While most of the daemons fight with their own foul magic, or natural weapons such as claws or horns, there are a few who use weapons, not unlike those of mortal men. Zepar the Scarlet, famously, and Loray the Archer. Cain, Prince of Coals and Ashes, is one of these.

* The Marian Codex

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15th Day of New Summer’s Moon, 297 AC

In a world of utter darkness, Loray’s daemonic core burned a bright yellow. Focusing on her was like staring into the hot center of a forge, and the effort of doing it beat a pulse in Trist’s forehead, behind his empty, ravaged eye sockets. He could catch just a glimpse of the daemon’s otherworldly being extending back out into… somewhere. Wherever daemons, Angelus, and fairies really came from.

“Does it look like I am running?” Trist answered the monster, holding his longsword steady. He brought the hilt up to his right ear, the length of the blade parallel with the ground he could not see, the point extended at the daemonic core itself.

“You can’t fight me,” Loray taunted him. He could picture her expression from the way she spoke: she sounded like a cat hunting a mouse. “You’re blind, sweet boy.”

“I can see you,” Trist said. He hoped the other Exarchs were getting Enid out. He could always find them later, using the Hunter’s Boon, and all he had to do now was buy them time to get across the bridge and into the city, where they could hide. Lutetia was the largest city in the Kingdom, with more people even than Rocher de la Garde.

“Have it your way,” the daemoness growled. “I’ll take that toy sword away from you, and carry you back myself.”

“Trist!” he heard Enid shout from somewhere behind him. “We can’t leave him!”

“Come on,” Margaret’s voice echoes across the bridge, and Trist’s ears caught the sound of their boots retreating on stone.

Loray chose that moment to attack. If she had thought Trist distracted by the voices of his companions, she was proven wrong quickly. The daemon archer loosed an arrow at him from no more than twenty feet away, but Trist could track it by the shine of her Boons, and he brought his blade around in a diagonal stroke, cutting the arrow down into the stone beneath his feet. Then, he dashed forward and lunged, cutting back up again in a reverse stroke that would have laid the daemon open from hip to shoulder if it had connected.

Instead, she moved back and up, and even without the use of his eyes, there was something about the motion that was immediately familiar to Trist. He’d fought enough of these winged monstrosities now that he recognized the move: a leap back, accompanied by a beat of the wings to gain distance, and then the swoop forward for a counterstroke.

Trist was ready.

He must have taken Loray by surprise, because as she came back in, he simply extended his blade forward in another lunge, pushing off the opposite foot this time. His armored shoulder hit the demon’s body, her claws scraped the steel of his armor with a terrible, high pitched noise, and black ichor poured over his hands.

“You, you,” the monster stuttered, as if he’d impaled her head rather than her breast. Trist’s Daemon Bane Boon did its work, flaring up in vibrant yellow as it burned away at Loray’s torso. It actually helped him to see her more clearly: she showed up as an absence, a darkness silhouetted by the ghostly flames of the Boon. Odd, that: he’d never been able to see the actual Boon at work before, only the blackened, curling skin it left behind.

With a shriek of pain, Loray threw herself back off his sword. He heard her impact the ground, and from the movement of her core and the still-burning flames at the edges of the wound he’d given her, Trist guessed she was crawling backward.

“Do it,” Acrasia urged him. “Tithe her.”

Trist raised his sword into High Guard, but just as he cut down to finish the daemon archer off, a second burning core swooped out of the sky. His blade clanged off another sword, and he stumbled, off balance.

“The terrible Loray,” a masculine voice, cold as ice, spoke. “Cut down by a blind swordsman. I will not let you forget this.”

“Just kill him already,” Loray shrieked, scrambling backwards away from Trist, her desperation audibly scraping the stone bridge.

“Cail, is it?” Trist asked, settling back into a Plow Guard. He could see the daemon’s core, but not his sword, and that was a problem. It made him want to keep his own weapon between them, to better defend himself from attack.

“Cail, Prince of Coals and Ashes,” the daemon answered. “I come on raven’s wings, and I carry your death in my hands, Fairie Knight. Ask me what happens if you face me today.”

“I do not need to ask you,” Trist said. He could no longer hear any sound from the other Exarchs; they must have made their way safely across the bridge by now, off of King’s Island and into the city itself.

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“I am bound by Oath to speak truly, if you ask,” Cail pressed him. Trist could hear the smile on the daemon’s face in his voice, and Loray was laughing from where she’d crawled away.

“Fine,” Trist said. “Tell me what happens if we fight, here and now.”

“You die with my sword through your back,” Cail said, and Trist couldn’t help but think of his own broken Oath, and all of the visions Acrasia had shown him, where he died a dozen different ways.

“Then I will not fight you,” Trist said. “Tor De Lancey! Percy! Father!” He thrust his sword point down into the stone in front of him, and heard the crack of ice on stone as the temperature of the dark city, already cool, dropped further in an instant.

“We’re here, Son,” the ghost of his father said, just in front of him. “What do you need?”

“Give me time to get across that bridge,” Trist asked.

