Telos wanted to scale the walls. They were only thirty feet, and sported many handholds as they were formed from loosely mortared stone slabs of irregular sizes and shapes. Nothing for a practiced climber. But Xheng said something about sea legs—Telos guessed he could not climb well on land—so instead they walked what felt like half the perimeter of the entire grounds, looking for a weakness.

  Eventually, on the western side and therefore shielded from the wave, they found a cellar door.

  They almost missed it. The doors were concealed, perhaps deliberately, by a violent outgrowth of buddleia, breaching through the uneven jags of stone with the tenacity only Nature could summon. But despite how well the doors were concealed, it was clear they were well used. The hinges gleamed with oil. The handles were worn yellow.

  “There she blows,” Xheng muttered.

  “You knew this would be here?” Telos said, impressed.

  “This is almost certainly the Governor’s manse. His fondness for Daimonwine—and other illegal imports—is well known.”

  It occurred to Telos he had not fully considered the implications of a government official being involved in Qala’s abduction. Of course, his natural inclination was towards loathing of any official—he had met enough Yarulian bureaucrats to know what power did to men—but he could not rule out the possibility Qala had been apprehended on some legal basis, however spurious. That would complicate matters considerably. He was already a wanted man in Yarruk. He hoped to retire in Aurelia.

  You know, once they had averted the end of the human race.

  “Well, this seems as good an entry point as any...”

  Telos tried the doors and found them locked. He reached automatically for his toolbelt—it had accompanied him on countless heists—and found it missing. The last time he had worn it was in the Royal Vaults, where he came within a hair’s breadth of the Tablet of Mastery. Wealth undreamt of.

  It all seemed so foolhardy now, in the light of extinction. And yet, the human desire to increase was irrepressible. He dreamed of the home of his retirement. Green fields. Perhaps a wood and a stream. Beer on the Holy Days. And a woman. Blonde, maybe. He flushed at thinking how the woman of his mind’s eye uncannily resembled Ylia. His imagination had become so much clearer after his change, as though he were sculpting the reality of a hidden world.

  He pushed such thoughts aside. Focus on the task at hand. The only thing he had at his belt was retracted sky-spear.

  “Brute force?” Xheng said.

  “It’ll have to be.”

  Telos raised his foot and stamped.

  Even he was surprised by the power he commanded. This was his first real taste, in many ways. Solid wood designed to resist entry simply splintered beneath him. The crack was audible, however, like a Wagemaster’s whip through the night. Telos winced.

  “Well, let us be quick then.”

  He descended, followed hastily by Xheng.

  He had expected a brief stairwell, and then entry into a cellar. But the stairs went down, and down, and down until Telos felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle.

  Thankfully, there was a light source ahead, illuminating a diminutive archway and a room beyond with tiled flooring.

  Telos froze on the stairs. There was breathing, in the room beyond. His sharpened senses not only detected it, but also registered the thickness of the breathing, indicating to him the size and weight of the person who breathed. They were a large man, wearing some kind of heavy armour. They were sat in a chair, but not asleep. In fact, the increased pace of their breathing indicated to Telos they were coming to alertness, no doubt startled by how the cellar door had been violently opened.

  Their shadow fell across the floor. Telos lifted a hand and turned to Xheng, indicating he wait. The captain nodded.

  Telos waited in the dark. The guard stepped onto the stairs. He was pretty much exactly as Telos’s God-senses had depicted: tall, broad-shouldered, muscular. No slouch. He had a short sword at his belt, a dagger in his hand. He was older, perhaps, than Telos would have guessed, with the first greys of life’s winter discolouring his beard.

  He peered up, looking up to see the source of the disturbance.

  Telos leapt.

  One moment the guard was squinting, then next his eyes flew open. There was no time for him to cry out as two feet, heavily armoured with metal soles, smashed into his face. The guard flew backward into the illuminated room, landing with a crash of metal striking stone. He expelled a hideously thick breath and lay still. Telos landed light as a cat, then darted into the room. A quick glance revealed it was an enormous wine-cellar, crowded floor to ceiling with vintages of every type imaginable.

  But he didn’t care about the wine. He cared about the man who lay still.

  Not breathing.

  Xheng reached his side a moment later. He spared no glance for the man, but began to rub his hands with glee, walking back and forth before the wine-racks, examining some closely.

  “It is as I suspected,” Xheng said. “Our Governor Lucan has been involved in all kinds of criminal activities. These vintages from Sumyr were thought taken by pirates, but here they are.”

  When Telos made no answer, Xheng turned and looked at him.

  “What is the matter?”

  Telos swallowed.

  “I… I just killed him.”

  Xheng’s face paled.

  “You did it so well, I assumed that was the intent.”

