Ashinaro glanced back as he was led in chains away from the docks.

  In the distance, the Divide Crosser disappeared into the fog of the Sea of Fear.

  When he’d seen the trolls waiting for him on the boat, he’d at first tried to act normal, like he belonged, but they had immediately come for him.

  Apparently they treated dock workers no different from any other stowaways.

  They’d tackled him and pinned him down, but he’d used Flesh’s Frenzy and Whirling Rush to coat them in blood and fling himself off the side of the ship to escape them in the water.

  He’d succeeded in getting away from those trolls, but more had been waiting along the docks. Before he was able to get away again, they’d cast a net around him, trapping him.

  While he was being dragged in, he’d masked himself as the shade who’d tried to kill him. He didn’t need them to realize there were two of the dock worker he’d taken the form of. If they found out he was able to appear as someone else, it would make escaping that much more difficult.

  Luckily the ship hadn’t turned around, so even if the trolls had recognized the dock worker, it would be sixty days before they returned and discovered that was not who had been captured.

  Unluckily, a problem he realized too late was the shade was also in the city, or at least Ashinaro had seen him leaving it yesterday, but he might have returned. Worse, the guards or someone else might know him.

  So far, that didn’t appear to be the case, but he regretted acting out of panic rather than reason. If he ever did something like this again, he’d plan out who to mask himself as.

  “Move it!”

  He stumbled as one of the guards yanked him forward.

  There were six of them, and all were Champions, so he hadn’t even bothered trying to escape. He wasn’t collared, but shifting to his battleform wouldn’t help him. He was masked, and so would appear veiled, but couldn’t see a way to bluff himself out of this.

  They led him through a boisterously jeering crowd who, despite their hurled insults, seemed to be enjoying the show.

  “Maybe that’s because they know you’re about to be led to a gruesome death they’ll get to witness,” Zanas suggested cheerily.

  They took him to a building away from the main thoroughfare. All the other buildings surrounding it seemed vacant.

  Three of the guards departed, while the remaining three escorted him inside.

  The interior was elaborately decorated, and in the center of the room a large wooden table was laid out with a partially eaten feast.

  “Oh good,” Zanas said. “We interrupted their breakfast. At least that explains the surliness.”

  The main room had a winding staircase leading up, and six stone doors, all of which were closed. At one end was something like a bar with someone he recognized. Orn-Kalot, the one he’d tried to get to become an adherent of Excite. She was in humanform again, unlike the rest of the guards. She held a crown somehow filled with liquid.

  One of the guards pushed him toward the bar. He stumbled and had to catch himself against it.

  “That’s fine, Val-Lenor,” Orn-Kalot said mildly.

  The troll huffed and watched as Orn-Kalot placed the crown on Ashinaro’s head.

  “Oh hey,” Zanas said, “maybe they’re making you king. This might turn out great. I could buy all the clothes I want.”

  The crown did something, but it wasn’t to make him king. He felt invaded, like someone was peering very hard into him with their beyondsight.

  Suddenly the crown was removed.

  “Whoa, that was weird,” Zanas said. “It felt like more time passed than I think did.”

  “What’s a drakken Lesser Defender doing all the way out here?” Orn-Kalot asked.

  “They can tell I’m a drakken?” Ashinaro mentally asked Zanas. “Does that mean they can see through your mask’s illusion?”

  Zanas scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous. You simply didn’t mask your battleform.”

  “Yes I did. I’m in the form of a shade.”

  “Well if you want to mask your humanform and your battleform, you need to actually mask your battleform, not just your humanform.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that earlier?”

  “Honestly I didn’t know until now. Or I forgot? One or the other.”

  “So this whole time people have been able to see my race and renown?”

  “No. It’s that crown thing. It directly examined your battleform. Which you didn’t mask.”

  “How did it see through it at all, though? I’m not even in my battleform. Could it see into my core?”

  “Maybe. There’s power in symbols, and a crown is one of them. It’s kind of like a scepter, but it goes on your arm instead of being your house.”

  “What? Crowns don’t go on your arm, they go on your head. And scepters aren’t homes.”

