Enna was not in a great mood. She'd been in shitty moods before, but this was definitely a new low.

Being a prisoner, for starters, was not exactly in her emotional color wheel. She'd spent her youth and adolescence free of need (if not exactly free of want) and had until very recently lived an adult life relatively unblemished by labor or hardship. In short, Enna was not terribly accustomed to not getting her way, and such a life experience had prepared her very poorly for being Gentry's captive.

He hadn't been ungentle with her, to be certain, but it was very clear he cared not at all for her comfort or contentment; she'd been given no food, barely any water, and no access to any sanitary facilities (which, she admitted, might be because she had tried furiously to escape repeatedly and Gentry was probably unwilling to take his eyes off her for long), conditions which were doing very little to enhance her calm.

He also hadn't bothered to bind her hands at first, but after a large number of attempts to hit, club, kick, bite, or otherwise assault him he'd given up and simply summoned a set of wrist and ankle cuffs, like convicts on TV wore. She could still move around, but her ability to attack was fairly limited (not that she hadn't tried to choke him with the chains, of course), and experience had shown her that trying to run away was useless since Gentry always turned up wherever she managed to escape to. Probably that "Entanglement" stuff Orton's always going on about, she'd thought sourly after some contemplation. It had, in short, been a very trying twenty-two hours, especially the freezing and uncomfortable flight to someplace named "Ivalo" in a country she'd never even heard of followed by an even more uncomfortable trip in the trunk of a car that Gentry had stolen. Now she was standing, shivering and vaguely delirious with sleep deprivation, on an unknown street in an unknown town somewhere very, very cold. The sky was pitch-black, despite her watch telling her that it was just past three in the afternoon. She started to yawn, drifting.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," said Gentry mildly, appearing out of the shadows to her right. "Yawning counts as vocalization. Make a single sound, and you'll never need a hat again." Enna stifled her yawn and glared at him.

You suck, she thought at him fiercely, you're a human vacuum cleaner. You suck so much that you would single-handedly win the World Sucking Competition. Regrettably, Gentry didn't seem to notice her ire -- he mostly seemed consumed with poking around at the base of a large statue and muttering to himself.

"It's supposed to be here somewhere... bugger me, how many statues are there in this park?" Muttering, he strolled back and forth across the black, freezing grass, apparently unconcerned with any need for illumination, while Enna shivered and tried not to pass out. Eventually, however, he made a satisfied noise and gestured to her. "This way, my dear. Mind your step, by the way -- there's a bit of ice."

Enna stumbled after him, discovering almost at the last moment that he was leading her down into a hidden stairwell beneath a large stone statue; the inside was, if anything, even darker than the outdoors, and she nearly fell several times, with only Gentry's surprisingly gentle grip to steady her. Dazed, she wondered if he would let her sleep if she fell into his arms, then flared with rage when she realized what she'd thought. You bastard, I'll see you burn for this, she seethed.

Eventually, she staggered into an open space, dimly lit by silvery light; it took her a moment to realize that the light was coming from a great pool of water at the center of a huge cavern, crossed by a thin stone bridge. Barely two feet across, it stretched straight out for nearly fifty feet across the tarn -- at first she thought there was a large platform in the center, but her wavering and blurry vision eventually revealed it to be a second bridge, set in a ring about halfway between the pool's center and its circumference. Doggedly, she strove to stand upright, but her focus wavered; it seemed as though the figure at the other end of the bridge appeared out of the darkness like a shadow.

"Hope you had lots of trouble finding the place," growled Orton, stepping onto the thin stone walkway. Gentry, nodding, began to cross the bridge from his end as well, holding Enna before him like a shield. Enna nearly went into the water several times, but each time he managed to keep her on the path.

When each of them reached the edge of the inner circumference, they paused. Gentry, clearing his throat, spoke the words of the binding. "Minä vannotan itseäni kertomaan totuuden enkä vahingoita ketään," he invoked smoothly. Orton did the same, then the two of them faced each other across the black water. There were a few moments of silence.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"I expect," began Gentry after a short while, "that you shall attempt to extract some promises from me."

Orton nodded. "That's the whole point of this place. Neither of us can lie, or harm anyone else within the circle. We make a deal, we make the exchange, everybody walks out of here."

Gentry looked pained. "My dear fellow, that takes all the fun out of things." You sick fucker, thought Enna grimly.

