CHAPTER FIFTEEN - A LOYAL SERVANT

As he climbed the long white marble steps before the Inquisition building, Luvo handed his horse's reins to an Acolyte waiting in silence. The young man didn't lift his head from the ground as he took the reins. To show one's face was a sin grave enough to defile an Acolyte in that holy hierarchy.

The building stood in the very center of the Capital, across from the palace and, by deliberate design, two bricks taller than it. Dazzling white marble, gold inlay gleaming in the sun... The face of Qysdes was carved with masterful skill into the stone atop every column — a god whose eyes gazed into eternity, whose mouth curved in that familiar half-smile, whose fingers were frozen in a gesture of blessing.

As Luvo looked at these flawless columns, he could see how many thousands of Attivs had been spent beneath that smooth stone. This was no building; it was a vast, ostentatious mass grave.

The guards before the high bronze doors stood like statues in their grand, heavy armor. As Luvo approached, he inclined his head slightly, by a measured, calculated degree. No response came from the guards. In the Capital, respect was the most expensive and the sharpest weapon. The guards' rigid stance was a subtle show of force, reminding him that he was not in his own house.

"Commander Luvo," said a low-ranking Acolyte in green robes who approached him. In the high-ceilinged hall his voice was no louder than a whisper. "Holy Vehras is expecting you. This way, please."

Luvo only nodded and began to follow him.

The marble corridors were like a vast labyrinth. Those deliberately built high ceilings multiplied and echoed every heavy sound Luvo's boots made. No one could walk these walls unheard; the building announced the weight and presence of every visitor to all its corridors.

At the first corner they turned, they passed another Acolyte standing before a half-open door on the right. At that moment, from the stone room beyond the door, a muffled, inhuman scream rose and was cut off abruptly by the sound of a metal blow. The Acolyte at the door didn't so much as blink. Luvo's face was no different from stone; he tightened his jaw slightly and didn't break the rhythm of his stride for even a second. Just two steps from the palace, behind these white walls, no one would answer for the bones being broken.

In the second corridor, an old priest in white robes appeared, coming toward them. The thick, gold-embroidered shawl draped down from his shoulders proclaimed the man's wealth and standing. Noble Halmir, keeper of the Inquisition's financial records. Luvo cast a sidelong glance at the thick stack of deeds and seizure documents the Acolyte beside the priest was carrying. Merchant fortunes confiscated in the name of God, then miraculously transferred into Halmir's personal records...

"Commander. May Qysdes be with you," the priest said, inclining his head slightly.

"May Qysdes be with you, Noble," Luvo answered. His voice was at least as false as the priest's gold embroidery. They passed each other by.

In the third corridor, a young Acolyte coming from the opposite direction nearly walked into Luvo's armor. The young man paused, bowing his head in apology, but in that split second of contact Luvo saw the uncontrolled, fanatical fire in the boy's eyes. That dangerous youth, newly joined to these walls, hungry to sacrifice someone or to be sacrificed... Luvo knew the flame in those eyes all too well. This building would use that flame as a weapon, and sweep up its ashes when it was done.

They stopped before another heavy wooden door. The Acolyte knocked softly.

"Come in," said a voice from within, old but smooth.

The room was not large, but its ceiling rose to a grim height. It had no windows; the yellowish, sickly light of silver lamps mounted on the walls lit the room. Around the round table in the center stood three chairs. And just beneath the ceiling, shrouded in darkness, was a latticed iron balcony. The moment Luvo stepped into the room, he felt the weight of a silhouette sitting motionless behind the bars of that balcony on the back of his neck. He didn't turn his eyes upward. He was being watched. And from a very high place.

The first of the two people seated at the table was Holy Vehras, with his white hair and the deep, measured lines on his face. The same merciless man who had interrogated street gangs twenty years ago now judged lords with that same serene sharpness. The young Acolyte seated beside him, Korin, held his quill poised over the parchment, alert as a hunting hound.

