Hellknight

  Jheraal had seen decomposed corpses before, and while she was concerned about the implications of the mold that fuzzed the dead man’s bones, the sight itself didn’t disturb her. Not compared to the others in that place.

  Slumped behind a tattered curtain were three hellspawn, each with a fist-sized, cauterized wound burned into the center of his or her chest. Two, presumably the missing servants Chiella and Nodero, wore the colors of House Celverian. The third was a more obviously devil-descended woman dressed like a fishmonger from one of the poorer districts.

  All three were missing their hearts—Jheraal had held a light to each of those gaping wounds and looked closely to be sure—and yet they lived. Their mutilated chests rose and fell in steady breaths. A ghostly pulse beat in their wrists. When the Hellknight brought her light to their eyes and held open their eyelids, their pupils contracted under its glare, and then dilated when she put the light away.

  They seemed to be comatose. Jheraal pricked each hellspawn’s fingertips with the tip of her dagger, prodding them hard enough to draw beads of blood from the pads of their thumbs, but none of them flinched. She clapped her hands sharply next to their heads and shouted into their ears, but none stirred. Their faces remained slack, their breathing slow.

  “What do you want to do with them?” one of the rundottari asked. Two ruin wardens armed with swords and crossbows had accompanied her out of the Obrigan Gate to meet the one waiting to show them the bodies. As formidable as the Hellknight was, even she wasn’t expected to venture into Rego Cader without protection.

  “They need a healer’s attention,” Jheraal said. “These servants may be innocent victims.”

  The rundottari spat on the muddy floor, displeased by her answer. “Or they may not. No offense meant to you, but they’re hellspawn. And whatever killed that moldy fellow might be contagious. This whole thing might be a trap.”

  PATHFINDER TALES

  HELLKNIGHT

  Liane Merciel

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  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  For Peter, with love.

  Inner Sea Regionz

  Westcrown

  PROLOGUE

  The devilheart chain was a cruel thing.

  It lay across Sechel’s palm and draped around her armored forearm like an iron viper, smooth and dark and deadly fanged. Each of its scale-shaped links was engraved with infernal runes and inlaid in gleaming red gold, evoking rivulets of magma running across the blackened landscapes of Hell.

  One end of the chain terminated in a hollow golden cap designed to be locked into another segment. The other ended in a lupine devil’s head, its gaping jaws stretched as wide as both of Sechel’s hands spread together. Black diamond teeth fringed its maw, arrayed outward in a double row of curving hooks. A spiked iron band covered the wolflike devil’s eyes, and another encircled its throat like a collar.

  Even in their imaginings, they shackle and torment us.

  The thought made her angry. Anger was not useful. She lifted her eyes and counted her heartbeats, willing them slower to match her breaths, until she was calm again.

  Her contact, Hakur, watched her closely, his nervousness barely showing. No sweat beaded on his black-stubbled scalp. No lines of worry furrowed his sunburned brow. He might have gone apostate, but the man had been trained as a Hellknight, and the iron discipline of his order almost masked his concern.

  Almost. He had taken a step back while she studied the chain, perhaps thinking she wouldn’t notice. The corner of his left eye twitched, and the raw skin around his mouth—blistered by the scalding water and acids he’d drunk to purge his sins—was taut with unspoken worry.

  “It’s what you wanted,” he said. The acid had roughened his voice to a gravelly baritone, but a quiver of trepidation ran through each word.

  “It might be,” Sechel allowed. She wrapped the chain tighter about her forearm, holding the blindfolded devil’s head against her palm so that its black diamond fangs spread outward like extensions of her own fingers. The sensation pleased her. “It might.”

  With the chain coiled around her arm like a cherished pet, she crossed the derelict shack that she’d chosen for this meeting. The place was too small to have been divided into rooms, but a sackcloth curtain hanging from bent nails on the ceiling offered a semblance of privacy around what had been the sleeping area.

  Three hellspawn huddled there, flinching as Sechel stepped past the curtain. Two women, one man, all tainted with the blood of devils. Rough brown rope circled their wrists and ankles, binding the three of them together like slaves being driven to market. Gags filled their mouths.

  Two of them, the most human-looking of the trio, wore servants’ garb in white and gold-slashed blue, the colors of House Celverian. Only subtle things—a faint odor of sulfur that trailed after the man like stale perfume; an opaque yellow tint to the woman’s fingernails and a line of coarse boar’s bristles down the center of her scalp, almost hidden by the rest of her hair—signaled the impurity in their blood. The third, whose snake-pupiled red eyes and sharp black fangs proclaimed her infernal ancestry, wore a scale-spattered fishwife’s apron tied over her dress.

  It was always easier for hellspawn to climb toward social respectability in Cheliax if they looked more human. Sechel had known that her entire life, and seeing these three confirmed it. The obviously devil-born woman would never have been permitted to darken the grounds of House Celverian, much less tend its lavish gardens or serve wine to its pious patriarchs. Never. She was fit to hawk day-old fish to Westcrown’s poor, and that was all.