"Yeah, I'm a real killjoy like that." Orton started ticking off points on his fingers. "Swear you'll remove all enchantments and bindings from both of us, that you'll free and release her upon receiving the Eye, not follow or attack us upon leaving this place, and never harm another innocent."

"Excuse me?" Gentry looked curiously at Orton. "The first three are sensible, I suppose from your point of view -- but the fourth? Wilkerson, you must be barking mad."

Orton threw up his hands in exasperation. "Are you kidding me? You're so attached to your whole Satan-worshipping murder-hobo spree that you'd ruin your own plan over your inalienable right to be a slaughtering dickhead?"

"You know nothing of what you speak." The violence in Gentry's voice stopped Orton's tirade cold. "The deep irony, you meddlesome clown, is that I could abide by your simpering vow and carry on unhindered -- no innocent has ever met harm at my hands, because no man is free of sin. How dare you mock and slander me in such a way." His clenched fists trembled with rage.

Orton blinked. "Wait, what the fuck?" This makes no sense. The Gentry I encountered before was always pretty open about his depravity. He shook his head slightly, trying to figure out what was happening. "You think you're righteous?"

Gentry took a step forward. "I know that I am. In service of my goals -- goals, I would wager, you could not begin to understand -- any sacrifice is worth the cost." Enna scrambled, trying to keep her balance -- in another second, Gentry would force her into the water. She choked back an inarticulate cry of protest.

"Whoa, stop!" Orton quickly drew the Eye out of his pocket and pulled back its brown woolen covering, revealing it to Gentry as he held it out to one side. "One more step, and it goes into the drink." The two of them faced each other, glowering, for several tense seconds before Gentry stepped back -- Enna heaved out a deep breath, trembling and queasy, as firmer ground reappeared under her feet. She tried to collapse, but Gentry held her upright.

Eventually, Gentry sighed. "Very well. I do so swear."

"Nice try," Orton shot back. "Say each oath in full."

Gentry rolled his eyes exasperatedly. "I swear that I shall, upon receiving the Eye of Alma Mayasha, remove all enchantments and bindings from this young lady and release her freely into your custody. After all of us leave this place, I shall not follow or attack you. More than that, you have no right to ask me."

Orton winced, but nodded. "Fair enough. I guess if I can't talk you out of being a homicidal maniac, I'll settle for a temporary truce." He began to walk carefully around the circumference of the inner ring; Gentry, keeping pace with him, did the same, until they were both facing each other across the expanse of the luminous water. Carefully, Orton placed the Eye onto the stone; Gentry likewise lowered Enna and her bindings until she was sitting, half-drunk with fatigue, on the bridge. Orton and Gentry continued to circle each other, keeping the maximum possible distance between them, until they had made a full circuit of the inner ring.

As Gentry reached his prize, Orton sprang forward and began tugging at Enna's bindings; the instant Gentry's fingers made contact with the Eye, Enna's cuffs fell away, and Orton whispered a word of power into her ear. Blazing wakefulness surged into her brain and body, and she felt the Binding of Dumah tatter and fray as the enchantment was sundered by Gentry's oath. Drawing in a huge breath, she prepared a furious shout, an invocation that would shatter his bones like glass. She was never, however, able to utter it.

As his bindings fell away, Gentry's prepared spells took effect; he accelerated once more, giving him ample time to raise the Eye and invoke its power as he drew out the sealed box, with only one layer of wrapping remaining on it. A dark maroon light bloomed around him as he shouted the invocation; the last layer of the warding fell away and began to drift slowly through the dream-thick air as the contents of the box were revealed.

To the untrained eye, it might have been a key from an ancient piano: bone-white, about two inches long, and vaguely rectangular in shape. An anatomist or mortician might have recognized it as the core bone of a human sternum -- the breastbone which joins the ribs together -- and an archaeologist, given sufficient radiocarbon dating tools and equal servings of both presumption and incaution, might have placed its age at around a millennium. But the true value was not in the bone's taxonomy or provenance, but rather the sigil carved into its inner surface: a looping, swirling glyph of teardrop-like strokes in a vaguely starlike shape. The bone hung in the air, weighty with power, as Gentry reached out to grasp it.

Orton, his sight beyond sight screaming with inchoate threat-warnings, entered the accelerated frame a split-second later; spotting the contents of the box, he blanched white. "DON'T DO IT!!" he shouted, but already he could see it was too late. With a flare of white light, the bone settled into Gentry's hand; and without an instant of hesitation, Gentry pressed it to his own chest.