  “No it wasn’t the damn intent,” Telos hissed, only more than a decades of practice keeping his voice from rising. He’d had many heated debates while on a heist. Keeping a lid on passions was one of the critical components of success.

  But he had never killed anyone before.

  He had tried to stab the Warden, but at the last moment, his courage had failed him, and he had aimed for the stomach, where he knew death would not be instant. Then, when The Warden had attacked again on the dragon-flight, Telos had simply let go. The Warden had killed himself, in a way. Telos had not felt responsible, merely that he did the best with a bad situation.

  But here, he had directly caused a man’s death. He had underestimated his newfound strength and paid the price with his soul.

  “He would have killed you,” Xheng said, grabbing Telos’s arm. “He would have slew you where you stood. He works for the Governor and as we are discovering, the Governor is a bad man.”

  Xheng’s eye suddenly went wide. He pointed across the room to another row of vintages.

  “See, here.”

  He left Telos, momentarily taken in by some new discovery. He pulled the wine bottle off the shelf and examined it, a look of horror growing on his face.

  “Qi’shathian…” he muttered. “The Wuzin Cloud Vintage… The Governor!” Xheng’s grip tightened on the bottle until Telos was sure the glass would shatter. The normally lackadaisical captain was blood red in the face, his eyes burning with passion. “He did that?”

  “What is it?” Telos asked the question, but he heard his own voice coming as though from a deep well. You killed a man. You killed a man. You killed a man.

  “This wine was one of the finest vintages ever made in Qi’shath. The grapes were taken from the high slopes of Wuzin. The Daimonsblood was filtered over six-hundred times. The spices were selected by the Empress herself. It is a masterpiece, and was a gift intended for the explorer Xai’dra. But the ship was intercepted by an unknown force. Two-hundred and fifty sailors were killed… Including my brother.” Xheng let out a frightening little laugh. “The vintage was thought lost. The Empress hired Daimomancers to search the ocean floor, but they could not find it. All this time it has sat here. I must have visited this port a hundred and fifty times. It was here, all along.” He gripped the wine bottle to him like a newborn. “I shall be taking this with me.”

  Telos’s head ached as though someone was hammering his skull. He wanted to show sympathy for Xheng, and feel rage at the Governor, but he felt none of these things. All his emotions were being swallowed by guilt.

  Xheng sighed. He marched up to Telos and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “You westerners are so fond of your guilt. We see things differently in Qi’shath.”

  “How is that?” Telos said, faintly.

  “The felidae does not cry when it pounces upon the antelope. The great squids of the Emerald Sea do not mourn for the sailors they ensnare. Life is death and death is life. If you cannot absolve yourself, then pray to the Kwei Shin of Death.”

  Telos stared.

  “To Koronzon?”

  Xheng nodded.

  “Yes. Now, we must continue. We must rescue Qala.”

  Telos rallied. A mission was good, could help him focus on something other than how he felt. He supposed more people might have to die before the end. He would avoid it if he could, but Xheng was right: they would not hesitate to kill him. And as for Koronzon, he had never thought much about the God of Death. From what little Beltanus had said of him, he seemed mysterious even to the other gods, a kind of entity unto himself, beyond even their caprices and politics. Perhaps one day we shall meet, and I shall ask him for forgiveness.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  They hurried on through the cellar, finding another door. It was locked but Telos found a set of keys on the guard’s belt, and was able to open it. Beyond, the hallways were nightmarishly dark. He heard strange sounds, muffled language, the groan of chains and bonds. His nose, however, provided a greater wealth of information. The stink of the place was hideous, almost overwhelming to his newly heightened senses. Blood, urine, faeces, fear, death. But a few of the scents that had permeated the very wall, layered in viscid histories the same was as Daimonic remains.

  They skulked through the corridor. Telos noted that sea legs or no, Xheng could move mighty silently when he desired. The fact he clutched a wine bottle was strange, but he was not about to ask the captain to part with it.

  At the end of the first hall, they found a strange contraption on their right. Telos had only seen one of them before, in Gorgosa, and that had been in the Royal Palace. It was a moving platform designed to move goods up and down via a mechanical pulley system. An elevator. He made a mental note of its location, for it might make a valuable escape route.

  He turned a corner and now saw before him a corridor lined with cells. The true nature of the place sank into him and he felt a burning horror, greater even than the horror he had felt at taking a man’s life.

  “This is not a good place,” he whispered to Xheng.

  The captain nodded, his lips grimly twisted.

  “This Governor gets worse by the moment.”

  Telos felt a stab of fear for Qala. What was being done to her? He tried to find a smell in the cacophony that resembled her, but he could not recall what she had smelled like before. He tried to find a scent that was unusual, that did not resemble the others… He struck out, hugging the walls. Many of the cells were unoccupied. But a few, he detected life behind.

  “I want to free them, Xheng.”

  “Then do it quickly.”

