“They were removed from the prisons two and a half days ago, according to Ialdi’s log books,” Hector finished up his recounting of events with Raesh standing off to the side, looking bored.
Jesne had returned just shortly after them and given her account first– she hadn’t run into any trouble at the Cathedral, though she had had a near miss when it came to avoiding Dahl. By the time she had gotten to the dungeons, Keric hadn’t been there, and upon exploring more thoroughly and without prying eyes, she was able to find evidence of a trap door, though hadn’t had the time to locate its trigger. Either way, we had a very good bet as to where my team currently was being held.
“So, what, the plan is to storm the Cathedral now?” Raesh asked somewhat wryly. “I’m sure that’ll go just great.”
“In a manner of speaking,” I admitted openly. “Jes,” I wasn’t sure when exactly we had gotten on good enough terms for me to be calling her by a nickname, but something about the fact that she was committing treason and heresy for me and my team seemed to have accelerated the friendship process, “how far do you think you could get us?”
“Them? All the way to the dungeons. You? Not unless you lighten up about your religion very, very fast.”
Hector and I both snorted in amusement at her phrasing.
“Maybe we could disguise him somehow?” Hector asked, tilting his head at me.
“What about with wraps?” Raesh suggested. “The Keeper said that men had come to take the prisoners wrapped in cloth, as though for a burial. If you did that, it could serve as a mask, could it not?”
I grimaced slightly. “No, but it’s not technically breaking the edicts.” I thought about it for a moment. My true face wouldn’t be seen, so it didn’t break any laws of the Turyn that way, but there were certain orders and rituals when masks were to be switched out, and this wouldn’t be something I had made. Then again, it was a temporary measure just for a night, to save the lives of those who had pledged themselves to me. I was pretty sure Priest would have allowed it if I had asked.
Though he wasn’t here to ask anymore anyway.
“That should be fine,” I conceded. “So long as it’s workable?” I looked at Jesne.
“I wasn’t involved with any of that, but I have seen people clothed as you’ve described. I think they were being called loyalists, which I thought was strange at the time.” She sighed heavily. “Loyal to Dahl, is likely the true meaning. Regardless, that should work. Everyone avoided looking at them much or speaking to them. I don’t think we’ll be questioned.”
“Unless we run into Dahl himself,” I brought up the topic we had all been avoiding.
“Unless we run into Dahl,” Jesne agreed. “I don’t know how we could make sure to get him out of the Cathedral in a way that wouldn’t jeopardize us and everything we’re trying to do. Subterfuge is our only advantage here.”
I turned to Hector. “Do you think Tiana meant what she said when she offered to help?”
“You want to use her as a distraction for Dahl? That could ger her killed.”
“Dahl is still maintaining a persona; he can’t just murder the Keeper of Ildanach in cold blood and walk away.”
“What if he has Rufais’ ear?”
“First of all, Rufais wouldn’t order her dead on someone else’s word; that’s giving up far too much power for his tastes. Second of all, if she was to be executed, it wouldn’t be for at least a little time down the road, long enough for us to do something about it, especially once we get my team back. And, third of all, she can take a little heat for a little while and deal,” I finished bluntly.
Hector gave me a slightly disapproving look but didn’t argue with any of my points. “I’ll go give her another visit then. We going under the cover of night?”
“It’s night now, and Ialdi doesn’t have a good reason to be calling Dahl in the middle of it. No, we’ll go closer to dawn, in the early fog. Have her tell him she needs to see him right away, as soon as it’s light. We’ll wait until we see him leave and then enter. We have to make it to the dungeons and figure out how to get inside the trap door.”
“And then walked back out again, which is the bigger concern for me,” Raesh pointed out.
“I don’t think we’re going to have issue with that. The catacombs underneath the Cathedral dungeons should link up with the rest of the network. If necessary, we’ll head out that way. If not, we can always wrap up the others just like me and walk right back out.”
“Assuming we work fast enough that the Inquisitor hasn’t returned,” Raesh said again, a reliable voice of simultaneous cynicism and reason it seemed.
“Well, most of this assumes that,” I said wryly. “If you expected a perfect, fool-proof plan, then I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place. But we always have some tricks up our sleeves.” I smiled at her somewhat coldly; she was well aware of a trick or two I had up mine. “Besides, you’re a Surgebinder. That has to count for something.”
“I’m a Surgebinder of Kalze. Do you know what that means?”
I paused and thought for a second. “Wind dude?”
“Yes. Not the best sort of ability for an underground dungeon. Stagnant air is far less receptive to my methods, and there’s a lot less versatility in a cramped space.”
