With a heavy sigh, Kael gripped the supply bag. He munched the little meat on the half-gnawed chicken carcasses. Had he ever tasted chicken? Not that he could remember. This one's dryness made it bland, the trash from the thugs, but it was good meat, at least not from rats, cats, or dogs.
He washed the cardboard-like taste down with fresh water from a canteen, his mind already reviewing options. Help Tonio. He wanted to keep his promise, really, but the entire slum would chase him if he left the sewers in the company of someone looking more rat than man. Staying here was out of the question.
It didn't mean he had to give up on Tonio, though. All he needed was to move him somewhere that aligned with his own plans.
Hide him in a rented place? Only if I earn enough. Even then, he'd never stay inside. No, it has to be somewhere isolated, or near a sewer entrance, so he can vanish if needed. Later. First, Riccardo. He'll break his anchor... I'm not convinced...
He needed more clues to make truth mutation safer, and Riccardo needed a miracle. Kael shut his eyes. Guilt wouldn't change the outcome. Even without him, Riccardo would do it if it meant increasing Tonio's chances of recovery.
He leaned back against the wall, elbows against his knees, dark hair jutting between the fingers clenching his head harder than he wanted to. A round frame pressed against the back of his arm.
He pulled the glasses he stole from the facility out of his chest pocket. The dark frame was cold against his palm, and the unblemished glass reflected the torchlight in brighter tints. He brushed the temple, his fingers finding engravings.
Relic 78.
He glanced at the ledger hovering beside him. So, the special items he retrieved in the submerged temple were relics as well. Garrick scammed him beyond everything he could have imagined. He crossed his arms with a click of his tongue.
Still, he got the ledger.
It hovered beside him silently, and he grabbed it. Perhaps, just perhaps, it had entries about relics. Even if it couldn't, powers had prices. The image of the corpse that wore the glasses flashed in his mind. Its skin clung to its bones, but it was whole, except for its empty eye sockets.
Must be the price. I need to understand if wearing them will damage my eyes or if I can avoid side effects by using them correctly.
He flipped the ledger open, skipped the first page on which entries about his truth of endurance sparkled faintly in the torchlight, bit his lip when he reached those about Giovanni's anchor-ghast, and finally found a half-filled page amidst the blank ones.
✦ Silent Frame ✦
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Automated echo of the truth of concealment: "No one knows who I truly am."
Primary Function: Obscures a truth bearer from relic-based detection and truth-seeking abilities.
────────────────────────────
Risk of Breaking: Medium.
Side effects: Slowly rots the wearer's eyes if worn too long.
────────────────────────────
Kael's finger stilled on the risk of breaking. Why did it look as if someone's truth had been trapped in those glasses, and how did they do it?
One answer, many more questions... At least Giovanni had been right. He could hide from the priests at the next harvest festival.
With a deep exhale, he put the glasses on. His vision didn't change; they felt like normal glasses. A veil of fog filtered from the frame, neither warm nor cold. Not as much as what the eyeless corps generated, but enough to shroud his features and likely cover him from detection. He kept them on, expecting his eyes to sting while imagining how he'd appear to others. No sting after a couple of minutes. If it could last for hours, it'd be a veritable treasure. Not the time for dangerous tests. He stowed them back in his pocket, hoping the fog wouldn't draw attention instead of concealing him.
***
Thirty minutes earlier, before Kael's discussion with Riccardo, someone hunted what refused to be seen.
Samuel kicked the grey snow of Ashcoil Row in his cheap shirt and coarse pants. Three days! Already three days wearing infidels' clothes instead of his sacred gown, yet the Hands of the Unburied didn't react once to the heretic's presence.
If that failure wasn't infuriating enough, he spent silver crowns without counting in Garrick's impious bar. Thugs drank at his table until they couldn't walk home straight. They talked a lot: about the girls they'd fornicate with tonight, the legs they broke to recover Garrick's money, and more sinful anecdotes he wished he could forget.
But clues about their boss's schemes? Not even a muttered whisper from the darkest shadows. Either Garrick disciplined his men to keep their mouths shut or was so cautious that he kept them ignorant.
Even worse, many of them were truth bearers. He even heard about a couple of binders. Binders! These thugs were as powerful as he was! And the Hands of the Unburied never pointed at them. It was as if they weren't worshippers of false truths. How was it possible? Was a church secretly funding Garrick?
He hissed through his teeth, fist trembling. This mission would take longer than expected, but by the grace of Kythra, he'd search relentlessly until he drove the infidels to the pyre.
Before his declaration ended, the Hands of the Unburied tugged toward the burial pits. His eyes widened, lips curling.