  Telos tried the keys he had filched from the guard, but these were not the right keys for the cells. Cursing, Telos considered using force.

  Then he heard a voice, very close by.

  “Xarl… Xarl, investigate that sound. Leave your tools with me. And make sure you take your sword.”

  “Shit, in here,” Telos said.

  He crossed the corridor, finding a cell door on the other side. There was no occupant, and so he opened the door and slipped within—only to find a ghastly pool in the middle of the room, a doll-eyed totems staring at him from all around. Telos’s skin crawled.

  Xheng shut the door behind them just as another door opened. Telos heard lumbering footsteps, and strange breathing. A chill went down his spine. Whatever now moved in the corridor beyond was not a man. A theront? The idea seemed impossibly unlikely, but it was the only conclusion he could draw from the sounds of the wet maw drawing such laboured breaths. He looked at the stinking pool, dug out of the floor of this unusual cell, and realised it must belong to whatever warden stalked the halls in search of them.

  Straining his ears, Telos could detect fragments of another conversation.,

  “Governor,” a voice said, lightly accented in the Qi’shathian manner. Might I—”

  “You stay here. If she attempts evocation, counter it.”

  She, that must be Qala, surely…

  Then he heard something like metal shrieking.

  “Now then. Where we were?”

  Oh Gods, they are torturing her. We have to act.

  He looked at Xheng. The captain looked bewildered.

  “Qala,” Telos whispered. “She needs us now!”

  That was all Xheng needed. He pushed open the door and stepped out into the hallway. Telos was immediately after him.

  The sight that greeted them could well have issued out of a nightmare. The cowled figure towered over them, a sword in his hand as long as Xheng was tall, curved cruelly, with serrations long its inner edge. The thing was preposterously elegant and gothic, considering the wild, shabby monster who wielded it.

  “Intruders,” the cowled man said thickly.

  Telos stepped forward. He raised the sky-spear cylinder.

  “Stand aside!” he cried.

  He depressed the place where Danyil had showed him and the two ends of the spear shot out as the weapon expanded. But as it did so, it seemed some invisible hand nudged Telos, twisting his wrist ever-so-slightly.

  He had hoped to scare off the cowled sword-wielder with his god-forged weapon. Instead, the two spear ends jammed into the walls either side, penetrating rock as though it were paper and becoming irretrievably lodged there.

  “Oh shit,” Telos said.

  The cowled man began to laugh. It sounded like a toad gargling on flies.

  “I am Xarl,” he said, pacing toward them, lifting his sword over his immense shoulders. “And this is my blade, Darkbite.”

  Telos did not have time to consider how absurd the naming convention was. He frantically searched for the motion that would retract his spear again. But he could not find it. Curse my luck, curse Nereth! Curse the damn gods!

  Xarl’s sword swung. Telos ducked. Darkbite slammed into the sky-spear and it shivered and reverberated, but held firm. Telos ducked under the spear and under Xarl’s arms, coming up behind him. He kicked into the back of Xarl’s leg.

  Again, he underestimated his newfound strength. Xarl’s knee shattered and the executioner went screaming to the ground.

  But he was not done. He swung around on one knee, his blade like a dragon’s tail. Telos leapt. He had always been light on his feet, but now it seemed he could become practically airborne. He somersaulted over the sweeping weapon and landed again. Through the black holes of the filthy hood, he saw Xarl’s wide eyes: full of rage, terror, confusion, malice, self-loathing, and a thousand other things. Telos saw Xarl’s stupidity, saw, in a way, his life story. He was not the villain here, though no doubt he had done despicable things. Here was a creature, whose sad genetics had been manipulated for gain.

  This time, when he struck, he tried as hard as he could to temper the blow, to deliver just enough force.

  The palm-strike struck Xarl cleanly on the forehead. The theront rocked back, the hood slipping from his bulbous, amphibian features. His eyes went crossed, and he swayed, then collapsed backward. His breathing was thick but steady. Out cold.

  He had no time to appreciate his victory. A woman’s scream reverberated through the cells. Telos stooped and picked up Darkbite. The sky-spear might be stuck, but he was always one to make use of whatever resources became available.

  Xheng ducked the spear and joined him.

  “That cell!”

  Telos wasted no time. He kicked the door open and revealed a scene that would remain etched onto his mind for all time.

  Qala lay, strapped to a cruciform rack. Naked. Robbed of her immense dignity. Or at least, that had been the intent. She had visibly aged since he last saw her, white in her hair, her face wrinkled. Had the torture done this, or something else? The thought horrified him. He cleaved to his youth. And now, you will have it forever. Or at least he assumed this was the case.

  Beside Qala was a man in luscious robes. This had to be the Governor. There was something horribly familiar about him. But Telos could not quite place the familiarity. It was as though he had seen his face in a dream. It was half-familiar, half utterly strange.

