Jheraal crushed a path through dozens of Lictor Shokneir’s servants to reach the inner sanctum. Red-eyed wights, zombies clad in shags of rotting skin, unthinking skeletons who tottered into her mace’s arc and grinned as its spikes smashed them back to oblivion—all roamed the halls of Citadel Gheisteno, and all stood in her way. She destroyed them without emotion, leaving her companions to finish off the stragglers.
It wasn’t fighting. Not really. It was just cutting a path through tangling obstructions, like so many jungle vines. She wanted the master, not these mindless thralls. But as Jheraal hewed a road through the groaning dead, her temper began to rise.
That Lictor Shokneir had subjugated so many lesser undead, binding their shells of skin and bone to serve in the place of the living, was just another confirmation that he had become a hollow mockery of a Hellknight. Only one who was unable to command the allegiance of worthy soldiers would resort to using these miserable things.
It wasn’t the worst of his sins. But it was another on the list.
The castle was full of them. Jheraal bashed her shield into the snarls of ghouls on the curving stairs that rose from the great hall to the upper chambers. She kicked the shambling corpses of wanderers and failed fortune-seekers off the catwalks that skirted those chambers, letting their bodies smash on the paving stones below like hideous, overripe fruit.
Her arms ached from the weight of mace and shield. Sweat soaked the linen shirt under her cuirass and dripped salt needles into her eyes. But the dead kept coming, wave after wave, and Jheraal broke them without mercy.
Twice she had to let Ederras or Velenne step to the front when their group was attacked by shadows or wailing ghosts, whose insubstantial forms were not so easy to strike down with her mace. Those added to the smoldering burn of her anger. Incorporeality was a coward’s refuge. The use of such creatures was another strike against the lictor.
But none of his servants, whether made of flesh or bone or spectral misery, could stop or even slow the Hellknight and her companions, until the hellspawn came.
There were only five of them, and they weren’t outfitted for battle. Two gripped rust-spotted daggers, one wielded a short sword that he held like a club, and the other two had nothing but sticks. None wore any armor. Instead, like the hellspawn whose hearts had been taken in Westcrown, they were dressed in a motley assortment of clothes that spoke to very different walks of life: tanner, dyer, rose-robed priestess of Shelyn, and a man who’d been caught in a purple silk nightshirt. Jheraal had no idea who that one had been, other than someone with money and questionable taste.
All of their clothes were at least sixty or seventy years out of date. They’d been dead a while. But there was one more in their little group, and that one hadn’t been dead for long.
That one was the little girl from the bathhouse in Rego Cader, with the froglike skin and the tympanums on either side of her head. She wore the same plain smock she’d had on when Jheraal found her, and the ring with the little yellow stones sparkled on her hand, even though both ring and dress had been returned to her family after she’d died. There hadn’t been anything else to give them.
The garments she wore now, Jheraal guessed, had to be illusions of some kind. Perhaps they were figments of the little girl’s memory, just as Citadel Gheisteno seemed in some ways to be a creation of Lictor Shokneir’s.
Her body seemed real enough, though. She looked solid, not like the shadows and spectres they’d fought on their way to the inner sanctum. All the hellspawn seemed to be corporeal. More than that, there was an intelligence and awareness in their eyes that none of the skeletons or zombies had possessed.
They’re really in there. Jheraal wasn’t looking at mindless husks. Those people were still in their bodies. They still possessed their own thoughts, memories, and souls.
All they lacked was their control.
There wasn’t any obvious sign of that. In a few investigations, Jheraal had run across people who were under the influence of magical compulsion. Sometimes it was blatant: glazed eyes, monotonous speech, jerky movements. Other times, there were no visible cues, and in a few instances the victims themselves hadn’t realized that their wills had been subverted.
The hellspawn were somewhere in the latter group. They appeared to be ordinary, living people. Nothing about them suggested that they were undead, and nothing suggested that they had been subjugated by some spell of control.
Nothing, except the fact that they stood arrayed against her in Citadel Gheisteno, armed with sticks and scraps of rusted metal against three professional killers.
