"I need to find The Speaker," Vale says. "To talk. He knows things about Voss's movements that we don't, and he may be the only necromancer in Haven powerful enough to help us close the rifts before Voss completes the circle."
"You want to work with a necromancer." Knox's tone is carefully neutral, the diplomatic voice he uses when he's reserving judgment.
"I want to stop a rogue Templar from cracking open the most dangerous vault on the continent and making himself immortal. If that means working with a necromancer who isn't actively doing that, then yes. I'll work with a necromancer."
Knox studies him for a moment, then nods slowly. "Cael won't like it."
"Cael doesn't need to know. Not yet. Not until we have Voss."
"And if we can't find The Speaker?"
"He's still working. He can't stop." Vale thinks of the reports, the eight years of quiet, stubborn compassion, the way the man had touched the ghost's shoulder with such gentleness before sending it to rest. He thinks of a community that has closed ranks around a dying man because he's the only one who ever helped them. "It's who he is. He'll surface. I just need to be there when he does."
They separate. Knox heads back toward the Old City to work his charm on the locals, to gather what he can about recent spirit activity and narrow down where The Speaker might surface next. It's the kind of work Knox was built for: the easy smile, the patient questions, the knack for making people feel they're talking to a friend rather than a knight of the church.
Vale has never managed it. He doesn't have the disposition for it, so he takes a different approach.
He spends the afternoon mapping The Speaker's known territory against Voss's rift sites. Eight years of reports give him a pattern: the necromancer favors certain areas and certain types of hauntings. He works at night, always alone, and according to multiple witnesses, he looks worse every time someone sees him. The corruption is accelerating. The man is running out of time, and he's spending what he has left the same way he's apparently spent every day for the last eight years, helping people who can't help themselves.
Vale overlays that pattern with the binding circle Voss is constructing. Two of the remaining rift sites, locations where Voss hasn't yet opened a breach, fall within The Speaker's usual range. If The Speaker has been tracking Voss's movements the way he claimed, he'll have noticed the same thing. He'll know where the next rift is going to appear.
Vale marks the locations. Checks his sword. Waits for dark.
He can't stop thinking about those storm-grey eyes. That resigned expression. The way the necromancer had looked at the spirit with such tenderness before sending it onward. He remembers black veins threading through intricate tattoos, corruption and beauty woven together in a way that shouldn't work but does, the way the Old City itself shouldn't work but does.
He pushes the thought aside. It doesn't stay pushed.
Somewhere out there, The Speaker is hiding, planning his next move, probably helping another ghost despite everything. And somewhere else, Maren Voss, Templar, deserter, dying man with a century of rage and a plan that's almost complete, is opening another rift. Cracking another seal. Moving one step closer to the vault.
Vale will find them both. The Speaker first, if he's lucky.
And this time, he'll listen rather than plowing through discretion headfirst. Knox will be so proud.
Chapter 4
August wakes mid-afternoon on top of the covers, still fully dressed, with a pain in his chest that pulses in time with his heartbeat and a headache to match.
He curls his fingers into the quilt and breathes out slowly, trying to ease himself through the worst of it. Sleep usually helps, dulls the constant sting that casting causes, but lately the recovery takes longer and the relief goes shorter, the gap between them narrowing. His body is losing ground it can't get back.
He drags himself upright and manages to sit on the edge of the mattress with his socked feet on the floor, which feels like an accomplishment he'd be embarrassed to admit to anyone. His boots are at the foot of the bed beside his jacket, and that's the entirety of what he owns right now. Everything else is in an apartment he probably can't go back to. He takes a breath,pushes himself to standing, and makes his way to the adjoining bathroom.
The corruption has crawled up his neck overnight. Thin dark lines thread across his jaw, creeping toward his cheekbones. His warding tattoos, ritualistic patterns he'd gotten between the ages of sixteen and twenty when he still thought he might have a future worth protecting, are barely visible beneath the spreading darkness. The circles under his eyes look like bruises. He can't remember the last time he ate.
August splashes cold water on his face and tries not to think about the Templar. Tries not to think about the conviction in those brown eyes, so full of certainty, as though the man knew exactly who August was and what he deserved. As though the verdict had been rendered long before August opened his mouth.
The Templar doesn't know anything. Not about August, not about the rifts, not about the person actually responsible for the dead flooding Haven's streets. He knows what the Order taught him, which is that necromancers are monsters, and he'd looked at August and seen exactly what he expected to see.
But that's temporary. Soon he'll know more than August wants him to. That's how the Order works: relentless, methodical, patient in the way that only institutions with centuries of practice can be. August has survived this long by being invisible, and now he's been seen. They'll track his movements, question people in the Old City, piece together his patterns. It's only a matter of time before they find his apartment, his research, every corner of the careful life he's built.
August needs to be faster than them. Which, given that he can barely stand up without the room tilting, is going to be a challenge.
He returns to the bedroom and spreads his research across the still-made bed. Maps take up the most space, marked withdates and locations where rifts have opened. Beneath them are his notes, cross-referenced with historical records he's stolen from the University of Haven's restricted section. The librarian who'd helped him had been sympathetic to his research without knowing what it was for, and August had felt guilty about the deception in the way he always feels guilty about deception, which is deeply and uselessly. The pattern has been clear to him for days: the rift sites form a circle around the Order's cathedral, each one corresponding to an ancient ritual location from before the War of Binding.
Mortis Cabal sites. Has to be.
The Cabal had been the most powerful necromantic order in history. Their artifacts and accumulated knowledge had been sealed in the Order's vault, considered too dangerous to exist anywhere else. Some of those artifacts were what had allowed the Cabal to endure the cost of necromancy. Objects that could absorb or redirect the life-draining properties of death magic, enabling their wielders to practice without paying the price in their own blood and years. For someone like August, they represent something he's never allowed himself to want: the ability to use his gift without it killing him.
He's thought about it. Of course he's thought about it. On the worst nights, when the pain is unbearable and the veins have spread so far he can barely look at his own hands, he's imagined what it would be like to help spirits without feeling his life drain away with each one. To do the work he loves without it being a death sentence. He's imagined it, and then he's put the thought away, because wanting something that badly when you can't have it is its own kind of poison.
