Neila had other ideas. For the first time since they’d entered the room, she spoke.
“You killed my father!” she shouted, and leaped across the overturned desk, straight for the priest.
Only Salim’s quick hands saved her. One moment she was airborne, sword extended, face twisted in a mask of rage. The next he had hold of the collar of her shirt and was hauling back with all his might. She slammed down onto the stone floor, taking him with her, as crossbows thrummed and half a dozen bolts studded the wood of the fallen table.
“Stay down!” Salim shouted, but Neila was in no condition to press her attack. Landing flat on her back had driven the wind from her, and she now lay gasping, spine arching as she struggled for breath. Salim reached out and plucked the sword from her fingers, then pushed both of their weapons away from them and raised his hands.
“A wise move,” Khoyar observed. The fear and anxiety that had been on his face a moment before was gone now, without a trace. Salim found himself wondering if any of it had been real. Certainly the man seemed unruffled by his brush with death.
Salim looked around him at the stern-faced men and women with the crossbows. All were priests, rather than true soldiers, but they held the bows competently enough, as any children who’d hunted in their families’ fields might be expected to. At this range, a blind gnome with a bow of cattails and string couldn’t be expected to miss. How the hell had Khoyar known to keep a dozen guards waiting outside his door? Had the protean warned him, or was he simply that paranoid?
Salim left those questions unasked, and tried a different one. “So what now, heretic? Will you order these priests to kill us, the way you killed Faldus Anvanory?”
Khoyar smiled. “Hardly, my son. No one is going to be sent to their final reward until there’s been time to meditate on the matter, as is only proper. Provided, that is, that you don’t try anything foolish.” He gestured, and one of the guards stretched out a leg and toed the swords farther away from the two prisoners on the ground.
“As you can see,” Khoyar continued, raising his head to address the men and women with the bows, “our suspicions have been confirmed. The fig, as they say, never falls far from the tree. These two have come here to reveal Faldus Anvanory’s killer, and so they have.” He cast a smug gaze toward Neila.
“Lady Neila Anvanory, I hereby accuse you of orchestrating the death of your father. May Pharasma have mercy on your soul.”
“What?!” Neila’s word was the scream of a wounded animal.
“Murdered,” Khoyar continued, addressing the room once more, “by one’s own child. If there’s a sadder fate a father can suffer, I know it not. And for what? For what, brothers and sisters?” He looked around, made eye contact with several of them. “So that she might inherit the sun orchid elixir, and buy herself a few more years of youth—a mere blink of Pharasma’s eye. What is a decade, or a century, compared to the eternity of the Beyond?”
“That’s a lie!” Neila looked like she would tear the priest’s throat out with her bare hands, but she stayed down. “You know I’m innocent! You said so yourself—your magic verified it!”
“Ah, yes.” Khoyar was nodding, his manner sage. “But even magic can be deceived. Especially by one of these.”
As he’d been talking, one of the high priest’s hands had crept into his pocket. Now he held it up, revealing a strange little brooch in the shape of a lustrous black beetle.
“Look well, my friends. Use both your eyes and the goddess-granted second sight, and see just how easily evil can disguise itself—how a mere bauble can cloud even the vision of the angels.”
Salim knew at once what the thing must be. He’d seen similar amulets and talismans before, on the creatures he’d hunted. A relatively simple charm, designed to occlude one’s aura and soul, making it impossible for a priest’s divinations to tell good from evil. An important tool for vampires and their ilk, lest they be called out by the first hedge-priest or friar to cross their path. Khoyar was implicating them by planting his own possessions. Brilliant.
The priest was still speaking, throwing himself into the speech. “As I grew more and more suspicious of Lady Anvanory’s motives, in spite of the failure of my divinations, I made arrangements for one of her servants to covertly investigate her quarters for evidence of tools just such as this. And as soon as he brought me this corrupted, filthy item, my prayers and visions suddenly became crystal clear. I knew at once that Neila Anvanory had ordered the death of her father, and furthermore that she would attempt to pin the crime on us—the very church that sought to put things right, seeking justice even for a cowardly would-be immortal like Faldus Anvanory!”
