The Mark of Gold

by A. S. Etaski

  He is incorruptible, they said.

  The Dyos Guerrimos had arrived too late to claim authority over her containment, but they refused to give up trying to wrest control of her from Isboern’s loyal Templars.

  “What of her?” Emil repeated. “We gain truth from her, Catechist, by whatever means. I have faith you can hear even a demon’s confession. Do what you do best.”

  Vene had sighed. “Yes, Archbishop.”

  Why is this ridiculous infighting always over anything with tits?

  The High Inquisitor reached the base floor of the cool undercroft and passed through the storage first. The door on the far wall was invisible to most, and a mage would have to know where to look and how to release the spell of protection without summoning every guard upstairs.

  The High Inquisitor entered the hidden set of steps alone and unseen, sealing the door behind him before lighting a torch in utter blackness. The whispers of the crypts were louder while he did so, trying to distract him. To frighten him into leaving. After fifteen years since he’d attained access to this place, he’d never found a sure excuse to requisition an exorcism of the ghosts either bound or clinging to the Temple’s underbelly.

  At last, fire flared. Vene lifted his torch high.

  Be gone, you haunting damned!

  The light made it easier to ignore the voices as he turned left at the bottom of this second flight of stairs, for he must get nearer to the crypt before he could take the hall leading to the dungeon.

  They grew louder.

  Silence. I’ll not listen to your lies.

  The Inquisitor swept to the right as soon as he could, striding quickly down the ancient tunnel that could be a millennium old. He hurried, listening to his bootsteps, eager to shed the sensation of cold mists touching his nape like a dead woman’s fingers.

  Stop. Malicious spirits, Musanlo compels you, stay in your consecrated graves!

  Suddenly, an old figure stood in his path, and Vene brought himself up short, surrounded by his own gasp of fright. He stared at the apparition, able to see a hint of solid stone wall through it. Despite recognizing something akin to monk’s robes adorning a blurry, elderly form, Vene could not decide if this was man or woman.

  Do not speak to it. It can’t hear you.

  “Who are you?” he whispered despite his best advice.

  The eyes were milky, the irises a smooth grey; its expression was one of mourning as a toothless maw opened.

  Tried to speak.

  “Shholvis’ya…rasshivag…”

  That unwelcome, sibilant language again. Could he never escape it, even here? It was not Ma’ab, Noiri, or Manalari. In truth, Vene had heard it long before he had learned the Tongue of the South.

  Deathless one returns?

  “Musanlo put ye to rest,” he rasped, gathering his courage as he grasped the sunburst pendant around his neck.

  The High Inquisitor walked forward, reciting the anti-possession prayer, reinforcing his will and focus. The ghost vanished before he could pass through it. There was no scent of the grave in his nostrils.

  God be praised.

  Vene continued to the dungeon, dismissing the hall leading to the bulk of the heretics and witches being held for trial. He went to the solitary wing, where currently they would hold only one prisoner. The guard seemed agitated when he answered the summons, sliding the metal panel to the side and looking through the small, iron bar window.

  “High Inquisitor has arrived!” the guard announced.

  He unlocked the heavy wooden door, letting the larger man inside before relocking it again. After armor clanked and scraped as men came to attention, the cramped room buzzed with life and voices.

  Of course, someone had called in Isboern, first.

  His torch was no longer the only source of light. Vene could see well, counting five Templars—including the one who opened the door—and three God Warriors, plus the Capitan. Tempers were simmering, tanned skin sweating, but they somehow hadn’t erupted into violence, yet.

  The Inquisitor smiled enough to unsettle them, tucking his torch into an unused sconce, presenting freed hands. “I come to see the prisoner, and a brawl is about to happen among Musanlo’s Best?”

  The God Warriors dared to smile first.

  “Inquisitor.”

  “Catechist Most Holy.”

  The third looked at Capitan Isboern. “Let’s see you deny interrogation now, Godblood.”

