“Did Eva send you?” Piret snarled in Brother Gregor’s face.
He tried to speak, but no sound escaped beyond a frantic rattle.
“Is she fucking us?” Piret insisted.
“He can’t answer,” Dagan said quietly, wiping his bloody hand on the dying man’s leathers. “You’re crushing his throat.”
Piret backed off slightly, and Brother Gregor sucked in air with a rattle and cough. “Fire and s-stone!”
“Quiet, traitor, or I’ll take your heart and leave the rest here with your friends,” Piret hissed. “Answer me: Is Sister Eva fucking us?”
Gregor shook his head frantically.
Hendrik kicked a body that had already been downed, flipping it over. He grabbed his knife out of its throat, unleashing a torrent of blood around his boots. He wiped it on the body’s dark leathers to clean it off. “How many of you are there?” he asked, voice low and intense.
“Th–this is it!” Gregor lifted one hand.
Before he could do anything with it, Piret grabbed his wrist and pinned it to the wall with a crack. Gregor gave the start of a low wail, but it cut off when she kneed him in the groin, doubling him over.
In spite of the vague sense of horror creeping up his spine, Dagan couldn’t help but be impressed. He had a sinking feeling, however, when he realized that they couldn’t leave the man alive. Any chance that he could escape and find reinforcements before they found their own people down here…
Fuck.
Hendrik inspected the other bodies carefully, kicking them over and poking at them as he went. “If he won’t answer, just kill him. We’ll find out soon enough.”
“It’s not Eva! I swear!” Gregor finally said. “I was forced into it. By some of the other priests—they suspect her!”
Hendrik swooped downward and came up with a little badge. He held it out to Piret wordlessly. It showed two knives crossed over one another, sewn in silver thread. “I thought the assassins were a myth,” he said.
“They’re not very good at their jobs, either way,” Piret said with a snort, then returned her full attention to Gregor. “Who knows? Who knows we’re down here?”
“Everyone,” Gregor said. “Well, not everyone yet, they were hoping to take care of it with a few assassins. But everyone will know, if I don’t come back to report that you’re all dead.”
“How many assassins?” Piret asked.
“I told you, this is it!”
Piret looked at
Hendrik. Hendrik nodded and went back through the doorway, saying,
“I’ll get Kajja.”
In one swift, sudden motion, Piret slit Gregor’s throat and let him slump to the ground. More blood plashed onto the stone, pooling around him.
Dagan looked away, taking a deep breath to steel himself. Delayed panic gripped his guts. He’d never seen this much blood in one place, certainly not from humans. “We don’t believe him, right?”
“Not for a second.” It was almost reassuring that Piret’s voice sounded as shaky as he felt. “Let’s go. We need to find the others before they do.”
“And then what?” Dagan wondered.
“And then who fucking knows. This is more than reconnaissance now, though; we may never get another chance down here.”
When she emerged into the cavern, Kajja daintily picked her way over the bloody puddles, avoiding the gazes of the dead. “Assassins,” was all she said. “Alara told everyone that’s where you’d been recruited, Hen.”
Hendrik snorted, but he was pointedly avoiding looking at their victims as he wove his way around them. “Thought she wanted me to be a priest guard.”
“I have a feeling if they’d been expecting us, it would’ve been a lot messier,” Piret admitted quietly, returning her knife to her belt. She knelt and took a sword from one of the dead, then tested its weight. “Let’s hope he was too shit-scared to lie about their numbers. Not sure how many more times I can do that.”
Bile rose in the back of Dagan’s throat, but he swallowed it down and followed them through yet another door, large and metal, that scraped across the stone when they swung it open. Instinctively, they fell back into silence, following Piret’s small candlelight and leaving the gore-spattered cavern behind as quickly as possible.
It was terrifying, just how close the assassins had been to Innan and Jak’s group, once they found them a few tunnels away, nothing more. When Piret burst into the sub-cave where she expected to find them, she sighed audibly to see everyone right where they should be. Bartolo, Gareth, and Jak stood in a protective circle around Innan. Innan sat lotus-style on the cave floor, their pale face a mask of sublime concentration, blissfully unaware that they’d come within moments of being brutally attacked. Maps spread out before them on the stone, winding labyrinths of tunnel depicted in charcoal.
“It’s a good thing we split up,” Dagan told Bartolo quietly; Innan could work with background noise.
Bartolo eyed the blood smeared across Dagan’s leathers and frowned. “Who?”
“Guards,” Hen replied. “Specifically assassins, which are an elite corps. They were headed here with Sister Eva’s little lackey, Gregor.”
Jak winced. “Gregor? But he’s with us.”
Hendrik shook his head. “He said Eva was suspected by other priests. They’re looking for us down here, and they know this room is our goal. How long has Innan been—?”
“I’ve got it,” Innan interrupted, eyes fluttering open. “I can show you where it is.”
“Where it is?” Piret asked.
“The biggest underground chamber. It’s directly underneath the See, and there are tunnels leading to it from all over. But only one is the real one.” They leaned over, on hands and knees, and began making notations on the nearest map. “Just let me make a note, in case I don’t get there.”
“You’ll get there,” Kajja said through gritted teeth. But she had gone chalk-pale, as if the horror of the previous attack was just sinking in for her.
“They’re right,” Hen piped up. “Someone should take Kajja and Innan back. We may never get another chance to come down here. This is balls to the wall, now.”