“Well, you’re a creative and talented girl. I’m sure you’ll be fine. You’re also a woman of her word, I assume.”
Raesh scowled at me but said nothing more.
I turned back to the others. “So, we have a plan. Hector, you need to go talk to Ialdi, let her know her part in this. And thank her for me in advance.”
Hector smiled faintly and nodded.
“Jesne,” I continued, “you’re the only one of us who has actually seen the way these loyalists look. I need you to find some cloth that will mimic them and give me a little bit of direction as to how this is going to work so that I can do it myself.”
Jesne nodded. “I should be able to do that. They’re using common burial cloth, and I can get that from any of the chapels around here.”
“Perfect. Raesh, you say stagnant air is hard to move. How hard?”
She shrugged. “If a breezy day is like throwing a pebble, fresh air with natural currents is a handful of rocks, and underground air is more like a boulder.”
“But you can move a boulder.”
She sighed heavily. “A bit.”
“Well, practice lifting weights, or whatever it is you do. If all else fails, I want you to try and blow the trapdoor open from the inside.”
Raesh stared at me. “That’s almost certainly impossible.”
“It’s a backup plan of a backup plan. Practice anyway.”
She glared at me slightly before conceding with a shrug of her shoulders, apparently giving up. “And where should I be doing this practicing?”
“Right here is fine. I’ll take the washroom to wrap myself up once Jes comes back with the cloth. We’ll head out just before dawn and wait until we see the Inquisitor leave. Everyone clear on their duties?”
I got a set of affirmatives, Hector’s vocal and the other in the form of nods.
“Then let’s get to work.”
Everyone split up, Raesh heading to the kitchen at the back of the little hut to apparently garner whatever privacy she could.
I was honestly quite curious about how her surge would present itself and how the process worked, but she didn’t seem like she would welcome an audience, so I faced the other direction for the time being and went about cleaning my weapons, mostly so that I had something to do with my hands.
Teris? Where are you?
I had a request or two to make of him, hoping maybe he could scout out the Cathedral, keep an eye on Dahl, or maybe somehow get us some knowledge about the trap door trigger, though I didn’t figure the latter to be very likely.
Shockingly, there was no response.
I frowned heavily.
Teris?
I felt a sinking feeling in my gut. Teris had never not responded. Sometimes he told me he was busy, waved me off mentally, politely or more rudely, but he had never simply ignored me. I hadn’t known he was capable of ignoring me. I certainly couldn’t fully ignore either him or his master when they decided to speak to me.
Teris?!?
And then, something– faint and distant, as though he were both speaking from far away and deeply distracted. Busy. You’ll thank me later.
And then it was gone.
The panic rising in my gut dispersed slightly, though not in full.
What was the little bird up to?
It wasn’t quite an hour before Jesne returned with a large amount of burial wraps. “The priest gave me the weirdest look when I asked for them, but I’m a Crusader from Isaria and came in with the Inquisitor, so he didn’t ask,” she told me as she dropped the mound of them on the table. “There should be more than enough for you– and for some of your friends if needed. I’m not sure how we’ll get them in, exactly, but I wanted to make sure we had what we needed.” She looked down, and I could see the exhaustion and the deep guilt in her eyes.
“Jes,” I said quietly. “You didn’t know.”
“I still– I keep going over every request he ever made of me in my mind, wondering how much I helped. How much I’m to blame for those deaths,” she said, quiet, clearly not keen on the idea of Raesh hearing our conversation.
“There’s no point in that,” I said, perhaps a bit sharply. “You take responsibility for your ignorance, and you do everything you can to correct it. That’s all you can do. But if you let the past continue to bog you down in guilt and regret, you’ll never be able to be the kind of person who can fix anything. And that’s how you redeem yourself.”
Jesne looked up at me for a long moment. “When I first saw you, I thought you looked barely twenty. But sometimes you speak with the kind of experience I expect from elders.”
“I’m not secretly eighty, if that’s what you’re asking,” I told her wryly.
She smiled very faintly as she looked down. “How do you know the way forward? or, if you’re just guessing, the words to say?”
“I am guessing at the words,” I admitted openly, “but the way forward is always essentially the same. You acknowledge your faults, you move on, you be better than you were, and, little by little, step by step, you become closer to the person that you know you should be.”
“What if I don’t know who that person is?”
“You keep improving in the ways that you do know until you figure it out.”
Jes nodded slowly. “Thank you.”
“Not really my advice, honestly. The wisdom belonged to the Priest of the Ildanach Shrine.”
