Flynn thought for only a moment. Decisively, he nodded, marching right back to the portal. It split open once more.
“You would go back to that Hell?!” Chari cried. “Just like that?!”
“Those two people you’ve sold out are why I do what I do.” Flynn returned to her side, placing a hand on her shoulder and looking her in the eyes. “You can stay in one place and play it safe if you want, and I wouldn’t think less of you for it. Or you can follow, and take a chance that something better waits beyond all this.”
Her round eyes met the slits of his, and she no longer felt fear looking into them. Only a kind of hope, deeper than divinity. Understanding, Chari nodded and summoned more courage than she’d known she had. Flynn took the lead and she followed him through; they emerged unnaturally back to Cordom, atop the fountain as though they’d never left. He caught her and wrapped his arms around her, keeping her from a painful and embarrassing fall.
“Appreciated.” Though winded, she pulled herself free from his grip. She could get herself down.
They climbed down together, and were near the bottom when they felt a distant rumble, the sound of a thousand leaves falling from the trees. Chari wasn’t sure what it meant, but Flynn picked up his pace, taking less care to avoid slipping and falling, leaping over the fountain pool to the ground below.
“I have to hurry,” he looked up at her. “I have to help them.”
Flynn left her still trying to climb down, cold and wet in the night wind.
*
Flynn had never hurried before. Never had to. Never cared to. He relied more on his innate talents in any crisis, and if ever one in his company got in such danger that he’d had to run, they’d never been worth saving. But now his boots pounded through the roads of Cordom. Each time the world shook, it was a little more intense, and he knew Jean was doing her best to keep from getting caught. Another tremor, and Flynn nearly tumbled, staggering and finding his feet again as quickly. Cordom woke slowly, lanterns dimly lit as eyes groped the dark to find the commotion. Another tremor; Flynn was certain Jean had escaped Chari’s house. If she’d made it, then Mack had too. Flynn knew better than to waste a bad situation.
“Jean!” Waiting only a moment, he called out again. “JEAN!”
“You fuckin’ stupid?!” Jean hopped the roots between two trees, stumbling down to the road to join him. In response, Flynn gave her a look that said Do I look stupid? Annoyed, she didn’t retract the insult.
“Mack an’ me got split. Don’t know where he is.” She shook her head, then hit Flynn on the shoulder with the back of her fist. “And where the fuck were you?! We got a buncha tin men tryin’ to nab us and you an’ Chari both are M. I. Effin’ A!”
“It’s …” Flynn paused to listen for a moment: distant footsteps; rattling armor. “… complicated. We make our stand here.”
“A stand? No, we’re grabbin’ Mack and we’re fuckin’ bookin’ it!”
“Back to Sechal?” Flynn asked. “We need into that manor, and we need to get caught to make it happen.”
“I told you before, I ain’t gonna be taken alive!”
“This isn’t Earth; they aren’t with Civilis.” Flynn grabbed her shoulders and looked her right in the eyes. His patience was slipping. “But if that’s not enough, then run and leave this town. I stand my ground.”
Rejecting Flynn, she turned to look for her friend. Whether it was the clang of approaching armor or an insufferable adherence to her ethics, Jean slowed to a stop almost as soon as she started. Clenching a fist in frustration, she cupped her other hand to the side of her mouth and yelled, “MACK!”
When he didn’t come, she drew her mace and rejoined Flynn. She wouldn’t look him in the eye. “He’ll find us here. We stick together. Him. Me. Even you.”
Flynn wanted to tell her to surrender, but he knew she wouldn’t. The soldiers would just as likely kill him for being in her company—they were outsiders, and he was the stranger of the two. They had to lose and survive to get where they needed to be.
A door opened and a local peered out to watch.
