They Split the Party, page 18
“Roso’s control is like a blade. It leaves a wound, but the weapon itself doesn’t stick around. And no lingering magic means there’s nothing for me to dispel. So,” Ink gave a playful smile, “I had to knock the sense back into you.”
“You knocked something, for sure.”
Ink chuckled, and her eyes drifted to the floor. A silence took hold of the room for a beat. She folded her hands. Kicked at the floor. When she finally looked back at him, she wore a confident smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes.
“It’s been a long time since one of us tied the other to a chair, hasn’t it?” she teased.
“It has.” He didn’t fight the small smile that crept onto his lips. “It’s good to see you, Kira.”
“I know,” she said. After a pause, she added, “You too.”
“What are you doing here?” Quint asked.
“My job,” Ink said. “Well, actually, I suppose right now I’m not. But I heard Roso got to you, and . . . I figured you could use my help.”
Quint slowly raised his eyebrows. “How far did you teleport to come save me?”
“Oh, shut up before I zap you again. Harder this time.”
“Is that a promise?”
“Are we interrupting something?” Brass’s voice cut through the tension in the room as he and Church stood in the doorway. “Because we can come back later.”
“No,” Ink said. She cast a quick glance back to Quint. “Come in.”
The shift in her voice was subtle but powerful. A little bit faster, a little bit tighter, and it was back to business. Stray thoughts of the past vanished from Quint’s mind, as if she’d thrown a switch in him. And she didn’t even need a demon’s voice to do it.
Quint started with something that had been in the back of his mind since waking up. “Where are we?”
“A tavern just up the road that wouldn’t ask questions when we brought in a tied-up, unconscious mercenary,” Brass answered. “By the way, do you still want to kill us?”
“No more than anyone else who has to deal with you, I imagine.”
“How are you feeling?” Church asked.
“Like I was kicked by a camel.”
Church nodded. With a quick prayer, Quint felt a warm, comforting sensation roll through his skull, like the world’s greatest head massage. His head stopped hurting immediately. His relief was short lived, though, as he saw the slight strain on the priest’s face and remembered how utterly winded he’d looked earlier. And how he’d tried to kill him.
He had tried to do that in the past as well, but that had been intentional. This time it hadn’t.
“Thank you,” Quint said. “I’m sorry. For before.”
“You weren’t in control of your actions,” Church said. “You have nothing to apologize for.”
“I don’t know about that,” Brass said. “Wounds heal, but do you have any idea how hard it is to get blood out of a white shirt?”
Quint gave a half-amused grunt. A lot of things had changed over the years. But the Starbreakers, it seemed, were not one of them.
“Roso’s not talking,” Ink said. “What happened?”
Quint’s expression hardened into a deep frown. “We’ve been working in Tecah, clearing allosaurus nests for a jungle expedition group based here in the city. We’d just wrapped up our last trip when a messenger came to us asking if we’d hear out their master’s business proposal. We were on our guard but . . . all he had to do was say a few words. Ever since then, he’s had the entire Cord doing his—’’ He stopped, suddenly worried. “The rest of the Cord. Are they—?”
“Sorry, it was just you,” Brass said. “We figured you could tell us where they were. Me and Church have been going through his underlings like wet tissue paper. I’d have thought if he had the Cord in his back pocket, he’d have used them by now.”
“He held me back as his personal bodyguard. If the rest of the Cord wasn’t with me,” Quint said, sounding more concerned by the second, “and they haven’t come looking for Roso, then they’re still on the last assignment he gave them.”
Out of all of them, Ink was the one most rattled by Quint’s distress. “What are they doing?”
“Roso loaned them out. To the Prince Killer.”
Ink was the first one to recover from the stunned silence. “The Prince Killer. As in Kurien, attempted assassin of Roland II. That Prince Killer?”
Quint gave a nod. “From everything I gathered, she was the one who got Roso out of Oblivion. She’s after arcane weapons. More than even she could ever use. And Roso gave her the Cord to help shake down the artifact collectors and importers here in Puerto Oro. They’ve been helping her amass an arsenal for weeks now.”
“Kurien’s here?” Ink asked. “And she’s got the Cord of Aenwyn for backup?”
“Worse,” Quint said. “When Roso gave Kurien the Cord, he had us give Kurien the Heart.”
Every pair of eyebrows in the room shot up. There was only one Heart that Quint could have been talking about. The one that the Cord of Aenwyn had taken in the aftermath of the Battle of Loraine.
“Kurien has the Heart of Shadows,” Church breathed. “That’s why the Oracle couldn’t see her.”
Several things came into stark focus at once. The Prince Killer was the one who’d gotten Roso, and presumably all the other inmates, out of Oblivion. She’d unleashed chaos on the world stage, and now, as all of Corsar’s defenders were racing around desperately trying to control the situation, she was amassing an arsenal of arcane weaponry with the Servitor Heart of Shadows to serve as its crown jewel. She’d be invisible to any attempt to track her with magic, and, even if they found her, Kurien had been one of the most dangerous people ever thrown into Oblivion without a Servitor Heart.