Jheraal raised her mace, but she couldn’t bring herself to take a step toward them. Even after Paralictor Leroung had used those hostage children to make her falter and fail, even when she knew the hellspawn before her had been driven there to test her will—even then, with her own life on the line, she couldn’t do it. Her muscles refused to move.
If only they’d been more obviously undead, it would have been easy to smash them aside. If it had only been the adults, her discipline could have carried her through. She knew what had to be done. But Jheraal couldn’t bring herself to wield steel against that little girl, not when she’d seen the terror in those eyes. She’s in there.
Fire stole the choice from her. A gust of heated wind blew past, carrying a ball of flame the size of a marble. Jheraal had just enough time to register the flash of warmth through her armor before the budding fireball reached the hellspawn and exploded into black-edged crimson.
“Keep moving,” Velenne said, putting away her wand.
“You couldn’t have—” Ederras sounded stunned more than angry.
“No.” The diabolist walked through the lingering devastation of her spell. Flames licked at the heels of her boots and reflected from the chain panels of her dress. Scorched bits of cloth tumbled across the stones. There wasn’t anything else left. “No, I couldn’t have done that some gentler, kinder way. That was the whole point. If it upsets you, I suggest you direct your objections to Lictor Shokneir. He’s the one who put those hellspawn there. He doomed them. Not me.”
Jheraal tore her eyes away from the blackened burst of stone. Her fists clenched as she watched Velenne stride so casually through the carnage. That child …
But what could she have done? What could any of them have done? Velenne was right: their deaths had been ordained by Lictor Shokneir, not her. All the diabolist had done was destroy their enslaved husks, just as all three of them had destroyed countless undead in the castle already.
It was the same, and it wasn’t. What was in those husks had been different. The skeletons and moaning corpses they’d fought had been utterly mindless. The ghouls and shadows had been so twisted by their transformations that only madness and hatred remained in their hearts. The hellspawn, by contrast, had retained their own identities. Jheraal was sure of it. And that was a worse crime by far.
What was the point of enslaving ordinary hellspawn? She had imagined that the devilheart chain would transmute its captives to ravening fiends, granting them strength and fierceness far beyond anything they’d had in life. Undeath transformed people into all manner of monsters, and Jheraal had thought that the Order of the Crux must surely have done something similar with the hellspawn they took.
But they hadn’t. Those people had just been … people. The only extraordinary thing about them was the extent to which they were controlled. That, and their apparent immunity to age. Judging by their clothing, all the adult hellspawn had been taken before the Order of the Scourge had stamped out Citadel Gheisteno. Yet Jheraal would have wagered every clipped copper she owned that none of them had aged a day since their hearts were stolen.
Is that all he wants from us? Eternal servitude?
At the end of the hall, a carved arch framed an unlit spiral stair. Skulls and chains and broken stones were sculpted into the soot-clad wall. Letting her infernal sight pierce the darkness, Jheraal led the way up.
A whisper of ghostly sound reached her as she came to the first landing. A conversation, hushed, intent. Two male voices, one low and urgent, trying to persuade. The other angry, disgusted, struggling to restrain it. Jheraal couldn’t make out any words, only fragmentary noises, but the emotions were overpowering.
That was the only warning she had before the memories of the dead overtook her.
“… to finally bring down House Thrune.” Two men, both in Hellknight armor, walked side by side up the torchlit stairs. Two remembered voices, one urgent, one angry.
“It’s a lost cause, Behrion. They’ve won. Your own father signed the peace accords two months ago—have you forgotten? The only ones left fighting are out in the colonies, or beggar-bandits in the woods. It’s over.”
“It can’t be over while injustice reigns.”
A snort. The other man’s face was vague, little more than an olive-tinted smudge in his Crux plate, as if whoever was remembering this scene didn’t care to recall him too closely. “They’ve been ratified by every church and temple in Cheliax. Even the Iomedaeans have recognized Queen Abrogail’s authority. Every major noble house has laid down its swords or been destroyed, one or the other. The Scourge and the Rack have conceded, too. Abrogail Thrune is the lawful queen of Cheliax. That means she decides what’s justice in the empire. She decides the law. Not us. I don’t like it any more than you do, but we enforce the law. We don’t invent it.”
