“Get up.”
Ederras opened his eyes. Sechel was staring at him through the cell bars. He couldn’t see any hair under the shifting colors of her hood, although with only their failing torch for light, it was hard to be sure. Gloves masked her fingers, giving him no clue there.
Her eyes told the tale, though. Her eyes, glowing eerily in the dungeon’s gloom, and her anger. The assassin had given up her hopes of humanity.
What does that mean for us?
He stood, ignoring the scrape of his shackles. Behind him, Jheraal stirred in her bonds, but didn’t rise. “You’ve already taken the memories you wanted. Why have you come now?”
“‘Why?’” Sechel echoed mockingly. She unslung the makeshift bundle that had been strapped around her shoulder. “As if you don’t know. As if this were anything other than exactly what you prayed for. I watched your memories in the glass. I know what you hoped to achieve with them. And now you have it. So stop pretending to be innocent, and take what you wanted.”
Stooping, Sechel untied the knots in the stained brown blanket. She pulled back its mangy corners and laid it out on the floor, letting the metal inside catch the torch’s weak flame.
The bundle held a sword, a mace, and a long-bladed knife. Ederras recognized the weapons immediately. The mace, its haft scarred to match a Scourge knight’s armor and its leather wrappings worn thin by years of chafing against steel-clad fingers, was unmistakably Jheraal’s. The knife was the curved obsidian blade that Velenne carried around for decoration.
And the longsword, its pommel gilded with Iomedae’s radiant halo and its silver blade traced with intricate designs, was his own holy brand. Ederras could sense the thrum of its sacred magic even through the bars, striking a chord of communion deep in his soul.
Along with their weapons, the assassin had delivered Velenne’s scroll tubes and spell component pouches, Jheraal’s collection of unguents and oils, and the padded, stiff-sided case in which Ederras kept his potions.
Flipping a skull-crowned key in a gloved palm, Sechel smirked at the paladin’s surprise. “You look disappointed. Did you think you’d have to spend days breaking down my barriers to persuade me? Please. I’m not Ochtel. I don’t need you to pretend to care about me as a person, and it wouldn’t work very well if you did.”
“I’ve never pretended to care about anyone,” Ederras retorted. He wasn’t ready to let himself hope that she’d really come to set them free. Not yet. This might just be some cruel game the assassin was playing. She had, after all, seized their secrets by magic to better hurt them.
“Then we have that in common.” Sechel’s smirk spread into a grin, but above it her eyes were hard as murder. She glanced from Ederras to Jheraal. “You’ll want to get out of the dungeons soon. I couldn’t get your weapons quietly. Had to kill the guardians to retrieve them, and then had to tip my hand again coming here, so the lictor and his dogs will probably be on their way shortly.”
“My armor,” the Hellknight broke in, standing beside Ederras in the cell.
“Too well guarded for me to risk, and too heavy to move anyway.” Sechel shrugged, unconcerned, as she bent to unlock the door. “The rest of your belongings are in the bone smithy, if you want to get them yourselves. Your helms, armor, shields. All the metal bits that don’t get shoved into people’s heads.”
“The armor does, actually,” Jheraal said. “I’d be happy to give you a demonstration.”
Ederras tested the door. It opened, and Sechel stood aside, but he didn’t step out. “You’re really just going to let us go.”
“That depends. Do you want to go? Or would you rather stand in your cell asking stupid questions until the graveknights come to finish the job?”
“You’ll forgive me for doubting your intentions.”
The assassin stepped away, shrugging again as she glanced over her shoulder into the darkness beyond the wall’s torch. Ederras couldn’t hear whatever she heard, but Sechel tensed and drew her gloved hands to the hilts of her knives. “Doubt them all you’d like, but you’d better move fast if you plan to move at all. You’ll find the bone smithy south of the chapel. Behrion Khollarix has returned, so he’ll likely be there, along with his honor guard. If he hasn’t torn it apart to make more guards yet, your armor will be inside.
