Chapter 8
Behind them stood four hooded null-priests, their lips sewn shut with silver wire, holding the chains of three massive, blind tracking-drakes whose nostrils flared with acrid yellow smoke.
And standing before them, unarmored save for a high-collared coat of midnight velvet and a gilded breastplate, was a tall, lean man with hair the color of salt and eyes like polished jet.
Inquisitor Commander Malakor.
Aveline felt her knees turn to water. The silver threads in her mind shrieked in agony as the anti-magic aura radiating from the inquisitors’ shields pressed against her skull like an iron band.
"Back," Garrick growled, stepping in front of her, his twin blades lowered at a forty-five-degree angle. His stance was textbook vanguard—broad base, knees bent, center of gravity low. "Aveline, to the colonnade. Cut through the old armory. I'll break their line."
"Garrick, no," she wept, grabbing his leather coat. "Look at them. It's an entire strike company. You can't—"
"I break their line," he repeated, his voice dropping into that terrifying, soulless monotone. "You run."
A slow, rhythmic clapping echoed across the flagstones.
Commander Malakor stepped forward, his gloved hands coming together in mock applause. A cold, razor-thin smile split his aristocratic face, revealing teeth that were unnervingly straight and white.
"Magnificent," Malakor said, his voice carrying effortlessly over the howl of the mountain wind. It was a refined, cultured voice, entirely devoid of the brutish rasp of common soldiers. "Truly magnificent. I had heard rumors from the border patrols that you were taking bolts for a witch, but I refused to believe it. I told the Grand Inquisitor: *No, not Vane. Captain Vane would skin his own mother for sixty pieces of silver.*"
Garrick did not move. His blades remained steady, pointing at the center of the inquisitor’s throat.
"Step aside," Garrick rasped. "Or your blood cleans the stones."
Malakor let out a soft, genuine laugh that chilled Aveline to the very core of her marrow.
"Listen to you," Malakor murmured, shaking his head with morbid amusement. "The Scourge of Oakhaven. The Butcher of the Silver Cloisters. Reduced to snarling like a common sheepdog on a leash."
The words struck the courtyard like thunderbolts.
*Oakhaven.* *The Scourge.* *Captain Vane.*
Behind Garrick’s back, Aveline felt the world tilt on its axis. Her breath froze in her throat.
She had known he was a sellsword. She had known he had led the assault that burned her sisters’ sanctuary. But she had believed—she had forced herself to believe—that he was merely a hireling, a desperate blade caught in the imperial machinery, a tool wielded by monsters.
*Captain Vane.*
"You're mistaken," Garrick growled, though a sharp, violent twitch jerked his jaw to the left. The muscles in his neck knotted violently. "I hold no commission. I take no contracts from the Inquisitor’s purse."
"No commission?" Malakor arched a pale brow, tilting his head with mocking pity. "Has the witch eaten away your memory along with your spine, Garrick? Who do you think planned the breach at Oakhaven? Who drew the architectural diagrams that showed us where the weavers hid their initiates?"
Malakor took two slow, unhurried steps forward. The obsidian-clad guards shifted their grip on their halberds, but did not advance.
"It was *you*, Captain," Malakor purred, his dark eyes locking onto Garrick’s face. "Six months ago, you walked into my tent in the border camps. You laid down the ground-plans for the Weaver’s Cloister. You told me—and I quote you precisely, my dear friend—*Weavers are vermin. Burn the library first so they cannot coordinate their thoughts, then hunt them room by room.*"
"Shut up," Garrick snarled.
A vein throbbed violently in his right temple. A bead of dark sweat rolled down into his beard. His knuckles were white upon the leather grips of his swords.
"Garrick, don't listen to him!" Aveline cried out, terror gripping her chest. She reached out with her mind, desperate to throw a fresh weave of psychic ice around his fracturing thoughts, but the cold-iron runes on the inquisitors' shields battered her power back into her skull like broken glass. "He's lying! He's trying to distract you!"
"Am I?" Malakor chuckled. He reached into his velvet coat, extracted a rolled parchment bound with black silk ribbon, and casually tossed it onto the stones between them.
The parchment unrolled in the wind.
Aveline looked down. Even from ten paces away, she could see the heavy, Imperial wax seal—and below it, a bold, jagged signature written in black ink, accompanied by an unmistakable thumbprint in dried blood:
*Captain Garrick Vane, First Company, Black Hound Mercenaries.* *Contract for the Eradication of the Mind-Weavers of Oakhaven.* *Payment: Four hundred Imperial crowns upon delivery of seventy weaver corpses.*
"Four hundred crowns, Garrick," Malakor murmured, his voice soft, intimate, dripping with venom. "You collected three hundred and thirty. You were only missing one head to complete the ledger. The girl behind you. Aveline of the Lower Cloister."
Garrick’s breathing turned ragged. His chest heaved against the straps of his cuirass.
"No," Garrick rasped. But the word lacked the absolute certainty it had carried a moment before. It sounded weak, hollow, choked with rising panic. "I... I found her in the ruins. I swore an oath. I swore to Kaelen—"
"Kaelen?" Malakor interrupted, his laughter cutting like a scalpel. "Kaelen died fourteen years ago in the border marches, you miserable drunkard! You left her to burn! And this little witch... this clever, terrified little parasite... she crawled inside your broken, guilty head and found that rotting corpse, didn't she?"
"Stop," Garrick choked out. His left sword point dropped three inches, the steel trembling violently in the mountain air.
"She didn't heal you, Garrick," Malakor sneered, stepping closer. "She *enslaved* you. She took the memory of your dead sister and pasted her own face over it! She turned the most ruthless commander in the Northern March into her private meat-shield! Look at yourself! You have four crossbow bolts in your meat, you reek of gangrene, you've marched three hundred miles through frozen muck—and for what? For the witch whose sisters you butchered with your own two hands!"
"SILENCE!" Garrick roared.
The sound was not human. It was the howl of a beast caught in a steel trap, chewing off its own leg to be free.
He lunged forward.
The move was blindingly fast—the explosive, lethal speed that had kept him alive across a hundred battlefields. His right broadsword whistled in a decapitating arc toward Malakor’s neck.
*CLANG!*
Two obsidian-clad inquisitors stepped into the gap, raising their rune-carved kite shields. Garrick’s steel struck the iron-bound edge with a sound like a tolling church bell. A blast of psychic distortion rippled outward, the runes glowing with an unnatural, sickly violet light.
Garrick rebounded, stumbling back two paces, clutching his head with his left hand.
Blood was pouring freely from both his nostrils now. A thick line of crimson leaked from his right ear, soaking into his linen collar.
"The construct," Aveline wept, the words tearing from her throat in a ragged sob. She fell to her knees behind him on the cold flagstones, ignoring the scraping stone that tore through her skirts. "The spell... it's tearing him apart!"
She reached out with both hands, throwing her consciousness across the psychic chasm toward him.