“We don’t abandon it, either. We don’t let devils rule over our land.”
“Even if I agreed with you—and I don’t—there’s nothing we can do. We don’t have the numbers to take on an empire.”
“We don’t have to.” Excitement in that voice. A remembered thrill of possibility. The imperative need to make the other man understand. “What the paravicar’s doing—”
“It’s a monstrosity. Madness. Lictor Shokneir has to stop her. Turning people—”
“Hellspawn.”
“Fine. Turning hellspawn into thralls? Tearing their hearts out, destroying their bodies, binding them into—”
“Safety. Safety, Korvai. They can’t hurt anyone once they’re bound. They can’t succumb to the evil in their natures. And they won’t ever propagate their taint. Their cursed bloodlines end there. It’s brilliant. The lictor is a visionary, and Paravicar Leroung’s a genius for finding a way to make it happen.”
“Then why are they hiding it?” The blurred man stopped on the stairs. Grabbed a remembered wrist. “Why is this all such a secret? I’ll tell you: because it’s a horror. If the world knew what they were doing—and that’s even without the assassinations—”
A flare of anger at the presumption of the gesture, another at the continued argument. The refusal to appreciate a masterful strategy. “The inspiration.”
“Inspiration to purges and massacres.”
“Inspiration to throw off the yoke of House Thrune.”
“Are you that blind? All this is going to accomplish will be the wasted deaths of innocents. This isn’t what we’re for, Behrion. This isn’t—”
A knife. The memory of blood. So hot, and then so cold.
Sadness. Just a little whisper of that, almost forgotten in the years since. Mostly satisfaction. That he had not failed when tested. That something as ephemeral as friendship had not held him back from destiny.
“Lead in life, or inspire in death,” he told the corpse. And picked up the limp weight of his friend—paralictor, a little voice suggested, he was a paralictor, his murder at the hands of Thrune agents will inspire the rank and file—and resumed his march toward greatness.
“Are you all right?” Ederras grasped her shoulder, returning Jheraal to the present.
“I’m fine.” She swallowed thickly, wishing for water to rinse the taste of bile from her throat. “It was a … a memory, I think. The Master of Blades murdering a comrade—a Crux paralictor, a friend of his—and blaming the death on House Thrune to inspire his subordinates to continue a war they couldn’t win.”
“They did hate us unreasonably,” Velenne said from the back, sounding bored and faintly annoyed. The boredom was a pretense, the annoyance probably wasn’t. “Always a poor position to take. Hatred drives people into all manner of stupidities. Or, in their case, into cursed oblivion, which might be worse. Are you well enough to continue?”
“Yes. I—yes.” She shrugged Ederras’s grip away, not unkindly, and resumed her march up the stairs. “I can go on.”
“A moment, please.” Velenne glanced upward. “We’re nearly to the top. It won’t be much farther. I’ll call the rest of my allies now.”
This time Ederras didn’t protest, and the diabolist worked her spells with the fluid ease of long practice. Devils clad in fur and fire and plates of ghastly, carapace-like bone emerged into their world, bowed their awful heads to Velenne, and swore words of fealty in hellish tongues. Three iron-barded warhounds and a devil of knife-edged bone formed a phalanx on the stairs around her, and Jheraal wondered whether it was mere accident that, in protecting her, the fiends cut their summoner off from the paladin.
Right now, she didn’t care. As far as the Hellknight was concerned, the devils were walking weapons, no more and no less. She only hoped they’d be effective ones. Putting them from her mind, Jheraal marched on.
At the second landing, the haunting whispers returned. This time she heard a woman’s voice, cruel and imperious, familiar even in its distorted echoes. Paravicar Leroung. Not a voice Jheraal was likely to forget.