“Paravicar Leroung has a workshop near the top of the north tower, and Lictor Shokneir has a throne room above that, where you might be able to find him if he isn’t wandering the parapets or headed this way to destroy you. Ochtel keeps to his garden, mostly. I don’t expect that one will take part in any fighting. Beyond that, all you have to worry about are their armies of undead and the curse of the citadel itself.”
“Fight with us,” Ederras urged. “You’ve seen what we can do. We took down two of the three graveknights here, and that was when you opposed us. With you on our side, we could destroy every walking corpse in Citadel Gheisteno.”
Sechel laughed. She lifted a hand to her color-shifting hood, drawing down a curious cloth band fitted with a pair of violet lenses that covered her eyes. “No. No, I don’t think so. I’ve done quite enough to help you already. The lictor thought he could cheat in his bargain with me, so I’ve done the same to him. That will serve as my revenge.
“Besides,” she added, tossing them a second key before melting into the shadows, “I rather like this memory siphon. I think I’ll keep it. You can distract the graveknights while I do.
“I should say, in parting, that I haven’t told them anything about your memories yet. If I escape, you’ll stay protected. If not … well, you know what the siphon holds. They’ll get all of your precious little secrets if they catch me. So I trust you won’t let that happen.”
Jheraal scowled, picking up the key. She fitted it to her shackles, unlocking her ankle cuffs before kicking away her chains and opening the paladin’s. Holding out her wrists for him to free her hands, the Hellknight nodded toward Velenne. “Best get her up, and quickly. We’re going to need her, and her devils, for what lies ahead.”
“My antidotes are in the potion case.” Ederras unlocked the last of her restraints and went to open Velenne’s. With the shackles gone, his raw and blistered wrists stung in the open air, but he welcomed the pain as a token of freedom.
The Hellknight handed him the case. Although Ederras knew its contents by heart, and could have picked out any one of its oils or philters without looking, he conjured a divine light and studied the antidote vial carefully under its white radiance before he uncapped it. A sniff detected nothing amiss. Neither did a cautious taste.
If their captors had contaminated the antidote, he couldn’t tell. Wishing he could be surer, Ederras poured the colorless liquid down Velenne’s throat, tipping her chin until she swallowed. He followed it with a second potion, the most powerful restorative he had.
A long moment passed. Then she coughed and her fingers curled, and her eyes fluttered open in the dimness, eventually focusing on him. “Where—”
“Dungeons of Citadel Gheisteno,” Jheraal answered tersely, pushing the diabolist’s returned belongings into her hands. “You spent several days being poisoned. Much as I’d love to give you weeks to recover, we need to get out of here before the lictor’s forces corner us in this cell.”
“Ah.” Wincing, Velenne pushed herself up to a sitting position, then began slotting her wands back into their crimson-banded hip sheath. “Not … the best awakening I’ve ever had, but not quite the worst.” She tied her pouches back into place and stood, grimacing as she raked her fingers through her dirt-flecked hair.
Ederras took her elbow to steady her. “Can you fight? If you need another prayer—”
“Save it. I’m sure we’ll need all your prayers soon enough.” She touched his wrist lightly, drawing some of the sting from her tone, as she slipped her arm from his hand. “I’m well enough to go.”
“Are you sure?” He could see the stiffness of her movements, the weariness under her eyes. “Your wounds were grave, and the poison couldn’t have helped. And the memory siphon was hard for all of us.” He’d been prepared, and it had been hideous to feel those unreal fingers digging through his mind. Velenne, unconscious, had been defenseless and taken unawares. “If you need more time—”
“Then that would be unfortunate, since we don’t have it.” Velenne canted her head to one side, regarding him with a mixture of affection and regret. “The memory siphon. Is that what that was? I thought it was only a nightmare.”
“No. It was a device Paravicar Leroung made. It stole memories.”
“I know. It tells you what it does while it’s working, even if you’re dreaming. Isn’t that ingenious? Otherwise you might not be aware you were being tortured.” She straightened her earrings and adjusted the choker about her throat, centering its black star sapphire. “So all of that was real.”
“What did it take from you?”
“Nothing you’d want to know, my love. That was the entire point.” Her lips quirked, regret winning over affection. “They wanted to know what would cause you to cast me aside, or worse. There are, I’m afraid, many such things. Better if you don’t ask, especially now. We have more urgent matters.”