  Willven Isboern didn’t appear worried. He never did. Despite every attempt to read that shining, resilient aura whenever he performed his “miracles,” Vene had not yet uncovered what the Western mage feared most.

  For he was a man like the rest of them.

  “High Inquisitor Kegyek.” Capitan Isboern saluted as was proper, hand fisted, touching first the brow then tapping above the heart. “Please remind the Dyos Guerrimos that the demon’s deliberate and preplanned target was a Templar and thus under my jurisdiction.”

  Vene chuckled. “A Templar? Her target was you, or so I read under every eyewitness report.”

  “Such is the law.”

  A pity she didn’t succeed.

  “I come to bear witness,” said Vene, correcting the neat crease at the hem of his long, black sleeve followed by a reverent touch of the gold sunburst pendant resting over his heart. “I need neither God Warrior nor Templar present, as you well know. Leave solitary until you are called again. I release the Capitan to his duties.”

  The two disparate defenders threw suspicious glares at each other. While the God Warriors were well-known farther outside the city’s walls and endlessly useful and effective as the civil enforcers guarding their borders, they tended to be burdensome while inside the walls or anywhere near the Manalari army, as the Templars considered it interference if not a direct challenge to their territory.

  Had Vene Kegyek been born here a hundred years ago, he would have advised the Archbishop of the time to blend the two together, by force if necessary, and let the next generation grow accustomed to a new set of rules. But that was impossible now, as part of their economy and defense had always been dependent on reining in the most zealous among them. Isboern’s arrival had made that clear divide among their people all too apparent to neighboring lands, especially Augran and Taiding.

  There is a Godless influence brewing, likely from Augran, and its agents have been here for a while, taking advantage.

  Willven Isboern, however, for all his faults, was anything but Godless.

  “I have time, High Inquisitor,” he said. “I will stay and answer any questions you have about the capture. I offer to guard your mind and body from what surprises of the captive I know about, as she is not Human.”

  The damned youth knew he was not so prideful as the Dyos Guerrimos.

  “Very well, Capitan. I accept.”

  The blond man turned to his Templars. “If you please, wait for me in the forechamber.”

  The Templars were not pleased but would obey, this was clear. Meanwhile the God Warriors began barking protests, using their typical lewd accusations about the demon being female as their sole justification to stay.

  And it is up to me to quell them, as they will not listen to the Capitan. Sigh.

  Vene slipped off his right glove and lifted a bare, pale hand, fingers curled in a gesture few here had seen before. Sets of Templar eyes widened, and the five fighters bumped fists with Isboern before filing toward the door without delay. The three Warriors checked each other, seeing which one of them might retreat first.

  They will make me waste the spell on a show.

  With any luck, the demon was watching through the crack in the door.

  “Ciolume fochere,” he chanted.

  The heavy pull of his spiritual strength circled twice around his heart, making it jump and race inside him, before burning through his back and down his right arm.

  “Pi’glori ao’sul!”

  Blue sky fire
erupted off his fingertips and swept the ceiling above the God Warriors, burning cobwebs and reaching down to make their hair stand up, sending tremors down their spines.

  “Agarde!” one cried, saluting. “At your leisure, Inquisitor!”

  Finally, they left. Whether they picked a fight with the Templars in the forechamber or not, Vene didn’t care so long as they did not return. It was ill-advised anyway, as the Templars always outnumbered the God Warriors within and underneath the Temple itself.

  “Ah,” Vene sighed, closing both the door and the sliding metal over the window. He picked up his torch. “That is better, is it not?”

  Isboern smiled, stood at ease, and saluted again. Unlike some mageborn officers of potent talent, the High Inquisitor never doubted his own safety around the Capitan of the Wall. The man’s clear ambitions for rising in the leadership did not seem to include pompous threats or political sabotage of his rivals.

  Not yet.