The other voices were weaker and more garbled, not as strongly retained by whatever resonances of pain kept the paravicar’s memories here. A man’s sobs, a baby’s cries, and a deep, rumbling baritone that carried such a commanding presence that it might have been the voice of the fortress itself.
“—serves two purposes,” she was saying, with a trace of pride at the efficiency of her design. “First, it preserves the flesh indefinitely. No aging, no decay. The bodies don’t even exist until called upon, at which time they can be reconstituted within moments. You can hold your agents until they’re forgotten and anonymous, or use them immediately if you want them to be recognized.”
A rumble of approbation. As much as anyone ever got from Lictor Shokneir.
Encouraged, she continued. “Second, it allows maximum discretion. The hearts appear to be mere jewels. In their mounts, they might simply be a … a pleasant decoration, of sorts. Those who need to know the truth can, of course, be made aware. But as far as the rank and file is concerned, the hellspawn go into the dungeons as prisoners, and are duly convicted and executed—there’s no connection between them and the ornaments in the upper quarters.”
“Good.” Not a trace of a smile, and no warmth in that cold iron voice, but she felt his approval nonetheless. “Show me the extent of your control.”
“It’s absolute.” She sent one of the recent acquisitions forward. He was a shoemaker from Kintargo, part of an entire family of hellspawn that had been condemned to debtors’ prison for … some reason she’d forgotten. It wasn’t important. What was important was that the sallow-skinned hellspawn was a new father to a squalling blue-furred ball of infernal corruption. And that he loved that thing, somehow.
She’d taken the shoemaker’s heart yesterday. His body, too. The hellspawn man who stood before the lictor now, sweating sulfurous yellow rings through his shirt, was a captive to her chain. Paravicar Leroung held his heart in her hands, in the most literal sense.
The shoemaker had a knife. She’d given it to him. His baby lay at the lictor’s feet, crying through a mouthful of sharp blue teeth.
“Show me,” Lictor Shokneir said.
Jheraal kept walking, pulling herself blindly up the stairs, as the haunts of Citadel Gheisteno rolled out the bloody tapestry of their tale. She didn’t stop. If she stopped, Ederras would ask her what was wrong, or try to take the lead from her, and Jheraal couldn’t bear either of those things. The visions only seemed to affect the first person to walk into their grasp, and she could have demurred easily enough. But doing that would have been an admission of weakness, and an acknowledgement that the Crux knights could hurt her, and she refused to give them that.
A Hellknight feels no pain. And she was a Hellknight, truer than they were. She held to her pride, and she went on, showing nothing of the toll that each step took.
Maybe this was nothing compared to what the paladin had seen at the Worldwound. Maybe it was nothing compared to what Velenne had done in Pangolais.
But for Jheraal, who had previously thought herself inured to the evils that humans could do, it was horror and heartbreak, again and again. Years of it. Decades.
She had never imagined anyone could hate hellspawn so badly. Just for existing. She was used to the casual abuse and thoughtless slights that were part of everyday life in Cheliax, but this … this … this went beyond hatred and became something else. Something cold and unfeeling and brutal beyond measure. A crime no law had contemplated.
She had to see it, though. She had to know. Everything. Her people had suffered here, at the hands of those who called themselves her comrades. She would bear witness.
And as the final vision faded, she came to the top of the stairs.
In the room beyond, pale pink lights twinkled on the walls and ceiling in a celestial sphere of rosy stars. Iron chains held them in place, woven into interlocking designs, and although Jheraal couldn’t see them from here, she knew that each heart was mounted in a claw-pronged holder worked to resemble a Crux Hellknight’s gauntlet. She’d seen them in the visions, and knew what they were for.
Two figures stood before the lights, blotting them out with their bulk. One was Paravicar Leroung, tall and serene. The mane of ice-white hair that spilled from her helm glowed pink at its edges with the radiance of the trapped hearts behind her.
The other was darkness in iron.
“Lictor Shokneir!” Jheraal called. Her voice was strong and clear, as strong as it had ever been when she’d declared herself at an offender’s door. “I am Hellknight Jheraal of the Order of the Scourge. I’ve come to bring you to account for your crimes.”
