Her plan was going perfectly.
The revelation of the Hellknight’s daughter would undoubtedly please Lictor Shokneir, and the Thrune woman’s memories held everything Sechel needed to enact her scheme. She had the ritual, the setting, and all the prurient details that would outrage both sides of the religious divide—the Iomedaeans that such a thing could be permitted, the Asmodeans that it could be interrupted—and set the court gossips gleefully aflutter.
All that remained was to examine the visions that the memory siphon had taken from the paladin. If nothing there contradicted the story that Sechel planned to tell, then she could set to work arranging the slaughter.
And then, with that last wave of deaths, she’d be free. Free of sin, free of shadow. Free to shake off the dust of her history and make a new way, unencumbered by her past or the infernal stain of her blood.
Her step was light as she made her way back to the druid’s garden and pushed open its gray-glassed door.
The greenery enfolded and soothed her, restoring an ache in her soul that Citadel Gheisteno seemed to bruise into even the hardest hearts. Sechel had never been drawn to wild spaces, and had little interest in flowers or trees, but after days in the unrelieved grimness of the dead fortress, she understood why Lictor Shokneir needed this place. She did, too. It was a last, precious reminder of a world that the graveknight had long lost. He couldn’t have it anymore, but he could look upon its image and remember.
So could she. And soon enough, when all this was done, she’d be able to walk under a real sun with a real breeze in her hair. She could have all the flowers in the world, not just the tiny, jewel-like handful that Ochtel fed his own life to keep growing in the dark.
As if her thought had summoned him, the maimed man was suddenly before her. One moment the path was clear. The next, the druid was standing in her way, a gaunt, misshapen ghost in a dirt-stained shroud.
It took all of Sechel’s training not to react. No one should have been able to surprise her. Not here, not anywhere. “What do you want?”
He didn’t respond to the harshness of her tone. He didn’t even seem to notice it. His words rasped out in a crawl, too mired in pain to manage any other emotion—if he even felt any others after all the graveknights had done to him. “A … curiosity … only. I wondered … what you might have seen … in their minds.”
“What possible difference could it make to you?”
“As I said. Only … curiosity.” Ochtel’s face was placid, his eye an oasis of unlikely tranquility in a landscape of blasted flesh. “I wonder … who we have … in our cells. Whether they are … as they seem.”
Sechel shrugged. Her startlement had worn off, and she wasn’t about to let Ochtel spoil her good mood. “So far. More or less. The Hellknight’s a Hellknight, although her discipline’s not as perfect as she’d like to pretend. The Thrune woman is exactly as she seems. Everything they say about House Thrune is true.”
“And the paladin?”
“Is the last one remaining.” Lifting a corner of her cloak, Sechel let the siphon’s cloudy glass shimmer in the garden’s starry lights. “I’ll have his secrets soon enough. But I don’t doubt he is what he claims. Even if I hadn’t seen his prayers in battle, the Thrune woman’s fears would prove that much.”
“What could … one such as that … fear?”
“Losing.” Her patience was waning. She’d indulged Ochtel long enough. Sechel strode deeper into the green, leaving the ruined druid behind. “That’s what that woman dreads. Making mistakes and losing.”
He didn’t try to follow. Sechel walked through yellow-streaked lemon balm and flowering marjoram, rustling the leaves to release their whispering sweetness. It wasn’t a thing she would ordinarily have done—usually she avoided scents, as she avoided anything that might betray her presence—but being immured among the unfeeling dead had left her yearning for any touch of life.
Soon, she consoled herself. Soon it would be done.
An immense live oak interrupted the path ahead. Sechel leaped easily up its branches, springing from one to the next until she was twenty feet over the mossy ground. There she perched, comfortable as a gargoyle in a church tower, and drew out the memory siphon.
Each of the visions she’d drawn through the glass had been different. The siphon smoothed and organized its stolen memories, arranging them into something coherent enough for an outsider to follow, but each sequence was shaped by the person who had lived it. The Hellknight’s recollections had been orderly and methodical, laid out with careful precision, while the Thrune woman’s had revolved around her own aspirations and desires, spiked with stormy flashes of contempt for the weak and admiration of the strong.
The paladin’s were lit by a gentle, unearthly glow, visible even within the siphon as a steady golden sheen. The presence of his goddess shone through his memories like sunlight, and like sunlight, it made Sechel feel uncomfortably exposed.
She pushed through the discomfort, drawing the stored visions from the glass. What do you fear?
Loss. The answer took shape in wavering, foggy images. The face of a laughing boy running under a fig tree appeared and then melted into that of the scholar Sechel had murdered in Vaneo Celverian. Others came and went: a Thuvian sorceress whose skin shone like fire-warmed brass; a black-bearded man in plate mail scarred by demons’ claws; friends and comrades, less distinct. Some fell to fiendish fangs or flames or the gibbering madness of the Worldwound. Some didn’t. Not all of the people Ederras mourned were dead, but all were lost to him.
And then there was Velenne. In the paladin’s memories, she held a grace that the real woman didn’t always show, and such a sense of mourning surrounded her that Sechel had to remind herself that the diabolist wasn’t actually dead.