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Jesne frowned at me. “Who?”
“You probably saw his corpse hanging over the ramparts a few days ago.” I couldn’t quite keep the bitterness from my voice.
She winced. “I’m sorry.”
“He wasn’t,” I admitted, quiet. “He was ready to meet Death.”
“I hope I will be too, someday.”
“Yeah,” I agreed softly. “Me too.” I shook my head slightly. “Now, show me the best way to wrap these so that I can get started. I have a feeling it’s going to take longer than we expect.”
Jesne straightened and immediately got back to business, following my lead.
As I had somewhat anticipated, mummifying myself was not a particularly easy feat, though it was fortunately made easier by the fact that I only needed to do my exposed skin, and I didn’t generally walk around with much of that anyway.
Still, it was nearly time to leave before I finished and exited the washroom, finding it slightly hard to breath– which was doing my claustrophobia no favors– but perfectly workable. “Are the swords going to give me away?” I had traded out my signature sniper rifle and long coat for a simple pistol and a shorter brown jacket that Hector had “retrieved” for me on his way back from his second meeting with Ialdi, smart man that he was. Still, the katanas were strapped to my back the same as always.
“Yes,” Jesne and Hector responded in unison.
I sighed and removed the cross sheath. “What if I carry one, at my side?”
They exchanged looks and Jesne shrugged. “I think that would work.”
I nodded and made the necessary adjustment. “Is everything else prepared?”
“Ialdi agreed in a heartbeat,” Hector reported. “She’s already sent the messenger, asking him to meet her at the crack of dawn. I asked what she was going to question him about, and she told me she had a few things in mind. I just hope she’s careful.”
“She’s a competent woman, Hector, both at combat and politics. She’ll be fine,” I assured him. “Raesh?”
“Still think you’re asking for the impossible, but I will admit that it’s been a while since I practiced like that,” she said a bit grudgingly. “It’s slightly less impossible than it was a few hours ago.”
“All I was looking for; thank you. You ready for this, Jes? You have to walk us in there like we belong, and all questions are going to end up at your feet.”
She nodded. “I know. I’m ready.”
“Perfect. Then let’s go.”
It was still pitch black as we exited the safehouse, leaving our little haven for the streets of Ildanach. The cloth wraps were uncomfortable and irritating, chafing against my face and wrists, occasionally impeding my sight due to their proximity to my eyes, so I kept my head down, somewhat hidden under the hood of the jacket Hector had acquired for me, mostly following Jesne’s feet as she walked in front of me.
Hector and Raesh trailed behind, Raesh with her head similarly down like mine, though I could see her eyes glinting and moving, warily scanning the area around us as we progressed. Hector had shed his peacekeeper badge and knight insignia for his old Ranger uniform, the greens and grays of the forest not having the same camouflaging effect in the city, but successfully masking his identity to some extent. He didn’t look like an Ildanach Captain.
It was a cloudy night, the streets dark save for the strange, faded, unnatural orange glow of the lavasliver lamps that dotted the main pathway. We attempted to stay off it as much as possible, though there were times when it couldn’t be avoided. The main route was the only way to the inner city.
The Manor district was completely abandoned aside from the private security guards standing outside of many of the houses, occasionally patrolling, but they only had jurisdiction on the property itself and therefore barely gave us a second glance as we passed by, making our way to the courtyard.
“Do you know of a good place to keep our heads down where we can see the entrance?” I asked Jesne in a hushed tone as we entered the stone square.
“Yeah; it’s not perfect, but it should work,” she said, and proceeded to lead us over to the garden bed of the Highlord’s Manor.
“You’re joking,” Raesh said blandly.
Jes shook her head. “We lie down flat. The bushes will cover us combined with the dark. More importantly, Dahl has no reason to give it even a cursory glance.”
I glanced around the primarily barren stone area and shrugged. “It’s the best option if we want to be inside the courtyard.” With that, I promptly settled down on my stomach to wait.
Grumbling under her breath, Raesh followed suit, and soon we were all lined up, utterly silent with our eyes fixed on the Cathedral door as the very top of the first sun started to ever sos lowly rise in the distance.
The ground was cold, hard, and uncomfortable, littered with twigs, leaves, and pebbles, as well as the occasional flower stem covered in thorns. It was an unpleasant time for all of us, trying to sit as still as possible so as not to rustle in the undergrowth or draw attention to our existence in any way.
And then, finally, the door swung open. All of us grew rigid in anticipation and anxiety simultaneously as the massive gates slowly creaked outwards far enough to allow passage of a singular individual.
