Ederras awoke in darkness.
He wasn’t alone. He could feel the warmth of other bodies near him, and hear someone breathing nearby. More than one someone. The air smelled of blood and sweat and the fermented rotten-meat stink, prickly with alchemical fluids, of arcanely crafted undead.
Blood soaked his clothing, cold and clammy against his skin. The discomfort of it heartened him. It meant the bleeding had stopped.
The weight of his armor was gone, though. His captors had stripped him of sword and mail. Whoever was in the darkness with him was bereft of theirs as well. He didn’t hear the clink of chain or plate accompanying those slow, pained breaths.
Cautiously, Ederras sat up. He wasn’t surprised to hear chains rattle when he moved, nor to feel them dragging at his wrists. His hands were free enough to allow a minor prayer, though. Calling upon the Inheritor’s favor, he prayed for a small blessing of light and touched his right manacle.
The steel flared in the darkness like a tiny sun, light washing over the fleshless faces of the skulls in the fortress’s walls and bringing stinging tears to the paladin’s eyes. What he saw in its glow stung more.
Velenne lay insensible on the filthy stone floor, her dark hair tangled in the dirt and matted with blood. More blood stained her leather dress and blackened its panels of silvery chain. Her breathing was shallow and too quick, and it caught in her chest as if something were snagging at her lungs. The pale wash of his spell’s radiance stole the color from her skin, but even so there was a bruised pallor to her that chilled his heart.
Poison, maybe. What he could see of her wounds looked bad enough already. With poison in her veins on top of what she’d already suffered …
Jheraal sat next to her, arms wrapped around her bent knees. Her armor was gone. Ederras had never seen the Hellknight without that carapace of black steel. In cloth and quilted padding, she looked strange as a turtle stripped of its shell. Drying blood gummed her streaked black hair and drew cracked lines across the scales of her cheek. Chains trailed from her wrists and ankles, but she didn’t seem to notice them. She wasn’t looking at Velenne, and hadn’t blinked when Ederras’s light blossomed into being. The Hellknight stared into the empty air like a lost soul, or one who expected to lose hers soon.
“Where are we?” Ederras asked, disturbed by her inertia. He had never known the Hellknight to be passive, or anything less than vitally devoted to her cause, but now it seemed like she’d given up entirely. “Why aren’t we dead?”
“In the dungeons of Citadel Gheisteno. We’ve lost.” Jheraal’s answer was toneless. She never glanced away from the emptiness ahead. “They took our armor, our weapons, Velenne’s wands. I don’t know why they haven’t killed us yet, but I imagine it won’t be long. We lost, and it’s my fault. I broke discipline. I showed them a weakness, and they used it. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t say that.” There was enough slack in his chains for him to reach Velenne. Ederras dragged himself to her side, steeling himself to look at her wounds. “You did nothing wrong. You saved those children, and you didn’t cause our defeat. I did that. I let myself lose sight of that assassin.”
“Did I save them?” Jheraal turned toward him, finally. Her amber eyes were bleak. There was more blood on the other side of her face, covering her in a grisly half-mask from brow to chin. “Did I save anyone? Or were they cut down by skeletons before they got to that bridge? Torn apart by the fiend we trusted to guard them? What did I do, besides doom us?”
“The only thing you could have,” Ederras said firmly. “You seized on a chance for hope.”
Jheraal didn’t say anything to that. She turned away again, staring into the distance, and Ederras brought his light closer to examine Velenne as he reached her side.
It wasn’t good.
She was so pale. Even in the dead of winter, there had always been a slight golden cast to Velenne’s skin, a touch of rich ochre that he thought beautiful and she found irritating. In her, the blood of Imperial Cheliax was mixed with something else, and it kept her from matching her rivals’ fairness. Porcelain pallor had long been the fashionable ideal for Chelish noblewomen, and Velenne had never come close to it.
Until now. It wasn’t just the poison, although he was now sure that the assassin’s blades had been coated in venom. It was the blood loss that was killing her.
Her blood covered his hands. It was warm, still seeping from her near-drained veins. There wasn’t much left. The human body was a fragile, ridiculous vessel: one small cut was all it took for life to pour out. And Velenne had taken many, many more than one.
