“It’s done.”
Defiance and pride colored Sechel’s words in equal measure. Defiance of the terror that she always felt around Lictor Shokneir, and of the fear that he might renege on his word. Pride that she had done what the graveknight couldn’t, and had captured all three of the assigned targets alive. They were somewhat the worse for wear, perhaps, and in the case of the Thrune woman only barely alive, but she’d fulfilled the letter of her contract. She had earned her reward.
The lictor nodded. He seemed pleased, if it was possible for such a creature to be pleased. “You have served well.”
I don’t serve you. She bit back the words and hoped he couldn’t see her thoughts. “I want my payment. As agreed.”
“As agreed.” Lictor Shokneir raised his gauntleted hands, cupping them together as if he held an invisible crown for a kneeling king’s coronation. The shroud of dark mist roiled around him, rolling off his armored shoulders in a spectral echo of his cloak. “Bow before me.”
Instinctively, Sechel bristled. They were alone in the ruins of the citadel’s great hall. The castle’s mindless servants had carried away the remnants of the fallen Master of Blades, and Paravicar Leroung had returned to her frost-walled chamber of experiments. No one was there to see her abase herself at the lictor’s command.
She still hated doing it. But for the promise of humanity …
Sechel knelt. Chill mist enveloped her, sapping the warmth from her body, as Lictor Shokneir passed his hands over her. His black-gloved fingers skimmed through the air over Sechel’s skin, tracing the contours of her form. Although he never touched her, wracking agony followed his path.
A thousand acid-tipped needles drove into the assassin’s flesh, tearing her apart inch by inch. A thousand tiny jolts of lightning followed them, forcing her shattered parts back together. She was destroyed, stripped to pieces, pulverized to dust.
And then she was reborn.
Sechel stood on legs as shaky as jellied eels. She flexed her fingers, stretched her arms, inhaled a deep breath and was astonished at how little she could smell. Every fiber of her being felt familiar and foreign at once.
She stripped off her gloves. Under the fine gray kidskin, her hands had nails. Not the blind, ragged stubs of torn-out claws. Nails.
Sechel pushed back her hood and ran a hand over her head. Instead of the usual bristly stubble, hard enough to abrade stone, she felt hair. Soft. Ordinary.
Her eyes had become ordinary, too. She couldn’t see through the shadows so clearly anymore. The far end of the hall was lost in darkness. Before, she could have fired a poisoned bolt through the jaws of any skull embedded in that wall, and it would have been a poor shot if the quarrel’s fletchings touched teeth. Now she couldn’t even see the skulls.
Her strength was still there, and her reflexes, but the ember of anger that had always burned at her core …
… was it gone?
Had Lictor Shokneir really taken the taint of evil from her soul? Purified the devils’ curse from her heart? Made her human, content to find enjoyment in the placid mundanities of life that she’d always mocked to disguise her envy?
I’ve become weak, she thought, and laughed, inconceivably, for joy.
The lictor’s fiery gaze returned her to the moment. “Do you accept this as payment in full?”
“Yes,” Sechel said, quickly, before he could take it back. Her hands closed protectively around her transformed fingers. “It’s mine.”
The skull-crowned helm dipped in a nod. “Then it is done. Our bargain is fulfilled. Now I shall make you another offer.”
“What?”
“The deaths of the three in the dungeons.”
“You wanted them alive, and now you want them dead?”
Lictor Shokneir’s burning eyes flared in irritation. Sechel’s levity died on her lips. Her new flesh was too precious to risk.
“They must die in a manner that serves me,” he said. The words reverberated not from the graveknight’s armored figure, but from the castle around her: floor, walls, ceiling. All at once, booming in unison, driving in at Sechel from all sides. “In Cheliax. In public. At the hands of the hellspawn, so that all can see that the taint of Hell drives those who carry it to the depths of treachery, and that the so-called discipline of the Scourge cannot begin to hold it back.”
Sechel nodded. She’d seen what the devilheart chain did when its magic was brought to its final form. With her heart in the lictor’s hands, the hellspawn knight would become his slave: a puppet in flesh to do with as he pleased. Apparently what he pleased was making a spectacle of the other two’s deaths, which suited Sechel just fine. “What’s my role in it?”
“You will find the most effective way to inflame all the empire of devils with their deaths. The temples and the righteous knights must be enraged by the paladin’s demise. The cursed legions of House Thrune by the woman’s. Find a way to kill them that will set all their kin afire, and the hellspawn will execute your plan.”