The graveknight laughed. The chill thunder of it boomed from the floor and ceiling and walls all around them, sending the heart-gems shuddering in their claw-knotted web. Undead soldiers stood in armored ranks before him, the plates of their ruined mail sunk deep into soft, discolored flesh. Behind the lesser abominations, a phalanx of black-plated skeletons, identical to those that had defended the Master of Blades, clattered their spears against round shields. Yet the lictor’s amused rumble rose above their clamor effortlessly, more a force of nature than a voice. “And what crimes are those?”
Ederras and Velenne had come up the stairs behind her, the diabolist’s fiends mirroring the lictor’s undead. Jheraal took a step in, allowing them space to fan out to either side. “You stand accused of murdering eight citizens of Westcrown, and of conspiring to murder a Hellknight of the Order of the Rack.”
“Eight?” Lictor Shokneir’s fiery eyes flared in hellish mirth behind his visored helm. He thrust his great flail up to the innumerable hearts that glowed in the shadows around him. Hundreds, at the least. More hundreds than she wanted to imagine. “Eight deaths are a terrible tragedy, indeed.”
She ignored his words as she had ignored those of countless other criminals before him. “You are accused of assaulting agents of the throne in the course of their lawful duties. You are accused of kidnapping, theft, and unauthorized uses of necromancy. You are accused of the hiring of assassins. What say you to these charges?”
“I say that you have come to die a fool’s death in service of no legitimate cause.” Lictor Shokneir strode forward, scarlet flames igniting about his flail, wreathing its three spiked heads in haloes of unholy fire.
Jheraal nodded solemnly, as if the lictor had confessed his guilt. “Then you do not deny your crimes. I have seen the evidence with my own eyes.”
“I deny nothing,” the graveknight said, and fire roared from the flail, engulfing Jheraal and the devil beside her in its fury.
The devil’s scream was as piercing as an icicle driven into her eardrums. Knotting her jaw against that cry of rage and the lictor’s flames alike, Jheraal charged forward. Black fire licked along her scarred platemail. Her hair crisped and smoked inside her helm, filling her nostrils with its acridity. But Velenne’s spell kept the worst of the heat from her, and what was left she could ignore. She could. A Hellknight feels no pain.
Even as the lictor’s flames roared toward them, Velenne hurled her own opening blast. Where the graveknight’s magic was black-streaked orange, the diabolist’s erupted into solar incandescence, filling the chamber with the blinding white-gold of the sun at high noon. Her spell obliterated the lesser undead instantly, vaporizing the wights and ghouls before any of them could raise a hand. Only the graveknights and their spear-wielders remained, and the latter were visibly damaged, their bones eroded like icicles after a warm spring morning.
Better odds. But for how long? The rosy hearts in the iron-chained nets were twinkling more rapidly now, their lights flickering and fluttering like startled fireflies. Jheraal had seen that magic in the visions, had watched it awaken in the paravicar’s hands. Soon their spirits will answer.
Ederras stepped out to the side, while Velenne’s bony devil came forward to crouch beside Jheraal, its ivory carapace reflecting the hearts’ glow in broken ripples. The diabolist herself stayed back, taking cover behind her trio of fiery-fanged warhounds. Paravicar Leroung, surrounded by a whirling cloud of ice motes, drew her scimitar as the remainder of her black-plated honor guard seethed around her. The armored skeletons marched forward, spears leveled in a black-tipped thicket.
The paladin stopped and raised his sword to meet them. A ring of holy fire burst outward around him, engulfing both the graveknights and their servants. Paravicar Leroung winced, squeezing her eyes shut until the white light passed, but the lictor never reacted. His mantle of fog and shadow roiled, then settled about his shoulders once more, seemingly undisturbed.
The skeletons weren’t harmed either. As one, they raised their round shields overhead, creating an interlocked canopy. The divine radiance hammered against it like hailstones against tile, somehow deflected by the skeletons’ shared defense.