It was Dahl, in his long white Inquisitor’s coat trimmed and lined with black, and his matching white gloves. He wore the coat pulled over an old fashioned silver breastplate marked with the insignia of the Chantry, and his black boots must have had steel bottoms, for they clicked and echoed on the stone as he descended the oversized steps to the Cathedral. A letter was in his hand, and while we were too far away for me to confirm, it had to have been Ialdi’s marked with her signet as the Keeper. He looked displeased, but his eyes never strayed in our direction once as he headed at a brisk and determined pace for the courtyard exit. The small black gates shut behind him, swinging freely on their hinges per the norm, and he was gone.
“It worked,” Jesne breathed as we all started to crawl our way out of the brushes.
“The first part worked,” Hector was quick to amend. “We still have a ways to go.”
“With Dahl out of the picture, no one else will stop me,” Jesne said with a soft snort. “They’re all far too reverent of those who came from Isaria. But you’re right, of course. Let’s get going.”
Nodding, we fell in step beside her again as she began the ascent up the Cathedral stairs. I remembered the last and only other time I had done so, before Callian’s death. Somehow it seemed so long ago already.
Jesne walked over and, just as I had done, rang the bell. The doors opened.
The Cathedral was dark. The massive space of the first domed chamber had seemed somewhat wasteful and intimidating upon my first visit, but now it was even more so, bathed in nearly complete darkness aside from the strangely silver-tinted light that came from a few corners made by putting lavasliver lamps inside of colored glass that altered the end result. The receptionist desk area was abandoned and, unlike last time, the monks operated the doors actually paused and looked at us for a moment, clearly taking stock of if we were meant to be here.
Jesne offered them a stoic nod, and they returned it, resuming their normal positions without challenge or complaint. The monks didn’t speak, but it seemed as though they were accepting our presence easily enough.
Jesne didn’t pause or hesitate, didn’t stop to take stock of us. She simply strode forward towards the main doors as though it were any other normal day, as though she belonged– which she had until just a day or two ago. She was perhaps a little overly stiff, but it was pretty good for someone who had almost certainly hadn’t spent much time having to play the spy.
We spent almost no time whatsoever in the worship auditorium, with Jesne taking an immediate right turn and heading towards the library main floor. The direction made me frown just slightly, but we continued following her, so far running into no one as we made our way through the door.
The library, unlike the previous two rooms, was nearly as illuminated as it had been upon my first visit, with lavasliver lamps picking up the slack from the lack of sunlight and accenting the purple riftsliver light that had bathed the room during the day as well. It was slightly dimmer overall, but far easier to see and navigate than the rest of it been. It also wasn’t completely abandoned, but, just as the last time I had entered, no one seemed to care enough about new arrivals to look up from their engrossed research. The people here were here to study and didn’t care to take the time to look and see who else had been drawn to the books at such an early hour.
This time, Jes did paused just briefly, glancing back for a moment over her shoulder to take stock that we were all still with her.
“So many books,” Raesh whispered in a nearly inaudible undertone, and I understood the sentiment, though now wasn’t the time to express it.
Hector tapped her on the shoulder to remind her to focus, and she straightened, looking slightly embarrassed.
Jes continued on her way, leading us further into the library and towards the back corner, directly diagonal the one where we had entered. The shelves grew dustier here, darker, more crammed together and even more abandoned. I quickened my pace slightly so that I could walk side-by-side with the Crusader.
“Why is this area different?”
Jes looked at me in surprise for the question, but after a moment she looked straight ahead again and answered. “The texts here are older, many from before the Purge. They’re generally either useless heresy or written in dead languages. We preserve them for the history, but no one comes back here.”
I hummed softly and fell back in step behind her slightly.
The shelves grew so narrow that we could only walk single file, and occasionally I was forced to bat a cobweb out of my path– not as frequently as I might have thought, however, and the dust also wasn’t as thick on the floor as it was on the shelves, not by far. Some people were walking this path, but it wasn’t to read.
The answer became clear as Jes finally reached the actual corner, revealing a door in the floor. It was undisguised, but the only way to open it was an old, frayed rope handle that she used to pull it open and lean it against the wall, revealing a staircase down into the dark. “There are lights down there, just not many,” Jesne assured us. “This is the normal dungeons.” A strange scent was emanating from the dark, faint but distinct and most definitively foul.
“Where Keric Thurien could be,” Hector checked to verify.
Jes nodded in confirmation. “Perhaps.”
“It’s one man,” I said, “and he’s not even technically Chantry. If we need to take care of him, we can take care of him.” WIth that, I started heading down the stairs, not giving anyone else a chance to respond or think about it for too long.