“You bastard.” Neila’s voice was barely above a whisper now, but everyone in the room heard it clearly. “You know that’s not mine. But it doesn’t matter. The Lamasaran officials have already been contacted and told everything. They’re undoubtedly on their way to arrest you as we speak.”
Khoyar smiled. He was radiant, almost beatific. No wonder he’d made it so high up the chain of command—the man was born to preach.
“My poor, deluded child,” he said sympathetically. “Who do you think turned you in?”
His hand dipped into his pocket again, and when it emerged the black beetle was gone, replaced by a carefully folded sheet of paper, its red wax seal with the Anvanory crest broken down the middle.
“It seems at least one of your staff suspected the truth all along, and was kind enough to inform me of the matter. Yet I wouldn’t worry too much. For you see, I’ve taken the liberty of summoning the authorities myself.” He looked toward the door and raised his voice. “Yusef, if you would?”
There was the sound of footsteps—softer this time, bare flesh on stone—and then a tall man strode into the room. He was bare-chested and bronzed from the sun, and as he entered Salim couldn’t help but notice the grace with which each fluid step carried him forward. Billowy white pantaloons covered his legs, and thin strips of white linen wrapped his arms and shoulders in elaborate patterns, crisscrossing his back. Below a turban of similar white strips, his face was handsome but hard, a hooked nose giving him the look of a bird of prey. Matched scimitars hung at his belt, their curving pommels carved into golden suns.
A dervish—one of the blade dancers of Sarenrae, the sun goddess. If ever there were a church devoted to protecting the innocent and burning away wickedness, it was that of the Dawnflower.
“Thank the gods,” Neila almost sobbed. “A Sarenite.”
Yet when the newly arrived priest looked over at her, his eyes were hard.
“Thank you, Yusef,” Khoyar was saying. “You’ve already heard the facts of the matter, in detail earlier and again just now. If you would be so kind as to read the young lady’s aura, and tell us what you find within her heart?”
The newcomer nodded without speaking, then turned to Neila and sank effortlessly down on his haunches. Tears streaming down her face, disheveled and bruised, Neila still sat straight-backed and defiant. If Yusef the Dervish was an eagle, then surely he must recognize that this girl was a hawk.
For a moment, the priest’s eyes softened. Then he blinked hard—once, twice. He pulled back, upper lip threatening to curl.
“Evil,” he said, and stood. “Her heart is evil.”
Neila cried out, and Salim joined his voice to hers, reaching one arm out to the dervish.
“Don’t be fooled, Yusef,” he warned, keeping his tone low and earnest. “Auras can be altered—a simple illusion. Khoyar’s projecting his own evil onto her. Don’t do this.”
The Sarenite batted Salim’s hand away with a casual swipe of his arm. He turned to Khoyar.
“Your suspicions have been verified. I’ll carry word to my church, and to the governor’s people as well.”
Khoyar’s smile was genuinely warm. “Thank you, Yusef. Your assistance is greatly appreciated in this time of tragedy.”
This was going from bad to worse. A sudden inspiration struck Sali
m.
“Yusef, wait! The gem!” Salim pointed to the emerald, which had fallen to the floor during the commotion. “Use the gem! It’ll cut through the illusions and show him for what he really is!”
Yusef paused, but Khoyar didn’t miss a beat.
“That will be quite enough of your witchcraft, Mr. Ghadafar.” His expression was pained. “It injures me greatly to see a respected affiliate of our church seduced into betraying his own by such base, venereal pleasures as this patricidal doxy has to offer—but then, you were never truly one of us.”
The high priest took a single step forward, then drove his boot heel down hard. The emerald shattered to dust.