  Almost all.

  The three hellspawn watched her fearfully as she drew the ragged curtain. With the light of Hakur’s lantern blocked off behind her, Sechel’s eyes lit with their own infernal radiance. She felt the change, and she knew what the others would see. Blue sparks ignited and circled around her pale green irises like tiny fireflies, enabling her to see in the dark. It was a trait she went to considerable pains to conceal before most onlookers. But with these three, there was no need to hide.

  Sechel saw the confusion on the hellspawn’s faces, the befuddlement that wouldn’t quite turn to hope. She was one of them. Her blood was tainted with Hell’s legacy as surely as theirs. They saw it, they recognized it, and they knew it was the only commonality they shared.

  But they didn’t know why that had led to them being bound and gagged in this stinking hovel.

  Sechel owed them no explanation, but it amused her to offer one—after a fashion.

  With showy, theatrical gestures, she removed the second half of the devilheart chain from a pocket sewn into the inner lining of her cloak. One end matched the golden cap at the end of the segment Hakur had given her. Its opposite end was another fiend’s head, but whereas the first chain ended in a fierce, snarling wolf’s visage, this one was a horned and shackled skull that seemed to be dissipating into mist. Although it was wrought of solid iron, heavy in Sechel’s hand, the fiend’s face had been crafted with such exquisite skill that she could almost believe it was fading into fog before her eyes.

  She snapped the chains’ hollow ends together. They clicked into place with a loud snap; she heard Hakur jerk in surprise on the far side of the curtain. A hellish spark flared within the chain where the two parts joined, then thinned and stretched as the light was sucked to either end. The spark was gone in the space of a second, but Sechel could feel its echoes reverberating through the metal.

  If it had been a viper before, it was a dragon now. Heat thrummed in the chain’s core, pushing at the throats of the heads on either end. Hunger pulsed along with that infernal fire; Sechel felt it as clearly as if it were her own gut twisting in emptiness. The devilheart chain sensed blood nearby, and it wanted a taste.

  “You’ll get more than that,” she whispered, caressing the wolf’s head in its spiked iron blindfold.

  Holding the chain as she had before, with the wolf’s head poised in her palm, Sechel bent over the red-eyed hellspawn. She untied the woman’s fish-speckled apron and pulled it off, crumpling the garment into the corner as she brought the devilheart chain toward her victim’s chest. The fishmonger’s jaws worked around the gag stuffed between her teeth, trying to form a word that Sechel couldn’t hear but understood regardless.

  Why.

  Everyone she killed, if they had time to see death coming, asked the same question: Why? As if that mattered. As if the reasons for their deaths would somehow serve as a final soothing bedtime story, making it easier to go into that last long slee
p.

  It was absurd. But they all asked, every one, even as the knife was sliding in.

  She never answered, unless whoever had paid for the blade had also paid for a message to be delivered with it. Even then, Sechel often slurred her words to keep them from being understood. The dead deserved no courtesy from her. If they wanted her answers so badly, they were welcome to walk out of their graves and ask again. Thus far, none had.

  But this time—this time, out of all the souls she’d cut loose from their mortal moorings—she felt impelled to give an answer. Because this time was different.

  “Your blood is a sin,” Sechel said as she pressed the wolf’s head into the cloth over the fishmonger’s chest. “Your existence is a sin. You are a thing that should not be, you and all your line.” Heat rose in the chain’s belly. The infernal runes carved into its links shone brightly in the hovel’s dimness as the magic flowed through the metal. The iron blindfold over the wolf’s eyes began to smoke. The tips of its black diamond teeth burned pinpoint holes through the fishmonger’s dress.

  So are you, the fishmonger mouthed. Her jaw strained around the cloth gag. The tendons of her neck bulged. Tears of fear or frustration spilled from the corners of her crimson eyes. No sound escaped, but her meaning could not be mistaken. So are you.

  “So am I,” Sechel agreed. In her hand, the magic flared and reached its final form. The fiendish wolf’s head opened its maw, black diamond teeth smoking, and bit into the fishmonger’s chest.

  In a blur of gold and glowing iron, the devilheart chain plunged into the woman’s body like a tern diving into the sea. Its metallic scales clacked between Sechel’s fingers as the chain skimmed across her palm, burying itself until its wolfish jaws closed around the hellspawn’s heart.

  There was no blood, no gore, nothing but a hiss of coppery-smelling pink steam. Flakes of burned cloth from her victim’s dress drifted through the air like black snowflakes. The fishmonger’s eyes went wide, and her nostrils dilated in shock, but Sechel read no pain on her face, only a jolt of sudden terror—and then, just as suddenly, nothing.

  The light died in the woman’s eyes, and the heat died in the chain’s hellish core. From the hollow end of the devilheart chain, a glimmering oblong jewel emerged and dropped onto the hard-packed dirt floor. It rolled to rest against Sechel’s boot, emanating a soft rosy radiance.