My heart was pounding in my chest and my breathing felt loud in my ears, not to mention stifled. The dust and the underground were suffocating, but I felt excitement simultaneously. We were almost there, almost to answers, at least of some variety. Almost to getting my team back.
The dungeons were dusty, the cells set up just like they were in the normal prisons but both far smaller and clearly less used. Lavasliver lines ran through floors, walls, and ceilings alike as small veins of light offering faint illumination. My hand strayed to the sword at my side as I walked down to the end of the two rows of five cells each, finding the final one on the left occupied with all manner of research materials that also quickly proved itself to be the source of the unpleasant odor that permeated the area and made it even harder to breathe.
“What is that Khane-cursed smell?” Hector asked, perhaps a bit loudly or perhaps his voice just echoed in the stone chambers, but somewhat startling nevertheless.
I gestured vaguely at the strange laboratory set up in front of us. “I would imagine something in there.”
“Thurien’s not here then,” Jesne sounded simultaneously relieved and disturbed. “He’s almost always here.”
“Let’s take our good fortune where we can get it,” Hector responded easily. “We know there’s a trapdoor somewhere?”
“Yes, this way,” Jesne said, and walked into the cell across from his to show Hector.
Raesh, on the other hand, seemed strangely unperturbed by the strange smells and walked fearlessly into the laboratory, poking at the flasks and books.
I watched her curiously. “You have any idea what he’s trying to do?”
“I’m not sure,” Raesh admitted. “He seems to be mixing science with philosophical and metaphysical experiments, based on these books he has out. His handwriting is nearly illegible, but he seems to talk about souls and truth a lot.”
Souls and truth? It sounded like the ramblings of some kind of zealot, but not of the Chantry. “Anything else?”
“Just the jars of organs and eyes on his bookshelf.”
She said it so casually, so dryly, that I nearly laughed, though that hardly would have been an appropriate response. I felt somewhat far from the person I was meant to be just now, my physical reminder and anchor replaced with the cloth of the dead. “I noticed.”
“He’s got some under the bed too. More than I expected.”
“Particularly since he’s only been here for a week or two,” I agreed suddenly, frowning.
“Unless he’s been dissecting… all of them,” Raesh and I shared a look for a brief moment.
“The trap door is over here,” Hector called out, “if you two are done being creepy and morbid.”
“Never,” I answered casually, but turned and went over to find what they were talking about anyway. It was in the corner opposite the entrance to the cell, disguised by blending in quite well with the stone, but possible to pick out with careful searching and observation, as Jesne had.
“Good work,” I told her, and she offered me a fleeting smile.
“No handle, and it’s probably very heavy even if we could find something to attempt to pry it up,” Jesne said. “There has to be a trigger somewhere, but I have no idea where.”
“Then let’s get searching.”
It was a surprisingly fast and utterly fruitless few minutes; the cell wasn’t big enough to hold a lot of places to hide anything but, try as we might, nothing that we pushed or pulled on made any sign it was meant to move whatsoever.
And then–
Under the bed. You have to pull and twist simultaneously.
Teris? How do you know that? Where are you? I froze mid step as the voice unexpectedly entered my mind.
But there was nothing more.
“Everything good, Leon?” Hector asked, and I realized I had literally frozen in the middle of clearly heading somewhere.
“I just had a thought,” I didn’t quite lie, and walked over to the bed, reaching under it against the wall, looking for anything that felt like it could be pulled or turned while they watched me in various levels of confusion and perhaps mild concern for my sanity.
And then I felt it– a little nub. Truthfully, I’d felt it before, searched here before, and I’d tried pulling and pushing. But, to pull and twist– I tried to follow Teris’ advice, first turning it to the left, to no avail, and then attempting right.
Something clicked, and there was the sound of heavy mechanisms grinding in the walls. The trap door didn’t swing open– it slid, grating against the stone loudly in the darkness, and it revealed a staircase into utter blackness.
“Anyone have any kind of light?” I questioned, peering into the dark.
“Anyone down there knows very well that we’re coming,” Hector pointed out.
“So we may as well have light,” I repeated.
“I think there’s a traditional torch in one of the first cells,” Jesne said, and quickly ran off. Just a second or two later, she returned with one old fashioned torch, which she proceeded to light with a match Hector offered her. “Who’s going fir–”
I didn’t let her finish the question, instead just taking my first steps onto the stairs. “Whoever has the torch come after me,” I ordered, and then, without waiting for them to sort any of it out, I simply plunged into the abyss.