Jheraal heard Ederras curse in frustration, but she didn’t have time to see what he did next. As the Hellknight charged forward, bulling through her companions’ magic, Lictor Shokneir swung his flail high at her head.
Jheraal ducked, letting the chains tick across the tip of her helm’s remaining horn. Fire seared the black iron, blistering her brow. She ignored it and closed in for a retaliatory strike. The lictor had better reach than she did, but if she could get inside the arc of that flail, the advantage would be hers.
All around the room, under the shimmer of their prisoned hearts, the shapes of hellspawn began to form. Tens of them, maybe hundreds. Far too many to fight, even if she’d had the will to cut those innocents down.
She didn’t. Instead she called to Velenne: “The hearts! Destroy the hearts!”
The diabolist didn’t ask questions. The black wand slid into her hand, and a ball of surging hellfire exploded into the web of hearts. Iron melted. Jewels shattered. A rain of sparkling fragments tumbled down amid the surge of attacking skeletons, losing their enchanted glow and becoming inert as glass even as they fell.
And a dozen hellspawn, their spirits freed, melted into the ether before they’d fully formed.
It didn’t stop the skeletons in their molten breastplates, though. The undead marched forward in unified ranks, and Velenne’s devils came to meet them with fiery breath and daggered teeth. Beyond them, Ederras squared off against Paravicar Leroung, calling out a challenge that was lost to the roar of Velenne’s fireball. His sword was a brand of white fire, so brilliant it seared afterimages into Jheraal’s eyes.
She looked away just in time. Lictor Shokneir reversed his flail’s arc and swung it back around, low this time, aiming for her side. Jheraal caught the blow on her shield, but it still knocked her back two steps and numbed her arm up to the shoulder. She grunted involuntarily, struggling to keep her feet. The graveknight was inconceivably strong.
“You can destroy all those hearts,” he said, “and it won’t matter. I’ll get more. You can destroy those, too, and I’ll replace them as well. Long after you’re dead and your name is forgotten, my work will go on.”
“It does matter.” She hit back, bashing something solid through his shroud of dark mist and the tattered cloak that flowed over his black plate. Impossible to tell whether it hurt him, though.
Another fireball erupted over her head, sending down another hail of glittering shards. “They’re free of you now. All those hellspawn you murdered and tried to enslave. They’re free. And every one of them mattered.”
“Others will replace them.” Lictor Shokneir struck directly at her face, and despite the spell that quickened her, Jheraal wasn’t fast enough to evade him. The best she could do was turn aside, raising her shield arm to guard her head. The flail’s spiked heads slammed into her shoulder, wracking her with unholy pain. For a while she lost the breath to make any retort, and could only fight furiously to hold her own against the graveknight.
Through the gaps of her visor, she could see Ederras dueling the paravicar in a swirl of ice and holy fire twenty feet away. The Crux knight cornered Ederras against a wall, her scimitar streaked red with frozen blood. A second wave of divine radiance emanated from the wounded paladin, driving the frost-cloaked paravicar back with a howl of pain before she could finish him. Although the blessed light engulfed Lictor Shokneir as well, the fiery eyes in his helm never flickered.
Across the room, a hellhound fell to a coordinated series of spear thrusts, even as its companion tore apart the skeletal warriors with teeth longer than Jheraal’s fingers. With the last of the nearby skeletons reduced to a rubble of bones in its armor, the hellhound turned to Lictor Shokneir and breathed a roaring rush of fire—but its infernal flames did nothing to the graveknight. Not a thread of his black cloak curled in the devil’s breath. And then the remaining spear-wielders closed on the hellhound, stabbing and thrusting, and it was lost to Jheraal’s sight.
Velenne had nearly finished demolishing the hanging web of hellspawn’ hearts. After detonating a final fireball into the last of them, she slid the black wand away and removed another of opalescent glass. She leveled it at the lictor, uttering something the Hellknight couldn’t make out. Jheraal felt the small hairs on her neck rise as magic gathered in the room, closing a vise of unseen force about the graveknight … and then it vanished, breaking apart before it could take its final form. Somehow, Shokneir had disrupted the diabolist’s spell without raising a finger.