Jheraal took the torch from the wall sconce, holding it out to Velenne. “What about your dog? Did he get out alive? Did he get the children to safety?”
Velenne started to answer, hesitated, and shook her head. Gentling her tone, she said, “Vhaeros is outside the fortress, that’s all I can say. I lost contact with him when he crossed the bridge of skulls. The same magic that prevents my teleportation has severed our link.”
The Hellknight nodded, unhappy but unsurprised. “All right. We need our armor. The assassin said it was being kept in the ‘bone smithy,’ whatever that is. Did you come across any references to such a place while you were studying the citadel?”
Velenne shook her head again, closing her eyes to steady herself against a visible wave of dizziness afterward. “What little I was able to find was almost entirely about the original citadel, before the Order of the Crux was extirpated and this haunted version arose. The most detailed account I could locate of Citadel Gheisteno after its fall was by Gholam of the Thousand Boots, who was … not known for his accuracy, let us say. He waxed long and poetic about the terrors of graveknights, and his own bravery in daring to confront them, but he never mentioned a bone smithy.
“Truth be told, now that we’ve seen the place, I’m not convinced he ever really came here. Little of what we’ve seen seems to correspond to his descriptions. Gholam wrote that the citadel existed only as the lictor imagined it—‘we walked within the lictor’s dream, and all was as he dreamed it’—but I wonder whether that wasn’t an excuse for passing off his own inventions as fact.”
“Fine,” the Hellknight said. “If we don’t have solid information, then we’ll have to charge in blindly and hope for the best.” Mace in hand, she led the way out of the dungeon.
Their way out of the dungeon was barred by a wall of animated flesh. That was the source of the pickled-meat odors, and of the moans that Ederras had heard earlier. There must have been at least thirty bodies pressed into that amalgamation of bone and muscle. Jellied blood mortared them together, oozing wetly into the gaps between the flailing arms and raw red ribcages that made up the bulk of the wall.
Little was left of the constituent bodies’ clothing, and less of their faces, but the chains that ran through the entire construct made their natures clear. The corpses in the wall were shackled to each other, lashed in place by steel chains that knotted around their limbs and punched through the hollows of pelvis and collarbone.
“This must be what became of Citadel Gheisteno’s prisoners.” Velenne stood well back from the stinking, moaning wall. “Some of them, at least. The ones whose hearts they didn’t take.”
“How do we get past?” Jheraal asked. An orc’s face pushed through the wall, gnashing his teeth at her. His green skin had been discolored to a sickly gray by the pickling brine, and a band of semi-translucent jellied blood covered the top half of his face in a rubbery mask. Ten feet away, the orc’s bent and broken arm thrashed from a tangle of other limbs, clawing at the Hellknight.
“Without a key?” Velenne wrinkled her nose. “Only one option. Cut through.”
It was raw butchery, not combat. Ederras hacked through the dense flesh with grim determination, trying to ignore the cold, viscous pink rain that spattered across his clothes. The wall clubbed and kicked at him with the disjointed remains of a dozen bodies, but its blows were as clumsy as those of the skeletons around the bridge. Even without his shield, they were easy to evade.
This was Paravicar Leroung’s work, or one of her underlings’. None of the Crux signifers would have undertaken a project of such enormity without her approval. Very possibly, no one else in the Order of the Crux had enough skill to craft one, which meant the wall of corpses might well be her personal creation.
What must his great-grandfather have thought when he walked through this place? What must he have felt upon seeing what his squire had done?
What would you think, walking through the Midnight Temple of Egorian?
Ederras cut through the last of the wall’s quivering sinews. The corpses lay behind him in oozing shambles, their gelatinous mortar glistening on the dungeon floor. He stepped through the dripping hole in the wall, across a carpet of pulverized flesh, and toward the stairs that led up to the castle.
Jheraal came after him, scowling her disapproval at the remnants of the Crux knights’ creation. Velenne followed last, dainty and delicate, stepping high over any bits of gore that might slip beneath her shoe.