“You have until the Master of Blades returns, since the paravicar does not wish to move our captives without him. It may be only one day, or it may be several. In either case, you will be prepared. Death is easy for you, is it not?”
Easier when I hold the knife. She’d have to trust one of the graveknights to control the hellspawn, and Sechel hated relying on others. They were never as competent, never as good. Something always went wrong.
But she was free from the touch of Hell, and cleansed of whatever malign seed in her soul had driven her to murder. Maybe she’d never kill anyone again.
Then why am I annoyed at the thought of someone else botching my targets?
Sechel dismissed the question. It wasn’t important. “What’s the pay?”
“Silver. Gold. Jewels.”
Money. She hadn’t worked for mere money in years. Sechel started to curl her lip before she caught herself. She’d need money, if she wasn’t going to do the work anymore. Maybe a lot of money. Maybe more than she had now. She had no idea how ordinary people lived. “Fine.”
Lictor Shokneir didn’t respond. He simply walked away, into the darkness, as if her importance to him was already forgotten.
Sechel tamped down her irritation. She had thought that becoming human would quell her temper, but the lictor’s dismissiveness would have sparked fire from wet cotton.
No matter. She had what she wanted.
Mulling over the new problem presented to her, Sechel went to the castle’s enchanted garden. How best to make martyrs of the paladin and the Thrune woman?
She knew why Lictor Shokneir wanted that, or thought she did. Sechel had used her time in the citadel to piece together the lictor’s motives, wanting to know everything she could about the graveknight who held her hopes in his hands.
It hadn’t been that difficult. After years of solitude in Citadel Gheisteno, Lictor Shokneir craved vindication, and his need to justify his deeds made it impossible for him not to tell her what he intended. The hardest part had been sorting through his fragmentary speeches and bursts of temper to put the tale together.
Since his days as a living man during the Chelish civil war, the lictor had hated House Thrune. He’d been an outspoken advocate of the view that devils were properly called only to serve their summoners, never to master them, and certainly never to couple with them. Those who allowed themselves to be seduced by the infernal were inexcusably weak, and the fruit of such unions were abominations. The spawn were irrevocably tainted, and were quite probably tools of Hell, deliberately created to undermine the bonds and structures of mortal society.
Proof of that proposition, however, had eluded the Order of the Crux for some time. When the world failed to grant him the evidence he wanted, Lictor Shokneir had instructed his subordinates to create their own.
And so the devilheart chain had come into the world.
She stopped before the door that led to Ochtel’s garden. It held a large stained-glass window depicting a tree with wide, spreading branches. Flowers and vines covered the hill beneath the tree, and beyond it, a sun or a full moon hung low in the sky. The image was simple and stylized, and every pane of glass that composed it was some shade of gray, but it was the only thing of real beauty in Citadel Gheisteno.
What lay beyond it, Sechel felt, wasn’t really part of the fortress. She wasn’t the only one who felt that way. It was the entire reason the garden existed.
Pushing past the door, she went in.
The fragrance of a thousand flowers and the green breath of leaves filled the warm, moist air. Trees rose toward the cathedral-high ceiling, brushing the buttresses with their branches. Vines and creepers climbed the walls in a living tapestry adorned with clematis and vivid pink orchids. Soft mosses and silvery-leaved shrubs carpeted the loamy earth. A constellation of tiny, glowing golden lights hung among the plants like captured fireflies. It was these, the creations of Ochtel’s magic, that allowed the garden to flourish in a place that never saw the sun.
Somewhere in the greening depths, the druid worked his magic and kept the garden alive, despite the haunted unreality of the fortress that held it and the life-obliterating aura of the castle’s cursed master. Somewhere amid the trees, he sacrificed his own life to sustain his plants’.
It wasn’t by choice. Ochtel was just a slave, if a gifted one. He was, accordingly, worthy of no real consideration. Sechel put him out of her mind as she walked among the plants, letting their color and fragrance beguile her while she turned the lictor’s problem over in her head. How could she arrange two deaths to set Imperial Cheliax aflame?