  “Are you sure about that? I feel like they’d fit better on your arm. Maybe in your mouth…”

  “What do you mean by symbols having power? What’s special about a scepter?”

  “Of course he doesn’t answer my question.” Zanas sighed. “What it represents. The power to rule. That’s what your false gods play at.”

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  “What do you mean by false gods?”

  “Now who’s memory is faulty? What I said. They’re not actually gods. That’s what false means. It’s the opposite of true. We’ve been over this.”

  They had, but at the time Ashinaro had just met Zanas and thought him insane. But now after seeing Joy was corrupt, maybe that’s what Zanas was sensing.

  “And you’re detecting it in the relics?”

  “If that’s whatever these things chasing me around are.”

  “They’re not divine you said, but you don’t know what divine would look like.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What about Joy’s curse?”

  “That thing that lights up when you say ‘weep for your sins’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yeah I don’t know, that one seems different.”

  “But not divine?”

  “Not sure.”

  “Are you sure you not just detecting that they’re low or high gods instead of Exalted?”

  “No? I mean, yes? Wait, what’s the difference?”

  Orn-Kalot sighed. “It wasn’t that deep of a question.”

  Ashinaro realized he’d been having a mental conversation with Zanas while staring at the woman and not answering. Even sped up, several breaths must have passed. Maybe he should have Zanas test speeding it up more again.

  “Exactly what I’ve been saying.”

  “I wanted to see the world,” he answered.

  She stared at him until it became uncomfortable—whether because she was thinking, or just to annoy him like he’d done her—then closed her eyes and shook her head, motioning at one of the six doors.

  Without a word, the other guard, Val-Lenor, led him to it.

  Whatever original purpose the fay had built this building for, its current one was made obvious when the guard opened the door, revealing a bare stone cell beyond with a single small window high up near the ceiling.

  Val-Lenor pushed him roughly into the room and slammed the door behind him.

  The weight of his failure hit him then.

  Another sixty days.

  That’s how long he was stuck here for. At the very least. That was if they didn’t imprison him.

  Zanas popped out, still insubstantial. “Look on the bright side. They might only indenture you. It’s not like you killed anyone.”

  His next course of action was the same regardless.

  Zanas laughed. “If the shade comes back, that’s going to confuse them. It’s going to be the twin problem. You see that? I used it correctly. I feel like that deserves a reward. Some new clothes, perhaps? Hey, don’t ignore me. What are you doing?”

  “Looking for a way out of here.”

  Going out through the main door wasn’t possible—he couldn’t take on four Champions.

  And the room’s sole window was too small to squeeze through.

  His flesh golem could probably make it, but that wouldn’t help him. Even without his flesh, he wouldn’t fit through it.

  He really wished the mask let him shift into something other than a person.

  He studied the window.

  It was too small for him, but maybe…

  “I have an idea.” He glanced at the skeleton’s shoulders. “How sturdy would you say your bones are?”

  “A Champion?” Vershik asked. “You’re sure it’s the right person?”

  Captain Ganis nodded. “Your priests are with him now.”

  It appeared the arnaphen delirium had indeed affected his sight. The shade was not a Lesser Defender, but a Greater Champion.

  Not that it would save him.

  “We caught him just strolling in.” Ganis’s lips twitched ever so slightly. It might have been a smile. “Looks like you didn’t need to go to Arkalis after all.”

  Vershik controlled his frustration. There was no way Ganis could have predicted the shade would return to Argalis. Vershik himself was at a loss as to why he would have done so, let alone so brazenly.

  The only motivation Vershik could come up with was that the shade wanted to get caught, though he couldn’t comprehend why. Unless he was trying to escape punishment from the trolls for some crime he committed there.

  If he was looking for clemency, he’d come to the wrong place.

  Vershik forced a smile. “Yes, it saved me your considerable fee.”

  Ganis nodded once, then left without another word.

  Vershik couldn’t tell if the barb had gone unnoticed, or if the man simply didn’t care about money.

  He left his office and headed to Senliksar Dungeon. They had a place for prisoners beneath the temple, but Vershik didn’t plan on keeping the shade prisoner for long.