Partway up the stairs, the diabolist made them pause for another round of preparatory spells. Diamond dust and bull’s hair floated in the air as she imbued them with strength and swiftness, shielded them against fire and ice, and warded herself against blades.
By the time she was finished, the wall of corpses was gone.
The space where it had been was empty. Dry. Nothing remained of the corpses that Ederras had chopped into reeking pieces amid puddles of blood and brine. A span of darkness led back to the cells, without so much as a smudge of ichor on the surrounding stones to mark where the wall had fallen.
“Maybe Gholam wasn’t lying,” Velenne murmured, looking at the emptiness. “Maybe what we see really is only what the lector imagines. Those who die in this place are simply … forgotten, as if they never existed at all.”
“Not everything gets forgotten,” Jheraal said. “Lictor Shokneir remembers his prison. He remembers his curse. And when this is over, he’ll remember us.”
As they came to the ironbound door at the top of the steps, Ederras raised a hand to signal a stop. Reaching for Iomedae’s blessing, he extended his senses outward, seeking the spiritual emanations that would warn him whether evil waited ahead.
He found them. One of the souls lurking beyond that door burned nearly as intensely in his spirit-sight as Velenne did behind him. He saw each of them as a pillar of black fire against the silvery, translucent landscape of Citadel Gheisteno—but the one that lay before him had a phalanx of weaker spirits around it, while the diabolist stood alone.
The paladin ended his prayer and turned to his companions. “There is a source of great evil ahead. I believe it must be one of the graveknights. Six servitors are with it. They’re weaker than the graveknight, but nevertheless significant.”
Velenne uncapped one of her scroll tubes. “How intense was the strongest of their auras?”
“Not quite equal to yours,” Ederras answered flatly, looking back at the door as he drew his sword. He disliked seeing her that way. The measure of the diabolist’s sins, at least in Iomedae’s eyes, had scarcely changed since the day they’d been reunited.
“You’re such a flatterer, my love.” She sounded amused. “I suspect that’s Behrion Khollarix waiting for us, then. I doubt the paravicar would come without her comrades, and I’m not vain enough to think I’d outshine Lictor Shokneir. And the late Master of Blades wields fire.”
“What of it?”
“I suggest you allow one of my servants to open that door. Fire holds no fear for them, and if we’re lucky, the graveknight will waste his blast on a creature he can’t hurt. It’s the least they deserve after that ruse by the bridge.”
“I don’t like you summoning fiends.”
“It isn’t a question of liking. Vhaeros is gone, and we lost with him last time. Without him, our chances are very poor. Both of you are unarmored, and I have no interest in watching you die for a point of pride. We need the devils.”
“Can you even bring them here? You said you couldn’t teleport in the castle—”
Velenne shrugged, examining her nails. One of them had broken, earning a frown. “It isn’t an absolute bar. The citadel’s misalignment only makes such spells … difficult. I may lose some of them in the transition, it’s true, but what does that matter? I wouldn’t take the chance with your life, but I will with theirs. Why not? Either they’ll help us or they’ll die. Both should be acceptable outcomes for you, yes?”
“Do it,” Jheraal said. “Whatever it takes to bring the graveknights down. Do it.”
Ederras studied Velenne for a long, silent moment. Finally he nodded, mouth drawn into a thin line of disapproval, and turned away from her. “Control them well.”
The diabolist wasted no time in reading the scrolls that held her unholy invocations. With quick, expert strokes of her curved black knife, she cut open rifts to the smoking chasms of Hell at the conclusion of each spell. A single fiend stepped through each of the tears in their reality, which sealed and vanished into the air as each one emerged. One of them was torn apart by a sudden fluctuation in the gate’s dark energies. Ederras saw the bloody tendrils of its beard—or maybe its guts—flailing around its yellow-toothed howl, and then it was gone, sucked away into the void between planes.
The others came through. There were two of them, muscular and horned, their scraggly beards alive and wriggling like mats of nightmare worms. They reeked of brimstone and heated iron. Each carried a viciously bladed glaive with a shaft longer than the fiend was tall.
