Saithorthepyro
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Chapter 52 - Second Circle IV
🕑 Added 2025-06-05 03:47:51 +0000 UTCMy eyes fluttered awake as cold air painted my cheeks.
I grumbled, muttered, tried to pull on rough, strange-feeling covers, and let the blissful darkness of sleep claim me once again. A second time, the chill wind danced across my face and dragged me away from my rest.
More mutterings, angry pronouncements of doom on whoever was denying me this, as I turned over to bury my face into my pillow.
Instead, I missed the bundled-up shirt that was my makeshift pillow and rammed my face headfirst into the wood of the floor. Blinking tears out of my eyes, I got up just in time to receive a third sudden gust of freezing wind right into my face.
I was still in the warehouse, not in bed at home.
I looked down at myself in confusion. Someone had dragged me over here in the corner, then draped an oversized coat on top of me. Ragged and torn, it still somehow managed to keep me nice and warm as I moved underneath.
Please let this not be taken off one of the corpses.
I tried to get to my hooves, and found my body unwilling. Tired. Wanting to spend more time wrapped up and not wandering about the chilly interior of this warehouse. I couldn’t find the strength to push past that urge, and instead settled down.
Someone had gone to the effort of trying to clean. The bodies of the dead Black Flame had been moved to a separate corner, laid out side by side. The worse of the rubble and shattered wood had been cleared from around the circle. That still left the rents torn in the flooring by the Devil’s claws, and no one had even tried to move the ritual circle itself. Same went for the knocked down door and I drew the coat closer as a fresh blast of cold air blew through the open entrance.
Gregory Montague was walking through that, a pair of tea cups in hand. Where in the hells had he found those?
“Of course the moment all three of us step out you wake up,” he called out, heading my way with a long, circular route giving the infernal circle a wide berth. “How are you feeling?”
I’m fine was right on the tip of my tongue, but something kept it from reaching my lips. What had happened before I’d drifted to sleep, had been….my lips were suddenly dry as the memories of that came down on my head like a collapsing wall.
Hells, I’d essentially collapsed in the arms of Tagashin, then had gone to sleep crying in her arms, and two out of the group of Melissa, Gregory, and Tolman as well. I really must have been on the verge of passing out to let that happen.
It was a lie, and one I forced myself to let go of as I breathed out. Trying to deny it, I wanted to but denying it at this juncture wouldn’t accomplish anything. Not to the people who had witnessed it.
“Not well,” I admitted, and felt the urge to try and cover for that lapse somehow. “Better than I was earlier, now that I’ve had some rest. As coerced as it might have been out of me.”
“Malvia, it was a hug,” he said in a soft tone. “I’ll admit I have definitely seen the hug as an effective social weapon, but that was hardly a case like that.”
“Barnes has a grip like iron,” I said, and even I wasn’t convinced by my voice. “She held me in place til fatigue took effect and-”
“I get the feeling she was far more open with you than she normally is,” Gregory interrupted. “You could at least be that open in return?”
A retort was on the tip of my tongue, but the fury in me was empty, cold dying embers of coal that I swallowed.
“This isn’t easy,” I said quietly. “Not as easy as it should be.”
“I don’t think anyone finds it easy,” Gregory said. “Easier than you do? Yes. Easy? No. Do you want to talk about it?”
I rolled that question around in my head for a bit. “No. Not right now. Later, out of the cold and this warehouse.”
He just nodded, not saying anything else.
“How long was I asleep?” It had probably been a while since they’d had enough time to make me comfortable, but I couldn’t see the sun outside, and there was no noise to indicate the time of day.
“It’s been about fifty minutes,” Gregory said, leaning down with one of the tea cups in his hand. “Far too early for you to have woken up already. You need rest.”
“I need rest in a place that isn’t here,” I countered, gesturing at the wrecked entrance to the warehouse. “Trying to sleep with winter howling in whenever it likes isn’t something I’m equipped to do.”