He was glad it was Vehras conducting the questioning. He would not have wanted to face Judge Drezen.

"Commander Luvo," said Holy Vehras, a thin, hospitable smile on his lips. "May the light of Holy Qysdes be upon you."

Luvo bowed his head. "May the light of Holy Qysdes be upon you, Noble."

"Please, sit."

As Luvo settled into the leather-upholstered chair, a familiar document on the table caught his eye. It was his own border report, written in his hand, underlined and read over many times.

"Our apologies for troubling you, Commander," Vehras said, slowly steepling his fingers on the table. "We need your view on a matter. The borderlands, as you know, are a region quite difficult to oversee."

"At your service, Noble," Luvo said. He waited without breaking his composure.

"In recent weeks, near Nihira, north of the border, an unfortunate incident took place," Vehras began. His tone was as casual as if he were discussing ordinary weather. "The information reached our channels quite late. A group of slave traders observed another group crossing the border and turning onto the pass road. They found them suspicious. People moving off the records are always hiding something, aren't they? Slave traders know that best of all. They have eyes sharp enough to tell who's moving officially on the border and who isn't."

"Are slave traders reliable as a source of information, Noble?" Luvo asked, lacing his voice with the right measure of military skepticism.

Vehras gave a faint laugh. "Generally, no. But sometimes, in places where they're the only ones in the dark, they alone see the truth. The border, you understand. A region official eyes can scarcely reach."

"I understand. Please, go on."

"When this information reached us, we felt we had to act," Vehras said, fixing his eyes on Luvo's. "The incident was north of the border, outside our direct authority. We know it falls under your responsibility, Commander. But given the distance and the urgency, we chose to use an intermediary. We handed the matter over to the Summit Wardens. Doing business with the outlaws of the borderlands sometimes smooths out the bureaucratic snags. It's outside the chain of command. Cleaner."

Luvo's breath hung in his chest for an instant. The Summit Wardens. But Luvo's face was so expressionless it might have been carved from stone.

"Are the Summit Wardens suited to a task like this, Noble?" Luvo said in a calm tone. "Don't they work to take heads, not information?"

"Precisely," Vehras said softly. "What we ordered was only detention. We meant to bring the questioning to the Capital. We stated it clearly, we paid the price, and we gave the instruction." The priest let out a deep sigh. "But you know the borderland mercenaries as well as I do, Commander. The moment they see a handful of gold, they do as they please. They get up to mischief."

Acolyte Korin scratched something with his quill without lifting his head from the parchment. The only thing breaking the silence of the room was the scratch of that pen.

"Got up to mischief, did they?" Luvo asked. He could guess the answer well enough. But he had to play that cold game of feigned ignorance.

"The news only just reached us," Vehras said. "It seems a major clash broke out. Something we didn't anticipate. The group that was to be detained must have resisted, and the Wardens grew impatient. The result... far worse than expected."

Vehras fell silent and watched Luvo's face carefully. This was not a silence; it was a net cast wide. Vehras was searching for the micro-reaction an ordinary commander would give to such a bloody event in his own territory. Surprise, anger, or curiosity...

But Luvo was like a dark well; he threw back not a single stone dropped into him. He waited, his hands unmoving on the table.

Hiding his disappointment skillfully, Vehras was forced to continue. "Many of them are dead, Commander. At the scene."

Luvo's mind raced for the right tone, the right military response. "Distressing news, Noble," he said, settling the gravity of a weary commander into his voice. "I have patrols in that region. If a clash like this took place, I'll need to assess my own garrisons' losses as well. I'll wait for the official report."

"Naturally," Vehras said. "We don't have clear information ourselves on who the casualties were. The report from the Summit Wardens is nothing but numbers. They didn't even take the task of counting the bodies seriously. Outlaws, after all... To confirm the details, in the coming days we'll send our own man to the pass. When he returns, we'll have a firmer picture."