The skeletal devil leaped at his back, striking at the graveknight with claws and teeth and a barbed scorpion tail. Its talons tore into the lictor’s armor, pulling his attention—and his anger—away from Jheraal.
Not for long. Lictor Shokneir drove his flail into the devil’s carapace again and again, each of his swings delivered with brutal force. The fiend fought back, tearing at his armor and stabbing at his cloak, but it couldn’t hope to match the lictor’s deadly, disciplined fury. Within moments it went down, shrilling in agony. Its body broke into pearlescent shards on impact, scattering ivory plates across the flagstones.
A heavier thud made Jheraal steal a glance to the side, already dreading what she might see. Paravicar Leroung stood over Ederras, who had dropped to one knee. The paladin’s sword, its radiance dim as a crushed firefly’s, had fallen just beyond the grasp of his failing fingers. His surcoat was white with frost and red with blood, and his head hung low with the pain of a dozen wounds.
“An end to a useless line,” the paravicar said disdainfully, kicking his blade away as she raised her own. She stooped, curling a gloved fist under his chin to force his dazed gaze up to hers. “I want you to look at me while you die.”
“I don’t.” Cold as Velenne’s voice was, it carried an anger Jheraal had never heard before. Black fire, tongued with crimson, surrounded the diabolist in a mantle of infernal wrath, rising over the back of her head in a ruff as she strode forward. Her face was a mask of pale gold, her eyes alight with reflected hellfire. In that instant, the living woman seemed a more profane embodiment of unholy power than the dead one.
That’s what will save him? Jheraal thought, stupefied, as she reeled away from another of the lictor’s fiery swings and countered with a desperate, clumsy blow at his knees. She’d known the diabolist stood high in her house, but she’d never seen Velenne drop her cultured pretense so completely to show what that meant. Now she had, and the sheer force of malevolence that surrounded her made it seem impossible that the lady was mortal blood and bone, not a fiend in flesh.
Velenne lifted her hand, and the hellfire that surrounded her leaped into her grasp. It burst from her palm in a black and red ray, shrieking with the voices of a thousand damned souls. The unholy fire slammed into Paravicar Leroung, knocking her back into the wall and melting the spikes of her half-helm. Liquid steel ran down her face, sloughing skin and bubbled flesh off the paravicar’s bones.
The diabolist stalked after her spell, ignoring the stench of burning blood and steaming metal that filled its wake. The remaining skeletons left the last hellhound’s corpse and marched toward her, drumming their spears against their shields, but Velenne never turned from her single-minded pursuit of Paravicar Leroung. She stepped in front of Ederras, blocking him from the graveknight’s gaze.
“I could take your soul.” Fury tightened the diabolist’s words. “Had I come on my own, I would take it. I would offer your wretched essence to the dukes of Hell, and they would vie for the privilege of torturing you into eternity. But instead, I’ll show you mercy you don’t deserve, because for his sake I swore that I would refrain from such measures.” She nodded slightly at Ederras, her eyes still locked on the paravicar. “We of House Thrune hold to our bargains. And I, who care nothing for it, have more honor than you ever did.”
Jheraal didn’t catch the paravicar’s reply. A searing sweep of the lictor’s flail forced her to stumble away, using every scrap of her remaining strength to keep her shield up against him. But she saw the dark flash of hellfire scream past, and she smelled its sulfur, and she heard the sudden tolling of the bells that announced Paravicar Leroung’s death.
And, a moment later, the clangor of bone and steel as the undead soldiers swept over Velenne. Eldritch energy crackled in Jheraal’s ears, echoing in the steely confines of her helm, but she could see nothing of the diabolist’s last stand.
Lictor Shokneir laughed, a sound like a distant rockslide, and pressed his attack on Jheraal. She defended herself as best she could, but she was winded and weary and mortal, and he was none of those things. The graveknight fought on endlessly, his stamina as eternal as his false life.