“Fair,” he admitted. “We did our best, but it’s not like we could lift it. Tea?”
“Where did you even get tea?” I asked him, raising an eyebrow.
I of course had a packet of it on my person, but most other people hardly did the same.
“In the coat of one of the dead diabolists,” Gregory said, smile gone a little sour. “A bit morbid, but the others decided that we all could really use a cup. So we went outside and started brewing it.”
I eyed the tea warily. “You brewed tea outside, maybe half an hour at most after a probably powerful devil finished dissolving into the air?”
Whatever was feeding me relevant details on the Hells, it hadn’t given me a clue on what that crab-thing had been. Hopefully it was gone instead of simply stumped. I did not need two different things in me feeding me knowledge I shouldn’t know about the Infernal.
“Easily solved,” Gregory told me cheerily. “Behold, Holy Water tea!”
I practically shoved the teacup away from me, keeping a wary eye on it.
“I’m definitely not drinking holy water,” I said.
“It’s not actually holy water,” Gregory explained. “I just put enough divine magic in to clear out any faces of diabolism. Not that exposure to that should hurt you necessarily?”
“We’re diabolism resistant, not immune,” I said, finally accepting the proffered cup. If the dead diabolist was as devoted to tea as I was, it probably was a good blend. “To our own if we produce it? Sure, we absorb it, unlike non-Infernal Diabolists but that has its own side effects. Diabolism made by others is likely to-urrgh!”
As soon as I’d taken a sip, my entire mouth had come under vile assault that made me choke and sputter. Gregory’s easy-going smile vanished as I gasped.
“Malvia, what’s wrong?”
“Hennison,” I coughed out as my eyes watered. Oh hells, it was worse than when I’d accidentally taken a swallow from the Nover.
“Who is that? Some poisoner from the-“
“Tea brand,” I got out in between coughs as my taste buds burned and twisted.
His alarm turned to amused annoyance immediately.
“A tea brand?” he asked as I coughed and sputtered and did everything but grasp at my tongue to try and scrub the taste off.
“Worst tea brand in the city,” I said, blinking still-forming tears out of my eyes. “Cheapest and by far the worst.”
Gregory just watched in barely disguised amusement as I got over my exposure to that raw sewage masquerading as tea. After more coughing, sputtering, and eventually dragging my gloves across the surface of my tongue, the taste of sawdust and rat fur was lessened. Enough I could breath without my eyes watering and another coughing fit.
“That was rather dramatic, wasn’t it?” He asked me, an easygoing grin back on his face.
I glared at him, then lowered my gaze to his own cup. “Have you had a sip yet?”
“No,” he admitted, the grin fading a little bit. “I don’t see how that’s-”
“Take a sip, then you can call it rather dramatic,” I said. “Unless you are too afraid of what it might-”
He had the cup to his lips, draining the entire thing as I watched incredulously. I’d just been teasing him, I hadn’t meant for him to drain his cup!
He finished, meeting my gaze flatly. “What was that you were saying being afra-”
I barely managed to scurry away before the vomit hit the floor. Gregory spent a minute emptying the contents of his stomach on the warehouse floor, even longer panting, coughing, and shaking as I offered what help I could.
“What is in this?” He demanded, staring incredulously at the cup.
“By weight?” I said, my own mouth not exactly feeling better but at least I didn’t want to scour it with sandpaper. “At most, Hennison’s will contain one quarter of its weight in actual tea leaves or other tea products, three-quarters of whatever they decide to cut it with to make it cheaper. Sawdust is an old favorite, but brick mortar is also pretty plentiful and doesn’t completely overpower the taste of tea. Or so they claim.”
I closed my eyes as the faint glow of divine magic appeared around his hands. Ten seconds to let him scour out his mouth of whatever surprise Hennison had decided to cut their tea with, then I opened them again.