  She picked it up. The pinkish stone was large enough to fill her hand, but it weighed next to nothing. It pulsed gently against her palm, echoing her heartbeat so closely that it took the hellspawn assassin several moments to realize that the translucent stone was not beating in time to her heart but to its own.

  Shrunken and smoothed from raw red meat to a jewel that looked like rose quartz and felt like a glass bubble, it remained, all the same, a heart. A living heart, strange as that seemed. It was warm in Sechel’s hand, it carried a beat, and it kept its owner alive.

  For the fishmonger was still breathing, even after Sechel pulled the devilheart chain out of its smoking wound. A gaping hole yawned beside her sternum, as bloodless and smooth as if it had been burned by a cauterizing iron, but her breast rose and fell steadily under the black-fringed rags of her dress. The woman’s heart was gone, transmuted into the gem that shone before her, yet she lived on without it.

  After a fashion. She breathed, and the jeweled heart in Sechel’s hand throbbed with a phantom beat, but there was a slackness in the fishmonger’s body that suggested her mind, and perhaps her soul, had flown to judgment in the courts of the dead.

  Did her consciousness linger in that maimed flesh? Was there anything left of the fishmonger that could feel, sense, care what happened to her shell of bone and skin?

  Sechel didn’t know, but she didn’t need to answer that mystery to finish her job. She had been warned that killing the hellspawn might disrupt the chain’s magic, so she left her victim bound and moved to the next stage of her task.

  Unlatching the steel-ribbed, padded carrying case that she carried in a secret compartment of her pack, Sechel slid the ghostly jewel of the fishmonger’s heart inside and tucked the top flap shut over it. Then she looped the devilheart chain around her forearm and strode to the other two other captives.

  It went faster with practice. A little.

  When Sechel emerged from the curtain, her hands were flecked with blood and soot. Three pale pink jewels nestled in her hidden case. Three not-quite-living hellspawn lay limp in her wake, their vacant faces tipped toward the ceiling and their wrists braceleted in coarse rope.

  “Did it work?” Hakur asked. If the apostate Hellknight had been nervous before, he was frightened now. Under the coarse black stubble on his cheeks, the skin was gray as death.

  Sechel took a pouch from her pocket and tossed it at him. Reflexively, Hakur put a hand up to catch it. Coins slapped against his palm, loud even through the leather.

  His fingers closed around it, but there was too much money in the pouch for them to meet. “Is this all of it?”

  Sechel shrugged, drawing her hood over her head and a scarf over her nose. “Count for yourself.”

  He hesitated only a second before unlacing the bag. A puff of gray dust came up from its open mouth, engulfing his face. Hakur staggered back, coughing, as the pouch tumbled from his fingers to spill gray-furred golden coins across the floor.

  Quicker than understanding, Sechel was behind him, her knife in his neck. The former Hellknight’s coughs turned to gasps, then to gurgles, then to silence.

  She eased him to the floor. Already the fungus was spreading across his flesh, burying Hakur’s lips and tongue under a thickening mask of gray. In an hour, the corpse would be unrecognizable. In a day, it would be reduced to teeth and bone.

  Someone might find him before then, of course, and might even identify the dead man—but if they did, they’d likely assume that the killers had been working at the behest of Urgathoa, the Pallid Princess, whose domain encompassed death and disease. Few outside her foul worship used such fungal spores. Sechel had collected that sample from the body of an Urgathoan cultist she’d killed. Following that clue would lead any pursuit down a perilous false trail.

  Not as perilous as the true one, though.

  Exhaling the breath she’d been holding since Hakur opened his poisoned pouch, Sechel pushed open the door and stepped back into the sunlight of Westcrown. She stripped off the scarf that had covered the lower half of her face and dropped it into a nearby canal. As it sank into the sluggish green water, trailing a fringe of bubbles, she turned north.

  North, toward the Dospera, the shadowy, abandoned ruins of old Westcrown that were the stuff of local dread and legend, and that sometimes served as informal execution grounds for the condemned.

  North, toward the gate that waited to carry the assassin back to her employer.

  North, to Nidal.

  1

  THE SCHOLAR’S MURDER

  JHERAAL

  Birds cared nothing for murder.

  Sweetly they sang from the branches of the fig and lemon trees that wreathed the grounds of Vaneo Celverian, the city manor of proud, ancient House Celverian. Under the elegant tile roofs and gilded balustrades, all might be in panic, but nothing disturbed the birds among their sun-dappled leaves. They sang and sang, bright as joy, while down below, mortal men and women struggled to grasp the enormity of loss.

  They’d suffered a staggering one, Jheraal knew. Master Othando Celverian, second and favored son of Lord Abello Celverian, heir to his house and hope of his family’s future, had been murdered in the night. Others had been killed, too, but in Cheliax, only one of those deaths really mattered.

  Out on the grand lawn, a semicircle of maids, grooms, cooks, and washerwomen in white and gold-slashed blue stood where they’d been turned out for her inspection. Every one of House Celverian’s servants was a picture of shock and grief. The younger maids held handkerchiefs to their tear-puffed eyes, while the older servants muttered about what they’d do when they found their master’s killer.