A unit of four soldiers had found them, charging with swords drawn. Armored as they were, Flynn’s claws would have required precision strikes that would do nothing for his case. It would have to be fists, then; he had no intention to kill regardless. The soldiers moved to surround them. Back to back, blades aimed at their throats, maybe Jean would just give—
No second thoughts. Ducking under the sword at his neck, Flynn moved in and caught the guard, turning his weighty armor against him and sending him to the floor on his back. Behind him, Jean was engaged in a sloppy duel against two others, relying on aggressive strikes of her mace to bat their blades away. But she was holding her own, and Flynn still had another guard to worry about, charging for the kill. Sparing just enough time to pull the fallen man’s helm loose before striking him in the head to keep him down, Flynn brought the helmet up and caught the attacker’s sword in its curvature, hooking the blade through the visor and tearing it from its owner’s hand.
The man’s exposed neck allowed Flynn to make a jab, staggering him. His fingers twitched to repeat what he’d done to Rebecca Saul and, for a moment, he very nearly did. Jean had in the meantime struck down both of her attackers with successive, heavy strikes.
“So far, so fuckin’ good,” she gloated.
More Cordomites had edged near to watch the scene. With several soldiers catching up, Flynn picked up the sword of his second attacker and the man himself, using him as a human shield. Moving forward with the hostage, Flynn got close enough to the next wave to suddenly shove the man into their ranks, creating enough local chaos and crashing metal that he and Jean were able to move in and start taking them down. Three left, and he and Jean were still standing. The number of bystanders had grown significantly.
“This is going too well.”
“It’s goin’ just fuckin’ right!” she countered.
Mano-a-mano, their attackers had no chance against what they were fighting. But if they brought in enough numbers, angry at seeing their comrades beaten, Flynn and Jean’s days would be numbered for sure. Unconcerned with the soldier trying to strike at him, Flynn glanced back and noticed the scar on the back of Jean’s neck, healed and distorted.
I have to knock her out, he decided. Knock her out and surrender.
Jean wouldn’t see it coming. He would just need to take care of this guard while she—
Thunk.
A sharp pain struck Flynn in the back of his head. He dropped to his knees, clutching the back of his skull in pain. His hands came away warm and wet.
“A rock?!” Jean cried. “All that and you get knocked down by a fuckin’ rock?!”
The bystanders cheered in support of their guard. Flynn’s world blurred, but he could see just long enough to catch Jean’s resignation. Mack tumbled from an alley to join the fray, only to be spied and caught right away. One of the soldiers struck Flynn in the head with the butt of his sword. All went black.
*
Chari watched Flynn run off, waiting as he faded quickly into the deepest shadows cast upon the boulevard. She had been raised for decency, cultivated to espouse it, and every part of her knew she should follow him and do what she could to clear up the mess that she had made.
Instead, Chari turned and climbed back up the fountain. Desperate steps, each taken with care, for there was no one around to catch her if she slipped. Dying from a bad fall while climbing a fountain in the dead of night would be as tragic as it was embarrassing. The first climb—not more than an hour past—was blurry in her memory, but she’d remembered enough to know that the way back to that other world—Sechal—should have opened by this height. Unwilling to let it go, she climbed farther, faster, reaching out atop the fountain, trying to find something unseen. The warm light of a better place, the path to better days ahead.
Her hand touched empty air, then fell to polished marble. Accepting that the way would not breach for her,
she groped weakly one last time in the starlit night for some trace, some sign. Chari felt herself an idiot—waiting, alone. Whatever Flynn’s secret was, she could not even guess. If there was some gesture he performed or incantation he uttered, she’d neither seen nor heard. She considered for a time whether she’d gone anywhere at all. She felt a twinge of regret for not bringing some reminder back, but there was enough proof around her that something had transpired: The dagger beneath the fountain’s waters, reflecting moonlight; the sheath she’d laid at the base, undisturbed. It seemed too good to be true, but something of it was.
Climbing down, Chari was careful and quick. The people of Cordom were static and unchanging, and she felt she’d further fallen away from them. At the bottom, she stood knee-deep in the pool of water and clutched the sheath to a dagger she’d bought scant minutes after the blacksmith had locked his doors. She tossed it up the fountain, near as she could to its paired blade, then climbed out, squeezing the water from her garments so as not to be weighed down.