“I’ve got a set of leaves in my coat,” I said drily, fishing out the sealed packet. “Greygold’s. Not the best, but the best I can afford, and much better than the other option. How about you toss the Hennison’s in the fire and make us a proper cup before we get to business?”
“I don’t want to poison everything within a ten block radius,” Gregory said sardonically. “No fire. Maybe I should just dump it in the Nover, it’s not like it could make it worse.”
“Pretty sure people doing that is how the Nover ended up the way it is,” I said. “Just…drop them somewhere.”
I waited patiently while he left to brew the fresh cup. I could walk now, and had to in order to keep the winter chill out of me while I waited. Eventually, Gregory returned, and after a quick sip to ensure the taint of Hennisons had been cleaned from the cup, I enjoyed a nice soothing cup of tea.
“Barnes left a while ago,” Gregory said as I sipped the tea. “Went to find Voltar and arrange some transportation for everything inside here.”
“Foolish,” I commented, my cup already half-empty. “She still has a bullet in her. Going around with a wound, no matter how magical she is, is foolish. Staying here and recuperating would have been the smarter choice.”
Gregory’s smile turned sardonic. “I’m sorry, are you saying people should rest after being injured in a fight? Instead of immediately involving themselves in even more potential violence?”
“We are on a time limit,” I muttered, drinking another small mouthful. I moved closer to the circle, drawing the borrowed coat tighter around my own.
“Are we?” Gregory asked. “The sudden halting of the killings doesn’t suggest so. Nor does this. Clearly this group has a lot more people involved in it than we initially suspected. Especially because our initial suspicions were one person. Now there’s…what, a group like this for each of these circles? Of which you estimate twelve in total?”
“Tyler’s circle only had one guarding it,” I replied, walking slowly around the sacrificial circle. It still pulsed on occasion, and the air this close was warmer than anywhere else in the warehouse. It smelled of sulfur, warmth, and something else. Something that called to me to take a step closer. What would the harm be, just a couple more inches?
I kept my distance. No more trips to the Hells for me.
“Yes,” Gregory agreed. “But I still think that if this was all so meticulously laid out and planned and such, why do these killings occur one at a time?”
I paused, my mind trying to chew on that one, trying to puzzle out an answer.
“Diabolists capable of combat?” I mused. “Maybe they only have a few willing to truly get their hands dirty in this way. Sacrificing people you’ve abducted in ones and twos is one thing, fighting priests is another, but…there isn’t a need to fight either, is there?”
“Definitely not,” Gregory agreed, taking a sip of his own cup. “Father Reginald was many things, for what people could see as good or bad. A good fighter isn’t one of them. The other priests I never knew as well, but these killers clearly knew them well enough to say, stage a surprise in the dark? For all of them at once? Even if most of them failed, they’d be closer to their goal than they are now and with less people knowing what’s going on. Every day this stretches on, the more of this that will unravel. Why take that risk at all?”
“Good question,” I said, staring at the circle in the center. “Trust perhaps? But then again, if she couldn’t trust anyone watching these circles to handle the killings, they wouldn’t be handling the circle portion. But it is strange. At a bare minimum, you’d have expected the Flame diabolists to join in a lot earlier than they did.”
I tapped my hoof nervously as a thought occurred. “The Flame used to do crimes as cover for other crimes, but on this scale? There’s a difference between using an apparent robbery to cover for a hit, and planning an opening to the Hells via multiple murders to cover for…what would it even cover for? You use smaller crimes to cover for bigger ones. I hesitate to even contemplate what a bigger crime than this could be.”
“What if it’s using a bigger crime they can’t commit to cover for a smaller one?” Gregory asked. “Or knowing that you or Voltar would recognize this gambit and make a fakeout with this being their actual goal?”
“The former is the most likely explanation,” I said. “But even then it’s…doubtful. Until we get someone skilled in Diabolism to examine one of these circles to say they can’t, I’m assuming they have the means. In which case, going for the more blatant crime will draw attention. The last one is the kind of screwy logic that ends up with you in a position worse than if you didn’t bother with any fakeout. No, we don’t have the information to call it either way. Right now, assume a spade is a spade.”
