Courtesy and legality attended to, he kicked in the door.
Satrine was not ready for the sight inside.
The room was filled with candles, meticulously arranged on the points of a nine-pointed star drawn on the floor. Three men sat on the floor, each on a point, while three dead bodies lay in the center of the symbol.
The stench hit her full in the face, threatening to upend her stomach.
“Stand and be held!” Kellman shouted, clearly finding his voice before Satrine had hers. She managed to bring up her crossbow with him.
All three men grabbed knives off the floor, and Satrine focused her aim on the closest one of them, shooting on instinct. Her blunt-tip bolt struck him in the hand as his knife went up, forcing him to drop it. The blade skittered out of his reach. Kellman’s bolt knocked one of the others in the chest, but it didn’t deter him.
The two who still had their knives went right for their own throats.
The third got to his feet and went for his knife, but Satrine stepped forward, putting herself between him and it. He swung at her, a wild punch. She easily dodged and brought up her handstick, landing a shot across his jaw.
Kellman had a whistle in his mouth, calling for Yellowshields. Not that they would be able to do a damn thing for those two. They had already bled all over the floor, and no Yellowshield or doctor in the city was going to be able to save them.
Satrine locked her handstick under the third man’s arm, twisting him around and down to the ground. “You will be ironed and delivered,” she said, getting her irons out and on his wrists. “Charges will be laid upon you, including and not limited to murder and robbery.”
“I fear not your charges,” the third man said. “I fear not your iron. Nothing can hold me while I serve.”
“You’re going to serve in Quarrygate,” Kellman said. “But first, by every saint, you’re going to explain what the blazes this all is!”
Satrine turned the man around. He was smiling broadly, eyes wild and crazed. Laughing, he said, “By every saint. You cling to this false faith, praying to emptiness that will never hear.”
“And this is a real faith, this horror?” Kellman asked, shoving the man back.
“Derrick, easy!” Satrine said.
“This isn’t faith,” the man said. “It’s truth, pure as the wind.” Despite being ironed, he charged down a hallway to a back stairwell.
“Rutting saints,” Kellman said, chasing after him. Satrine ran right behind, reloading her crossbow as she went.
Up four flights of stairs they chased him, all the way to the rooftop of the building.
“Nowhere to go,” Satrine said as she came out into the daylight. She leveled her crossbow at him. “Let’s come along and you can tell us all about this faith.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” he said, turning toward them. “For you are heretics, and you will never understand.”
He took a few steps backward, to the edge of the roof.
“Hey, easy!” Kellman shouted.
“But it does not matter,” he said. “Soon this city, and every life within it, will belong to the Brotherhood.”
He took another step back, and plummeted to the street, landing with a sickening crunch. Screams immediately rang out from down below. Satrine raced up to the edge to confirm it with her own eyes: he was definitely dead, his head cracked open.
Kellman walked up next to her, and silently handed her a coin.
She took it and pocketed it, but her attention was already elsewhere. Amid the crowd gathering around the body, there was a familiar face. Perhaps just a coincidence, but her instinct still told her no.
The trapmaster, the one who disarmed Sholiar’s device in the Parliament. He looked up and met her gaze, giving the barest of nods.
In his eyes, she saw it: that burning curiosity.
Veranix no longer heard Delmin. He had definitely taken the wrong passage, and had gotten so turned around he wasn’t sure how to get back to where he had split off from Asti.
Stupidity.
The passage he had found himself in was slightly different—still a manmade tunnel, but the style of the brickwork changed, the wood used to make the support beams—those had changed. And to Veranix’s eye, to something slightly familiar. It now looked like the Spinner Run, the tunnel to the university carriage house that Veranix had often used to sneak out of the dorm buildings. Were these built by the same people, or at the same time?
Also, the walls here gave off a low, greenish glow. Veranix touched a spot of the wall with a particularly strong glow, and the brick felt soft. He scraped it with his fingernail—some sort of moss, by the look of it. He wondered what Professor Yanno would make of it. Veranix had only started the naturalism courses he needed to earn his Letters, but he had to admit he found it an interesting study. Yanno was specifically a Master of Plants, so an underground glowing moss was definitely pertinent to his interests.
A tearful cry cut through the air, snapping Veranix out of his thoughts. That was a child.
Then: “Stay away from me!”
Veranix drew two arrows as he charged down the hallway. He had heard it clearly: there was a boy, in terror. When Veranix reached the mouth of the tunnel, it was clear why: a giant fellow was trying to grab the kid. Veranix fired the arrows as quick as he could to let the kid get away.
“You stay away from him!” Veranix shouted. The giant fellow stumbled and looked at him with a stupid expression. And it wasn’t just any giant fellow. That one. The one in the Tarian uniform from Fenmere’s. Veranix could feel that magical tag he had put on him.
Veranix was a wellspring of rage, and he let it overflow. “Saints help me,
