They know about Indrath.
Jheraal kept trying to push that thought away, and it kept coming back, inexorably, through the fog of her weariness and wounds and despair. She couldn’t escape it. In the prison of her memory, there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. No cloak of denial that she could pull over her own ugly failure.
They’d stripped away her armor, within and without, and they’d seen all the weakness that shivered underneath. They know about my daughter.
She had never imagined that the graveknights would care. Her daughter wasn’t the reason she had marched on Citadel Gheisteno. Indrath had nothing to do with Jheraal’s investigation, or her companions’ tactics and capabilities, or even the internal workings of the Order of the Scourge. The girl wasn’t relevant to anything that should have interested Lictor Shokneir or his lieutenants, and for that reason Jheraal had never dreamed they’d seek her out. Families shouldn’t matter for this.
But to the lictor and his underlings, they did.
Their pursuit of that information wasn’t professional. It wasn’t even about hunting down and extirpating every last trace of her hellspawn bloodline. Hideous as that would have been, Jheraal could have understood it as a logical extension of a Hellknight’s duty. Her own order had taken measures as extreme, and worse. All of them had.
But this wasn’t about duty. It was personal, and it was rooted in a hatred so intense, so unreasoning, that even its echoes in the siphon’s glass had sickened her.
She opened her eyes.
They were still in Citadel Gheisteno’s dungeon. The injuries she’d suffered during their disastrous fight with the graveknights were gone, leaving only the familiar, bone-deep ache that followed magical restoration. Ederras’s work, she presumed. She didn’t think their captors would have bothered with such mercies.
That healing was the only comfort she found. The torch in the sconce opposite their cell had burned out, leaving nothing but a warm wisp of smoke. Darkness surrounded them, but it was no barrier to Jheraal’s infernally gifted sight. She could see every detail of the dungeon, and every one convinced her that they were imprisoned in some nightmarish imagining, not a place that was or had ever been real.
There were no rats in the cells. There never had been. In any ordinary castle’s dungeon, rats left scent-marked trails of grease and hair rubbed against the walls. Their tiny pellet droppings littered the corners and crevices, and their squeaks and scratches whispered through the halls. But in Citadel Gheisteno, Jheraal heard nothing and saw nothing, and knew that no living rat had ever twitched a whisker in this place.
Other strangenesses abounded. Despite the damp that should have softened it, and the chafing of their chains and bodies, the soot on the walls didn’t rub off. The iron bars grating the cell door didn’t show a smudge of rust. The air hung lifeless and clammy around them, undisturbed by natural currents.
Whatever the dungeon’s peculiarities, its chains were solid enough, and its bars as well. They weren’t going to imagine themselves free. Jheraal turned away from her fruitless examination of the cell and looked, instead, to more ordinary aspects of despair: the weak rise and fall of Velenne’s chest, the hopelessness that slumped Ederras against the floor. He’d let the tiny light of his prayer die.
The Hellknight needed to rouse him out of that despair. She dragged her chains across the stones, deliberately, so he’d know she was awake. “They’re going to come back with that siphon tomorrow.”
“I know.” The paladin closed his eyes, tipping his head back against the wall. “I’ll volunteer when they do. I should have done that today.”
“No. You’re going to let them use it on Velenne tomorrow.” When he opened his mouth to protest, as Jheraal had known he would, she cut him off mercilessly. “Don’t argue. Listen. I didn’t offer myself up because I wanted to spare you suffering. I took the siphon so you’d be free to talk to our captors. Do you remember what you told me back in Fishbone Alley? About how you make people become better versions of themselves? We need that. I’m not going to intimidate anyone through these bars. But you can still do what you do. I saw you with Ochtel, how you were able to reach the man he must have once been. You can still inspire. And swaying one of them to our side is about the only chance we’ve got.”
“What does it do?” Ederras asked. “The siphon.”
