SHADOWS OF THE CAPITAL

In the slaughter valley, nothing disturbed the crows' feast but the rain. The disappointment he'd found in that dim infirmary tent, and the weight of the unthinkable horror Seer Birek had described, hung from Commander Luvo's shoulders like a cloak of lead.

He moved through the mud with slow, measured steps, toward where Captain Garrick waited for him, in a muck-filled hollow ringed with corpses.

Captain Garrick held the torch in his hand toward an armorless body lying on the ground. Beside Luvo's flawless royal plate, Garrick wore plain leather armor, patched again and again by his own rough, calloused fingers. The thick wool scarf wound around his neck, crude provincial work, was nothing a Capital Officer would be caught wearing — but Garrick would never part with it.

"Commander," Garrick said, in that thick, flat voice of his, "I'm starting to think the Sanctified Bloodlines came here for a different reason than we assumed."

Garrick crouched and drew a thick parchment scroll from the mud, hidden inside the corpse's robes, stained with blood. It bore the seals of the Royal Intelligence. "Official transit papers. The kind that let a small merchant caravan pass the border checkpoints without question."

"If the Inquisition wanted to set up a caravan, they wouldn't need royal permission. I'd think they could forge their own," Garrick said, baffled. "These documents should belong to merchants headed down to Nihira. Somehow they ended up in the Inquisition's hands."

Luvo took the document in his muddy glove, and when he saw the stamp belonging to Director of the Royal Intelligence, he shook his head slowly. The pieces were settling into place in his mind, and the picture they made was uglier than before.

"What were our orders, Garrick?" Luvo asked, though he already knew the answer.

"That the Sanctified Bloodlines were trying to start a holy war on the southern border — a crusade against the desert peoples," Garrick answered. "We were ordered to catch them red-handed beyond the border and arrest them in the crown's name."

"But these papers..." Garrick said, pointing at the parchment. "How could papers like this start a holy war?"

"They can't. The Inquisition wasn't starting a holy war." Luvo shook his head. "Whatever their actual target was, they were hunting the group that crossed the border with these documents. It looks like Vael himself baited the fanatics into this valley. And he sent us to the scene so we'd run straight into the Inquisition's forces."

"Think it through, Garrick. As an Inquisition officer, you learn that whatever you've been chasing was set up by the Crown, and then in the middle of nowhere, you find the royal army standing in front of you. You'd assume you'd been trapped, and you'd fight your way out of it."

"And we wouldn't have a choice but to defend ourselves — and arrest the rebels," Garrick said, catching his commander's meaning. His thick brows drew together. "Why would Vael make a move this risky just to arrest the Inquisition?"

Garrick's question hung in the air for a while. Some truths had already surfaced for Luvo, but to see the whole picture, he needed to face Vael himself. And he would do it on his own terms — not inside Vael's game.

"Because the air in the Capital has changed, Garrick," Luvo said, nudging one of the Sanctified Bloodlines' shields half-buried in the mud with the toe of his boot. "The throne's shadow is shrinking while the temple walls keep growing taller. It seems men like Vael don't shy from spilling blood, or from setting two sides against each other. The Inquisition's stopped listening to the Crown a long time ago. Vael must have wanted to put a leash on them — pin a border crime around their necks and yank the reins back into his own hands."

"But the plan blew up in their faces..." Garrick said, looking with dread at the shattered stained-glass armor scattered around them.

"Yes," Luvo said, surveying the wreckage. "Because neither Vael nor the Inquisition accounted for a third thing waiting for them in this valley. Whatever did the slaughter Birek saw... it cut through both sides."

Garrick's mind churned with what he'd heard. "And the giant man and the boy lying in the tent?"

"I don't know who they are, or how they survived that slaughter," Luvo said. "Maybe they were slaves the Inquisition was transporting. Maybe they were the merchants headed to Nihira themselves — a man with his memory wiped clean, and a mute boy. Whatever it was, it wiped out an elite company, and those two are the only ones left breathing."

Luvo turned his head slowly toward the infirmary tent. "If I bring those two with me back to the Capital, control of this slips out of my hands. And my instincts tell me I won't get another chance like this. Even if they're nothing but surviving victims, I need to be certain before I rule them out."

Garrick nodded slowly. He needed no further explanation to grasp the gravity of it.