“Salim Ghadafar and Neila Anvanory, I hereby pronounce you guilty of the murder of Faldus Anvanory. May the Lady of Graves have mercy on your souls.”
Neila moaned. Salim made one last, desperate attempt to make eye contact with the crusader called Yusef, but the sun-worshiper had already turned away.
Then something hard connected with the back of Salim’s head, and everything went black.
Chapter Sixteen
Whispers in the Dark
Salim’s first thought upon waking was that he had somehow gone blind. No matter how hard he blinked, the darkness behind his lids was indistinguishable from the darkness beyond them. He raised a hand to his face, almost touching his nose, but to no avail. Had the blow to the back of his skull—some crossbow’s stock, most likely—been enough to knock the sight from his head?
Yet everything was not uniform. With agonizing slowness, his eyes gradually began to make out a faint glow coming from his left. He turned and crawled toward it, hands and knees grinding against dirty stone.
The light—no more luminous than a dying coal, yet blazing clear against the impenetrable darkness—resolved into a thin-lined rectangle. Salim reached up and felt at the edges, finding a lip where rough wood met the cold stone of the surrounding wall.
A door. This was a door, and the glow—too thin and soft to see anything by, but enough to at least orient himself—was from some light in the chamber beyond, creeping in through an imperfect seal in the doorjamb. Slowly, so as not to knock his aching head on a low ceiling, Salim crouched and then stood, running his hands along the wooden surface before him. There was no knob, but he felt a metal plate with a keyhole and thick, rough iron bands that stretched across its length. No hinges on this side—that would be too easy—but it was a door nonetheless. When he was satisfied that he’d felt all there was to feel, Salim began to sidle sideways, his fingers sliding lightly along the stone of the wall, charting out the limits of his prison.
“Salim!”
His heart jumped, and he almost stumbled. The voice was close, almost right next to him, and clearly terrified.
“Salim, are you there?”
“Neila?” He dropped to his knees again, reaching out blindly in the direction he thought the voice had come from. There was a moment of fumbling, and then his outstretched fingers brushed cloth. A hand wrapped around his wrist, so tight it was painful.
“Salim! I can’t see. I can’t see anything.”
“It’s okay,” he said, pulling himself awkwardly closer to her. “It’s alright, it’s just dark. Look at the light from the doorway. You’re fine.”
A small body pressed against his side. He could feel the mad thrum of her heart, her quickened breathing, but when she spoke again, her voice was calm.
“Where are we?” she asked. “How did we get here?”
Salim had a pretty good idea of both of those things, but instead he answered with a question. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Khoyar.” In the shelter of his armpit, her body tensed with rage. “That murdering bastard judging us guilty. Then someone said something else I couldn’t quite hear, and then—nothing.”
A sleeping spell. Hardly the most priestly of enchantments, but still a damn sight better than being clubbed in the back of the head with a chunk of wood.
“Where are we?” she asked again, and this time he answered.
“In a cell.” Even without testing the other walls, he knew that much. He reached down with the arm not encircling Neila and touched the stone floor. It was cool. “Judging by the temperature, I’d say we’re underground. Probably in the catacombs beneath the cathedral.”
“The catacombs!” Her shiver might have been from the cold, but he doubted it. “Why would the church have jail cells beneath it?”
“It wouldn’t,” Salim said. “But a storeroom with a lock works just as well, when you’re surrounded by stone on all sides.” For all he knew, this was an auxiliary embalming chamber, or a place to store corpses still awaiting their turn beneath the knife. It might even be a holding cell, in which the Pharasmins could trap some of the undead they naturally ran across in the course of their work, studying them in order to train acolytes in their destruction. But Salim decided it would be better not to mention such facts to Neila.
“So he thinks he can just lock us up?” A familiar heat was back in Neila’s disembodied voice, and Salim didn’t need light to imagine her expression. “This will never stand. Even if Amir—that officious little shit—has thrown in with Khoyar, the rest of my household won’t buy it. Someone will contact the authorities, and the guard will come for us.”