Five minutes ago, Church, Brass, and Ink had thought they’d taken care of the last of their problems in Puerto Oro. Now, they had what was possibly the biggest problem of the entire breakout to deal with.
“Well . . .” Ink began. “Fuck.”
29
BROKEN GATES
Angel cut a relentless pace through her portion of the escapees, tunnelporting across the kingdom from one fight to the next. She never took on less than six in a day, and her record so far was twelve.
Bart and Ruby hadn’t been nearly as much of a hassle as she’d worried. Church hadn’t been happy to hear they were with her, but he was sympathetic to Ruby’s plight with the people of Aenerwin, and Angel might have accidentally said some bullshit along the lines of a promise to keep them safe. Apart from occasionally spectating her louder and more obvious fights, like the one with the Thunderer, they stayed out of her way and even helped Thalia around the kitchen.
Funnily enough, the bartender was actually the closest thing to a problem Angel had on the job.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Thalia said when Angel finally decided to ask what was bugging her, “but I’ve never seen you work yourself like this. You’re running yourself ragged, forgetting to eat, barely stopping to catch your breath . . . You’re taking on more work than any of the others and moving faster. Why are you in such a rush?”
Angel wished she’d just left it alone.
“I’m fine,” Angel dismissed. She knew immediately that wasn’t going to fly, so she switched tactics. “I just want to get this over with, okay? And the closer I get to the end, the more I just want to hurry up and finish.”
“You said yourself most of these people aren’t causing real trouble yet,” Thalia said. “You can afford to slow down. To rest a little.”
“I’m fine,” Angel stressed, as if repeating it would make it more convincing. “The only people left are chumps and pushovers. I won’t even need to turn the lights on to take them down. And I’m almost done. A couple more names to cross off and then I can stop, and we can all move on with our lives.”
If she wasn’t already so close to the end, Angel might have taken a nap right then, just to make Thalia feel better. But she was so tantalizingly close to being free again. From the fight. From Renalt. From herself.
Rest could wait just a little longer.
It was when she was in her home stretch of escapees that she got the message from Ink. A contingent of the Seven Gates, the order of knights who served the crown and the vanguard of the king’s own efforts to round up Oblivion escapees, had failed to check in during their latest assignment, and everyone else—including Ink herself apparently—was too wrapped up in other issues to find out what had happened to them.
Before the Seven Gates of Sasel had ghosted Ink, they’d been on their way to apprehend Wendel Lestrade, an Oblivion escapee who’d been incarcerated for stealing the secrets from the Academy’s original Disassembly Council and then murdering every single one of its members.
Before their unfortunate end, the Disassembly Council had been tasked with keeping dangerous artifacts secured from the rest of the world. With them dead, Lestrade was the only man alive who knew the location of the Black Vault, where all of the artifacts in the council’s charge were stored.
Lestrade was dangerous and valuable for what he knew, but he was a scribbler first and a half-rate necromancer as a very distant second. The Oracle had given them an exact location and heading. For the premiere knights of the crown, he should have been an easy grab.
But “should” was always a dangerous word.
The Seven Gates’s last known location took them to a winding limestone gorge, deep enough for the sun to have already disappeared behind the top of the ridge and cast the entirety of it in shadow. One step out the door of the Rusted Star, Angel knew something was wrong.
It was quiet in the gorge, the air still and heavy, like it couldn’t escape the confines of the surrounding ridges. The only sound came from the occasional cry of a distressed animal echoing against the rocks coming from somewhere deeper within the gorge. High overhead, vultures circled.
That’s not a good sign.
“Stay here,” Angel ordered. No one argued.
She advanced slowly down into the valley, the silence making the scuff of her boots against the rocky ground seem deafening. With every cry from whatever panicked animal was waiting for her, she winced.
She quickly found the source of the cries—a horse, straining against the lead that tied it to a lone tree. It was laden with heavy saddlebags decorated in the heraldry of the Seven Gates, but there was no sign of its rider. There were two other leads tied to the tree, but both of them were frayed at the ends.
As soon as the horse saw Angel, it let out a panicked whinny and thrashed its head, trying to break free and failing.
“Easy, easy,” Angel said, running her hands along the mount’s neck to try and calm it down. “Don’t suppose you know where your owner went?”
The horse let out an unhelpful whinny, and Angel sighed, giving it a pat. “Yeah, I didn’t think so.”
There were no more bends in the gorge, just a gentle slope down as the mountains of the gorge converged. Down at the very bottom at the end of the gorge was an intricately-carved stone facade framing a wide, open set of doors and a pitch-dark corridor beyond them. The entrance to an Old World ruin.
“Be back,” she told the horse.
As she approached the entrance, a faint glow began to flicker at her fingertips as a flutter of warmth spread through her chest. Deep inside her, something instinctually curled in disgust. She could feel it in her soul. This place was stained to the bones by something foul.
The interior quickly swallowed up any light from outside, leaving everything inside in complete darkness. Her eyes adjusted to it after only a moment, and the world came into focus in an eerie black and white. Sharp, angular Old World stonework greeted her with shallow grooves running through it that once held lightstone. Cracks had formed in several places in the stone, and wisps of black smoke trailed out from each and every one. She nearly gagged on the smell of rot and mold.
