawn she was protecting as ‘prisoners.’ “What’s happened to them?”
“Lady Thrune didn’t say. Only that you must come at once. She left a scroll to hasten your arrival.”
Jheraal raised an eyebrow and held out a clawed hand for the scroll. Even for House Thrune, a scroll of that power was no trivial expense. “It’s that urgent?”
The signifer nodded. “So she said.”
After giving the scroll a brief inspection, Jheraal curled it in her palm and looked at Ederras. “Teleportation. Can you use this?”
“No.” Wizardly magic had always been beyond him.
The signifer stepped forward. “I can. Sir.”
Jheraal looked the woman over, lingering on the dark leather of her cloak’s shoulders. The signifer only had one pin on her left shoulder, and that one was a plain length of brass. Ederras wasn’t versed in the nuances of the Hellknights’ ranks, but he guessed that meant Jheraal ranked higher than this masked spellcaster—an impression soon confirmed by Jheraal’s peremptory tone. “What’s your name?”
“Baliah,” the signifer replied. She sounded young, maybe not much over twenty. Ederras wondered about that—teleportation spells were no easy matter, even with a scroll to guide the caster—yet the woman must be skilled to have survived the Hellknights’ tests and earned induction into their ranks.
Evidently Jheraal agreed, because she tossed Baliah the scroll. “Take us there.”
The signifer smoothed the page and began reciting its incantation. As she spoke each syllable aloud, the inked letters on the fine white paper ignited into golden flame and burned away, washing Baliah’s steel mask with spectral firelight.
Near the end of the spell, Baliah reached out to touch Jheraal’s right shoulder. The Hellknight, in turn, clasped Ederras’s arm with her gauntleted left hand. At once the paladin felt the magic envelop him, gathering power and intensity. He closed his eyes, offering a heartfelt prayer to Iomedae that the Rack signifer would be able to keep control of the spell.
Around him, the world dropped away. Ederras felt a disorienting lurch in the core of his being, as if he had plunged without warning from a great height and just as suddenly been jolted back up again. Bile burned at the back of his throat.
Swallowing its bitterness, he opened his eyes.
Baliah had calculated their arrival perfectly. They stood on the cobbled street fifteen feet outside the Obrigan Gate, facing two dottari and a slack-jawed ox-cart drover. The dottari, although initially astonished, seemed to have been forewarned of the possibility that Jheraal and her companions might arrive so abruptly. Recovering from their surprise, they gave her a pair of crisp salutes. “Hellknight.”
Jheraal nodded perfunctorily in return. “I’m told something has happened to my guests?”
The dottari exchanged a glance. There was more than apprehension in those looks, Ederras thought. Neither of the dottari was a wet-eared new recruit. They looked to be closer to forty than twenty, their faces seamed with the lines of sun and wind. Veterans, both of them.
And visibly afraid, both of them.
“Yes, ah, mistress,” the nearer of the dottari said, fumbling for a title. “It began early this morning.”
“What began?”
The guardsman took an unconscious half-step away, shifting his weight toward a defensive, placating crouch. “Best you see for yourself, mistress. Lady Thrune is with them. In the cells. They haven’t—I mean, we haven’t moved them.”
“Show me,” Jheraal said. Her face had become a mask, her voice steady but toneless. Ederras could feel the anger coiled inside her, pulled back on a tight rein.
The dottari could sense it too. Without another word, they led the Hellknight and her companions into the cells she’d commandeered under the Obrigan Gate, where the maimed hellspawn had been put for safekeeping.
Two dottari stood watch at either end of the torch-lit corridor. Between them, Velenne paced before the cells in the black-and-red attire of her office. Yet despite their guards and the formidable fortification of the Obrigan Gate itself, Ederras’s apprehension increased with every step he took toward the hellspawn’s iron-barred cells. There was too much tension in the air, too much brittle silence.
“What’s happening here?” he whispered roughly to Velenne.
The diabolist gestured to the iron-barred window in the door nearest him. Ederras peered in, pulled back in surprise, and looked again.
It was empty.
No, he realized an instant later, not empty. The coarse straw pallets remained on the floor, each one covered by a tousled knot of blanket. There were clothes tangled up in that blanket, too: the fishmonger’s dress, speckled with the iridescent white wrinkles of dried-up scales, and the livery that Nodero and Chiella had been wearing on the night of Othando’s death. The clothes were slightly rumpled and deflated, as if they’d been draped over ice sculptures that had melted away.
“Where—?” he began, but before he could finish the question, Velenne seized his wrist and pulled him over to the next cell.
“Now,” she hissed. “This is why I called you. This is what happened to the others. Watch.”
Shuffling a half-step to the left so that Jheraal could stand alongside him, Ederras bent his head to the window and watched.
