“Why all this?” she asked. “You’re shutting up shop to help a couple of complete strangers.”
His smile was brilliant and as full of guile as a coven of foxes. “Why, my dear, I feel we’ve become acquainted with one another in the brief time you’ve been my guest, and besides, you’re a Slayer, and we all owe you a debt of not-inconsiderable size. Also, are you really in a position to turn down any help that’s on offer, right now? You want your Yorughan friend back, don’t you?”
Something inside her kicked and wanted to argue, but she recognised it as her Forinthi upbringing, unwilling to give a Cheriveni the benefit of the doubt. With bad grace she shrugged. “Lead on, then.”
He did so, tripping off down an alley from the Hospice street as blithely as though they were going sightseeing. Celestaine and Nedlam followed him, and Fisher trailed dourly behind, carrying rope and grappling irons and a robust iron-shod staff.
“So if the priesthood’s all supposed to be dead,” Celestaine asked over Catt’s shoulder, “and they’re now some sort of secret murder cult, how do you know where they do their murdering?”
“Oh, as to that, it’s no great mystery.” Catt’s grin was nonetheless a little shamefaced. “They were taking all manner of magical bric-a-brac from the minions of the Kinslayer during the war, so of course I tooled up and went to take a look, in case they had anything that deserved to be preserved for the ages in a private collection.” He sighed theatrically. “Alas, nothing of worth. Except the poor old Redecina, or what’s left of it. They abstracted it from the rubble, I’d guess, but only in pieces. So much for the Grace of the Gracious One.”
He got them to a street where the houses were boarded up, the doors and shutters chained and padlocked. They were all imposing three-storey jobs; Celestaine guessed they were the townhouses of rich families who had yet to return for them. Catt stopped at one door and tutted. “Remarkably inconvenient. They’ve resecured the place since my last exploratory larceny. Fishy, do the honours, would you?”
Fisher muttered something uncomplimentary and came for the door, tweaking a pair of picks out from behind his ear. Before he could get to work, Nedlam reached forwards and took the lock and chain in both hands. A mulish look came to her face that Celestaine was well acquainted with, and the muscles of her arms bulged like blue-grey melons. The snap of the metal shearing was muffled in her grip.
“It would seem, Fishy, that you’re surplus to requirements,” Doctor Catt remarked mildly, pulling the door open. Within was a dust-caked hallway, rich furnishings and hangings defaced and spattered. Picking at the splintered gilding of a balustrade, he added ruefully, “They barracked the curfew patrol down this street. I fear the character of the neighbourhood will not soon recover.”
“Why are we here?” Celestaine asked him. “The Hospice was over by your shop,”
“Yes, but when we descend to the wine cellar here, now sadly denuded of comestibles, you’ll see that one entrance to the sacred caves is behind the barrel racks. All through the occupation, the Underprior’s agents were sneaking in and out under the noses of the guard.” He frowned at her unhappy expression. “Hmm?”
“They’re heroes,” she said simply. “They fought the Kinslayer, like I did. And now I’m going to fight them.”
Catt glanced at Nedlam. “You have a curious choice in friends, and they’re desperate. The Kinslayer’s death didn’t give them back their god.”
IN THE CELLAR, behind the barrel rack and the false wall, both of which Nedlam shifted with a minimum of fuss, they found their way. It was a chasm straight down, a crack in the earth that made Celestaine think of giant spiders and centipedes, mostly from personal experience.
“They utilise magic to ascend and descend, I suspect,” Doctor Catt murmured. “We are bound to a more traditional methodology, alas.”
“Where’s Amkulyah?” Celestaine hissed at Nedlam.
The Yorughan shrugged. “Little razzer was right on their heels. Moves quick and quiet for a prince. They got him, or he got in after them, or something else.”
“An admirably complete list of options,” Catt commented. “Fishy, make yourself useful, would you?”
Fisher hooked his grappling iron over a beam, swinging on it like a bellringer to test its firmness. With a long-suffering look at Catt, he kicked the rope down the hole, watching the fixed end shake and shiver as the rest unravelled down the abyss.