Luvo's eyes locked onto Garrick's. "You'll take both prisoners. Quietly. You'll go to the Tree of Wisdom."

A flicker of surprise crossed Garrick's eyes, but he composed himself quickly. "The Tree of Wisdom? They say the Keepers can pull knowledge out of someone dead for hundreds of years. Do you actually believe in that legend, Commander?"

"What I believe right now doesn't matter," Luvo said sharply. "Birek's Consciousness magic didn't work. We need to turn to something older. If there's a chance to find some thread, buried in the roots of that tree, about what the Inquisition or Vael are really after, I'll take it. There will be no mention of two prisoners in my report. If I have to, I'll list them as dead."

"Understood." Garrick gave his commander a short, formal salute and turned toward his own unit's tents. His eyes were already moving through the camp, picking out the unlucky names who'd accompany him on this task.

The journey would be long, and full of shadows. To avoid drawing attention, he needed a small but lethal squad. A sharp-eyed scout to watch the front and rear, a guard to hold the prisoners' chains, a heavy man unafraid of blood to wall up against whatever hell might break loose, and a hand steady enough to hold a needle if they bled along the road... Garrick already knew all four.

---

Outside, the rain kept falling against the thick canvas of the infirmary tent in heavy, rhythmic blows. Inside, the tent had settled into a strange, heavy silence in the wake of the earlier chaos.

Krazoc sat on the ground, back against one of the wooden support poles, his thick legs stretched out before him. The cold iron shackles wound around his ankles and wrists let out a faint clink with every breath, metal grinding against metal. In the blank White Void of his mind, there was no thought at all — no echo of the past, no anxiety for the future. There was only now. And at the very center of that now lay the small body curled against his right leg.

The boy was awake. Wrapped tight in his tunic, stained with mud and dried blood, he was trying to keep himself from shivering. Every time the freezing night wind seeped in through the gap in the canvas, his shoulders drew in further.

Krazoc slowly lowered his head. His eyes caught on a dented metal water flask, knocked from the medic's table in the earlier chaos, now lying barely a yard from the boy. The boy's cracked, dry lips parted slightly, fixed on the single drop of water sliding from the flask's mouth. But he didn't move — as if the smallest motion might burst some invisible, fragile bubble of safety around him.

Krazoc reached out, silently.

The iron chains at his wrists pulled taut and caught where they were lashed to the wooden post. He was still half a hand's width short of the flask. Krazoc, ignoring his body's protests, pushed his thick, scarred arm a little further forward.

The heavy wooden post holding up the tent gave a pained crack under the inhuman pressure Krazoc exerted against it. The iron links bit into his calloused skin and drew blood, but not a single muscle moved on his face. He simply reached, closed his long, thick fingers around the flask, and pulled his arm back before the post could splinter any further.

He set the metal flask down silently, right in front of the boy, on the muddy ground.

The boy flinched and raised his head. Krazoc was so close to his face that even in the dim light, he could clearly make out that jarring, asymmetrical detail. The boy's left eye was a pure, open sky-blue, reflecting a rational calm. But his right eye... his right eye was an amber-yellow that gleamed in the dark, wild and ancient in its color.

When Krazoc looked into that yellow eye, he felt an unexpected, physical lurch in his chest. In the bottomless void of his mind, a whisper echoed up — torn from his own blood, his own flesh. He didn't know who this boy was, but every cell in his body could feel that something belonging to him lay hidden behind that yellow eye.

The boy grasped the flask with trembling small hands. Without once looking away from Krazoc's blank, empty gaze, he drank the water greedily. A drop of water ran down his chin. After he set the flask back down, he had stopped shivering.

He leaned his small body a little further into Krazoc's leg, taking shelter in the warmth of that massive, chained man.

Krazoc didn't move. Even as Garrick's heavy boots approached through the mud outside the tent, all of Krazoc's attention stayed fixed on the small body beside him — a body that joined two different worlds together.

The footsteps stopped in front of the tent. A deep, tired breath cut through the sound of the rain. The man outside was about to come in.

Krazoc slowly closed his fingers into a fist. The weight of his presence formed a wall, claiming the space around him. Behind that wall stood only the boy — and Krazoc was ready to bury anyone who tried to breach it, uniform or intent be damned, with his own two hands, into that mud.