The five hellspawn from the bathhouse in Rego Cader had been separated into two groups, since the cells under the Obrigan Gate had been designed to house single inmates and didn’t have enough space to hold all five together. The three men had been put on pallets in one, and the woman and child had been laid side-by-side in another.
He was looking into the cell that the woman and child had shared. The woman lay unmoving on her pallet, but the little girl, like the hellspawn in the previous cell, was gone. Her simple cotton dress, shapeless and empty, peeped out from her rumpled blankets. The ring she’d been wearing had tumbled into the straw. Its tiny yellow gems twinkled in the magical light that Velenne had conjured to illumine their view.
Next to him, Jheraal exhaled. It was quiet, probably quiet enough that the others missed it. But Ederras heard and understood: whatever was happening to these people, whatever horror they were about to see, he too was glad that they didn’t have to watch it happen to that child.
It wasn’t much easier watching it happen to the woman, though.
A second after Velenne pulled him to the cell, Ederras saw the hellspawn woman’s mouth twitch. Her brow wrinkled, and she shook her head, slowly at first but with increasing fervor, as if she were arguing with someone in a dream. Her stiff, glossy curls, which had remained undisturbed since her arrival, flattened and tangled in the straw as her agitation grew. A breath puffed out her lips: a long, miserable moan, clearly shaped but drained of sound.
“What is this?” Ederras asked, turning to Velenne. Nothing they’d done to the hellspawn had been able to rouse any reaction from their insensible bodies, and now the woman seemed to be in great distress without any visible cause.
The diabolist lifted her right shoulder minutely. “I can’t be certain. This is no magic that I know. I would guess, however, that something is being done to their missing hearts. Something that frightens and hurts them. Badly.”
Jheraal glanced away from the window. The enchanted light cast her scaled face into sharp relief, emphasizing the curves and shadows of her horns. “Can you stop it?”
Velenne shook her head. “I couldn’t do anything for any of the ones who went before.”
The noise of the woman’s body thrashing across her bed of straw drew Ederras’s attention back to her struggles. She was flailing, her back arched high and wild into the air like a fish fighting an angler’s hook. Every muscle in her neck and shoulders was clenched hard. Her legs kicked desperately as she strove to get away from something none of them could see.
Most devastatingly, her eyes were open. She didn’t look at any of them—her wide, panicked gaze was fixed on some empty spot past the ceiling of her cell—but for the first time since she’d come to the Obrigan Gate, the hellspawn woman’s eyes were open and focused.
And the terror in them was unbearable.
“Unlock this door,” Ederras demanded, turning to the nearest dottari. “I have to help her. Give me the key!”
The guardswoman shrank away from him, looking at Velenne to forestall his fury.
“You can’t,” Velenne said. There might have been a note of compassion in her voice, or perhaps he only wished there was. “Healing doesn’t work. Dispelling doesn’t work. I’ve tried everything that you could do, and more. The magic that’s affecting them cannot be countered here.”
“No.” Gripping the window’s iron bars, Ederras stared into the cell in frustration, then flung himself away. The hellspawn’s misery was impossible to watch. He couldn’t conceive of how Velenne had been able to stand by and watch four other people go through this pain. Four innocents. One of them a child. “You’re wrong. There has to be something!”
“There is.” Jheraal crossed the distance to the dottari in two long strides. “The key. Now.”
Hands shaking, the woman gave it to her and backed away.
Immediately the Hellknight turned on a booted heel and unlocked the door. “The rest of you may wish to turn your eyes away.”
“You need to see it,” Velenne protested, her eyes widening in alarm as she realized what Jheraal intended. “You can’t—”
“I can and will. I don’t need to see what happens next. You can tell us whatever we need to know.” Drawing the long, flame-marked knife from her belt, Jheraal stooped beside the thrashing hellspawn woman. The Hellknight grabbed one of her flailing arms to hold her steady as she knelt in the straw. “There’s no need for this poor soul, or any of the others, to suffer.”
Despite Jheraal’s invitation, Ederras did not look away as the Hellknight slashed deep across the agonized woman’s throat. It was important to bear witness, to engrave this on his soul so that he would remember, always, what was at stake. This is the cost of failure. When this is the greatest mercy we can give, we’ve lost.
It was worse than he’d imagined. Cutting the hellspawn woman’s throat didn’t end her struggles. Blood gushed across her throat and chest in a crimson apron, but it made no more difference to her than if the Hellknight had wiped a damp cloth over her brow. The hellspawn kept thrashing and gasping through her voiceless screams, spraying scarlet mist over Jheraal’s face and the scarred plates of her armor.
Grimly, her face frozen in an alabaster mask, the Hellknight kept cutting.
Both of the dottari fled, first one and then the other, neither able to bear the sight. Baliah made no sound, but angled her blank mask away. Ederras himself had to grip the window bars to stay standing. Without them, his knees might have buckled at the grisliness of Jheraal’s work.