“I suppose it doesn’t matter too much,” Gregory said.
“It does matter,” I replied. “Maybe just not as much right now as it will later. What made you think of this, anyway?”
“Thinking about the last time we worked together,” Gregory said. “Plans hidden within plans.”
“True,” I said. “Before I forget. Talking with Barnes, it turns out your father’s convinced young Lord Karsin that I’m behind his mother’s death.”
“Really?” Gregory said, eyebrows raising. “Father has always had such a distant relationship with the truth, it’s nice to see he’s become reacquainted with it.”
I glared at Gregory, who, much like Tagashin, refused to wilt and melt under my gaze.
“You are technically correct,” I said through gritted teeth. “I’d argue that choice was ultimately the drakes, but it does leave us with this issue. We don’t need the distraction, and I don’t need another noble house with a grudge against me. I have enough people trying to kill me without adding another name to that list.”
“Desmond isn’t going to kill you Malvia,” Gregory said. “I’ve heard his mother’s story about him refusing to eat meat for a month once he found out animals died to fill his plate. He’s not going to have your throat slit.”
“A Desmond who's been influenced by your father for months on end?” I asked him, and he frowned.
“I would think Lady Karsin’s retainers are better people than to allow that to happen,” he said. “But I haven’t really talked with Desmond since this all happened. My…interactions with noble society after that incident have mostly been limited to people I know and who don’t mind being seen with me.”
“Not getting invited to as many balls and parties?” I asked, maybe too bitterly.
His lips pursed, but quickly turned into a sly smile. “Not when two parties resulted in a small mountain of corpses. People don’t want to be at the third when it happens. I have become a harbinger of death in polite society, and society is quite eager to act like I wielded Zaviel’s scythe itself, instead of the actual guilty parties.”
That had contained no small amount of bitterness of its own, and I felt a little guilty in response. I could relate a little to people thinking you were just a harbinger of death.
“Well, someone needs to talk him into backing off, for his own sake,” I said. “And before you ask, no, I am not threatening to hurt him. I am saying he’s going to get himself hurt if his fumbling hits something important while we’re trying to solve this. No one is going to look kindly at him if he accidentally causes a Hellgate to open, or just does something that might have helped it open. So you, or Voltar, or someone, needs to talk to this kid before that becomes an issue.”
Gregory nodded. “My standing is reduced but hoepfully I can set him straight.”
“It might be better if Voltar did,” I said, speaking carefully. “Your father has been filling Karsin’s head with stories about you, me, and Elise.”
Gregory paused, the urge to ask fighting with instinct telling him not to. I could only hope the look on my face was encouraging the “Don’t ask” side to win.
“You might want to ask him instead of me,” he said. “But enough about Desmond Karsin. What do you want to do regarding this?”
I assumed this referred to the warehouse we were currently in and the plethora of potential evidence contained within. It was a safer this to talk about than the other options.
“Search it,” I said frankly. “Before anyone else gets a chance, too.”
“Not trusting your own employers?” Gregory asked me.
“Never,” I answered readily. “They chose to hire me, after all. But joking aside, I really don’t want to risk the next people showing up being any of our bishop acquaintances.”
Gregory nodded. “By all rights, I should have a problem with that, but as a duly appointed priest of Tarver, it is also within my duties to defy the ranking deities of the pantheon and their servants when they are being utter twits. Especially if it makes for a worse story.”
“Seems like there are quite a few like that in the group,” I said. “Tarver, Lareran, Baltaren. Something else to consider. I’m going to investigate their living quarters. Also, duly appointed? How did you become a priest?”
“Probably a story for a less morbid place” Gregory said, eyeing the stacked up corpses. “You want me to wait here in case anyone besides Melissa and Tolman shows up?”
“They’re still here?” I asked him.