"God has sent her revelation. The heretic's nearby!"
He rushed down Ashcoil Row's alley and streets, the tug coming heavier and sharper the closer he got to his prey. Once he reached the junk market close to the poorest neighborhood, the necklace chain almost pulled him to his knees.
His stomach churned, sweat beading on his temples. He glanced at the necklace. The hands squirmed toward the floor, fingers twisting, nails scraping at the air with insatiable desire.
And Samuel understood.
He understood that he wasn't after a lone heretic. How many hid underground? At least a dozen. No. Hundreds. Impossible. Something didn't add up. Heretics were rare even in this dark pit. Why did the hands only react now, and how could he go down?
Tucking his fingers around his chin, he surveilled his surroundings. Old men bartered repurposed junk, and sellers waved wares that filled the air with a pervasive scent of rust. People came and went in stitched or dishevelled clothes—nothing out of the ordinary.
Until his gaze fell on a group. White-bloused men and women hurrying out of a dead end. They were too neat, their faces too clean despite their grimaces.
He watched them leave before he entered the dead end. Heavy barrels blocked the path, or should have. The group had moved them in their flight, leaving a round trapdoor exposed.
Kneeling beside it, he tentatively pulled. The door rose without resistance, which made him slow down. A passage meant to be secret. Unlocked. People running from it. Relic 89 going crazy. The muffled blare of an alarm. Something happened; something wrong.
He stored the necklace in its box, then began to descend the ladder.
Screams worse than those he heard from burning heretics filtered through the intensifying alarm. His boots met the bar gratings of a floor, and what he saw down the railing made his hair bristle.
Amidst broken shields, thugs sprawled on the ground floor. Stomach lacerated to the spine, guts lying beside them, they cried, in agony, but alive against all logic.
"Please make it stop. I beg you." A dismembered thug said with a hole in his chest. He planted his sword in his own neck, relief flashing on his face for a heartbeat before despair engulfed his features. Reality pulsed around him, refusing him death.
"That's..." Samuel's knuckles whitened, "Impossible... unless..."
Leaning half his chest over the railing, he finally saw it: a face half-melted like cheap tallow crowning a distorted body three times taller than he was. Its right side, like cracked marble, refused to fall, while its left side dripped and reformed over visible organs.
None of the arrows shot from the floors fazed the creature that tore through men.
"A fractured crystalline core floats around its heart... Oh, Kythra, show mercy to your devout believer." He clasped his hands, shivering as he knelt. "Burn the anchor-ghast in your purifying flames, for your believer can't. But my mission only begins."
Fire burning in his eyes, he locked onto the eight-legged monster in the cracked glass tube. The ghast reached for it. The thugs fired barrages of arrows. As long as he avoided both, he could find the heretics. Not hundreds as he had assumed—the anchor-ghast likely counted for most—but perhaps a dozen.
He slipped behind archers too focused on shooting to notice him. Beyond them, cells held desecrations of Kythra's blessing. Humanoid beasts, deformed, with scales, and nails, and tails. Fifteen in total.
Burn them? Flames flickered in his palms, then faded. No, they were part of Garrick's scheme. Keep the man in the dark. Report to the high priest; he'd answer appropriately with the temple's arbiters and strike down the anchor-ghast if it found its way out.
He returned to the ladder, pausing on the first step to gaze at the glass tube. "If that perversion of humans gets out... The temple needs to act fast."
The last thing he heard was a man's forceful command to his men.
"Hold it until Brannick arrives! Shoot, shoot every arrow we have!" Marek weaved between the anchor-ghast's legs, his hair, now messy, flying with his sharp movements.
His blade flashed across joints and arteries. The debilitating wounds barely slowed the anchor-ghast before they closed as if they had never existed.
"Giovanni!" He growled, hate pulsing in the veins of his neck as he struck faster.
Bones like claws shredded the air to decapitate him, while the abomination's stomps threatened to crush him. His long sword never paused. His steps never wobbled.
He sliced behind the knee, the ankle, and the inner thigh.
A bony claw engulfed his vision.
He used the blood covering the ground to slide beneath, knocking a loose arrow in the same movement. With a sharp spin, he buried his longsword in a visible kidney.
The anchor-ghast slowed, then, as if it had no spine, bent back until its face was in front of Marek. It didn't screech. It observed, with eyes that searched for the meaning of survival, that craved to gut more people to find it.
Marek leapt back, and the anchor-ghast didn't chase.
Instead, it lumbered toward the glass tube. What was inside felt like it wanted to survive, like the answer.
"NO!"
Marek sliced shoulder, elbow, and wrist but failed. It now towered over the cracked glass, its bony hand raised.