A distant tremor caught her attention. Chari had never known the earth to shake like this, and she feared what it might portend. She gave pursuit, running fast as she could, though too slow and unpracticed to match Flynn’s pace. Burdened as much by exhaustion as by her soaking wet clothes, she came to the scene of the brawl long after the perpetrators had been taken away. There were a few spots of blood in the road, caught by chance in the moonlight, but nothing to tell a story. She was nearly home, and was compelled to return and investigate; it took great will to put aside her wants and tend the wounded guards. Ingrained habit had taught her to never compromise her cover.
As she mended broken men as well as her endurance would allow, lanterns in the windows snuffed one by one, and whatever scene her houseguests had incited drifted from interest as sleepers settled into the night.
*
In time, Chari’s work was finished and she excused herself to home and rest. A guardsman waited at her door, and she recognized him from the day prior at the Leafless Green pub, where he and Jean had clashed egos. She had known that he’d remember the redhead and the boy with the stitched eye, and had sought him out earlier that night. It had taken some time to find him so late in the evening, but at the time she had felt assured of his passion in aiding the High Priestess. Now, he was like a blight standing at her door.
“Priestess,” he acknowledged her approach. “We—”
Chari’s door slammed firm on him. Their earlier discussion had been tedious enough, and she hadn’t it in her to hear praises for her works in this matter. Nor did she wish to speak further to a man who thanked her for saving his faith and soul, all during a consultation she found too unimportant to remember. He was neither the first nor the last whom Chari had performed such a service, and she hated that it meant so little to her, even more so compared to a brute such as the one she had just locked outside. The thought of returning to the church and saving even one more soul broke her heart.
Setting past regrets aside, she greeted the emptiness that awaited her. A lantern burned on the floor in the middle of the room, its sideways flame blackening glass that had been cracked but not broken. Kneeling, Chari righted it.
The books that were once so neatly piled had been scattered haphazardly across her living room and into her hall. Nearly an hour was spent in straightening the stacks—not so far as perfect arrangements, but enough order that she could sleep through the night. The task gave her reason to ignore her surroundings, but when she finished, she only became aware of the lack of spiritual symbols in her home, and the questions their absence would have raised had any thought to notice.
The couch loomed behind her, empty now. She noticed the “rifle” Flynn had shown her. Like the missing symbols, it had been ignored and forgotten. Her nerves settling, Chari rose to her feet and made her way down the hall. The guest room door was still open, the sheets a ruffled mess, evoking memories of days long past when the room had belonged to her parents. The intervening years had seen the place house more books than people—albeit texts she did not expect to open frequently.
Recalling her guests, hailing from lands more distant than she could conceive, Chari pulled the door shut and held it until it locked in place.
When the night was at its darkest, she lay in bed, staring intently at the knots in the wooden ceiling, desperate for frivolous distraction. Something had always been amiss about them. The hints had been there, but who could have been expected to believe something so impossible, so desperate? She feared what truths they would spill to the Inquisitor. What facts might she scoff superficially at before all were killed in the public square?
For all this worry and woe, Chariska slept peacefully. Her heart had been dulled long ago, in seeing so many taken away crying, screaming. The fate of her friends was at least yet uncertain—there was still the hope that the Inquisitor would sleep too late, waste too much of the next day to bother.
*
Eight days in the highest levels of the tower prison had not readied Flynn for eight hours in the depths of another. It was colder, for one. The howling winds he’d become accustomed to while imprisoned and instinctively expected to hear again were absent. Instead there was a pressing silence, broken occasionally by the reverberating footsteps of the guard in the outer hall.
Flynn had been stripped of his possessions, save his shirt and pants. His cell was in the middle of a passageway, with parallel bars in front and behind while stone walls blocked his sides. He deduced readily that a row of cells continued adjacent to his, complimenting those running in front and behind. Though there were many cages, all were empty save three. The prison, it seemed, was always prepared for a larger haul.