The only sound was the echo of her footsteps and her own breathing. The back of her neck prickled at the dead stillness of this place, and the warmth in her chest was spreading to the rest of her body. Every step carried a slight sting, like her feet were rejecting the floor itself.
There was a lot of dried blood on the floor.
An open vault door of solid, ornately decorated steel greeted her in the next room, flanked on either side by modern lightstone lamps bracketed into the walls. As she approached, the wall next to the vault doors lit up with glowing text in a dozen different languages. In every one Angel could read, it said the same thing: CLASS 1 IMMUTABLE: HELM OF THE DREAD KNIGHT. SEALED FOR SAFETY. DANGER! DO NOT OPEN!
There was nothing inside the vault but an empty podium and broken glass. The stench of death was so strong, she couldn’t even set foot inside it, but she could still clearly see, on the back wall, a mural of an undead horde tearing into panicked masses with a single, black-armored individual at its center. Mottled black wings fanned out from its back, and its face was obscured behind an ominous, spiked helmet.
She activated her messaging coil.
“Ink, it’s Angel. We’ve got a fucking problem.”
30
THE WARDEN
When Phoenix had last been here, Cutters Place had been barely more than a village. Clinging to the edge of the Iron Forest, it was one of a few dozen places along the forest’s edge where loggers brave and stubborn enough to deal with it lived and worked. In the eleven years since then, however, the tiny community had grown into the largest settlement on the forest’s edge. It was their last stop before plunging straight into Edelfric’s home turf.
It looked like it had seen better days.
The defensive wall facing the road into the forest was battered and worn down. Several structures near it had holes in their roofs, and others had collapsed altogether. The ground outside the wall was absolutely littered with scraps of wood, twisted gnarls of dead plants, and deep scores in the dirt.
Phoenix wanted to keep a low profile if they could, but Wings was a knight of the crown, so of course, as soon as she saw signs of recent battle, she flew straight to where the damage looked the most severe.
By the time they touched down, a crowd had already gathered in a circle around them. Voices came at them like waves, too many and from too many directions to make out even half of what they were saying. Phoenix took an unconscious step toward Wings, who was trying to get everyone to calm down, when a sharp whistle silenced the crowd.
“Everyone, back off! Give them some space!”
A young man pushed his way through the crowd, nudging people away and waving them off as he went. He couldn’t have been older than twenty, but he wore a breastplate over well-worn leathers and a cloak that was frayed at the edges and held in place with a scratch-covered silver pin of two crossed axes. His deep-brown face was furrowed, caught in a nebulous territory between fear and hope.
“I’m guessing you’re the Winged Lady, then,” the young man asked.
“Lady Elizabeth Meshar, Knight of Sasel,” Wings introduced herself.
“Please tell me you’re here to help.”
“We are now.” She looked at the surrounding damage. “What happened here?”
“What hasn’t? We’ve been—” The young man stopped when he finally took notice of Phoenix. The boy had been carrying himself with a certain confidence up until now, standing tall and speaking with authority. But when he saw the spellforger, his eyes went wide, and he suddenly looked very young. “You’re back.”
Of all the things Phoenix could remember with perfect clarity, faces were not one of them. The young man was familiar, clearly from here, and he knew Phoenix. Given the circumstances, he had to be someone Phoenix met the last time the Starbreakers had come through here. But for the life of him, he was drawing a blank.
“You probably don’t remember me. My name is Dietrich. The Starbreakers saved me from goblins when I was eight.”
Phoenix was confused for a moment because he did remember rescuing captives from a goblin camp back then, but those had all been children, and this man was . . . probably exactly the right age to have been one of them. As soon as Phoenix did the math, everything clicked—including, it felt like, his joints. It was one thing to know in his head that he’d taken up glintchasing fourteen years ago; it was another thing altogether to see a child he’d saved now standing in front of him as a grown man.
“You grew up,” he said when he finally found his voice again.
Dietrich gave a soft chuckle. “Yeah.” He looked around at the eyes of the crowd still on them. “Maybe we should go somewhere to talk.”
After urging people to disperse, Dietrich led them off the streets and into a cabin deeper in the city. The whole walk over, people kept flagging Dietrich down with questions and concerns. It turned out he was the town warden, charged with protecting Cutters Place from everything that came out of the Iron Forest. That was supposed to mean dealing with things like goblins, ogres, and the occasional fey creature. But now, Cutters Place was under siege from Edelfric.
“According to him, we’re encroaching on ‘his’ forest. We’ve gotten runners from surrounding villages saying they’ve been attacked once or twice, but he’s hitting here the hardest. We’re the biggest target along the forest’s edge, and he’s sent copies here every day this week so far.” Dietrich closed his eyes for a moment, rubbing his temples. “How is this happening? How is the Scourge back?”
Phoenix sighed. “When we stopped him last time, we burned him down to his core, but killing that last part of him was harder. Nothing we tried worked, so eventually,” he paused, thinking of how to explain, “we locked him up as far from the forest as we could get it. But he grew back, and then he got out, and now he’s here again. Which is why we are too.”
“So, are you a knight now, then?”