“Only about twenty feet, no demanding venture,” Catt said, before clambering down the rope with a nimbleness Celestaine wouldn’t have credited. She followed, wishing she’d had a chance to get her armour—surely there would be steel flying about soon enough. She was halfway down when Nedlam started after her, and she got off the rope quickly in case the beam gave. Yorughan weighed a lot, but they were stronger even than that, and Nedlam let herself down effortlessly, hand over hand.
Down below, the walls were part natural rock, part carved. Where the cave dipped low, it had been worked into an elaborate arch; where it reached higher again, one wall had been levelled out and inscribed with lessons of the Gracious One, all open hands and unconditional love. The sconces by the words were empty, and Celestaine guessed the surviving priesthood had been operating off-book for a while now.
There was a wavering light to be seen somewhere ahead and they made their way forwards cautiously through the narrow cleft in the rock, hearing the murmur of a few voices talking in low, agitated tones. Doctor Catt walked like his namesake and Nedlam had her boots off, her bare leathery soles soft on the stone. Behind them, Fisher was clumping along as though every step was a personal insult to his standing as a professional.
The cultists were arguing in that strained, formal way people do when they really want to come to blows but can’t. The discussion seemed to be part magical theory and part theology. The dominant voice was a woman’s, but two or three others had strong, academically complex opinions they were trying to get in. Celestaine couldn’t follow two words of it together, magic never having been her thing. The debate was involved enough, though, that it covered their approach nicely.
The fugitive priests had a couple of braziers set up, and the heavy scent on the air suggested they were for more than just light. Between them, where the rock floor had been levelled precisely flat, was the Redecina. It had been a golden pillar about six feet tall at one point, but as Catt said, the temple had fallen on it since. Now it stood, crooked, within a rough scaffold of wood and cane, and the orbs that had danced about Catt’s little toy were conspicuous by their absence. It formed the centrepiece of a phenomenally complex design on the floor, some of which was carved, the rest written in chalk, and now being rewritten as one of the priests made some philosophical point. Chained to the Redecina was Heno.
Chapter Six
HE HAD BEEN beaten about a bit, Celestaine saw, and her heart lurched to see the blood on his lips where his own tusks had cut them. Yorughan were nothing if not tough, though. A fierce human beating was the sort of thing they’d expect for a minor infraction in the Kinslayer’s army.
The argument was reaching a peak. There were nine of them there, Celestaine saw, in robes of varying condition and fit, mostly emblazoned with the Redecina. The woman doing most of the whispering looked as though she was only a little over twenty, and of the rest only one was much older, a grey-haired man who was continually spoken over as he tried to say something. Not the priests of the fallen temple, but their children, or maybe the children of their most faithful? Save me from the fires of young faith.
“No more!” Abruptly the young woman—the Underprior?—shoved the older man in the chest, and then thrust a hand in the face of a boy surely no more than sixteen. “We don’t have time. The gods will have to understand.”
“She’s got magic,” Nedlam muttered. “That manchild too, watch ’em.”
“But Lees and the others aren’t back,” the boy was saying. “At least wait—”
“‘Not back yet’ means ‘not coming back,’”
the Underprior snapped, and of course she was right in that, because Nedlam had presumably flattened Lees and his or her compatriots. “We do it now, before the militia come calling. You think we’re so very secret here?”
“But why should it work this time?” the older man eventually managed, and the Underprior cut him off contemptuously.
“If it doesn’t work, then look to your lack of faith! We keep going until it works.” She knelt swiftly to finish the chalk lines, then stepped gingerly over them, drawing a knife from within her robes. Catt sucked at his teeth when he saw it, suggesting that it had a threat beyond a mere keen edge.
“Right,” Celestaine said, and made herself known, Nedlam at her back. “No further, any of you.”
They scattered in surprise as she appeared, but then mobbed up again. Swords and staves and daggers flashed in the emberlight.