The assassin had all but torn her apart. Every breath she took was a miracle, and her miracles were fading fast. Hoping he wasn’t too late, Ederras steeled himself to ask for one more.
“Iomedae, Inheritor, hear my prayer.” The invocation’s words came to Ederras easily, familiar as the beat of his own heart, but he didn’t hear them. His mind was entirely blank, stripped of every thought except for what he was really praying: don’t leave me.
Velenne was a diabolist, and she was damned. She’d promised her soul to Hell for her power, and while the Prince of Darkness sometimes granted reprieves to his most useful servants, the Archfiend’s mercy was no reliable thing. Ederras had slain enough of Asmodeus’s other servants to know that. If she died, she was lost to him.
Fifteen years ago, Ederras had prayed to Iomedae to smite his lover, and he hadn’t been sure that his goddess would answer. Now he prayed with every fiber of his being that Iomedae might heal her, and he wasn’t sure if the Lady of Valor would answer that call. There was no denying that the diabolist’s death would take a great evil from the world.
He prayed anyway. Let me keep this. If there is any chance for us—any hope for something good—let me keep her.
The magic ignited in his soul, reassuring as the sudden bloom of a campfire on a winter night. It coursed through his hands and flowed into Velenne, drawing her back from the brink of death. Her breathing steadied. The flow of blood slowed, then stopped.
Relief flooded through him, nearly as exhausting as fear. Ederras sank back on his heels, momentarily off-balance, and then straightened and renewed his prayers. The magic came faster, stronger, surer. He no longer feared Iomedae’s disapproval of his work. The Inheritor had seen what was in his soul and had expressed her acceptance, if not approval.
She’s done no evil while she was with me. Maybe that was close enough to redemption. Close enough to win Iomedae’s clemency, at least. For here, for now.
But when the light of his final prayer faded, Velenne didn’t wake. Her pulse steadied but remained sluggish. Some of her color returned, but a gray-blue shadow lingered under her eyes, and tormented dreams fluttered their lids.
Jheraal hadn’t seemed to notice his prayer, but she lifted her horned head in the silence that followed. “Why isn’t she getting up?”
“Poison.” Ederras brushed a dirt-flecked lock of hair from Velenne’s forehead. She turned blindly toward his touch, murmuring something he couldn’t catch, and it dug a barbed hook into his soul. “I don’t know what the assassin used, but it’s still in her.”
“You can’t cure it?”
“The goddess’s power is infinite, but I’m an imperfect vessel. Poison is tricky—I can heal the damage, but it’s still there in her veins. If Velenne’s too weak, or the toxin’s too strong …” Or if the Inheritor isn’t sure the recipient is worthy, or the Prince of Lies has already laid claim to her soul … He pushed those thoughts away. Iomedae wouldn’t have healed Velenne if she’d judged the woman unworthy, and the diabolist’s soul lingered in her body. It was poison that afflicted her. Only poison. “I have an antidote with the rest of my gear. If we can find out where the graveknights took it—”
Jheraal’s laugh was as hopeless as surrender. “How? We can’t get out of this cell without Velenne. These chains and bars are way too strong to break, and I don’t have any magic to dissolve them. Do you?”
“No. But—” He stopped short, hearing footsteps. An icy, sorcerous blue light appeared, cutting through the dungeon’s gloom.
It was Paravicar Leroung, garbed in black steel and blue silk and a halo of bitter frost. All signs of their battle had been wiped from her. The paravicar’s armor was immaculate, her pallid skin unscratched.
She seemed surprised, and then pleased, to see that none of them were dying. “I’d thought we might have to send Ochtel to tend you,” the graveknight said, looking over her captives before settling her attention on Ederras. “But it seems you don’t need the help. You’re as holy a fool as Kelvax was.” She studied him coolly, stroking the hilt of her ice-bladed scimitar. “Who was he to you? Anything more than a faded name written in a family history?”
“My great-grandfather.” Ederras stood to confront her through the cell’s bars. “Why do you speak of him with such venom? You were the one who betrayed his ideals and turned against his teachings.”
“You must be joking.”
“Not in the slightest. You were his squire. I found the records in the Dorjanala.”
“His squire?” Disbelief widened the paravicar’s bright blue eyes, and her lip curled in cold amusement. “Look at me, boy. Do you really think I was just his squire?”