The air was rank with shit and it didn’t take much to deduce the source: holes in the ground of each cell, cut into the stone blocks in lieu of toilets or chamber pots. Torches in the hall licked and burst wildly, keeping the worst of the gasses from flooding the room. Just the same, Flynn noticed that Mack—currently in the cell across from his—had used the one coarse, wool blanket they’d each been given to plug the hole in his cell.
“Heya, Flynn-o! Finally up, eh?”
“I hardly slept,” Flynn replied. It was a soft lie, for being knocked unconscious had given him what rest he needed. He tried to look around, but their lynchpin was nowhere to be seen. “Where’s Jean?”
“Next to you, actually.” Mack glanced to Flynn’s right, at the adjacent cell he could neither see nor breach. “Sleepin’ like a lamb.”
Flynn gripped the bars at the front of his cell and pulled futilely, finding them planted firmly in the surrounding stone. The Cordom prison instilled an immediate sense of fear and certainty, in deep contrast to the indefinite fate that had awaited them in Civilis. No one had bothered to check on them in the hours that had passed, nor brought any food. No effort had been made to isolate the prisoners either, for the Inquisitor’s ilk were in a hurry to break bodies more than spirits.
“I don’t expect we have long,” Flynn warned. “A few days, maybe. They’re going to torture us, break us down. They’ll decide then whom they wish to show clemency to.”
“Clemency?” Mack asked.
“I doubt they kill everyone who comes in here.” He paused, considering their group. “Maybe just those who repent are the ones they’re willing to parade around. When you look at what we have between us: a twisted beast, a violent brute, and a poor cyclopean boy who couldn’t even fight back … it’s not hard to guess who they’ll favor.”
“I got a little lost,” Mack said abashedly, “by the time I got there—look, if we get any say on who goes in first, send me, ‘kay?”
The noble are always the most easily tossed aside. They practically can’t wait to catch a few bullets in their flesh for someone else, Flynn thought, then immediately felt a little guilty for it.
“You already know,” Mack said, sliding a hand over his stitched up eye. “You’ve seen the proof. I can take it.”
Mack soun
ded too genial for someone volunteering to be tortured, and it led Flynn to a slightly off-topic question. “How did you lose your eye?”
“Screwdriver.” Mack smiled back.
Flynn’s sensitive ears picked up an iron door opening somewhere beyond them; footsteps coming closer. Mack heard it too. Rising to the edge of his cell, he held the bars and tried to peer beyond. Like Flynn, nearly everything had been taken from Mack—even the bandages that had covered his elbows and knees. What they had concealed was now exposed—a mass of nerves, crowded and pressing against Mack’s skin like worms trying to burrow out of his body. A matched set adorned his interior elbow joints, and Flynn found little doubt that these nodules were tied to Mack’s apparent inability to feel pain, while the condition of his face assured that immunity to pain was not congruent with immunity to harm. He stood—curious, waiting, accepting the exposure with cavalier grace.
Preceded by two hooded lackeys, Inquisitor Carmella Thunau entered the hall at a steady pace. Bearing a torch, she looked upon the recent captures as though inspecting the latest catch at the market. Her posture shifted slightly, at ease amid so many cages.
Gesturing at the cell beyond Flynn’s, the lackey to her right banged on the bars, bellowing, “‘Ey, you! Get up in there!”
The iron bars vibrated loudly, the hum reverberating down the hallway. Jean stirred, and the Inquisitor spoke.
“The three of you stand accused of heresy. In the next few days, we will be assessing the pitch of your souls, and in so doing you will realize your inexorable fate. Are any of you three lost ones meant to see the Goddess’s light, or are your deaths meant to remind the faithful that they live to satisfy Her wants and needs?”
“This is some kind of moronic,” Jean yawned. “We weren’t hurtin’ no one.”
“Quiet in there!” The Inquisitor punctuated her words by striking the bars of Jean’s cage. The resulting clang resounded sharply and, for Flynn, the sound was ear-splitting. “Weren’t you?” Thunau asked them. “You come to our city as agents of contrary faith, which will only serve to upset and confuse people who are on the proper path. Several eyewitnesses have noticed subtle deviations in High Priestess Jerhas’s behavior since your arrival.”
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