“A bit outside the entrance. They said thanks for the tea.”
“Then also keep an eye on Melissa and Tolman while I’m gone,” I told him. “If either of them tries to leave the area or do something suspicious, stop them and yell for me. Especially if they try to lay their hands on the circle. Understand?”
Gregory looked uncertain. “A bit untrusting, considering those two possessed tried to kill-”
“With these stakes, I’m not risking anything when dealing with a current and a possibly former member of the Black Flame,” I said irritably. “A broken arm to establish a cover identity is the least of what Versalicci has made people do before. Gregory, I’m not asking you to restrain them or do some of the Watch’s favored methods of interrogation. Just keep an eye out and don’t turn your back on either of them.”
He gave me a reluctant nod, and I turned to investigate the other side of the warehouse.
I doubted I’d find anything as useful as oh, say, a journal entry naming every single member of the conspiracy. Competent people weren’t that sloppy, but there might be something we could never find at one of the crime scenes.
Voltar would be best for this, I thought as I got to the other side of the warehouse. We’d have to make do with me for now.
They’d done their own construction work to turn half of the warehouse into a series of rooms. Definitely something they'd been working at for a while. The implications of that could wait until I’d gotten back home.
The first room on the right was the one I’d taken Melissa out of. Rubble from that collapsed section of wall jutted out of the still-open door. I maneuvered past, sucking my gut in as I squeezed past.
The second room was the living quarters. Two rows of beds with scavenged nightstands and a pair of communal dressers at the end. Much like with all furniture in the quarter, a mixture of different styles, makes, and generally of pretty low quality. Most of it was probably scavenged. A good, new bed could set you back quite a bit.
Going through the nightstands turned up a treasure trove of personal effects, none of which seemed relevant to this. No correspondence. Nothing seemed connected to the only crime scene these diabolists had made. A lot of little things you could use to maybe read into the psychology of the various diabolists who’d owned them. Half of whom were now dead. Nothing too important yet, but I’d make sure to have these carted away when we get a chance. A closer examination could be called for.
Third room, kitchen. Foodstuffs were nothing fancy, a lot of them either preservatives or other rations that would keep. They’d had multiple cabinets set up for storage, organized and sorted. Nothing too fancy in terms of cooking, a simple oven, a freestanding cask of water for cleaning and a second for drinking. A couple of simple spices, a few small tins of tea. Burroughs and Smithinsons, poor quality, very cheap. Hard to imagine someone acquiring a taste for this, so either funds had run low for them, or they were unjustly punishing any tea drinkers among them. Seeing that they had three times as much of coffee? Yes, clear prejudice against those who preferred a clearly superior drink.
Then again, someone here had a taste for Hennisons. If that had been their introduction to tea I could see their hatred of it.
Not too much here. The most informative part of this was the fact that this was more evidence for having set up here a long time. Had Vesper misled me on when the deal had been offered? A disconcerting thought, and something that would need her tested in some way. But it was also possible that what I’d said to Voltar earlier. An initial smaller offering to a select group of diabolists, then a wider general offer. Why make the wider offer then?
Chaos was the easiest answer to arrive at. The core group could handle the heavy lifting while whatever of the leftover diabolist took the bait became a smokescreen with their own efforts. However, none of that had occurred yet. Had it misfired? Or maybe those diabolists who had been considered too reluctant to bring in the first time were waiting for their moment.
It would take a lot to embolden them into thinking they stood a chance. Especially in Avernon.
The next room was an office and workspace of some kind, a desk and a workbench, the latter containing quite a few artifacts of diabolism. Home-made ones, not very powerful given the paltry materials the Flame diabolists had used. Probably didn’t have access to anything better. I put them in a lined pocket of my coat. I had wards set into this one, which would contain and hide the traces of diabolism. I could go through them later, but most of them seemed related to summoning.
There was one half-finished one that was far too large to fit in my pocket. A human skull, definitely not Infernal, in the process of being covered in some black metal. Not iron, not steel. Diabolic traces on it, but not any great amount of power. Still unfinished. This one could go to Intelligence.