They’ll take her. Dread—his, not hers, yet the secondhand emotion was strong enough to clench icy fingers in the assassin’s gut—knotted around the thought. Other images swam around it, entangled in the net of the man’s worries: Citadel Gheisteno’s stern walls and unyielding bars, the endless armies of the dead, and Sechel herself, pitiless and cold, with Ochtel lurking behind her like a one-eyed shadow.
It was an oddly flattering perspective. In the paladin’s eyes, she was an adversary to be feared and respected, someone dangerous enough to merit mining information from Ochtel. Sechel, watching her reflection in the siphon’s memories, allowed herself a small glow of pride.
Then she paused, frowning, as remembered words drifted to her ears in watery, rippling echoes. Lictor Shokneir can only reshape reality so far.
… her transformation’s a ruse …
… crosses the bridge and takes off the amulet …
… the siphon won’t let you lie.
Slowly, flexing her fingers against a sudden chilled stiffness, Sechel emerged from her trance. She stared at the oak leaves without seeing them, listened without hearing the sighing breezes, breathed the garden’s air without tasting its damp earth or green herbs.
She touched the amulet that hung around her neck. As ever, it was heavy and cold against her skin. An odor of metallic smoke clung to it, always a little stronger than it should be. The Crux’s skull, chains, and broken stones were worked into the amulet’s face, although the emblem was only dimly visible through the soot that masked the rough-edged metal.
Lictor Shokneir had given her the amulet to ward her against Citadel Gheisteno’s many dangers. It shielded her from the soulsearing gaze of the skulls on the bridge, protected her from the graveknights’ own devastating auras, and caused the castle’s lesser undead to turn blind eyes to her passing.
Does it deceive me as much as it does them?
There was one way to find out. Unfolding from her crouch, Sechel tumbled from the oak’s branch onto the garden path and made her way to its door.
If her transformation held once she removed the amulet on the far side of the bridge, then she’d know that Ochtel had, for some inscrutable reason of his own, chosen to lie to their prisoners in order to lure her into a fool’s errand. But if it failed …
Do you accept this as payment in full? Lictor Shokneir had asked.
And she, so quickly, so blindly, had answered: Yes.
An old, familiar anger burned in Sechel’s chest as she made her way through the gloomy halls and back to the inner courtyard. The skulls in the walls were blind to her, as were the skeletons clattering in rust-grimed mail and the wights with their milky dead eyes. She walked through the castle, hood thrown back and hands on her knives, and none of them ever glanced her way.
Because of the amulet? Or because they thought she was nothing to fear?
You’re being too suspicious. Ochtel might have lied.
The words rang hollow even in her own mind, though. There was no reason for Ochtel to lie, and every reason for Lictor Shokneir to deceive her.
Months of work, dozens of deaths … had she done all of that for nothing?
Beyond the citadel’s gatehouses, the slim thread of its bridge stretched across the chasm that separated the haunted fortress from the world. Black on this end, gray on the other. Unreal into real.
Sechel hesitated for only a heartbeat before she drew up her hood, crossed beneath the portcullises’ iron fangs, and walked through the guard towers’ looming silence. Her boots made not a whisper over the bridge’s worn skulls. She felt them underfoot, but couldn’t see them. Not clearly. Not with her weak human eyes.
If I’m not human, why can’t I see? But the thought gave her little consolation. It was too easy to steal sight. Sechel herself could do it half a dozen ways, and she wasn’t the deathless lord of a cursed castle.
On the far side of the bridge, she stopped and tipped her face up to the cool mountain night. There was a vibrant breath on the wind, evanescent and inexpressible, that did not exist in Citadel Gheisteno. It was as if she’d stepped from the stark lines of a woodcut back into the color and sensation of the living world. A gray flatness had lifted from her vision, a dullness from her tongue.
She was beyond the reach of the lictor’s power. And so, with numb and uncertain fingers, she lifted the amulet from her neck.
At first, nothing happened, and Sechel let herself hope that the druid had lied, or had simply been wrong.
And then, bit by bit, her world began to change.
Starlight filled her vision. Sechel’s infernal heritage lifted the shadows from the world, sharpening fuzzy details into clarity and piercing the deepest darkness with quicksilver tones. Her hearing became more acute, as if she were unwrapping a thick woolen scarf from her ears, layer by layer. The wind touched her sensitized skin more keenly, and she felt its caress like a blow.
It wasn’t just the citadel’s curse vanishing from her awareness. She was changing. The weight of her hair left her shoulders. The scrape of her nails in the fingertips of her gloves disappeared. Under the fine gray kidskin, she knew, her fingers would be as they’d always been: stubbed, scarred, deformed. Monstrous.
Ochtel had told the truth. She’d been paid in false gold.
Lictor Shokneir had never transformed her. He’d never had the power. Outside the walls of Citadel Gheisteno, reality was beyond his ability to shape. Only within the haunted fortress could he control it enough to give her the illusion of humanity, and only with the amulet could he sustain that illusion long enough that it might have robbed her of the chance to strike back.
Do you accept this as payment in full?
