Perhaps that was the idea. So far, my fate seems like a bad turn of luck.
Dom kept close at her back. For once, he wasn’t so out of place. While the streets were quiet, the Priest’s Hand was busy, and many Adirans were as large as Domacridhan. Bruisers, bandits, pit fighters, sailors with sun-damaged cheeks. Lean thieves and beautiful courtesans from all over the Ward wove among them. A man with diamond-pale, glowing skin even winked at Dom, blowing him a kiss with a beckoning hand.
Corayne stopped searching stalls and began searching faces, hoping to spot whoever Sorasa intended to recruit to their quest. She nearly halted before an Ibalet man, his look similar to Sorasa’s, with a belt of daggers and eyes like a falcon. But Sorasa passed him by without a second glance. Soon the long walk through the church was finished, and they stood before the abandoned altar. Instead of a droning priest reciting godly scripture, a pair of dogs lounged around it, panting with slobbering smiles.
“Are they here? Have we missed them?” Corayne said, looking back down the church. A few eyes trailed them, watching carefully. The two most obvious were a pair of men in long gray robes, their boots new leather. They had the look of a religious order, even if there was no religion under this roof. “We’re being followed,” Corayne said flatly.
“I’m being followed,” Sorasa replied with a sigh. She even waved a hand in their direction. “They’re nothing. The Twilight Brothers are a joke.”
Andry’s jaw dropped. He looked from Sorasa to the robed men, not bothering to drop his voice. “The Twilight Brothers? They’re killers, assassins—”
“And what am I? A milkmaid?” Sorasa smirked, once at Andry and then at the Brothers. They sneered, turning tail with a dramatic spin of their robes. Steel flashed beneath, their swords naked with no sheaths. “Like I said, a joke. They’re waiting to get me alone, make me an offer again. All so I can refuse again.”
Sorasa declined to elaborate.
Dom cared more for the stone tiles beneath them, flat and worn, making up the raised the dais of the altar. He scuffed a boot over them.
“There’s more beneath us,” he said sharply.
“Nothing gets past you, Elder,” Sorasa said, waving them all past the chipped altar. The dogs panted in their wake, watching with baleful eyes. Andry stooped to give one a scratch.
He caught Corayne watching and shrugged. “A criminal dog is still a dog.”
A narrow stair hid behind the altar, cramped between the dais and the exterior wall. Another image of Tiber, his mouth spilling coins, loomed over the stairway. Sorasa gave him a familiar pat on the nose as she descended the steps. Corayne did the same, hoping for a blessing.
A square chamber, once a crypt, opened up below. Three of the walls had long rectangular openings, vaults for coffins. They were blissfully empty. Corayne swallowed, put off by the vaults, but at least no skeletons leered in the dim light.
On the only flat wall, a single torch burned, off center against the brick and mortar. When it flickered, Corayne could make out something like a doorway, nearly blending into the wall, visible only at the edges where it couldn’t lie completely flush.
But Sorasa didn’t go to the door. Instead she reached into one of the vaults, never hesitating, and rapped her knuckles on the back wall inside. It sounded like wood. After a hasty second, it slid back, and a pair of eyes appeared where a body once rotted.
“Five—” Sorasa said to the eyes, then stopped herself and checked their number. Valtik was still upstairs. “Four. The witch is mingling.”
“You know the rules: no more than two,” came a raspy reply. The eyes darted. They were green and watery, surrounded by fat, pink flesh.
Sorasa bent closer. “Since when have rules meant anything around here?”
Before the eyes could answer, another voice sounded behind the sliding panel.
“Is that Sarn I hear?” a male voice said.
The eyes rolled. Before Sorasa could say another word, the panel snapped back into place, slamming shut.
Dom rumbled out a low laugh. “You have that effect on most people.”
There was a grinding, a gear turning somewhere in the wall as a pair of latches pinged open. Corayne jumped when the door in the brick wall swung forward, heavy on great iron hinges. The chamber beyond was long, well lit by torches and streams of daylight.
Sorasa smiled in the Elder’s face, or as close as she could reach. “I certainly do,” she said, passing into the next room with a bounce in her step.
The original crypt extended the length of the church above, set with fat, cobwebbed columns and high, flat windows to bring in at least some natural light. It shifted, blue and white with the passing clouds. There were more vaults along the walls, all stuffed with crates, tools, and food stores, as well as miles of parchment and gallons of many-colored inks.