For a moment, Ederras didn’t catch her meaning. Then he did, and felt his cheeks flush. “That’s impossible. He loved—”
“—his wife? Yes, he did. He loved her. In a dull, dutiful, expected way. He had less passion for her than he did for his hunting hounds. The one he wanted was me. Even in the beginning, when I was but a squire of seventeen. Even at the end, when he claimed to be sickened by my sins. But you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?”
Her blue-tinged lips curved into a smirk as she looked at Velenne, then back to him. “You Celverian men, so proud and pious, so pristine in your shining armor. But you’re just like him. You don’t love virtue. It’s the taste of transgression you really want. The thrill of touching something wicked. You’re worse than he was, though. Even Kelvax never took a Thrune. It didn’t go well for him in the end. How much worse do you suppose it’ll be for you?”
Ederras shook his head mutely. He wanted to mount a defense of his great-grandfather, but in truth he knew almost nothing about the man. Had Kelvax Celverian loved his wife? Had he betrayed her with Corellia Leroung? He had no idea. No word survived to say.
He couldn’t really argue about Velenne, either. Everything the paravicar had said was true. Unflattering, and not nearly the entirety of what he felt for her, but true.
Seeing that her barb had struck the mark, Paravicar Leroung laughed. “You can’t deny it, can you? All your haughty pretenses are just that. Hollow to their core. Shall I tell you another secret? The devilheart chain, the so-called heresies of the Crux—they were Kelvax’s fault.”
“That can’t be,” Ederras protested. “Kelvax was no wizard. He wasn’t a Hellknight, either. He was a paladin in Iomedae’s grace, and he could have had no part in your infamies.”
“Is that what you think? He was a paladin, oh yes. And he hated House Thrune. He was the one who seeded the idea: What if there was some way to strip the infernal taint from a soul? What would it take to ensure that someone blighted by devils’ blood never acted against the common good? To turn that same devils’ blood against the summoners? To undermine the Thrune tyranny?
“Idle thoughts to him, I’m sure. Mere fancies. But they were his thoughts, all the same. It took years of work for me to make them concrete. Eventually I managed, of course. And then he rushed in, all aghast, pretending that the Crux had spun horror out of thin air, when in fact they were his ideas from inception.”
“You can’t blame him for what you did,” Ederras said.
“Can’t I? You should be proud of him. He was a better man than you. At least Kelvax fought them. Whereas you—well, I can’t think of a more profound surrender to House Thrune. Can you?” The paravicar turned on a booted heel and left the dungeon, her wintry laughter trailing after her.
They weren’t alone for long. Only minutes after the paravicar’s unearthly blue light faded, the orange glow of a torch replaced it.
Their new visitor was the assassin, Sechel, in her twilight cloak. She looked different, somehow. Dimmer, maybe, as if some subtle and deadly magic had evaporated from her. In the glow of her torch, the woman’s face seemed entirely ordinary. Waves of sandy hair framed a wide mouth, cool blue-gray eyes, and a slightly snub nose set in an angular, hollow-cheeked face. Neither plain nor pretty, she was so perfectly forgettable that she could have lost herself in a crowd of three.
Beside her stood a seven-foot-tall, grotesquely disfigured man whose lanky black hair couldn’t conceal the vicious maiming of his features. Dirty linen draped his body. Behind them, indistinct in the shadows, something nebulous groaned and writhed.
“What do you want?” Ederras asked. He stood, putting himself between the cell door and the other two. “Why are you here?”
Sechel regarded him for a long, unblinking moment. The illusion of ordinariness died as she met and held his gaze. There was such a flat, unfeeling emptiness behind the assassin’s eyes that she almost made the graveknights seem warm.
“I’m not here to kill you,” she said at last, taking a delicate glass spiral from inside her cloak. Wide and flat on one end, it narrowed through its coils until the far end was a hollow, blunted needle. It didn’t look like a weapon, but Ederras tensed anyway. “Not yet.”
He tipped his chin at the spiraled glass. “What’s that?”
“The Crux knights are curious about you. And your companions.” The cloudy glass gleamed in the torch’s flame as Sechel tilted it back and forth. “This will tell them what they want to know. It doesn’t have to hurt. It doesn’t cause any damage. Resisting, though, or refusing … that will hurt. I can make it hurt a lot. Almost as much as your woman would.