“It steals memories.” Jheraal thought about trying to downplay what she’d sensed and suffered through the glass, but it only took her a second to discard the idea. Ederras deserved to know the truth, even if that made it harder for him. He needed to understand what they were enduring so that he could have a chance to bend their captors’ loyalties.
She drew a breath. It shook, despite her best attempts at control. Tears burned behind her eyes. The Hellknight stared at the lock of their door, forcing herself to study every meaningless curve of its metal without blinking, until the heat of her grief went away. No pity, no emotion. You will not be weak. “It seeks out, and seizes, one of your secrets. Something personal, something that’ll hurt. The siphon didn’t hunt out information that might have damaged my career or my order, and it didn’t go after anything related to the investigation that led us here. It looked for the secret most likely to wound. That’s all they wanted.”
“Then that would be—”
“Indrath. Yes. That she exists, who she is, what she means to me. That I never told her the truth of her origins.” This time Jheraal got the answer out without quavering. She was nearly as proud of that as any other pain she’d hidden. “They know about my daughter. If they want to hurt me—and they do—they’ll take her heart as they took the others.”
“I see. I’m sorry you had to endure it.” He turned away, staring into the dark without seeing. Trying to hold back the words that gnawed at him, Jheraal knew. She wasn’t surprised when, a moment later, Ederras had to say: “You want me to give Velenne to that.”
“I want you to save us. More than us. It’s not just our lives anymore.” They know about Indrath. She wanted to howl it. Instead, she said only: “If we get the chain, we can stop them. So that’s what we have to do. What you have to do.”
The silence settled in again, heavier than it had been. Hours trickled away, uncounted and unknowable. Jheraal dozed off when she could, grateful for the small mercy of sleep. She didn’t know if Ederras slept, or if Velenne could.
Eventually a pair of zombies came carrying gruel, water, and a latrine bucket. One of them replaced the burned-out torch with a fresh brand. After pushing cups and bowls through a slot in the bars near the floor, the mindless, stinking undead shuffled away.
Jheraal took the gruel, the water, and the bucket. When it came to sustenance, there was no sense refusing. She fished a scrap of rotting skin from one of the cups and a squirming maggot from one of the bowls, flicking them both aside. “Which do you want, the corpse water or the maggot porridge?”
“Nothing wrong with a good maggot porridge,” Ederras replied with the same black humor. “It’s considered quite a delicacy up in Mendev, you know. Grain untainted enough to host maggots is a treasure. Corpse water, on the other hand, tends to make people sick. So I, being blessedly immune to such things, will take that.”
“A true champion of the people.” She passed him the fouled cup and tried the other. The water was stale and flat, with an unpleasant mineral aftertaste, but Jheraal was too thirsty to care. She drank it in tiny sips, trying to make it last.
The porridge wasn’t any better. Hard, uncooked grains dotted its pasty mush, flavorless except for the charred black bits that had been scraped up from the bottom. Jheraal forced herself to swallow it in globs, because chewing it would probably have chipped her teeth. She ate it, though. All of it. She’d take whatever they gave her.
“You’ve had prison fare before,” Ederras observed, watching her.
“A few times. Worse than this.”
“Dare I ask?”
“There’ll be time for stories later. We need to make plans now.” She jerked a clawed thumb at his neglected gruel. “And eat that. You need to keep whatever strength you can.”
“Spoken like a survivor.” He ate it, though, and drank his water. “What’s your plan?”
“None of the graveknights will bend, and there’s no use talking to zombies. We only have two options: Sechel and Ochtel.”
Ederras set his empty bowl aside, stacking the cup neatly inside. “Sechel’s the stronger, but Ochtel’s the easier to reach. Despite all they’ve done to him, he hasn’t given himself over to evil. There’s still a glimmer of humanity in him—and still a part of him that wants to be human.”
Wants to be human … Jheraal narrowed her eyes as a sudden thought struck her. “Did the assassin look different when she came to our cell?”
“Her eyes weren’t glowing. And she had hair, which I don’t remember seeing before.”