The first devil hopped up the steps, blood-red hooves clattering on stone, and shoved open the door with a thrust of its sawtoothed glaive. Fire roared out before it had even gotten the door open, rushing through the gap in a sulfurous yellow torrent. The devil giggled—actually giggled, a sound hideous in its glee—and lowered its head to rush in with all the joy of a child running through a fountain’s spray. Its companion charged up the stairs behind it, vanishing into the flames a second later.
Ederras waited a beat, just enough for the fire to fade into smoke and a few last licking tongues, then followed them out.
In the shadow-swept courtyard of Citadel Gheisteno, the Master of Blades was waiting. He stood motionless, save for the sweep of his charred and crumbling cloak, behind a screen of spear-wielding skeletons in partially molten breastplates and blackened greaves. Yellow fire lit the darkness of his helm, and it was mirrored in the eyes of the dragon carved into the hilt of his enormous greatsword.
He unsheathed that greatsword, holding it high in challenge, as Ederras and Jheraal came out of the dungeon to meet him. His skeletons fought the devils in lethal flurries before him, but Behrion Khollarix paid them no more mind than leaves drifting about his ankles. His burning gaze stayed fixed on the living challengers.
“Your bravery is worthy,” the graveknight said. His voice sounded like logs cracking in a bonfire, each word accented with a hiss of unseen sparks.
“I should say the same for you,” Ederras called back. “We killed you once already, and here you are, back for more.”
“Death refuses me. But it will take you.” The Master of Blades swept out his greatsword. The steel dragon’s eyes flared, its toothy jaws gnashed around the blade, and the sword became a plume of searing gold. It roared over the spear-wielding skeletons, rushing through their empty ribcages like water sluicing through floodgates.
Ederras braced himself for the blast, wishing he had a shield to raise as cover … but the fire washed over him without singing a hair. Velenne’s spell had protected him completely.
The skeletons hadn’t been as fortunate. Behrion’s fiery torrent had burned them with full force, and several had been badly damaged. The devils, grinning, leaped forward to take advantage of their opponents’ weakness.
They didn’t find it as easy as they might have hoped. The skeletons fell into perfect formation, each one raising its black-tipped spear and shield to defend its comrades as well as itself, and to exploit any weaknesses that its companions might uncover. These were no mindless brutes like the ones Ederras had fought at the bridge; these understood the rhythm of melee as deeply as he did.
Snarling infernal imprecations, the devils skittered around the skeletal phalanx, jabbing their glaives at the warriors. Their sawtoothed blades screeched against steel and bone. Behind the devils, Jheraal came forward, careful, her white-scaled face well guarded.
Ederras shared her unease. It had been ages since he’d faced a real fight without his armor, and all his instincts were wrong without that sheltering steel. His own body felt alien—lighter, less substantial, stripped of its battering mass. He couldn’t rely on his helm to conceal the direction of his gaze. Instead, like a boxer, he had to consider whether it might betray his next move.
He drove forward into the skeletons, but hesitation made him vulnerable. The spears came in, and although he sidestepped one and twisted away from another, the skeletal warriors fought with such coordination that each thrust pushed him into the path of the next. The third spear came in fast and confident, and Ederras raised his arm reflexively to catch it before remembering that he had neither shield nor mail.
Red pain tore along his arm. He answered with a blow of his longsword that shattered the skeleton’s grin into loose rolling teeth, but the damage was done. Blood ran hot across the inside of his elbow, and the other skeletal warriors pressed forward, black-tipped spears flashing. One gouged his side, scraping against a rib and punching his breath away. Another cut a long, shallow laceration across his thigh.
Then, abruptly, a crackling arc of lightning exploded across them. The skeletal warrior on Ederras’s left froze as electricity erupted around it in spitting blue. An indigo corona blazed up around the paladin’s sword, filling the air with the scent of ozone. Static energy fizzed around him, pulling his hair up on end and scattering sparks across his clothing.