“But I’m human now, and better than I was, so I’ll give you a choice. You can accept the siphon, or I can take your lover’s face off with a knife. I won’t kill her. She’ll live. At least until she wakes up. Then I think she’ll probably kill herself, because she’s too vain to live like that.” The assassin watched him through the bars, those blue-gray eyes dead as salt flats. “Or you can accept it, and I’ll give you mercy. All of you.”
There’s a demon’s offer. Without looking, Ederras moved his hands apart to measure the distance between his shackled wrists. He might have enough chain to strangle her. “What does mercy mean to you?”
“A quick death. No torture. That’s mercy, isn’t it? A mercy you’ve handed out often enough yourself.” Sechel shrugged, indifferent to any answer he might make. Handing her torch to the stooped man beside her, she bent over the cell’s lock. A swift rake of steel picks, and it sprang open. “I only need you to die. It doesn’t have to be badly. But that’s up to you.”
“I’ll do it,” Jheraal said, before the door opened and before Ederras could move. He stiffened, turning toward her to protest, but the determination on the Hellknight’s face made him hold his tongue. She stood and shouldered past him. “You can use it on me. The paladin won’t interfere.” The white-scaled woman glanced at him, her eyes flashing from amber to golden fire as she moved from light into shadow. “Give your word that you won’t intervene.”
With difficulty, Ederras swallowed his protest. He didn’t know what Jheraal was doing, but the Hellknight was no fool. She wouldn’t throw herself into this without cause. “I won’t intervene unless you’re in danger.”
“So honorable.” Sechel’s colorless lips curled in a pale imitation of a smile. Opening the cell door, she stepped inside. She kept a fluid, ready stance, effortlessly readjusting her position with every breath she took. The instant Sechel came into their cell, perfectly at ease despite the close quarters, Ederras knew that he’d never have bested that woman while unarmed and in chains. Jheraal had, in accepting the assassin’s bargain, saved him from himself.
It wasn’t clear what that would cost her. Sechel placed the wide, trumpetlike mouth of the siphon on Jheraal’s forehead midway between her horns. The glass adhered to the Hellknight’s scaled skin, pulling it up in a brief and awful moment of suction. Jheraal’s eyes clouded over with swirling blue fog, and the same fog rose up through the glass, condensing from vapor into liquid as it climbed the siphon’s coils.
Tiny shapes floated through the fog. Figures, faces. They were too small and fleeting for Ederras to recognize, and they stretched and shrank as the siphon sucked them up, but he was sure that he was watching Jheraal’s memories drawn through the glass.
Sechel watched too, just for a minute, and then she slipped out of their cell and locked it behind her. “Ochtel will stay until it’s done. He’ll see that you don’t get into trouble.” A moment later she was gone, melting into shadow so seamlessly that Ederras never saw her leave.
The torch guttered in her wake. Streaks of orange firelight cut across the maimed man’s face, illumining him like some monstrous idol carved in flesh. Citadel Gheisteno’s fire-blasted skulls grinned around him, darkness locked between their teeth, but their stillness was no greater than the man’s own. He hadn’t said a word while Sechel had been there, and he said nothing now, simply squatted in silence, unmoving, barely breathing.
Ederras reached for Iomedae’s favor. When the goddess’s silvery light filled his soul, he reached through the dungeon bars, touching the linen-wrapped wreck of a man on the other side. To his surprise, the silver radiance didn’t tarnish in the man’s presence. Alone of all the creatures Ederras had encountered in Citadel Gheisteno, this poor wretch wasn’t evil.
The paladin cleared his throat. “Ochtel. Did I hear your name correctly?”
For a long, long time, there was no answer. Low groans and clatters echoed through the dungeon’s unseen depths. Velenne’s breathing was an unsteady rasp. The siphon’s cloudy glass swirled with Jheraal’s memories, the ghosts of her past rising up in blue spirit-smoke. Ochtel sat inert on the soot-crusted stone of the floor, staring at nothing, never blinking when his torch spat sparks onto his skin.