Treachery. That would be the wedge to break the empire’s powers apart. The truce between the righteous faiths of Cheliax and devil-binding House Thrune had always been a fragile thing. Iomedae’s crusaders hated fiends, despised the empire’s abandonment of its old virtues, and had little love for a royal family that had elevated tyranny into a high art. House Thrune, well aware of their distrust but ever cognizant of political balances, had chosen to make a show of tolerating the Inheritor’s faith and accepting its subservience while pushing it toward a slow, quiet death.
The paladin and the Thrune woman, therefore, represented a perfect opportunity to confirm each side’s worst suspicions of the other. If that uncertain alliance, instead of solidifying, could be shattered into bloody shards …
Sechel vaulted from the ground onto a low-hanging tree branch, slapping a palm against the trunk to steady herself as she landed. Weak as her reborn body was, it had strength enough for that. She perched easily in the tree, balanced on the balls of her feet, and gnawed her lower lip as she mulled over the problem. How to arrange a betrayal?
If the paladin caught the Thrune woman doing something that violated his code—making a sacrifice to Asmodeus, perhaps, or interrogating some innocent using Nidalese tortures—then he might go into a rage at her duplicity. He might accuse her of having betrayed whatever oaths she’d taken that allowed them to work together, and kill her for that offense.
Of course, the “offense” would have to be something entirely permissible, even praised, by Chelish society, but that wouldn’t be difficult. Many of the rites and customs of Imperial Cheliax were killing crimes to a paladin.
So the Thrune woman would do something that offended her lover, the paladin would react violently, and the Hellknight would catch him bloody-handed on the scene. Then the Hellknight would kill him in turn, because the Iomedaean fanatic would, predictably, refuse to submit to Chelish justice. He might even shout a few words of defiance before he died. In any case, the Hellknight would give him no chance to surrender—instead of capturing him as the law demanded, she’d kill him on the spot, giving in to the bloodlust that lurked within all hellspawn.
It wouldn’t be hard to arrange their bodies to suggest such a scene. Laid out appropriately, the corpses would tell the story clearly enough for a blind man to see. And with the devilheart chain, the lictor could make the Hellknight confess everything, perhaps even fighting the former comrades who came to arrest her.
The Hellknight’s missing heart would be a problem, if she were examined. Sechel tapped her lip, thinking hard. Magic might disguise the hole, but self-immolation would be safer. As soon as it looked like she might be captured, the Hellknight could douse herself in alchemical fire. As long as she burned hot enough, there wouldn’t be enough of the body left for anyone to identify the hole in the ribcage.
That should spark the conflagration Lictor Shokneir wanted. The flames would need coaxing, of course. They wouldn’t consume the empire without considerable encouragement. But as far as one could tear at Cheliax’s fragile alliances with a few deaths, it would be as good a beginning as anyone could ask. Betrayal, a murder that undercut the righteous temples’ pretensions of virtue, another murder that undercut the Hellknights’ pretensions of law.
She was sure she could stage the wounds believably. It wouldn’t be difficult. And none of their spirits would contradict the tale told by their bodies. Even if priests or inquisitors tried to call her victims’ souls back with magic, they’d have no success.
The diabolist was damned; her soul would be seized by her infernal masters at the moment of her death, leaving nothing for clerics to contact. The paladin would surely refuse to answer Asmodeus’s call, and Sechel could make sure that no one other than the Archfiend’s priests was permitted to try. That left the Hellknight, whose heart the lictor still held. Would the devilheart chain continue to bind her soul after death? She’d have to ask the lictor. If not, surely he could come up with some other way to block any postmortem testimony.
Sechel smiled, imagining the protests, the imprecations, the curses that Iomedae’s so-holy church would level against devil-ruled Cheliax. And then the empire will burn.
She dropped off the branch, landing soundlessly on the garden path. Scarcely a leaf fluttered in her passing.
All she needed was to find an obscenity to start it all. Some act of devotion to Asmodeus that would earn praise from his faithful and condemnation from the virtuous churches that still survived in the empire. Something so far beyond the routine rites of the Archfiend’s worship that the Inheritor’s faithful would be hard-pressed to blame the paladin for resorting to the sword to stop it. Ideally, something the Thrune woman had actually done in the past, or that would align with her known predilections, so that the revelation wouldn’t come as a surprise to court gossips. Instead they’d nod sagely and confirm that, yes, it was just what that woman would do. Some torture from her time in Nidal, perhaps.