The lightning leaped up from the paralyzed skeleton to the fleshless warrior on the far end of their line, spreading through the air in dazzling forks that jolted across every skeleton in their formation. Blue-violet coruscations danced across their blackened breastplates and branched through the hollow rings of their ribs. The skeletons’ hands clenched convulsively on their spear hafts, bone hammering against wood, as electricity wracked them. Their teeth chattered and trembled in their bony jaws.
Then, all at once, they tumbled to the ground as the electricity released its grip, dissipating into the courtyard’s smoky fog with a final lash of burning blue.
Velenne dusted the last motes of her scroll from her fingertips. “I do like enemies stupid enough to stand in a straight line. Such a rare and joyous thing.”
No one had time, or breath, to respond to her. Stepping over the remains of his servants, the Master of Blades closed the gap. One of the devils leaped forward to meet him, its glaive thrust forward.
The graveknight knocked the fiend’s weapon aside contemptuously and brought his greatsword around in a heavy, shearing blow that beheaded the devil in a single stroke. Mouth still agape in a howl, the head tumbled into the mist, the gristly tendrils of its beard grasping uselessly at its cauterized stump.
The Crux knight kicked the devil’s body aside. Ederras came forward to meet him, offering a prayer to Iomedae as he did so. Divine power filled him in a rush, transforming his blade into a blessed brand and granting him a grace and clarity that pushed away his fog of pain. He could see every heat-warped crenellation in the graveknight’s armor, every tiny notch in the teeth of his dragon sword. And he knew, with perfect premonition, where Behrion Khollarix would strike next, and when.
He couldn’t hope to match the graveknight’s strength, nor could he survive a direct hit from that sword. Shieldless and unarmored, his only hope was to evade a telling blow long enough to land one of his own.
“You’re bleeding,” the graveknight said. With each word, his fiery eyes flared behind his helm, like coals stirred by a breath of wind. “Weak. Mortal. Dead, you will be stronger. A worthy soldier, in the end.”
“Flattered, but I’ll have to pass.” Ederras saw the tiny movement of the graveknight’s articulated plates, heard the creak of aged leather under all that steel, and was already ducking before the sword came at him. It cut through the air, singeing the back of his neck with its unholy fire.
Lunging forward, the paladin stabbed upward from his crouch, using his longsword like a spear. Iomedae’s wrath lent strength to the steel, and his sword plunged through the graveknight’s armor as if he’d thrust it into cold black water. White fire blazed through the tiny holes of Behrion’s chainmail and flickered along the inner curves of the heavy plate, consuming all it touched.
The graveknight staggered away, snarling, and slammed his greatsword down in a vicious but ill-aimed blow. This time Ederras dodged more easily, and Jheraal struck from the right, slamming her spiked mace into the Master of Blades’ cuirass with a thunderous impact that reverberated through the courtyard like the clash of some huge, infernal gong.
Too late, Behrion raised his shield toward the Hellknight. It left his side unprotected, and Ederras—quickened by his goddess’s blessing, alight with the joy of fighting for a righteous cause—slashed in once again. Divine fury flared, bright and true as the North Star, and for the second time, the Crux’s Master of Blades fell before them.
Bells tolled in the darkness, calling from the high reaches of Citadel Gheisteno’s ruined towers to announce the graveknight’s fall.
Ederras clasped a hand to his wounded arm, drawing upon the Inheritor’s power to heal his injuries and restore his flagging stamina. He repeated the prayer for Jheraal, who’d been struck by several spears herself. The other devil had fallen to the skeletons at some point. He hadn’t seen the creature’s death, but its corpse lay limp on the stones.
Jheraal grimaced at the bells. “They’ll know the Master of
Blades failed now. Let’s get to that bone smithy before they stop us.”
“South of the chapel.” Ederras wiped sweat from his brow. His hand came away smeared with greasy black. The graveknight’s flames. If not for Velenne, those undead would have killed him.
Perhaps that was why Iomedae had chosen to save her, despite her devils and the damnation in her soul. The gods make use of all their tools.
Finding the chapel wasn’t difficult. East of the courtyard’s crumbling pentices, the pointed arches and ornate windows stood out amid the fortress’s severity. Whatever religious emblems the chapel may have born, they’d been replaced by skulls nested atop coils of broken chain—Ederras wondered if that had been before or after the citadel’s razing and resurrection.