“You have a friend of mine,” Celestaine told them flatly. “I don’t care what you think you’re about here. I’m leaving with him, alive.”
The Underprior looked at her with utter loathing. “If you count things of the enemy as your friend, then you won’t leave here at all. When the Gracious One comes back to us, she will judge you.”
“Let her. My name is Celestaine. I killed the Kinslayer.” With help, but just this once she let the truth slide.
In the pause that followed, the boy-mage cultist’s reverent “Fuck” echoed from the walls.
“My friend, Heno,” Celestaine went on calmly, advancing with measured steps as the priesthood melted away on either side, “brought me and the Slayers to the enemy’s chamber. For that, he should be in the songs, but right now I’ll settle on him not having his throat cut.”
The Underprior bared her teeth like an animal. “You don’t understand. Look at it!” And she meant the Redecina, not Heno.
“The war’s over.” Celestaine was certainly saying that a lot, these days. She stopped with her feet at the edge of the chalk.
“It’s not about the war, it’s about the gods!” the Underprior shouted. “How can we ever be what we were, without the gods? The Gracious One meant everything to this town. People came from every kingdom for Her mercy and Her healing. The Lightbearer herself dwelled among us, teaching and training us. And the Kinslayer killed her, tortured her to death when she would not fight. The Kinslayer killed almost all of us and tore down our walls and broke the sacred symbol of the Gracious One’s trust in us. And without the gods we’ll never be what we were, we’ll only decline and decline. I’ve seen it out there. Everything’s… mean and poor and broken!”
“But they’re rebuilding,” Celestaine insisted.
“How can they?” the Underprior demanded. “It’s just stone and wood. It’s not the gods. If we can’t reach the gods, we’re nothing. The Kinslayer cut us from Them, but we will bridge the gap to Them, with his own tools.” And she lunged for Heno, but Celestaine had been ready for her. She was scuffing through the chalk already, hauling back on the girl’s robe so that the blade did no more than nick a hair of Heno’s beard.
The Underprior lashed out at her, elbow cracking across Celestaine’s cheekbone, that dagger lashing dangerously close to her face. Nedlam whooped her Yorughan battle cry, instantly dragging the attention of all the spare priesthood and leaving Celestaine and the Underprior to each other’s good graces.
“Doesn’t have to be this way.” Celestaine still hadn’t drawn her blade; that was a bridge that couldn’t be recrossed. She tried for the dagger wrist, but the girl wove back from her, nimble as a dancer. The move gave Celestaine the chance to get between her and Heno, who rattled his chains pointedly.
“You’re not a Slayer,” the Underprior spat. “If you were the Kinslayer’s foe, you’d understand. You’d not protect a thing of his making. The world needs to be cleansed of them, and why not do so and bring the gods back at the same time? You think the enemy’s death cleans up all the blood he spilled?” Abruptly she scuttled back, but she was taking up a halberd from the scattered weapons by the cave wall.
“No,” Celestaine said, still calm. She slipped her blade from its scabbard very carefully, because a halberd in a trained grip was nothing you wanted to face with bare hands. “But what are you suggesting? That all the Yorughan, all the Grennish and the rest, they just get rounded up and put to death?”
The Underprior stared at her as though she was mad. “Of course! They’re just things the enemy made, after all. All the monsters and dragons and mockeries of mankind, all of them. They’re just pieces of the enemy, you idiot woman! They’re him, left over. And as he took the gods from us, so his pieces will bring them back!” She punctuated the last word with a cleaving stroke that Celestaine deflected with a brief pass of her blade. The halberd head rang and danced on the stone floor and the Underprior looked at the clean-cut end of the haft.
“If you just open up enough of them, right?” Celestaine prompted. “How many did you kill so far?”
“Not enough!” The Underprior swung the shaft like a quarterstaff, lashing out with one end and then the other.