“That’s part of it, but … it was more than that.” Jheraal cast her mind back, trying to remember what it was that had struck her about Sechel. Then it hit her, all at once, in a tingling rush of recognition. The weight of the world was gone.
The assassin hadn’t become kinder, or gentler, or less deadly. But she had become human, and she had done it in some way that meant more than a temporary disguise. Jheraal had lived that transformation herself—the glorious, giddy buoyancy that came with having one’s anchor of difference cut loose—and she recognized it in another. “She’s not hellspawn anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s transformed herself. Like I did, with the hat, before I met Indrath’s father. That’s what’s different. She’s made herself human.” The Hellknight sat up straighter in her chains. “Or someone else did.”
“Lictor Shokneir? Do you suppose that’s why she’s been working for the graveknights?” Ederras raised his head, alert to the possibility of hope, then frowned. “But even supposing that’s true, how does it help us?”
“I don’t know. Not yet. But it tells us something about who she is, and what she wants—and if we know that, then we have the beginnings of a lever.” Jheraal shifted in her shackles. She felt naked without her armor, and even more vulnerable that she had to trust in someone else to chisel out the secrets that might save them. A friend, but still … “That’s what you need to get from Ochtel tomorrow. The rest of that story.”
He nodded, turning back to Velenne. At some point while Jheraal was dozing, Ederras had folded the diabolist’s bloodstained cloak into a pillow to keep her head off the floor’s filthy stones. Now he looked on her with such naked sorrow that the Hellknight glanced away, not wanting to intrude.
“She’ll probably take it better than we can,” Jheraal said, keeping her eyes locked on a skull outside their cell. It was hard not to see her companions in her peripheral vision, though. The dungeons didn’t afford that much privacy. “Doesn’t she hurt herself for fun?”
“Not exactly.” Ederras lifted a hand to the diabolist’s face, trailing his fingers against her cheek. “And I’m as much afraid for us as I am for her. If you’re right, and what the lictor wants, even more than he wants to hurt House Thrune, is simply to make her suffer … then I fear he’ll do it by breaking us apart. Velenne’s secrets aren’t likely to hurt her. She’s lived her whole life avoiding the risk of blackmail, and I don’t think she feels much remorse for any of the evil she’s done. But I … I might have more difficulty with it.”
“Why?” Jheraal lifted a scaled eyebrow at him. “You know what she is. You know what Thrunes do. Asmodeans. It can’t possibly be a surprise.”
“Abstract knowledge is one thing. Details are another.” He glanced up, but his hand stayed on Velenne’s brow, soothing her through her uneasy slumber. “A woman might know her husband’s unfaithful, but finding him in bed with his mistress is another thing entirely. A merchant might know a partner’s dishonest, but catching him as he’s pocketing stolen gold? Those are moments of rage. Murders. Because seeing is different from knowing.” Ederras’s hand stilled, cupping the angle of her jaw. “I love her, you know. Despite it all.”
“Then don’t let them take that.”
“That easy?”
“Doesn’t have to be that hard.” Jheraal grinned, a grab at levity on the gallows steps. “Or so I’ve been told.”
“I suppose that’s true.” He smiled, a little, and touched Velenne’s dark hair again. Winding it around and around his finger, like a ribbon for a memory. “True enough to try, anyway.”
Some time later, Sechel returned. Ochtel was with her, tilted steeply to the side so that his shapeless clothes hung from him like flags in a windless sky. The disfigured man kept three steps behind the assassin, his gaze fixed on the ground.
That wasn’t just deference, Jheraal thought. He was trying to hide himself. His face, his thoughts, whatever was left of his private and independent self. Surrender had become its own kind of defiance.
Maybe. If she wasn’t just seeing what she wanted to see.
Sechel drew the memory siphon out of her cloak as she came to their cell. “That first session was fascinating. Shall we see what the rest of you have to hide?”
“I’ll go next,” Ederras said, pushing himself to his feet and grabbing the bars on either side of the door, just as he and Jheraal had agreed earlier. It would have been too suspicious if the paladin had given his lover up easily. He had to put himself out first, and he had to do it desperately, so that their captors’ cruelty would make them refuse.