The conviction in her voice was so strong that Salim hated to rob her of it. He squeezed her hand.
“I think we’re on our own, Neila. The Church of Pharasma is no petty noble to be argued against. And whether or not he believes that you were responsible for your father’s death, the dervish from the Sarenites thinks he saw evil in your heart. Never mind that Khoyar undoubtedly used magic to swap your auras, the same way he used that beetle medallion to cover up his own. The point is, there are now priests from the two most powerful religions in the city who say you’re guilty, and I suspect that only Khoyar knows the truth.”
“But surely at the trial—”
This time Salim couldn’t help it. He laughed once, hard and without humor.
“With all due respect to your experiences abroad, Lady, you’re a long way from home. I think you’ve overlooked some key details about how things work here for the common man. Or murderer.”
“What—”
“There’s not going to be any trial.” His words were firm without being cruel. “Or rather, we already had it, up in that audience chamber. By now, word of our imminent execution—and the Church of Pharasma’s generous offer to handle both execution and proper burial—is no doubt making its way to the queen’s palace. And when it arrives, who will speak out against it? Your father’s rivals? Some serving woman in your household, placing her character reference against the sworn testimony of one of the high priests of Pharasma?” Another chuckle. “No, Neila. The bureaucrats will be happy enough to let the church handle its own problems. And with you out of the picture, there will be no reason not to resell the sun orchid elixir again. What’s more, unless someone from your family comes to claim your estate—an impressive feat, considering no notification will be sent—the city will reclaim Anvanory Manor and all of its holdings. Everyone wins.” He grimaced into the darkness. “Except us.”
Neila said nothing for a moment. Then: “So we’re on our own.”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s not waste any more time.”
She had a point. Working together in the darkness—for though the lines around the door were now as clear as day, they still didn’t provide enough light to see anything else—the prisoners took stock of both their possessions and their surroundings, feeling their way around the cold stone of the cell.
What they found was not encouraging. They were indeed in some kind of storeroom, though whatever had been kept in here once was long gone, leaving only dust. The walls were smooth stone, cut straight from the bedrock, and came to an end just above Salim’s head with a ceiling of the same style. The entire room was no more than twelve feet across in either direction, and everywhere S
alim knocked, his fist struck with the dull report of solidity—if there were other chambers neighboring this one, there was plenty of stone between them. The door was nearly as stout, and though Salim knew little enough about locks—personally, he was more fond of kicking doors down—the little he could feel of the keyhole and the blank plate surrounding it told him the church hadn’t skimped on security.
Their supply situation was even worse. In tallying up what they’d been left with, it became clear that they’d both been searched with remarkable efficiency. Salim was momentarily surprised, then realized that men who prepared corpses for a living were probably quite used to checking over inert bodies, making sure that no one was accidentally buried with a potential contribution to the church coffers still in his pockets. Though they’d been left their clothes—certainly no one would want to be accused of impropriety at an execution—everything else that might be useful had been rooted out and removed. In addition to their weapons and belt pouches, the priests had taken Salim’s magical amulet and both of their sets of shoes. They’d even removed the ribbon that had helped lace up the neck of Neila’s dress. Perhaps they thought she’d try to garrote someone with it, or strangle herself and rob them of their justice. Somehow Salim doubted Khoyar was overly worried about the latter. But other than the two prisoners and the clothes on their backs, the cell was empty, without so much as a basin to relieve themselves in.
When they were done searching both the walls and themselves, the two inmates hunkered down next to each other, listening at the door. After several minutes of perfect silence, they gave up. Either there was some sort of magic blocking the sound or, more likely, Khoyar hadn’t bothered to set a guard directly in front of the door. It was, in retrospect, a wise choice—any guard that could communicate with them might be convinced to hear them out, and they were bottled tight as it was.
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