South of the chapel stood the charred shell of a partially roofed building. Sullen red light seeped from its interior, softening its darkness without illumining anything. As the three of them neared, Ederras saw that what he’d initially taken for firewood heaped along the smithy’s walls were, in fact, stacks of human bones. Spines, arms, legs. All were blanched and picked clean.
Nothing stirred within the smithy, but he approached cautiously all the same, sword held at the ready. Beside him, Jheraal was equally alert. It was strange to see the Hellknight’s clawed hands bare on the haft of her mace, or the grime-streaked paleness of her white scales in the courtyard’s swirling mist. He was used to seeing faceless iron where she stood.
Still, it was a comfort to have her there, as it was a comfort to sense Velenne behind him. He’d never thought that he’d find reassurance in a Hellknight and a diabolist, but there it was.
Under the smoky shadows of the smithy’s bare, burned rafters, three forges glowed with vermilion light. Gritty bone ash dusted each one’s firepot, while human bones were piled along their sides, waiting to be fed into the furnaces. Arcane sigils shimmered in a semicircle on the bricks around each forge’s mouth, each radiating a different color: cool azure, fiery orange, and an intense chartreuse that permeated the air around it with sizzling acidic vapor.
The skulls and flayed faces of fiends, both real and wrought in iron, covered the walls in regimented lines. Between them, iron racks held spears and swords, and armor stands supported empty suits of chain and plate, their shoulders dusted with coarse ash.
Ederras took those things for decoration, but neither of his companions did. Jheraal went to look for her own armor among the mounted suits, while Velenne conducted a slower, more thoughtful examination of the smithy’s contents.
“Remarkable,” the diabolist murmured, surveying the skulls and faces that glowered from the ash-flecked walls. “I hadn’t thought graveknights capable of such things.”
Ederras glanced over. “What’s that?”
Velenne extended a finger to the nearest flayed face. It didn’t seem to be that of a true fiend, but rather the preserved face of a hellspawn whose gray, leathery skin resembled a blowfish’s belly, all covered in tiny spines. As the diabolist’s finger came within a few inches of its mouth, the face suddenly lunged up and snapped at her, straining against the nails that pinned its leathery fringe to the wall.
“They’re not dead,” she observed, untroubled by the grotesqueness of the magic. She passed her finger down the row, and each of the skulls and tanned faces reacted in some way, cringing or snarling or making soundless cries of pain. All reacted with fear or hate or misery. “They’re not really alive either, of course, but … there’s still some emotion embedded in these scraps. Some fragment of who they were. Something that the Master of Blades wished to draw upon, for magic or for inspiration, when he worked upon these forges.”
“What did he make here?” Nothing good, not on fires stoked with human bones and tended by the unliving. Yet Ederras was curious, all the same.
“Undead, presumably. Skeletons, zombies, wights. Those spear-wielders we fought in the courtyard.” Velenne shrugged minutely. “But more interesting things, too. It’s impossible to say what all was made here, but the tools suggest so much. Skull helms that cast their victims’ dying agonies and terrors onto the wearer’s foes? Cloaks of flensed skin that preserved the hellspawn’s’ resistance to fire? Armor forged around bones to imprison the soul? Maybe even other graveknights, if a champion of sufficient might fell into the smith’s hands. A living person fed into one of these forges, the smoldering remains enclosed in a casket of plate mail … might such a person might rise as a graveknight to join the lictor’s chosen few?”
Pursing her lips, the diabolist studied the faces more closely. “Few of these are devils, have you noticed? They’re almost all hellspawn. For all that the Hellknight orders idolize devils, I suppose even they realized how much easier it was to refine their techniques on defenseless prisoners. Certainly it would have been far easier to evoke their emotions and trap them in bone and skin. Fiends are more difficult to frighten, and much more difficult to preserve.”
So many lives. Ederras spent a moment trying to calculate the number of dead represented on the walls, but soon gave up. There were too many, and it was a distraction for which he didn’t have time. He needed to find his armor.