  But before he got rid of him, he needed to discover how he had blinded the godseye to his location.

  Hornblade sat in an uncomfortable chair, glaring at the priests gathered around him.

  The room had no bars, but it was a jail nonetheless. There was nothing he could do against four Greater Champions. Especially not while collared.

  When he’d reached Argalis, the guards at the gate had attacked him on sight.

  And this city did not take their guards lightly. One of them had been a Hero.

  What kind of Hero worked as a city guard?

  One who spent all his life in a backwater, isolated from the rest of the world.

  Now Hornblade sat in an interrogation room, wondering why he’d been captured. He couldn’t imagine what the drakken could possibly want from him.

  He’d tried asking, but neither the guards who’d captured him nor the priests who’d come later had answered.

  The guards were gone now, but four priests remained, staring at him in silence with unreadable drakken gazes.

  Hornblade was not easily unnerved, but it was not a comfortable experience.

  Eventually a man strode into the room. He was tall, with long red hair that streamed past his shoulders, and wore a more ornate robe than the other priests but in the same strange one-piece style.

  Without a word, the other priests left, leaving Hornblade and this new priest alone.

  Unlike the others, he wasn’t in his battleform. As a Sovereign Champion—a fact he didn’t veil—he didn’t need to be. Even if Hornblade’s relics hadn’t been suppressed by the collar around his neck, he wasn’t fast enough to kill him before he could shift.

  The priest stared at him, as though waiting for him to say something.

  Hornblade had already tried that, so he was content to sit and wait. The trolls had negotiated a treaty, so the drakken couldn’t keep him here forever, nor could they execute him.

  They would have to accuse him of a crime or set him free. Even if they did accuse him, he’d be tried by the trolls, not these drakken. He was no adherent of Joy, so the priests had no greater claim over him than the city guard did.

  Not that he could think of what crime he might have committed. Maybe it had happened while he’d been drunk. He didn’t have clear memories of that night.

  Another possibility was the drakken he’d taken the staff from had reported him. But the drakken was still alive, so the worst they could have on him was simple theft. He’d pay the fine and be on his way.

  A little voice at the back of his mind warned him that if that were the case, the guards wouldn’t have handed him over to the priests.

  The priests of Joy, to be precise. Perhaps the whelp was an adherent. Still, he lived, so it didn’t justify any kind of capital punishment, and it wouldn’t allow them to break the treaty.

  Unless the drakken he’d taken the staff from at the tower and the one he’d seen later were two different drakken, and that one at the tower had died.

  That… was an unnerving possibility.

  Still, he reassured himself, they’d been alone, so no one would know he’d done it. And even if they somehow did, they’d still have to turn him over to the trolls.

  Which may be even less pleasant, now that he thought of it. Since they healed so well, their punishments tended to be gruesome.

  But surely they wouldn’t punish someone who wasn’t a troll in the same manner.

  Suddenly the priest nodded to himself. “I am Vershik, high priest of Joy. You are Hornblade, adherent of Rage, son of the Third District Chancellor, of the House Setting Sun.”

  “Were my memory failing me, I’d thank you for reminding me of my identity.” Though truth be told, Hornblade was disturbed the priests knew that much about him. The only logical way they could have found out would be if the trolls had told them for some reason. Or if Joy had.

  Either way, it didn’t bode well.

  “What was your purpose in disrupting the ritual?”

  Hornblade was relieved that he had no idea what the priest was talking about, but considered whether he should say so.

  His first instinct was always subterfuge, but why lie in a case when the truth was the best defense?

  “I disrupted no ritual.”

  “No?” Vershik asked. He made a gesture and though the room had no windows and the door was closed, one of the priests reentered the room.

  Hornblade thought it was a woman, but had a hard time telling with drakken in battleform.

  “Is this not you?” Vershik asked. Hornblade didn’t like the smile he wore.

  Vershik nodded at the new priest and an image suddenly appeared in front of Hornblade.

  In horror, he watched himself do something he’d never done.

  He was pretty sure he’d never done. He’d been very drunk, but this image was in daylight, while that had been at night.

  Hadn’t it?

  Yes, definitely.

  Almost definitely.