“Was what he said just then true?”
“I don’t know.”
The Spine Adept removed his sand mask; his lifeless eyes now turned towards the captain of the temple guard. “This conversation is illegal. I advise you to keep silent.”
“Didn’t you hear what the lad said?”
“The Maze is a place for sinners. Salvation lies only with our Lord Ulcis.”
Clay ignored him. “Who are these Mesmerists?” he asked Dill.
“They whisper to the dead,” the young angel replied, “and change them. They are making demons for the war to come. A red veil heralds their coming.”
“What war?”
“The war between Hell and Earth.”
The captain rubbed a big hand across his stubble. “Fucking gods,” he growled. “Ulcis offered slavery, and now Iril wants to wipe us out completely. You can’t trust any of them.”
“Ulcis offers salvation,” the Adept said.
Clay punched him, or tried to.
The temple assassin neatly sidestepped the blow. Behind him, his men loaded their crossbows with bone- breakers, the heavy bolts they reserved for use in holy places. The round stone tips could crush a man’s skull without drawing blood.
“Clay!” Rachel warned.
But the captain’s face had darkened with fury. He lashed out at his opponent a second time. He was quicker than Rachel expected him to be, much quicker than an old man in heavy plate had any right to be. But he wasn’t nearly fast enough.
The Adept grabbed the other man’s fist and turned it effortlessly against the force of Clay’s own attack. Rachel heard bones snap in the captain’s wrist. Clay roared in pain, and then threw himself forward, trying to use his own weight to slam the smaller man against the wall.
But the assassin flowed around his opponent’s charge, almost lazily it seemed. He motioned to his men to lower their weapons, then drove a savage kick into the back of Clay’s knee, one of the few weak spots in his armour. A second bone snapped. The captain crashed to the floor, his broad face creased in agony.
“That’s enough,” Rachel cried.
“Not quite,” the Adept said.
“But he can’t even get up to fight back.”
The assassin shrugged. He broke Clay’s other knee with a second kick, then paused for a moment, studying the metal suit. Clay remained facedown on the sapperbane floor panels, unable to turn over. He sucked in gulps of air through his teeth. “Fuck…you,” he gasped. “And fuck…your…”
“His armour is standard temple issue,” the Adept said to his men. “How would you seek to improve this design against ranged attacks?”
“Find and eliminate weaknesses,” one of the Cutters replied. He removed his sand mask, revealing a youthful face with a high forehead and a weak chin. Bruises and needle marks under his eyes indicated recent tempering. “I would test the joints for strength.”
“Then do so.”
The Cutter raised his crossbow and shot a bolt into the captain’s neck guard. The stone missile ricocheted off the metal with a hideous peal. Clay gnashed his teeth and groaned. The young assassin reloaded.
“Stop it!” Rachel yelled. “You’re just tormenting him.”
“Restrain those two. Bind the angel’s wings.”
The remaining Spine surged forward, dragged Rachel and Dill to their feet, and forced them up against the wall. One of them produced a set of chain-and-burr cuffs, a torture implement like a short leash, and tightened them around the angel’s wings, drawing them closely together behind Dill’s shoulder blades. Meanwhile the young Cutter standing over Clay aimed down a second time. This time the bone-breaker struck the captain in the crook of his elbow. The big man howled and tried to push himself upright, but he could no longer move his broken legs. Four more bolts followed before the young Cutter finally stopped shooting. “I don’t see any weaknesses beyond the obvious gaps in the knee joints,” he observed.
“Give your crossbow and quiver to me.”
The younger man complied.
The Adept rewound the windlass, set the latch, and then selected a fresh bolt from the borrowed quiver. This missile had a yellow glass bulb full of oily liquid attached to its tip. “Your mistake was to test only the efficacy of what you perceived,” he said to the Cutter, “while failing to consider what was absent from the design altogether. These older suits lack fireproofing.”
“No!” Rachel tried to break free from her restrainers. She struggled, every muscle in her body fighting against their grip, but it made no difference. She wasn’t strong enough. The Adept aimed the crossbow down at the helpless man and squeezed the trigger.
The incendiary struck Clay’s back and exploded, engulfing his whole body in crackling, spitting green flame. He screamed in agony as the burning chemicals trickled down through the tiny gaps between the plates of his armour. Rachel could feel the searing heat from the other side of the chamber.
“A productive lesson,” the Adept said, handing the bow back to the young assassin. “Obstacles cannot necessarily be overcome by brute force. You must make yourself familiar with the entire breadth of your arsenal.”
He smiled, just for an instant, but long enough for Rachel to notice. Her eyes widened in surprise. This Adept had taken pleasure in murder. His stoicism was just a carefully maintained facade. Like Rachel herself, he hadn’t been tempered.
They left the antechamber and Clay’s charred corpse, and proceeded through a warren of interconnected metal tunnels. Aether lights set into the floors bathed each junction in soft green luminance, while leaving the passageways between shrouded in darkness. Eerie metallic tones with no determinable cause or origin haunted the spaces around them.
Their route gradually led them down into the temple. The sapperbane conduits gave way to passages constructed from cut black stone and then finally to a lofty chamber with a sunken, bowl-shaped floor. Rachel did not recognize the place until she tilted her head, thus viewing the room the other way up. This had once been a hallway right below the Spine sleeping quarters. Smoke rose from cressets arranged along one side of the depression and hung in a thin blue layer over the heads of the nine assassins and their captives. The room also smelled vaguely of sweat. Shards of glass littered the floor, although there were no windows here. In the center, a rickety scaffold had been constructed out of timbers and hemp: a series of ladders and platforms that rose twenty yards to connect two small doors positioned on either side of the flat polished ceiling that had once been the floor.
“Climb,” the Adept said flatly. His face still revealed no emotion, but Rachel now knew him to be a fraud. If he hadn’t been tempered, why go to the trouble of pretending that he had been? His Spine masters would know the truth. Only the low-ranking Cutters would not be aware of his deception.
“Why aren’t you tempered?” she asked him.
“All Adepts are tempered.”
She snorted. “I’m living proof that they’re not, and so are you. You enjoyed what you did to Clay, didn’t you? Torturing him gave you pleasure. My problem was always the opposite. I didn’t particularly enjoy the messier aspects of my work.”
He stared at her, but his eyes betrayed nothing. “Your Spine status was revoked,” he said. “Indeed, you were never truly an Adept. You always lacked the ability to focus.”
This was the one Spine technique Rachel had been unable to master during her former training. The brutal process of tempering through torture and the administration of neural toxins vandalized an Adept’s mind, destroying his or her ego, yet it also granted the tempered assassin mastery of his or her own physiology. Focusing enabled Spine to temporarily heighten their senses, and to push their bodies far beyond the limits of normal endurance. Such combatants were far quicker and stronger than normal humans.
Rachel had struggled for years to learn the technique, but still her untempered mind had resisted. Every attempt at focusing had ended in failure.