In the desk were papers, most of them encoded. I looked briefly over the inane letters discussing life on some country farm “Cousin Emilia” had moved to. Something to try and crack later. We’d need the books from the living quarters, just in case any of them were the base for the cipher.
The following rooms were…grim. Manacles, chains, and dried blood. No guessing what these had been used for. They must have done something with the bodies, but that was a mystery to be solved another day.
Overall, not a great haul of potential clues, but I didn’t expect to find anything matching recovered evidence from most of the crime scenes. They hadn’t made those ones. I could only hope what had happened today had put a dent in the creation of future crime scenes.
Given they’d summoned devils probably on par with the large crab thing? I didn’t have much hope.
Tracing the inside of the warehouse walls now, tracing the boundaries of the wards. Arcane sight called out the limits of it, a slight golden sheen along the interior of the warehouse. That one diabolist had been right, there were holes from where creatures not keyed to the wards had punched through. Most of them were in the process of healing, albeit very slowly, and that was worth paying attention to. Checking these first before I started looking for hidden places.
I frowned, looking at the wards then turning my head to catch them at an angle. Maybe it was just the perspective, by the thickness seemed to change, thinning then thickening again further down the wall. As if the wards were being powered at certain points and their protection weakened at the halfway point in between.
They hadn’t used Infernal magic for the wards. Ah. Probably trying to prevent any trace, even a slight amount, of Diabolism. They’d probably gotten some back-alley sigils, stolen from churches and sold on the black market. Used a couple dozen of them as a base, then used them to power the wards.
Risky business using divine magic for that. They’d have keyed it to accept each of them without issue.
It was either that or suffer mild burns every time they walked through.
I kneeled down at one of those points, testing the floorboard. It came free, and I grinned. Entirely possible that age has loosened it, but too much of a coincidence. I pulled it completely out of the floor, and my smile vanished as I grimaced, a burning sensation spreading across my face. I hurriedly backed away.
“Gregoy?” I called out. “There’s an object underneath the floorboards. Do me a favor and grab it?”
Confused, Gregory moved over, glancing at my face. “You look like you were-”
“It's a sunburn,” I whispered. “Just not from any physical sun. Grab it, please?”
He went over the floorboard and stiffened when he caught sight of what had been buried underneath. Grabbing it, he quickly wrapped it in some cloth, both to hide it from the other two’s eyes, and also to keep it from shining its light over all of us.
A holy symbol of Halspus. I moved back towards the plank now that the painful light from the symbol had faded.
“Halspus’ symbol,” Gregory said. “I’d make a joke about how even his digits burn brightly, but this isn’t a sigil, is it?”
“Sigils don’t burn when you look at them,” I told him. “This is something else. A holy symbol, probably a casting tool for a cleric. This could have roasted us, the Infernals among us anyway, if it hadn’t been broken by the rat first.”
I shivered. It had all been on the inside, so I wouldn’t have been able to see it. And I’d been in too much of a hurry trying to get inside before they sacrificed Melissa. If the rat hadn’t disrupted the wards, I could have died when crossing through.
“We need to check the other spots,” I said. “See how far this goes.”
I honestly wasn’t sure what would be better, an assortment of various deities’ holy symbols or them all being from Halspus.
A few minutes later, we had half a dozen symbols of Halspus covered in cloth.
Even then, being near them still made me feel ill. Needles pricking my skin as the cloth failed to be a good enough barrier, so Gregory set them a safe distance away.
We’d only dig up half the symbols powering the wards, but it was a good bet they all were of Halspus.
“I smell a rat,” I said.
“I’m shocked you do,” Gregory said. “It’s not like you and Bishop Gallaspie get along. Or the Halspusian church in general. I thought you’d be chomping at the bit to lay any blame on corruption at the church’s doorstep?”