Leaving the garden, the assassin started up the stairs to Paravicar Leroung’s icy sanctuary in the citadel’s north tower. The half-seen flickers of restless spirits flashed and faded in her peripheral vision as she climbed the sooty steps. Citadel Gheisteno was filled with those figments of agony, and although the lictor’s favor protected her, Sechel could still feel them prying at her thoughts. Given any chance, the old ghosts of the Crux would wrap their suffering around her, splintering her will under the force of their own and insinuating their memories, their miseries, into her skull.
But she was shielded by Lictor Shokneir’s amulet, and none of them could touch her. Sechel ignored them as she ascended through the castle’s gloom to the paravicar’s tower. A chill in the air, and a melting embroidery of frost over the black stone walls, told her when she was drawing near.
At the top of the stairs, beyond a curtain of snowflakes suspended delicately on strands of silver light, a frozen fairyland unfurled. Ice in white and blue and palest green filled the paravicar’s chamber. Her tables, cabinets, chairs, and knives were all fashioned from glittering ice, but so too were the rippled, sinuous patterns that flowed across the walls, the sculptures that erupted from the floor in dazzling prisms, the impossibly fragile trees with leaves of frost and branches of bright snow. The colored lights of a thousand enchantments played through the workshop, splintering sharp and clear across panes of ice or blurring into snow-veiled mist.
Paravicar Leroung’s workshop was, in its way, as beautiful as the druid’s garden, but its beauty was as wintry as its creator’s, and lethal to those who lingered too long. The graveknight kept her sanctuary so cold that it was nearly as perilous for the dead as for the living. Frost-blued zombies and ice-glazed skeletons, casualties of carelessness, littered the laboratory’s perimeter. More corpses, and stranger ones, were embedded in her walls.
Sechel didn’t enter. She stayed just outside the swaying curtain, a solid shadow against the magical lights, and eventually the paravicar came to her. “Yes?”
The assassin took her time in answering, waiting until her voice was steady. Paravicar Leroung didn’t have the lictor’s terrifying power, but she was a graveknight all the same, and death hung heavy in the air around her. Sechel could feel the life evaporating from her when any of the graveknights came close. Her skin drained of color, her heart slowed its beat, and the taste of cold dirt and phantom worms filled her mouth.
Sechel wasn’t even sure they knew when it happened. Perhaps, having been locked away so long in their cursed citadel, the graveknights had forgotten what their presence did to the living.
She was sure, however, that Paravicar Leroung would laugh at any show of fear. Therefore Sechel stayed silent and motionless, her arms crossed and hip cocked in a deliberately insolent pose, until she had mastered herself and the paravicar’s porcelain face was taut with impatience.
“I need the memory siphon,” Sechel said.
The devilheart chain hadn’t been the paravicar’s first creation. Before perfecting that device, she’d made several others. One of them, the memory siphon, copied its victim’s memories and crystallized them into visions that others could watch. Originally intended for clandestine use, it had proved far too slow and obtrusive for that purpose, but it would serve for prisoners in Citadel Gheisteno’s cells.
“Why?”
“I need to find religion.” Sechel took a petty satisfaction in the uselessness of her answer, but didn’t dare leave it at that for more than a moment. “I need to sift the Thrune woman’s thoughts. Lictor Shokneir’s orders.”
“Fine.” Paravicar Leroung disappeared behind her veil of snowflakes. She returned a few minutes later, bearing a slender spiral of colorless glass. Wide at one end and narrow at the other, it resembled a cross between an alchemist’s condensation coil and an ear trumpet. Rather than offering it right away, however, the paravicar held it back coyly in a black-gloved hand. “But, of course, I’ll want a favor in return.”
Sechel didn’t bother trying to reach for the siphon. “What do you want done to them?”
“Nothing terribly difficult.” The pale-haired woman held the glassy spiral out between two fingers, extending it slowly through the drifting fall of her snowflake curtain. “I only want you to listen to all three of them. Find out what they fear. What would hurt them most. Then report that to me before you enact the rest of your plan.”
“That isn’t in my orders,” Sechel said, annoyed. She had no patience for sadism. It was inefficient and self-indulgent, and she’d seen it ruin too many plans. “It’s supposed to be done by the time the Master of Blades returns. I don’t need the others’ memories to do what Lictor Shokneir wants.”
“But you need my siphon, and this is my price. Therefore you do need their memories.” Paravicar Leroung smiled as the assassin reached out to take the glass. “Go. Find their fears for me. Bring them back. I’d like to watch.”