Luvo inclined his head slightly. "Thank you for your understanding, Noble."

Again that heavy silence hung in the room. Vehras tapped his fingers rhythmically on the mahogany table, three times. Korin's quill stopped. At that moment, the invisible shadow on the upper balcony shifted ever so slightly, the chair creaking beneath it.

Vehras tilted his head slightly. As if he'd just remembered some ordinary detail, he settled that serene, dangerous thoughtfulness onto his face.

"While it's on my mind, Commander. I should add... during the clash, the Summit Wardens came across something uncommon." Vehras's eyes narrowed. "There was a child among them."

The air filling Luvo's lungs caught in his throat like a lump. Every muscle in his body went rigid for that single instant. He didn't breathe, didn't swallow, didn't so much as blink. But that split-second hesitation, that invisible tremor, was enough to change the air in the room.

Vehras saw that hairline crack. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes deepened. He had caught it.

"Poor child," Vehras said, smearing that false, clinging sorrow into his voice. "These borderland roads are no place for children. Was a family on the move, who knows... Perhaps she was a merchant's daughter. Perhaps a slave to be sold. When our man reaches the pass, we'll find out what became of the child."

Luvo closed that split-second opening at once, with an iron will. "When a child dies, even for borderland soldiers there's a grief in it," he said in a flat voice. "If information comes, I'd be glad if you'd share it."

"We will, Commander," Vehras said, smiling. It was the satisfied smile of an archer who'd struck his mark. "Information is a shared service. We all work beneath the light of Qysdes."

"Beneath the light of Qysdes."

When Vehras rose, Luvo lifted himself from the heavy leather chair as well. The farewells were made within that same frame of false respect, and Luvo threw himself out through those heavy bronze doors.

When the Capital's cold, rainy air hit his face, Luvo paused for a moment on the marble steps. The stone stairs beneath his legs, the mud of the street — all of it had lost its meaning at once. When he finally let the air out of his lungs, his mind began rapidly breaking apart and reassembling the words from that dark room.

A child. Most of them dead.

Luvo gripped the collar of his cloak tightly with his gloved hands. His mind was working like a tactical map on a battlefield. The timing... The timing was all wrong. He himself had arrived in the Capital only yesterday and had only just submitted his report. Yet in the story Vehras told, the Summit Wardens had gone after the caravan, attacked, and the news had made its way all the way back to the Capital.

This was an operation that would take weeks. The Inquisition must have known of this caravan's existence and its route before Luvo had even reached the border. The slave traders' tip-off was one great lie. The only ones who knew that caravan's route, its exact location, were himself and Garrick.

This truth poured down Luvo's spine like freezing water, along with the cold wind.

He had thought he'd infiltrated the Inquisition, that for years he'd been trying to breach those walls. He'd offered gold to Acolytes, sent wine to nobles, always searching for a gap. But the tunnel hadn't been dug from outside the wall inward — it had been dug from within, toward him. If that squad's location had reached the Inquisition, there was a leak inside his own unit, one that reached all the way into his own command tent.

He took the reins roughly. As he settled into the saddle, the subtext of the sentence Vehras had constructed echoed once more in his mind.

They didn't say the child died. They said there was a child among them.

Just as he was about to set his horse moving, he noticed the man standing across the street, at a corner where the palace's shadows fell. Ordinary clothes, an ordinary stance. But amid the crowd, unlike the leaves tossing in the wind, that man stood rigid and locked on his target, like a predator. Luvo knew those eyes. This was not the bearing of soldiers on a battlefield, but of throat-cutters in the dark. One of Vael's hunters.

Clenching his jaw, Luvo turned his horse's head in the direction opposite the palace, toward the military barracks. The cold air filled his lungs, but it no longer choked him. His mind had cleared, regaining its lethal calm.

His men might be dead. He might be nursing a snake at his side. Two great powers might have loosed their dogs to hunt him. But Luvo was a commander. To mourn, he first had to survive.