The Hellknight watched him from the corner of her eye while keeping her head down and her shoulders sunk in apparent defeat. This was the riskiest part of their gambit.
She wasn’t worried about Ederras’s performance convincing their captors. The paladin wasn’t a particularly good liar, but for this, he didn’t have to be. He didn’t need to feign anything. He just had to let his real fear and worry show.
What they couldn’t control was whether Ederras’s insistence that he go first would affect Sechel’s choice of where to place the siphon. Despite her taunts, the assassin hadn’t struck Jheraal as much of a sadist. There was an affected artifice to her threats, and a lack of interest in their responses, that made the Hellknight think Sechel was merely going through the motions in her mockery.
The real cruelty, Jheraal guessed, was coming from higher up the chain. The assassin, like a hired torturer, was only carrying out the duties for which she’d been paid.
But if she had been instructed to torment them, then it might not matter whether she was personally invested in the results. If she thought Ederras would be hurt more by watching Velenne undergo the siphon, then—
“No,” Sechel said. “The Thrune woman first.”
Ederras protested, but allowed himself to be pushed aside as the assassin laid the siphon upon Velenne’s head. The clear glass clouded with memories, the diabolist’s eyes fluttered open over shining blue mist, and Jheraal had the surreal experience of watching someone else succumb to the same magic that taken so much, so intimately, from her.
Almost as soon as the glass was anchored, Sechel left the dungeon, confirming Jheraal’s guess that the assassin wasn’t interested in watching their pain. Ochtel remained, listless and unmoving long after Sechel had vanished.
“Who is that woman?” Ederras asked at last, turning away from the unconscious diabolist and approaching Ochtel as far as his chains allowed. Anger tinged his words, but it was nearly eclipsed by sorrow, and compassion for whatever struggles had bent the assassin into becoming what she was. Listening, Jheraal was struck with wonder. She didn’t think the paladin was feigning any of that. “Why is she doing this? No—wait.” He let go of the bars, extending his fingers through them instead. “Allow me to heal you first. It isn’t fair to force you into talking otherwise.”
Cleverly baited. In accepting the healing, Ochtel would—if there was enough decency left in him—also accept the obligation to answer their questions. And that one still wants to imagine himself decent.
The druid stayed frozen for a long moment, but eventually he unfolded himself from his stillness and reached a mutilated hand to meet the offered one. Divine light blossomed between their fingertips, and Ochtel sank back with a groan. If any of the man’s wounds had in fact been healed, Jheraal couldn’t see it, but the grinding weight of pain seemed to have lifted from him.
“She is a killer,” Ochtel said, his eye closed in agonized relief. “She came to the citadel a year ago, tracking a man she’d been sent to murder. Her target was already dead—he was a fool, one of the dozens who came here seeking glory and whose bones now walk in Lictor Shokneir’s army—but she did not rest until she found his corpse among all the others. She took his head and his family’s locket to prove that she’d found the right one.
“The lictor was impressed. Not only that this assassin was able to survive the citadel long enough to find her quarry among the dead, but that she would—that she had the professional pride to find the bones of a man whose soul was sent to the courts of the afterworld long ago. Few would go so far to confirm a kill. So rather than capturing or killing the assassin, he chose to offer her a contract.”
“To murder my brother, strip the hearts out of hellspawn, and steal the devilheart chain,” Ederras said flatly. “What did he offer to pay her for all these enormities?”
“Transformation. Transcendence. That one has always sought to … erase herself. She wishes to be without a history, to become unknowable. She would, if she could, rewrite her existence so that it began anew every time she walked through a door, and ended each time she left.
“But she has—has always had—one desire, despite her pretense that she wants nothing. She wished to become human, and no longer hellspawn, so Lictor Shokneir promised her that.”
“He can do that?” Jheraal interrupted, startled out of her silence.