But there must have been over a hundred faces and skulls mounted around the smithy’s walls, and he had no idea of the numbers that might have been consumed in failed attempts before the magic to preserve the others was developed. Nor could he guess how many had died to create the other things Velenne had named.
How much of this did the Scourge knights see when they marched into Citadel Gheisteno? And why hadn’t they written any of it down? Surely, surely, these crimes would have attracted condemnation across Cheliax if they’d been known.
“I’ve found it,” Jheraal called from across the room. She held up her horned helm, dislodging the skull that had been set inside it. “They put skeletons in our armor, but they’re just skeletons, not undead. Whatever they’d meant to do wasn’t finished.”
“Good.” Ederras saw his own silvered plate near her. He strode over to retrieve it, extracting the bones that had been placed inside. Brittle black filaments, delicate as charred corn silk, connected the bones to the inner surfaces of his armor, but Jheraal was right: whatever they’d been meant to become, the magic appeared to be incomplete.
He held out one of his gauntlets so that Velenne could see the crumbling strands inside. “Should this be a concern?”
The diabolist contemplated it for a second, then waved the gauntlet away. “It will do you no harm.”
Brushing the black threads from the metal, Ederras began strapping on his mail. “What is it?”
“The beginnings of a formidable servant. Armor, bone, fire. Yours, I think, might have been desecrated to draw additional power by making a sacrilege of your blessed armor. But it was nowhere near done. Khollarix must have just begun the process when we slew him.”
“I’m glad to have stopped that, then.” His shield was lying nearby, its golden wings dusky in the smithy’s shade. After fastening his gorget, Ederras picked up the shield and strapped it back onto his left arm. “Is there anything we can do to prevent the graveknights from adding more undead thralls?”
“Do you want to spend the time on it?” Velenne waited until he nodded, then lifted a slender shoulder in a shrug. “Burn those bones outside.”
“They’re not just fuel?”
“Not in the way you’re likely thinking. They’re the raw materials for the forge, not its fuel. The iron, not the coal. A smith can’t make swords without steel, and the knights of the Crux clearly can’t make their undead without bodies or bones.”
“We can’t just destroy the forges?” Jheraal asked. She’d settled her horned helm over her head, and her voice was distorted through its visor. Somehow, that felt more familiar than the Hellknight’s unfiltered voice did.
Velenne’s black pearl earrings swayed as she shook her head. “It would take far too long, and I’m not certain that we could do it anyway. This entire fortress rose overnight from ashes. Its rooms and furnishings seem to change as easily as pieces of a dream. Gholam wrote that, and we’ve seen it. If the citadel is shaped by the lictor’s thoughts, how could we hope to destroy the smithy? We could tear the whole thing down, walk around a corner, and return to find it standing again, untouched.”
“But you think we can destroy the bones?”
“Yes. They’re real relics of real lives, not of this place. They came from elsewhere, and they can be destroyed, just as all the lesser undead we’ve encountered could be. Destroyed, and forgotten.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Ederras said. “And then we’ll go after the lictor.”
“Must we?” Velenne ticked a fingernail over the wands sheathed at her hip. “We rescued the children you were so worried about. If you want to retrieve the devilheart chain, I may be able to find it more directly. It may be in the paravicar’s keeping, or in the castle treasury. Confronting the lictor is likely to be very dangerous, and very expensive, for no particular gain. He’s a graveknight. He cannot die. The gods have cursed Lictor Shokneir, and we cannot rob gods of their vengeance.”
“No,” Jheraal agreed, her words hollow through her helm, “but even if you can take us directly to the devilheart chain, the graveknights are likely to be defending it, or else they’ll attack us to reclaim it. We’ll have to fight them anyway, in that case. Better that we choose the field and come to it prepared.”
The Hellknight turned toward the door. “But beyond that, Lictor Shokneir broke the law. You’re probably right that we can’t steal the gods’ vengeance. Fine. We won’t. But we won’t let it stop us, either. I’m a Hellknight, and I have my duty.” She hefted her mace. “That the lictor has to pay the gods’ price doesn’t mean he won’t pay mine.”