“Done!” Tor De Lancey roared, and everyone moved at once. The three dead knights, visible to Trist as barely perceptible shades of thin fire, tied to his sword by burning cords, charged the two daemons. He didn’t wait to see what happened. Instead, Trist turned and ran, stumbling on the stones of the bridge.

“Margaret,” he breathed, casting out the line of the Hunter’s Boon. It latched onto the Exarch of Rahab, somewhere beyond him in the city, and he followed it as best he could. The cries of the ghostly knights, and the daemons they fought, faded behind him, and he careened off the corner of a building, bruising his shoulder.

Without anyone to guide him, Trist had to put his sword away. He managed to get it back into the sheath by feel - a motion he’d made a thousand times before, so familiar it was near as practiced as breathing.

Everything else, however, was a disaster.

The fiery orange trail of the Hunter’s Boon pulled him onward, and sped his steps to a point that was outright dangerous when Trist couldn’t see the world around him. He tripped on gutters, and only the leather interior of his gauntlets prevented him from skinning his palms when he fell and caught himself. He knocked over barrels, ran into walls, and before long he was stretching his arms out in front of him and to the sides, trying to fend off the constant collisions.

While he ran, bruised and exhausted, Trist clung to the only way he had of seeing anything: that sometimes elusive, off-focus, nearly trance-like state where he could perceive the cores of daemons, faeries, and Angelus. With nothing nearby to latch onto except the tether of the Hunter’s Boon, and his own sword at his side, it was hard to tell whether he was succeeding at all until he rounded a corner and skidded to a stop, slipping on the stones and falling to one knee.

Somewhere beneath the city lay a nightmare.

It burned blue and white, a thin knot of strands that had been stretched out from a single core and pulled taught, like the web of a spider. Lesser fires burned around the greater, not strands, but chains, like those he had seen beneath the Hauteurs Massif so many weeks ago. Two or three chains were attached to each blue-white strand, and they were of no brighter a shade than yellow. Trist was surprised they could hold the greater core at all: it must have been as powerful as Forneus, the daemon of the sea, or perhaps even Auberon.

“What is it?” he asked. “Acrasia, do you see it?”

The fresh scent of the Ardenwood broke around him, pushing aside the smells of the city for a moment. “It’s an Angelus,” the faerie said, her voice coming from somewhere above his right shoulder. “Or the corpse of one, at least. Beneath a great cathedral, buried under the stone.”

“There is only one cathedral in Lutetia,” Trist said, his thoughts racing. “The Cathedral of Camiel.”

“Angelus of War,” Acrasia said, and Trist nodded, though he couldn’t see more than her shining core. “The same one they dedicated the chapel to, when they imprisoned me.”

“Yes,” he said. “The histories say that Saint Camiel died fighting the Sun Eater, and that they raised the Cathedral over his tomb.”

“The Angelus and their tombs,” Acrasia said, and he could picture the sneer on her lips. “Monuments to their own fragile egos.”

“What is happening to it?” Trist asked. “Those chains - they’re like the chains that bound Adrammelech.”

“It is a binding,” Acrasia agreed. “But more than that. I can feel the blood, the Tithes, wrapped up in the magic. I can almost see it, even through all the stone beneath the city. If you were to go down there, Trist, I think you would find a circle of blood, much like the one Agrat drew in the Church of Abatur at Falais.”

“Agrat was trying to corrupt the church,” Trist recalled. “To take it away from the Angelus, to make it no longer sacred, and to change it into some kind of dark power. But I thought they needed Adrammelech to do that.”

“The Prince of Plagues was not the only one who knew how to corrupt,” Acrasia said. “Think of how many daemons we know to be free now, Trist. Half a dozen, at least.”

Trist lurched to his feet, turned away from the sight of the corpse beneath the city, and focused again on the strand of Cern’s Boon. One step at a time, he let it lead him away from the Cathedral, and toward Dame Margaret.

“What are you going to do?” Acrasia asked him.

“I cannot do anything right now,” Trist said. “Blind and alone. I need to find the others.”

“You can’t let them corrupt the corpse of an Angelus,” Acrasia insisted, grabbing him by one pauldron and pulling him to the right. “That’s a wall, Trist. You were about to walk into a wall.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Is it morning, yet?” He saw the faintest trace of something on the horizon, some pale glow in the everpresent darkness.

“As much as it’s ever dawn, since the Sun-Eater struck,” she told him. “I can see the white ring rising to the east, but you know it won’t light the city.”

“But it means the bells will ring soon,” Trist pointed out. “I need to get off the streets, to wherever the other Exarchs are hiding. We need food, and a rest, and to make some kind of plan.”

“Fair enough,” Acrasia said, continuing to guide him through the cold streets of Lutetia. “And then, Trist? Once you’ve all had a moment to catch your breath?”

“Then,” Trist said, “our goal is no longer to escape. Our goal must be to stop whatever is happening beneath the city. We need to break into the Cathedral, fight our way to the corpse of Camiel, and destroy whatever foul rite they are performing.”

“It won’t be left unguarded,” Acrasia cautioned him.

“Then we kill whatever is in our way,” Trist resolved. “Whether it be men, or daemons.”