Fatigue weighted Jheraal’s mace and dragged down her shield, and finally she failed to stop him. She saw the flail’s glowing red ball come in, flashing through the citadel’s darkness like a three-headed comet against a starless sky, and tried to pivot away—but she was too tired. Too injured. Too slow.
The lictor’s flail crashed into the armor over her left thigh. Tendrils of dark energy crackled over the steel, sucking life from the flesh beneath.
Jheraal’s leg went numb instantly. She fell forward as it buckled under her weight. The Hellknight threw her shield up to block the deathblow that would surely be coming, even as she knew it didn’t really matter. Crippled, she couldn’t evade him, and she had no allies left.
“Spells and swords and proud declarations of virtue.” The lictor’s inhuman voice roiled with contempt. He loomed over her. Darkness filled her dizzy vision, punctuated by a pair of fiery eyes: the last sight she might ever see. “Do you imagine you’re anything I haven’t seen before? Haven’t destroyed before?”
“You never destroyed us,” Jheraal spat back. The cold in her leg spread up to her side, stealing away pain and life alike. She fumbled her visor open with a gauntleted hand, showing her hellspawn face. Her eyes burned gold in the shadows, nearly as bright as the lictor’s own. She bared her teeth, white and sharp. “You never could. Don’t you understand that? I’m hellspawn, and I’m of the Scourge, and my kind and my order have flourished in the world. While you—the three of you—surround yourselves with old bones and pretend you still matter. But you’re chained here, alone. Because you’ve already lost. You lost before we set foot in your citadel. And you can’t change that, any more than you can die. You can’t erase us. All you’ve done is convince me that I don’t want to erase myself.”
The lictor’s hatred bought her a moment of crystal stillness. His shock that a hellspawn would defy him so openly bought another.
And then she didn’t need any more, because Velenne—drained, drawn, and bleeding badly from a laceration across her temple, but very much alive—hammered him with a volley of razor-sharp diamond shards that tore into the graveknight’s armor and drove him briefly, fatally off balance.
Jheraal dropped her mace, letting it dangle from the loop that secured its haft to her wrist. Lunging up on her good knee, she grabbed the clasp of Lictor Shokneir’s cloak in one hand and his shoulder with another. With a twist and a heave, she pulled the overbalanced graveknight down and threw him onto his back, flat on the ground.
He stared at her with absolute defiance, completely unafraid, even as she put a boot on his armored chest. His flaming flail, without the leverage to swing properly, lay limp in his hand. “All you’ve done today is meaningless. I cannot die.”
“Your death isn’t the meaning.” Jheraal stripped off her helm and cast it aside, showing her horns and her scales and her inhuman eyes. She felt his loathing and pressed harder on her boot, crushing his armor under her weight. It was the crudest kind of authority, but she didn’t care. It was authority, and she wanted him to feel it. Wanted him to understand, at the end, just how low a hellspawn had brought him. “Your destruction is. I know what you did, and I know why you did it. I know how much you hated hellspawn, and how you tried to make the world see us as monsters. But you were the monsters, weren’t you? All along, it was you. And I know how badly you wanted to keep that secret. How you lied to the men and women who died under your command.
“I know those things, and I’m going to destroy everything you planned for. Your heresies will be announced to the world. No more secrecy to protect the honor of House Khollarix or House Leroung, or even House Celverian. No more hushed whispers to hide the enormity of what you plotted against House Thrune. Everything comes into the light. Everything.“
The graveknight’s eyes dimmed for a moment, as if a cold wind had blown across those embers. Maybe that was a blink. Maybe it was defeat. She didn’t know.
“I will return,” he said.
“That doesn’t matter.” Jheraal gripped her mace, its haft solid and certain in her hands. “The law is the same for everyone. Even you. And the sentence for murder is death.”
The mace came down.
And the bells of Citadel Gheisteno sang their deafening song. Tolling, tolling, tolling. Crying long into the endless dark, as their master’s spirit fled back to join them.