Nedlam was holding back. Celestaine caught sight of her from the corner of her eye, swinging her massive club around to keep the priests back. She was scowling, plainly wanting to reduce a few more to a bloody paste, but she was doing what she was told. Celestaine saw the older man rush her from behind with a sword, only to get hoofed in the stomach and end up on his back, gasping for breath. Another two jumped on one of her arms and she used them as an impromptu flail against the rest of them.
Two strikes and the Underprior was left with a stick barely suitable as a cosh. Celestaine decided to try the last reasonable argument she had, in the moment of stillness before her enemy found a new weapon. “The Yorughan aren’t made things,” she insisted. “Yes, he bred dragons and monsters and all sorts, in ones and twos, or perhaps a half-dozen at a time. He didn’t make the Yoggs,” she cursed herself mentally for the slur but pressed on, “or the Grenns or the rest. They’re gods-made, like us or the Oerni. They’re just the races the Guardians didn’t reach, that the Kinslayer hid away for his own pleasure. He twisted them to serve him, but he didn’t create them, and they don’t deserve to die.”
The Underprior had a denial right there on her lips, but something in Celestaine’s tone got to her. She had a sword now, Cheriveni war surplus, and her knuckles were white about the hilt, but she didn’t use it.
“Seriously,” Celestaine told her. “They didn’t choose it, none of it, any more than we did.” She watched the battle behind the girl’s eyes. Would any words cut through that terrible certainty? Would they balance out the guilt of so many wasted sacrifices? Easier, surely, to believe her own lies and just keep slitting throats, buoyed by the heady liquor of her divine mission. Celestaine slashed across the chains holding Heno, sending their severed ends rattling away and inadvertently carving a long scar of sacrilege in the front of the Redecina.
There was a sizzle and flash that left spots dancing before Celestaine’s eyes and she heard Nedlam bellow in fury. The young mage-priest had finally got his power together and conjured blazing rings of fire about her wrists, locking her arms above her head. “Kill it!” the boy shouted, forehead gleaming with sweat at the effort. Nedlam roared and bared her tusks, but the power held her in place as the cultists closed in with their blades.
Celestaine shouted out for them to stop and the Underprior barrelled into her, knocking her from her feet and sending her sword flying off to bury itself to the quillons in the wall. A moment later she was on her back, the breath slammed out of her, with the furious girl poised above her, dagger raised.
“Liar!” she shrieked, so desperate to gainsay Celestaine’s words that she didn’t take her best chance to stab.
Nedlam kicked the closest of her attackers right between the legs, adding considerably to the celibacy of the priesthood. There were too many of them, though, and the magic held her, tug as she might.
The boy mage gave out a wordless cry of triumph at his
own power, before an arrow took him in the eye hard enough to split the back of his skull. Abruptly freed, Nedlam brought her club down to smash the nearest swordsman’s arm into bloody splinters. Celestaine wanted to tell her not to kill anyone, but the Underprior was trying to stab her in the face and, besides, the unseen archer had obviously declared open season on priests. Amkulyah, somewhere up high. She hadn’t taken the little Aethani as a climber, but he must have been scuttling about the upper reaches of the cave like a monkey.
The Underprior shouted out a vitriolic incantation, and abruptly Celestaine was losing the struggle for the dagger. A mad strength surged through the girl-priest’s limbs, her muscles writhing and swelling with borrowed power. Celestaine saw veins bulge and burst beneath her skin, the white of her eyes flooding red and blood leaking from their corners.
“If the blood of his creatures won’t suffice, then the blood of his killer will!” the girl spat, and she hoisted Celestaine bodily up, smacking her against the crazily slanting Redecina and holding her there with one hand. Celestaine punched her in the face and kicked her in the knee, neither of which did the slightest good. A hundred arguments swelled in her head to try and turn this girl back to sanity, but none of them were good enough and, besides, she was being choked by the Underprior’s iron fingers.
Nedlam was still fighting, too involved in mopping up to see the problem. Would an arrow wing its way from the darkness to save her? Her grasp of the tactical situation was fading along with her breath but she didn’t think Amkulyah would have a good enough angle to try it.
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