  If Telos had thirty seconds more to study Lucan’s face, he would have arrived at the answer. As it happened, a Qi’shathian man in all-black leathers stepped in front of him. He radiated danger and certainty. Xheng hissed.

  “He’s the one who took the princess! Beware his—”

  The dart was flying out of the blowpipe before Xheng could finish his warning. Telos’s skin prickled. Rippling sensitivity surged over his flesh and limbs like scalding water. God-infused power answered the call of desperation. He moved with mantis-like speed, arcing his body backward and twisting as he did so. The dart hissed by him, only a nail’s width from connecting to flesh, clattering off the stone wall beyond.

  Telos straightened. The assassin stood looking at him, dumbfounded. He had clearly never seen such speed.

  “You get Qala!” Telos said to Xheng.

  Telos leapt forward, swinging Darkbite. There was no hesitation now, no worry about whether he might kill. The assassin was a threat, needed to be eliminated as soon as possible.

  A blade flew from the sleeve of the assassin’s tunic, answering Darkbite with a ring of steel on steel, sparks flying. Telos was stronger by far, but his foe was skillful, parrying in a twisting motion that used Telos’s own strength against him. He has been trained in some Qi’shathian academy, Telos thought. He had seen such martial arts before, and admired it. But now he felt it was not merely pretty to look at but deadly.

  Telos swung. The speed of his strokes, especially considering the size and weight of the sword, would have dazzled the most prestigious knight in the land. The air hummed with the passage of the razor-sharp edge. A few times he clipped the wall and stone was unmoored as easily as crumpling cake.

  But the assassin was determined, agile, cunning. He did not meet Telos directly now, realised he would easily be overpowered. He darted, dodged, evaded. His dagger occasionality jabbed whenever Telos overextended. Telos knew it would be coated in venom. Could his God-forged constitution resist such a poison? He did not want to find out.

  Meanwhile, Xheng had cornered the Governor.

  “Untie her!” the captain spat. “You dog kyrelic hi’shash.”

  The Qi’shathian expletives were clearly understood, for Lucan’s lip curled.

  “Why should I do that?”

  “Very well,” Xheng shrugged. He swung the winebottle at Lucan’s temple. The blow was perfection itself, toppling the Governor in a single strike. He crumpled on the filthy floor. Xheng rushed to Qala’s side.

  “The riches of the empire will be yours, Xheng,” Qala said, as he began to pull apart the ties, though they were fearsomely tight, even for his sailor’s fingers, used to knots of every kind. There were tears in her eyes as she spoke. The captain looked embarrassed to see her so moved.

  “It is nothing, dear princess.”

  Finally, she was freed, and embraced Xheng. He knelt, grabbed Lucan’s cloak, and pulled it off the governor’s unconscious body. He threw it about Qala, covering her nakedness in purple and gold.

  The assassin leapt backwards from Telos. His eyes flickered to the unconscious Governor, and Telos saw—for the first time since their encounter—the faintest tremor. He cares, Telos thought. He is devoted to this man. This is not merely job. He has some deep loyalty.

  Telos made to press the attack but the assassin suddenly retrieved a black orb from his back pocket. Telos froze.

  “Do you know what this is, Yarulian?” the assassin whispered.

  “I suspect…”

  “It is an explosive device, made by a Daimomancer, purchased at extravagant cost. Loaded with concentrated blood. It will wipe out everything in this room and in the corridor beyond. One flick of this mechanism on which my thumb now rests…” The assassin carefully placed his thumb upon a flint-wheel. Telos gritted his teeth.

  “You would kill yourself and your precious master.”

  “If I do nothing, then you will kill him,” the assassin countered.

  Telos stood perplexed. “There is no logic in that at all.”

  The assassin’s eyes flicked to Xheng. “Perhaps not to a Yarulian. But whatever the circumstances of my life, I was born a Qi’shathian. Your sea-dog and whore friend here will tell you. Honour matters more than life. If you kill my master while I live, that is dishonour. But if I kill us all, here, now... If I would rather die than suffer dishonour… That is glory. Remember the tale of the Child Emperor.”

  Telos did not know the story, but it seemed Qala did, for her eyes widened.

  “Telos…” she croaked. “Let us leave.”

  “I give you your life,” the assassin affirmed. “You give us ours. And we will meet again when the timing is right.”

  Qala and Xheng edged away from Lucan’s body, along the wall, until they stood behind Telos. Slowly, the trio backed out of the room.

  When they had rounded the corner into the corridor, they ran into the elevator as fast as their various wounds would allow them. With the swift pull of a lever, they were hurtling upwards through a stone chute.

  The assassin came and watched them ascend, still clutching the dreadful black orb. His eyes were black diadems winking like stars.

  His lips were curled in a smile as they mouthed the words, “When the time is right.”