Ederras began to fear that the man was deaf, or even witless. Perhaps the graveknights had mutilated his hearing and his mind as terribly as the rest of him.
Then, finally, Ochtel stirred. He raised his head, very slightly, and his remaining eye focused on the paladin through the bars. “Yes.”
Thank the Inheritor. Ederras reined in his excitement, trying for a gentler tone. Obviously the man had been badly treated by the graveknights, and his manner suggested that he’d responded, in part, by detaching whatever was left of his identity from the wreckage of his body. Coaxing him back to helpfulness would be a delicate task. “Who are you? How did you come to be here?”
“I am … I came by misfortune.” Ochtel’s gaze skittered away like a frightened animal. He darted a hand toward the dungeon’s shadows, as if he might find safety there. His voice was a tortured thing, breaking from his lips in blood-flecked bubbles. “An … old story. Not wise … to speak of it.”
“Does it hurt to talk?” Ederras paused. The man didn’t answer, but the truth was written in the shuddering hunch of his shoulders and the crust of dried blood at the corners of his mouth. “Will you allow me to try taking your pain?”
Ochtel flinched as if the paladin had struck him. “It is … I cannot be healed.” His eye was furtive and fearful behind the greasy black ropes of his hair. “This is … the lictor’s curse for me. A small part of his own. Torment, unending. The knights cannot die. The citadel … cannot fall. And I … live … who should not. In misery.”
“What harm can it do to let me try?” Ederras extended a hand through the bars, reaching as far as his shackles allowed. “You’re already suffering.”
The man’s scar-seamed lips quivered. Maybe that was fear, or maybe it was a prayer. Ederras couldn’t tell. But Ochtel reached out with a shaking, three-fingered hand to clasp the paladin’s. As their fingers met, Ederras drew upon Iomedae’s blessing, sending a rush of restorative magic into the crippled man.
It was like no healing Ederras had ever done before. The warmth of the holy power was familiar to him, as was the glow that suffused his body and soul whenever the Lady of Valor granted her gifts to him. But when the magic flowed out of him and into Ochtel, it changed. Like a song shifted into another key, or a sapphire that glinted blue in the sun and violet in shade, the magic both stayed itself and became something new as it passed into the man’s disfigured form.
Little else seemed to happen. None of Ochtel’s scars vanished when Ederras finished his prayer. His wounds were old and long healed; untangling the painful knots they’d left in him was beyond the power of that prayer. The man’s spine stayed twisted to one side, his missing eye didn’t come back, and his torturously elongated fingers continued to tremble with uncontrollable shakes.
Yet some of the pain seemed to leave him. The agony of his breathing eased. The lines of suffering in his face softened. When the maimed man turned his head back toward Ederras, there was a clarity to his gaze that hadn’t been there before.
“It won’t last,” Ochtel said. The whispery slur of his words had smoothed into a clear tenor. He’d had a beautiful voice, once. “It can’t. You’ve poured life into a leaky vessel, and it’s flowing out of this poor shell already. But thank you, all the same. Thank you. I’d forgotten what it was to breathe. Just to breathe, and not feel like my lungs were full of smashed glass.”
Ederras sat back on the cell floor, letting his chains trail across his knees. “What did they do to you?”
“The lictor wanted to ensure my obedience. I came to the citadel a person, and he saw ore. Something to be smelted down into metal, then forged into a tool. He crushed out the weaknesses, the impurities, the flaws … the things that made me human, and less useful as a tool.” Something that might have been a smile, or a wince, twitched at Ochtel’s ruined lips. “That’s what he did to me, with needles and magic and pain. He killed my companions, my lover. Tortured them to death in front of me, so I’d be obedient, or would work harder, or would give him more of myself. I did. I gave him everything, until there wasn’t anything left but what you see today.”
“Why did you come to Citadel Gheisteno?”
Ochtel’s uneven shoulders rose in a shrug. “We thought there was something worth the risk, just as you did. One of my companions—an ambitious, accomplished wizard, not so different from your lady—wanted a spell of the paravicar’s devising. The rest of us wanted treasure, or glory, or to cleanse this place’s taint from the world. The wizard, she was lucky. She died fighting. The rest of us … met with misfortune.”
Would Velenne have been luckier if I’d let her go? Ederras didn’t want to dwell on that possibility. “You were the only one they kept alive?”
