Information or weapons? Or both? Yes, both. Up it is.
He climbed quickly, dashing up two stairs at a time on the balls of his feet, pausing only slightly at each landing to poke his head up and check for guards before running up and up again. There were signs of life everywhere. Voices echoed in the distance. Doors creaked open and slammed shut. Swords clashed. Torches burned. Candles burned. Footsteps echoed. But at each new level, Salvator always found his stairwell abandoned and ignored. Once he caught someone disappearing behind a door, but no one caught him.
No one ever catches me.
After three flights his legs were burning and after five he was slowing quite a bit. Here the ancient stone fortress transitioned to the polished wooden temple, a much younger and airier place. The inner walls appeared to be a thin white fabric, almost like paper, which allowed a small amount of light and shadow to come through.
At the seventh floor, he stepped away from the stair and leaned against the wall to stretch. There was an old Persian carpet on the floor and a series of faded tapestries hanging along the corridor wall. He considered the two closed doors beside him at the end of the hall.
The left door opened on a primitive water closet, a bare wooden seat that exhaled a foul wet odor.
Lovely, I’ve been climbing up the stairs alongside the cultist shithouse.
The right door opened on what appeared to be a small class room. Rows of benches and chairs faced a tall blackboard with many faded and poorly erased markings on it. Salvator paced inside to squint at the markings in the dark. They meant nothing to him.
A voice in the hall drew him to the door and he peeked out to see two men standing together at the far end of the corridor speaking in low voices. When their conversation ended, one of the men turned away but the other turned toward Salvator’s end of the hall and strode purposefully along. Salvator drew his rapier and waited.
The figure of the man swept past the classroom door and the Italian heard another door creak open and slam shut, and then he heard the man wriggling out of his clothing.
Well, these people do eat a lot of hummus.
The Italian darted across the hall and clambered up the iron stairs one more floor before he countered a heavy iron lid bolted across his path, barring him from the ninth floor.
Aha! Finally. Locks. Locks mean something to protect, and that means something worth taking.
He fished a pair of steel needles from his pocket and deftly picked the lock with a few careful gestures and choice expletives as bits of rust fell down in his face. With the lock open, he listened carefully for sounds of life above, and hearing none, he pushed the lid up and climbed out onto the ninth floor.
The stair ended. He stepped out of the stairwell not into another hallway but into a massive chamber that seemed to span the entire width of the building, a vast space interrupted only by a few ironwood pillars no doubt needed to support the other six or so levels of the temple above.
The wooden floor here was badly scuffed and scraped and scratched. Salvator trod carefully across the room, peering down at the marked wood.
A training room. But shouldn’t something like this be on a lower level? If you filled this room with men all lunging and stomping around, you’d have someone crashing through the floor sooner or later.
Most of the marks on the floor were pale brown or even white with flecks of dust around them. But some marks were black. He knelt to scratch at one of the black marks and found the wood charred and brittle.
Practicing with burning swords in a wooden room? Sounds almost suicidal. Unless that’s the point of the lesson. Hm. Seems like everything about these cultists looks stupid on the surface until you see the face behind the mask.
There were large doors at either end of the room and he guessed the ones toward the front of the temple would lead to the main stairs for whatever poor souls were forced to trudge up here to train with their fiery seireiken blades.
Which leaves the rear door.
With his ear pressed to the rear door, Salvator heard new sounds of life. A creaking floorboard. The scuff of a shoe. The flap of paper. A cough.
Perfect.
Salvator swung the door open and strode inside with his right hand ready on his sword. The room was only a fraction the size of the practice room, and it was a jumble of furnishings and equipment for a jumble of purposes. Directly in front him were racks of wooden and steel staves and practice swords, and knives, maces, boomerangs, chakrum, flails, crossbows, and ornate rifles that might have been old Espani blunderbusses.
Beyond the racks were bins full of gloves, leather helmets, leather breast plates, bronze heart guards, iron masks, dented greaves, and other mismatched bits of armor from a dozen countries across a dozen centuries.
And then he came to the heavy linen curtain. Beyond it he heard the shuffling footsteps quite loudly. The footsteps stopped. “Yes, what is it?”
An older man. Hm. Let’s see how far my borrowed clothes and accent can take me.
The Italian swept the curtain aside with a smile. “Good afternoon, sir. I was hoping to have a quick word with you.”
The middle-aged Aegyptian man sank back down into his chair at his desk, his face a nest of frowning wrinkles. “I don’t recognize you. One of Rashaken’s men, are you? If you report to him, you should be bothering him.”
“Yes of course, I’m sorry, sir. And you are?”
“I am Khai.” There was a hint of satisfaction in the way he said his name, a smugness and a sense of expectation, as though his name alone should have commanded respect.
“Khai. Yes, of course. I’m sorry, again. Is it Lord Khai or High Priest Khai?”
A dark sneer twisted his lip. “First Knight of Osiris. And who the devil are you?” He half-turned to reach for the short sword lying across the end of his desk.
My accent still needs work, I see.
Salvator whisked out his rapier and lightly tapped the point of its blade on the man’s sword to make him take back his hand. The Italian smiled. “First Knight? How quaint. I am the Supreme Knight of the Order of the Seven Hearts. I suppose that means I outrank you,” Salvator said. “Your duties and responsibilities?”
“A northerner. Italian, I suppose. So? What is it you want?” Khai sat very still, his hands in plain view. There was no visible weapon on his belt or anywhere else on his person. “Money?”
“Information. An old friend of mine works for your people. She’s done a few strange things, many strange things, and I want to know why. I want to know about the burning swords. I want to know about the assassinations.”
“You want a great deal,” Khai said calmly. His eyes closed a small fraction. “In the east, they would call that the path to suffering.”
“In the east, they worship cows. You’ll pardon me for thinking their ideas are stupid.” Salvator paced around the small office behind the curtain. Books and papers, measuring tools, maps. And a small bed in the corner. “Now. Let’s start with this temple of yours. What does it do exactly?”
The Aegyptian shook his head. “You may as well kill me if you expect me to tell you that.”
Salvator shrugged. “I may kill you anyway.”
“Indeed. And that is hardly an incentive for me to talk, is it?”
Both men chuckled.
We’re two a kind, aren’t we? A pity we’re on different sides today.
The Italian wiggled the point of his rapier at his hostage. “What would you be willing to talk about short of me taking a look at your spleen?”
“Ah. Perhaps a history lesson. A brief one.” Khai gestured to the other chair.
Salvator sat, his rapier resting on his knee. “A word of warning. I’ve killed four of your guards to get in here. I expect I’ll have to kill more to get out. If you play for time, especially if you bore me, I’ll only kill you as well. But not necessarily quickly or painlessly.”
“I appreciate your honesty,” the Aegyptian said. “I’ll be brief, and as entertaining as I can. So you want to know about our swords, do you? Well then. Several thousand years ago on a faraway island, a sword smith discovered a strange golden nugget. He quickly learned that it was not ordinary gold. It drank in aether like a magnet draws in iron shavings. And it swallowed the souls of the dead that touched the metal, making the gold hotter and harder. In the span of a few generations, the sword smiths on this island learned to handle the gold with
