“I know,” Branwyn said, “but speed is of the essence here.”
Yes.The sword-spirit gathered herself together.Sorry, girl. I should be able to guide you to the worst of it, at any rate. That’s probably where they’re keeping the kid.
“Silver lining, I suppose.”
Branwyn opened the door slowly, which didn’t keep it from creaking, and stepped carefully out into a dark hallway. The walls held brackets, but no torches, and they were bare of any ornament that might provide either color or warmth.
Darya, Branwyn’s friend and fellow Sentinel, spent much of her time hunting in ruined cities. Now Branwyn recalled her stories with a new perspective, one that let her understand them much better. She didn’tthinkany of the rooms would contain the restless dead Darya had talked about, but neither guards nor cultists were an especially pleasant alternative. As for monsters, one never knew.
Down, said Yathana,and I think on the left. Hard to say from this distance.
Regardless, Branwyn opened the doors up and down the hallway, gave each room a quick inspection, and left when they contained neither a child nor, in most cases, any signs of use. One end of the hall was boarded up, and scorch marks stretched long, misshapen fingers out onto the wall in front of the boards on either side.
“With any sense,” Branwyn whispered, “they’d have given up being cultists after all of this.”
Nah. Probably made them try harder to be worthy. That’s how fanatics work.Yathana chuckled.I should know. But my cult’s right.
“Is this the time for existential philosophy?”
In a desecrated building, right before we might die? Absolutely.
Branwyn opened the last door, found nothing, and then followed a winding, narrow staircase down to the ground floor.
There, a reasonably skilled and fairly unpleasant person had carved murals into the wood. Most of them showed a giant head—presumably Gizath—glowering at people in different states of vice: a man in a gutter with a bottle of wine, a woman in a low-cut gown, a mob at the gates of a castle. Another scene met with its evident approval, one in which a well-dressed family accepted the obeisance of three soldiers and a peasant couple.
Oh, for a picture of a waterfolk orgy.
The first door Branwyn opened led to a small room with a table, a chest, and a bookshelf. She didn’t spend much time investigating, but at least one of the books looked like it was bound in…
Well, it could, in theory, have been goatskin or pigskin, undyed, but Branwyn wouldn’t have been confident about saying it was either.
New plan. We get the girl, the knights execute every damn one of these people except Zelen, and then we come back with a squad of Blades and set fire to the place. Sorry about your young man’s house, but…
Branwyn doubted he’d mind.
Chapter 35
It’s at the end of the hall, said Yathana, as Branwyn crept forward.At least, that’s where the corruption is strongest.
“Do you know if they’ve still got a demon?” Branwyn asked under her breath. The door opposite the study had only been a linen closet, though why cultists conducting rituals in an abandoned wing would need linens…
Well, she did know. Or she could guess, little as she wanted to. They were quite organized about the whole business; Branwyn had to give them that much.
No. After a certain point, degrees of corruption don’t register. Once you’ve drowned, it doesn’t matter if you tried to breathe twelve feet of water or only ten, does it?
“No,” said Branwyn, and the neatly stacked linen took on a new connotation. “How long would you say they’ve been worshipping the Traitor? Sacrificing to him?”
Generations. Maybe since before the storms.
For a second, Branwyn could see darkness overlaying the whole hallway—not the shadows that had been transparent to her since her reforging but the grime of old filth, spreading and clinging to wood and rock. She shuddered, and had the mission not been so urgent, would have paused before opening the next door, perhaps found a cloth to wrap her hand in. The handle felt as though it crawled underneath her palm.
She pushed it open regardless.
“Mmmmmmfffff!”
The muffled, desperate, angry sound came from one corner of a small bare room, not much more than another closet with the linen taken out. There was a shape there, a small version of the comma human beings became with their limbs tied together. As she hurried over, Branwyn recognized the face that she’d dimly seen through her injuries. It was bruised now, with a large purple lump near one temple.
“Easy,” she hissed. “Be still, be quiet. I’m going to get you out.”
