We crept forward, moving silently through the darkness, our senses on full alert and our weapons at the ready. After we turned a corner, I saw the flickering orange glow of torches shining down the corridor, so I held up my hand, signaling the others to stop. Silhouetted against the torchlight were two hooded figures dragging a corpse into a room.
“Who do you think they are?” I whispered to Elyse.
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen clergy or cathedral servants dressed like that before.”
“They look like people who need a good killing,” Rami added.
“Let’s check it out,” I said.
I moved swiftly but stealthily through the shadowy passage with Grave Oath at the ready. In the torchlight spilling out of the doorway, shadows of the two hooded figures lifted up the body. There was a squelching sound—like someone being run through with a sword—and then silence other than the shuffling of their feet.
I stepped into the light and looked into the room. Even for someone as accustomed to the sight of death, blood, and gore as me, this was a bit much. Lining the walls of the room were countless naked human corpses, all hanging from meathooks. They seemed to be of young women, but the blood and horrific wounds made it hard to tell. The squelching sound I’d heard had been the freshest corpse being placed on a meathook. She had been dead long before being impaled on the hook though. On her left breast was a gaping wound, a large incision from where her heart had been removed. The same wound adorned all the corpses.
“I don’t know what sick shit you two motherfuckers have been getting up to,” I growled as I stepped into the room, “but it ends tonight.”
The hooded men cried out, but they were quick to react. Each whipped out a long, curved dagger from their purple cloaks before they snarled and charged.
I could have killed them quickly. That would have been easy. But I wanted information first.
The flame of justice guided my hand as I darted under the closest man’s clumsy lunge. Before he could recover, I spun around and caught his arm under my right armpit and in the crook of my elbow. With a swift jerk, I broke it, and he screamed out as the bone snapped. His dagger dropped from his limp arm and clattered to the ground. Keeping his arm locked in mine, I shoved my upper back onto his chest as his friend veered and charged at me. I launched my weight up and backward, using my victim’s spine almost like a bendy spring. He howled as he was forced to lean back. The movement allowed me to bring both legs up high in the air so that I could smash both of my feet into his buddy’s face.
The donkey-kick broke his jaw, and he dropped his dagger as he flew back. The momentum of my backward roll, combined with the reverb of the kick, forced the other guy’s spine to bend so far back that it snapped. As I finished my maneuver with a backward flip, he flopped to the floor, screaming, with a broken arm and a broken back.
The other guy scrambled onto his hands and knees, groaning and spitting blood from his broken jaw as he attempted to reach for his dagger. I simply strode over to him, picked up the weapon before he could get to it, and kicked him in the stomach. He rolled over a few times and came to rest against the wall.
With both of the assholes effectively immobilized, it was time to ask some questions.
I half-wondered where Elyse and Rami were and looked up to see them watching through the doorway. Both wore appreciative smiles, and even my skeletons seemed to be looking at me with respect from over their shoulders.
“By the Lord of Light, what is this evil?” Elyse must have only just noticed the corpses on the meathooks. Her eyes were almost popping out of their sockets.
“I have seen many dark things in my days as an enjarta,” Rami murmured, “but never anything as horrifying as this.”
I walked over to the man with the broken back and knelt down next to him.
“What the fuck are you psychotic creeps doing?” I held the point of Grave Oath mere millimeters from his eyeball. “You’ve got five seconds to tell me just what you’re up to before I start peeling your face off.”
“We were only, only acting on, on Bishop Nabu’s orders,” the frightened man immediately started stammering between groans, his eyes locked on Grave Oath’s razor-sharp tip. “He, he used these girls, these virgins, for blood sacrifices.”
“So, what does the slug do, cut these poor girls’ hearts out? And then what? What does he gain from this depraved fuckery?”
“Great… power,” rasped the man with the broken jaw from behind me. “Power… the likes of which you… could not begin… to comprehend.”
“I don’t give a goblin’s ass about Nabu’s twisted power. I’m gonna cut his heart out before the night is over. I’ll shove that black, rotten piece of diseased flesh right up his ass.”
A slow, strangled laugh gurgled out of the man’s throat, and, despite the pain he was in, he managed to glare at me through the gloom.
“You fool. You have no idea… of the pain that awaits you. You—”
Whatever he was saying was cut off very abruptly when his head popped like a ripe melon. I turned around to see Elyse standing over him, her mace buried in the pulpy mess of what was left of his head. An intense wrath was burning like a demon’s aura in her eyes.
“I always knew that Nabu was evil,” she said, “but I had no idea that he was this evil. And these slithering serpents, these disgusting servants of his... I cannot let them live. Not after what they’ve done to these poor innocents.”
She yanked her mace up and made a beeline for the next one. Suddenly, her free hand