“Yes. Because they had use for me.” Ochtel spread his mutilated hand over the dungeon floor. A tiny green seedling sprouted from the dirt between two stones, snaking up toward the torch’s light and unfurling tender green leaves. He regarded it with parental affection for a moment, then snapped the seedling off at the base with a quick, efficient pinch.
“You’re a druid,” Ederras said, surprised. “Why would Lictor Shokneir keep and torment you for being a druid?”
Ochtel cradled the broken plant in his palm. In his hand, it withered as quickly as it had grown. The leaves wilted, then went brown and brittle, in the span of seconds. The stem twisted into a wrinkled curl. He tipped his hand and let it fall back to earth, a crippled brown butterfly. “To make a place of respite for him. A garden to remind him of the world beyond these walls. It gives him … peace, I think. But in this cursed place, nothing can grow without magic, and the graveknights’ presence makes it … harder. Their aura blights what little I can do, and sustaining the garden’s life drains my own. It takes a terrible toll. The pain … that was why I fought him, early on. The pain was unbearable. Or so I thought, until the lictor showed me that he could hurt me in worse ways than that.”
The druid held his hand up to the bars, showing the stumps of two missing fingers and the impossibly long, scar-seamed three that remained. “He took some of my fingers, and some of my lover’s, and cut them apart and stitched them back together. So I’d always be able to hold onto Artuno, he said. So that I’d never be without his touch. Lictor Shokneir made me beg for that kindness.”
“That’s monstrous.”
“Yes. The lictor is a monster.” Ochtel slid his hand down the cell’s bars. Remembered pain, and deep resignation, touched his voice. “He is a monster, and he has you in his grasp. The greatest kindness you can give your friends is to kill them. Quickly, mercifully. Especially the hellspawn. Lictor Shokneir intends to murder you and your lady, but I don’t think he means to torture you. The same won’t be true for your friend. He hates the Scourge, and he hates hellspawn. If you care for her, you’ll spare her that.”
“There must be a better way. If you can unlock our shackles, and open this door—”
“Then what?” Ochtel looked upon him with great pity. His breath had begun to claw in his throat again, and his words were breaking on his tongue. Saliva bubbled on his lips, and even by torchlight, Ederras could see that it was bloody. The druid’s brief respite from suffering was running out, and his body was returning to ruin. “Will you run, having nowhere to go? Will you fight, having no weapons? They’ll catch you again, and punish you for having the temerity to hope. No, there is no escape. Not alive.”
“If we could get our weapons—”
Ochtel was already shaking his head. “You cannot kill the lictor. Or his lieutenants. They are graveknights. The knights of the Crux are bound to their citadel, and they will return, no matter what you do. Nothing but misery lasts in this place.”
“There must be something.”
“No.” Ochtel said it gently, but with finality.
The siphon finished its work. As the last of its vapor gathered in the coil’s needled end, the druid pushed himself to his feet. It was a slow and painful process, requiring him to lean heavily on the wall for support as his legs popped and cracked under his weight. He drew a key from somewhere in his shapeless wrap, then opened the door and hobbled toward Jheraal with lopsided, laborious steps. With great care, he reached down and lifted the memory siphon from the Hellknight. The mist cleared from Jheraal’s eyes, and she stirred weakly as her senses began to return.
“Now would be … the kindest time,” the druid said, retreating from the cell. He locked the door and shuffled away, leaving the torch behind. The beauty of his voice had cracked and gone to dust. “Now … before she recovers. Before she can feel anything. Before she understands … what has been done. The siphon is not subtle. When she awakens … she will know. Best you act before then.”
“I won’t,” Ederras said, but no one was left to hear him. Ochtel was gone, Jheraal dazed, Velenne lost to the venom in her veins. He sat alone in the dungeon’s flickering shadows, watching the feeble torch burn.
Eventually it died, leaving him in darkness. The wall’s uneven stones bit against Ederras’s back as he leaned against them, circling around the cage of his thoughts and finding no way out.
Hope’s the key. It always was. But how could he give hope to a man who refused to take it?
And if he couldn’t—if there really was no way out, and no greater kindness than Ochtel had suggested—would he have the grace to see that before it was too late?