Arc 4: Chapter 26: Separate Ways

Arc 4: Chapter 26: Separate Ways

As my oldest friend and I stood there, locked together above the kneeling crowfriar, I felt the rage creep in through the confusion.

“Lias.” My voice sounded oddly calm to my own ears. “What is this?”

Lias’s green eye narrowed, while the false one remained still. I could make out my own fragmented reflection in the crystal’s red surface, blood-smeared and angry.

Instead of answering me, Lias spoke to the knight confessor. “Can you stand, Vicar?”

He knew the crowfriar’s true name. He knew, and he’d saved him.

Growling, I tried to free my weapon. Lias kept the lock with a deft movement, his form stiffly perfect. I was stronger, but he hadn’t been idle the last decade. He’d trained, and in more than just sorcery. He used leverage with a warrior monk’s expertise. By the odd pressure I felt, I suspected he used aura as well.

Vicar rose to his feet, backing away. His hands were ruined and useless, but even still I didn’t trust him not to be dangerous.

My focus remained on Lias.

“Stop this!” I snapped. “He’s a monster. I won’t let him roam free.”

“Monster?” Lias shook his head. “Alken, he is us. He simply serves different masters.”

“Are they your masters now, Li?” I shifted a step, adjusting my grip. Lias responded by rotating his staff, freeing my axe. He carried the motion in a whirling movement, the air whooshing around the length of ebon wood. The iron nail froze under my chin. I batted it away, glaring.

We backed away from one another, a cautious dance. We’d done this before. We’d once trained together, he and I. The pang of nostalgia was a bitter medicine in that moment.

It all made sense now. A terrible, horrible sense.

“All your talk of change and progress...” I shook my head. “I should have known. You were the one who encouraged Markham to lift the trade ban with the continent. You knew, didn’t you? You knew it all.”

Lias nodded. “I did.”

“Why?” I asked, unable to understand. In my mind, I recalled his marions, the continental alchemy in his lab — had there been Devil Iron there, too? I recalled Rosanna’s words, about Lias removing those who’d objected to the new trade.

I’d seen all the signs. I’d just ignored them.

This is why he didn’t rescue me from the Inquisition, I realized. He and Vicar have been allies this whole time.

And I’d put Emma in front of him. Had he known her identity...

How could I have been such a fool?

I knew how. Am I always going to make this mistake?

Lias’s features hardened, the angular lines of his fox face stiffening with emotion. “Because we are trapped by nostalgia! Because our land is a tired backwater filled with bickering warlords and superstitious peasants. We must change.”

“Into what?” I demanded. “Into what he wants?”

I pointed my axe at the crowfriar.

Lias shook his head. “There are worse things out there than devils, Alken. There are worse things than apostate lords. There are even worse things than demons. You have no idea just how small we are, how vast the theater in which we play is.”

“This is not a game,” I told him with bitter anger. “That’s always been your problem, Lias. You see everything as some grand competition. Your ambition has gone too far.”

A pensive look came over the wizard. “Perhaps. Yet, if the beings who rule this land would keep us trapped in this tired dream, if I must burn it to wake us up...”

He shrugged. “Well, cauterizing a limb is sometimes necessary, to prevent rot.”

I bared my teeth at him. “You sound like Reynard.”

Lias flinched. Then, mastering himself, he held out his hand, palm up and empty. “Please, Alken. You don’t have to remain their hound.”

“You think I’m doing this for the gods?” I asked him. “For faith? I thought you knew me better.”

His eye and voice turned cold. “We have been strangers for more than a decade now. I know you little better than you know me, paladin.”

“And Rose?” I asked him.

Lias went very still. Then, his one eye narrowing he said, “This is for Rosanna’s good as much as anyone’s. She could rule this land, if she was not so afraid of what she might become.”

I remembered then, a conversation between me and my queen. Lias’s queen, too. We’d both sworn oaths.

Am I a tyrant, Alken?

I remember thinking about it for a long while.

Yes. But this is a war. We can build from here, right?

...I’m not certain.

“Something damned,” I replied, taking a guard.

The hellhound stepped out of the bonfire. Bigger than any I’d seen, twice as large at least as those Jon Orley had called during his fight with the Hunting knights. A low growl, more like the noise a furnace makes than any beast, rumbled through yellowed teeth.

Worse, these flames didn’t dissipate into harmless nothingness like normal phantasms. They began to spread across the floor.

“Get out of here,” I ordered the cleric at my side.

“Not without you,” she shot back, her fingers working with strings of aura.

I expected an attack, but Vicar only glared at me, a threatening rumble building in his bloated chest. Heat built in between his huge jaws. I got the message — step closer, and I’ll burn you to ash.

Could I survive it? I tightened my grip on my axe, prepared to take the bet.

I caught sight of Lias, and that gave me pause. He’d stopped fighting, instead moving behind the podium. I caught sight of a bundle of red robes where the corpse of the Grand Prior lay.

Lias knelt. When he stood, he had the quill in his hand.

The quill with Horace Laudner’s blood.

My heart became ice.

“LIAS!” I roared, turning. “STOP!”

I made to rush toward him, but the hellhound leapt into my path. It spat a plume of fire, forcing me to throw a hand up as I flinched back.

Calmly, almost without hurry, Lias wiped the quill on his sleeve, then stabbed it into his own palm. He winced. At first, I didn’t understand.

But I knew enough history that my confusion didn’t last long.

The Magi had helped found the Church. To the Zosite, who abided by ancient laws, they were as holy as any preost. More so, in some circles.

Had this always been his plan? Or had he just taken the opportunity presented?

I watched him, the man who was like a brother to me, cut our bond.

With his own blood and name, Lias signed the parchment still lying on the cracked stand. The moment he drew his hand back, it burst into yellow hellfire. The flame engulfed the podium, forming a profane altar. I felt a terrible power exuding from it as the contract, the Oath, became inscribed into reality itself.

Lias shuddered.

I stared in horror. Lisette, who didn’t understand, stood still and uncertain at my side, not knowing what to do with her magic.

“It is done,” Lias said, letting out a sigh of relief. “Now there’s no going back.”

He met my eyes, and had the gall to smile. It was a remote, eerie smile, full of self-loathing and pride in equal measure.

“Traitor,” I called him.

“In your heart,” he told me, as mist flooding out of the broken chapel window encircled him, “you betrayed them all long ago. Have you read the book I gave you?”

That froze me. It gave Vicar time to leap back, landing on all fours next to the wizard. The mist wrapped them, becoming dense as a fog in the deep sea. Lias’s power had been in the brume since the moment he’d arrived.

When it faded, he and Vicar were gone. So was the infernal contract.

The Priory clerics had fled during the fight, terrified by their champion turning into a beast of Hell, and by the spreading flames. Some had died in the violence, their corpses scattered across the edges of the room.

For them, this had been a matter of their leader promising... what? What had Horace told them about Vicar’s scrap of parchment?

I ignored the dead and fleeing, moving toward the window. I stopped where Lias had stood, staring out into the mist.

Behind me, flames had begun to crawl up the walls.

“Alken!” Lisette cried out. “We need to go! It’s going to burn down!”

I paused long enough to kneel and grab something off the ground — the thing which would change everything.

When Lisette saw what I had taken, her already pale face blanched.

“Let’s go,” I told her quietly, feeling an odd calm.

Lias had shown me who he really was. No, I’d already known since we were young. Only, now we both understand the true trajectory of our separate paths. His would take him to some uncertain and frightening future, one of brutal progress, guided by beings who moved in shadow and secrecy. Mine...

Dawn was coming.