Sechel squeezed her eyes shut to block out the tears of hurt and rage. The lictor had cheated her—of hope, of self-respect, of what should have been her moment of greatest triumph. He had treated her like a child. Like a servant. Like some underling whose wishes could be mocked and cast aside without cost.
But if the maimed druid had been right about one thing, he’d been wrong about another. Sechel’s revenge wasn’t limited to murder. She’d discovered Lictor Shokneir’s treachery in time to pay him back with better coin than that. Something that might hurt even a graveknight who couldn’t die.
Replacing the amulet, the assassin retraced her steps across the bridge.
Her false humanity didn’t return when she put the amulet back on, but the skulls didn’t ignite on the bridge either, so Sechel approached the undead of Citadel Gheisteno with measured care, unsure whether they would treat her as an invader or continue to ignore her.
When she spotted a cluster of walking corpses gathered under one of the rotting pentices, she veered toward them, intent on finding an answer.
Four of the skeletal creatures were clustered under another wearing a skull-faced helm in imitation of the Crux graveknights. The leader wore the rat-gnawed ruins of a foot soldier’s leather armor and a soot-crusted breastplate punched through by a cavalry lance. The lesser undead wore nothing save the rags of priestly vestments and their own skins, which had dried and hardened into rawhide crusts over withered muscle and rinds of soapy, cured fat.
Sechel strode forward, scuffing her boots against the courtyard’s paving stones so the creatures would look up.
She held her relaxed pose, making a show of studying her foes with contempt, as the creatures’ vacant eyes locked onto her and their mouths stretched into hissing grins. The creature that had been holding a picked-over human skull—the scrap they’d all been so fascinated by—tossed it aside.
Snarling and clawing, they came at her in a rush.
Sechel waited until she could smell their fetid breath, and then she dropped the bottle she’d been holding in one hand and drew her enchanted lenses from the band of her hood onto her eyes with the other. Dense white mist flowed from the shattered vial, rising up into an opaque cloud that defeated even the corpses’ unearthly eyes.
Not hers, though. Not with those violet-tinted lenses shimmering over her sight and cutting through the fog. Sechel dropped into a crouch as the first of them came at her, letting it lurch off balance as it grabbed at the empty air. The lenses distorted her vision in the mist, but she’d worn them for years and was well accustomed to adjusting. Unerringly the assassin swept her left leg forward, kicking the creature’s ankles out from under it. The undead cleric toppled, hissing, and the two behind it went down as well, tangled in its flailing limbs.
They’d be back up in seconds, but seconds were all she needed. Staying low, Sechel danced around the helmed wight’s blind graspings and popped up behind it, then drove her twin knives deep into the creature’s unguarded back.
Violet-red energy crackled between the black blades, meeting in forked arcs inside the wight’s ribcage. The undead creature threw its head back and screamed, and the back of its throat was lit as though with dragon’s fire.
It sagged on her blades, dead before she pulled out the knives. Sechel slung its weight off her weapons, throwing the corpse into its rag-robed brethren. That sent them stumbling again, and when she saw the nearest of them grab the twice-dead thing to hurl its impatiently aside, she struck. Two hard upward blows into the surprised creature’s chest, another flare of amaranth that flooded its eye sockets and poured from its mouth, and the creature collapsed.
The three remaining undead, frightened now, clustered together in the fog. Eyes darting warily for some sign of motion, tongues flickering through their yellow teeth, they fumbled to find a way out of the blinding white mist.
One raked a claw through the space where Sechel had stood while killing its companion, seeming almost fearful at the chance that it might catch her. Another backed away hurriedly, snatching at nothingness while stretching its foot behind it to feel out a retreat.
That was the moment she’d been waiting for. Soundlessly, Sechel slipped through the mist, raised her boot, and stomped on the fleeing corpse’s extended calf. Dead brown bone punched through its shin. The creature jerked its head up, squealing, and Sechel cut its throat twice from behind, one knife scissoring across its spine left to right, the other crossing over in the opposite direction. Magic flared from the black blades, and the monstrosity fell, biting its own withered scrap of a tongue into pieces that hit the ground on either side of its head.
One of the survivors flung itself at the flash of crimson energy, but Sechel sidestepped it easily, her twilight cloak swirling around its claws. She laughed, both in delight and to unnerve them, and kicked one of the dead creatures so that it flopped in the mist. When one of the remainder snapped its head toward the movement, Sechel slid around to its blind side and tore it apart.
The last one turned and fled. Sechel let it clear the mist, just to give it a glimpse of whatever hope it could feel, before she took it down.
She wiped her knives clean on the ragged remnants of the leader’s armor, satisfied with her own performance. None of the undead had touched her, and none had needed more than a single pass to drop. Good.
Of course, the graveknights wouldn’t be so easy. Better to avoid their notice altogether, if she could.
If not …
The assassin shrugged to herself as she turned away from the undead guardians’ remains and toward the citadel’s soot-shrouded chapel. Her cloak melted into the haunted night, blurring her form until she seemed no more substantial than any other shadow flowing along the blackened walls.
If she couldn’t hide, she could always kill.