Only Velenne, who courted Kuthites in the smoky-crystalled palaces of Nidal, watched without flinching.
Finally, after a grueling eternity, it was over. The hellspawn woman’s suffering had ended.
But not before Jheraal had taken off her head. Without the space to properly swing a blade, it had been slow, brutal going. Nothing else had worked, though. The woman had flailed and writhed and fought her invisible tormentors until the last wet shred of sinew snapped loose.
Breathing heavily, Jheraal left the cell. She wiped the blood from her face and the knife’s blade. Sweat cut wavery, pink-streaked lines through the crimson spatters on her neck.
She didn’t look at anyone, and she didn’t say anything. Ederras tried to meet her eyes, willing the Hellknight to let him offer strength, empathy—something. But she never glanced his way.
Instead she held a clawed hand out at Baliah, who went to fetch a cup of water. Jheraal took it from the signifer and drank slowly, in small sips. Ederras couldn’t tell whether she was rinsing the taste of ugliness from her mouth or simply too exhausted to drink quickly.
Velenne broke the silence. “Why did you do that?”
“What?” Jheraal finished her water and stared blankly into the empty cup.
“Take off her head. When slitting her throat didn’t work. Why did you keep cutting?”
The Hellknight turned the cup around in her hands. Her fingers left sticky red prints on its wood, layering over and over each other. She didn’t seem to see the blood, keeping her gaze focused on the darkness of the cup’s interior instead. “I knew that killing her would stop the magic. Not exactly how, but that it would. There were accounts in Citadel Rivad that spoke of it, and hearts to corroborate it. The ones whose bodies were destroyed before the magic finalized its hold turned gray. The others didn’t.”
“What will become of the others?” Ederras asked. He didn’t have the stomach to sit through that again, and the three hellspawn men who’d been brought back from the bathhouse were still in their cell. Still waiting to suffer.
Velenne stirred. She pushed herself off the wall she’d been leaning against and went into the cell to examine the decapitated body more closely. “If they follow the same pattern as the others, then in about an hour, one of them will begin to moan and twist, as this woman did. Their struggles will accelerate over the course of perhaps twenty minutes. Then they will dissolve.”
“Dissolve?” Ederras echoed.
The diabolist nodded, glancing back over her shoulder at him before bending to the bloodied corpse. “They … melted. Like snow on a warm day, or paper eaten by fire. Their flesh seemed almost to turn to fog. With each of them, the dissolution began at the edges of the wounds in their chests, then spread outward. It moved at a variable rate, slowing in some places and accelerating in others, so that there was always an equal amount of flesh left in all directions. I don’t believe any of them stopped fighting until the end, but given how little was left, I can’t be certain.”
“That’s what you wanted us to watch,” Jheraal said dully, addressing the blood-smeared cup. “That’s what you wanted us to come here to see. That suffering.”
“Would you have believed me if you hadn’t seen any of it yourself?”
The Hellknight didn’t answer. She held the empty cup out, and Baliah dutifully retrieved it.
“More water?” the signifer inquired.
Jheraal shook her head. Baliah nodded, retreating gracefully to return the cup to wherever she’d gotten it from. The signifer’s step was smooth but swift, suggesting that she was glad to leave the dungeon’s tension behind. She hid it well, and none could have accused her of showing fear, but even for a Hellknight, it seemed, what they had just witnessed was unnerving.
“What will we do with the others?” Ederras asked.
“We’ll take them out of here,” Jheraal answered. She finally raised her head. Her eyes were haunted, unearthly. Ederras felt that he was looking into something dangerously close to madness. Hysteria burned at the edges of her gold-rimmed irises, not quite overtaking the hellspawn but close. Very close. “We’ll take them outside and end them humanely. It’s the only mercy we can give. But it will be a mercy.”
“I’ll do it.” It was the least he could do to take some of the burden Jheraal was carrying. He knew that what he was offering wasn’t the same as what she’d done, not remotely. The other hellspawn were insensible, and likely wouldn’t feel his blade any more than they’d felt the little pinpricks that the healers had tested on their fingers. Their ends would be swift, merciful, nothing like that hard-fought bloody horror.
But it was still going to hurt him to do it, and he knew it would hurt Jheraal worse. These are her people.
“Thank you,” the Hellknight said. That eerie emptiness hadn’t left her eyes. She rubbed her hands blindly over her thighs, over and over, trying to scrub away the blood that stained them well past the wrists.
“What next?” Ederras asked quietly. “After that’s done.”
“We find the killer,” Jheraal answered. “Without allowing him to strike again. I’m not waiting for him to gather another pile of victims so we can track him out of Rego Cader. I will not allow anyone else to suffer as these people have. I can’t. I have to find a way to stop it.”