“He can make the promise.” Ochtel’s eye was a gleam of reflected torchlight behind a lank black curtain of hair. “Would it tempt you, too? You are nothing like her. Why do you want so badly to be something different?”
“Sometimes changing yourself is less painful than trying to change the world.” Jheraal met the crippled man’s scrutiny without blinking. “But you said the lictor can only make the promise. Not the transformation?”
Ochtel’s shrug was as lopsided as the man himself. “Within the walls of Citadel Gheisteno, his power is absolute. Beyond … I would be less confident in his promise. Lictor Shokneir can only reshape reality so far.”
“I assume Sechel doesn’t know that,” Ederras said. “Isn’t the lictor worried about her being upset when she discovers his deception?”
“What will she do? She is an assassin. Her power is to kill. But Lictor Shokneir cannot die, so he has nothing to fear from her. By the time she discovers that she’s sold herself for false gold, he will have everything he wants, and she will have no recourse.”
“What else does he want? He already has us imprisoned. He has the chain, he has his hearts. I’m surprised he hasn’t sent Sechel on her way.” The paladin glanced at the siphon swirling over Velenne’s insensible form. His jaw tightened, but his tone remained mild. “He doesn’t need an assassin to steal our memories. He could do it himself, or send one of his other servants.”
“He doesn’t need her to steal them,” Ochtel agreed placidly. “But to enact them, and use your fears and secrets to take his revenge on Imperial Cheliax … that is another tale. He does need the assassin for that, because he needs hands that are not shackled to his curse.”
“When will Sechel discover that her transformation’s a ruse?” Jheraal asked. “What does it take to break the illusion?”
Ochtel’s shoulders huddled inward. Under the flickering torchlight, his face looked like a half-melted wax mask. “The lictor’s power does not extend past the bridge. He can store a little of his magic in amulets, and he has given one such to the assassin—by the time it fades, the work will already be done. Yet the magic will be broken immediately if she removes the talisman while beyond his reach.”
“So if she crosses the bridge and takes off the amulet, she’ll discover the truth?”
“Yes.” Ochtel’s tongue flicked out to touch his scar-seamed lips nervously, but he held the Hellknight’s gaze. Then he turned his eye to the blasted, blackened skulls that grinned from the walls all around them. “And if she does, and you are able to use that to win your freedom, then I would ask a boon for … this. My aid.” His voice was weakening, slipping back toward a crumbled slur, as the Inheritor’s magic began to drain away.
Ederras leaned forward in his chains. “What would you ask?”
“Take me … with you. Across the bridge. Help me exact a … vengeance. One that will last.”
“We’ll do it if we can,” the paladin promised. “Just tell us how.”
“Come … to the garden. Later. If you are able to … win free. If not, there is … no point … to my dreaming of such things.”
After that, the druid said no more. He curled his stilted legs under his shapeless clothing, bent his head and bony shoulders into a ball over them, and went as inert as Havarel’s brass golem when it didn’t have orders. In the hush that followed, Ederras and Jheraal exchanged a look.
“Can you do it?” the Hellknight asked. Quietly, although she didn’t fear being overheard by Ochtel. Not after what he’d just said. “Can you get that thought into her head?”
“What exactly do I have to do?”
“The siphon won’t let you lie.” Jheraal fought down a shudder, remembering how relentlessly its magic had stripped her defenses away, peeling back the veils of her identity as deftly and cruelly as a scalpel cutting through skin. “It will take everything—everything—bound up with your memories of pain. If you can make Ochtel’s revelation part of that memory, then the assassin will see it and know that it’s true. Then we just have to hope she acts on the druid’s information, and that he’s right about what will break the lictor’s falsehood.” The Hellknight paused. “Can you do that?”
Ederras nodded. His eyes went to the charred and grinning skulls in the walls, the disfigured lump of Ochtel balled like discarded clay in the corner, the real-and-unreal weight of the chains that bound their wrists and ankles. Then to Velenne, dying slowly in a dream from which he couldn’t wake her.
“It won’t be hard,” he said.