“Eager? Yes, I am,” I conceded. “And general corruption may be the cause behind this, but in Gallaspie’s case? Arranging for something to shut down the diabolism program and prune the ranks of those he probably considers damned for its use? I could see that. Masterminding a plot to open a permanent hellgate into the capital? Do you think he would do that?”
“Not unless he’s turned traitor to his deity, and that is unlikely,” Gregory admitted. “Not that it isn’t possible, but his record is rather impeccable. The kind you write songs about, if he wasn’t the kind of man to have your..piety tested based on if you embellished anything in the lyrics. But he wouldn’t be the first pure, well, pure in his own mind soul to fall to the Hells.”
“He wouldn’t be,” I said. “Although that’s died off as Hell's ability to make good on their promises has been constrained in this country.”
Gregory frowned. “Saying you smell a rat would mean they’d want us to find these, right? I don’t see us discovering this place as part of some master plan. Perfectly laid out plans where your opponents do everything you expect stay only in the songs and the page.”
“You’re right,” I agreed. “I don’t think it was a rat for us to find, I think it was a rat for anyone who might have noticed someone acquiring quite a few holy symbols and transporting them into the Quarter. Must have been a delicate operation, considering how noticeable these things can be to anyone with a hint of devil in their blood. Are Halspusian clerics buried with their symbols?”
“Yes,” Gregory said. “Well, not buried with. They are set into the tombstone itself, embedded and cemented inside. So that every day when the sun rises, its light shines on the symbols and on the souls of its most faithful servants.”
“That would be kind of touching if it wasn’t Halspus,” I said scathingly. “Instead, it might just make me retch.”
“I’m not going to deny you have an extremely good reason to dislike Halspus and his servants,” Gregory said. “But for most people, Halspus is the sun, who grants life and light, who helps crops grow, and drove the devils and other things that used to rule the night back to the darkness they came from.”
“That just makes it more infuriating,” I told him. “The hypocrisy.”
“Well, regardless of that, it does make removing them a little difficult. Not as difficult or as obvious as digging up a coffin. Or these could be new ones that have not yet been given to a priest to channel through.”
“Unfortunately, the one person we know for that is also the prime suspect still,” I muttered. “Working around that will be difficult. How loyal is Forcreek?”
“You’ve met him,” Gregory said. “There’s not much else to Forcreek but surface, I’m afraid. Or to put a bardic spin on it, the ocean has learned from experience to let the sky only see its shallows.”
I raised an eyebrow. “He has no independence from Gallaspie?”
“He went on pilgrimage once for a few months and came back early because he missed being around his bishop,” Gregory said sardonically. “Trust me, trying to get him to work around Gallaspie is a dead end. Forcreek was the orphan of a devil attack out in the countryside, in a place where the barrier between this world and the Hells waned. Gallaspie took him in after preventing a sea-devil from gobbling him up, and since then, well, they won’t call each other father and son the bond is much the same.”
“Sea-devil?”
“Apparently, it resembled a sea-serpent, but it wasn’t a natural creature of the deeps. Envy devil, if I remember correctly?”
Well, I was keeping my scarf on around everyone already, but especially around Forcreek now.
“You do remember correctly. So, we’ve got several symbols likely connected to the Halspusian church, who generally would be above suspicion for things like this. But the possibility of corruption can’t be discounted, and the two connections we have in the church are the most likely ones to be behind it.”
“Or it could be a rat,” Gregory said. “Or coincidence. Not everything has to line up as some grand piece of the overall plot.”
I stared blankly at him. “You’re a bard.”
“Yes, which means I’m well aware of how everything is tied into a neat little bow after the fact,” Gregory said with a smile.
“I certainly hope so,” I muttered, as my ears picked up the sounds of wheels on stone from the edge of the Kettle. Someone was finally on their way here.
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Saithor
Hey folks, I am back and decided to release Friday's chapter a day early here on Patreon. The next RR release will be on our regular time on friday.