  The Inquisitor approached the prisoner’s door, listened to the silence inside, looked at the stout, Dwarven-made bolt-lock.

  “Have you the key, Capitan?”

  The younger man grinned with charming chagrin, glancing at the far corner of the room behind them near where Vene had been standing. Isboern murmured a prayer-spell as he outstretched his hand and, with enviously less effort, a piece of metal dragged in the dark corner then floated into view, gentle and direct, to settle in the Inquisitor’s now-gloved hand.

  The fine control in this display had never been lost on Vene, the few times he’d witnessed it before. Moving and blocking physical objects without touching them had been what got Willven Isboern noticed in the army in the first place.

  The Western man seemed to have shields, ropes, and clubs none of them could see, plus a set of eyes in the back of his head. Isboern had yet to teach any of the Bishops these new spells he’d brought with him and had proven an exceedingly difficult man to kill.

  Yet the people call him Godblood, not sorcerer, like so many others they’ve gleefully sent to the rack. Pfeh.

  “Is she loose inside?” he asked, testing the key, preparing to slide the bolt.

  “Chained on the far wall,” said Isboern. “Two paces in length.”

  He jiggled the key into place one-handed, tightened his grip. “That’s long enough to strangle herself, Capitan.”

  “She can’t escape that way, Inquisitor.”

  “Oh? How do you know?”

  Clunk.

  “Because she has a mission to complete.”

  Vene pushed the door open as an outward display of confidence in the Capitan’s assessment that attack wasn’t imminent, or if it was, the self-appointed bodyguard would do his duty. The Inquisitor placed the torch in the door-side sconce to better light the cell, sniffing the air.

  I cannot… place that scent. She is not Human, he said.

  There was the same, mundane filth of the living to which he was accustomed among men and Dwarves—skin oil, sweat, urine, feces—but in these tight, breezeless quarters, they possessed an exotic quality. Foreign, even for a born foreigner like him.

  The High Inquisitor looked for the demoness, and at first could not make her out among jumping shadows caused by his torch. Then he saw the white hair and red eyes as she lifted her head to glare at them over her shoulder. His mouth dropped in shock while annoyance and bafflement swept the Inquisitor.

  Why was she positioned as if she loitered on a day bed being painted by an artist? He could see a clear hint how this creature with horn-shaped ears could tempt the holiest of Bishops.

  Then she shifted, making it even clearer.

  It was insultingly deliberate, that spreading of her legs, making it easy for him to see how her tuft of woman’s hair matched the white on her head, and how her dark anus clenched and winked like any other. Despite his own preferences, his cock twitched under his robe.

  She was real. Yet, she was unreal. He couldn’t stop looking as she rested on her elbows, an evil smirk on her face. What was wrong with him? Did she hold him in a spell? And why was Isboern watching him, not her?

  Did he not warn me to look away?

  “Why is she naked, Capitan?” Vene asked with a snarl.

  “She removed her own clothing the last time she washed,” the younger man answered, pointing at a pile of black clothing. “She hasn’t elected to don them again and we haven’t opted to force-dress her.”

  Vene squinted, confused. “How long ago was this?”

  “Two days.”

  “She possesses no maiden’s modesty at all?”

  “I don’t think her origin has that concept.”

  Indeed, how silly of him to forget.

  “A succubus, perhaps? Would she leech the living force from a man to enhance her magic and aid her escape?”

  The Capitan smiled. “The God Warriors wanted to test that theory. I say if she’s drained of magic, let her stay drained. Although I don’t think they recognize what they see, anyway. She either has no mage’s aura or has never let one be seen. Given I’ve watched her while she has slept—not faking, which she also does—and I’ve seen nothing. No hint of one.”

  “How could something that looks like this not have magic?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me, Inquisitor.”

  The two men stayed at the door and did not enter the room. The prisoner kept her anus on display, putting her head down while tensing up.

  Then she farted, an abrupt blurt of sound in both his ears.

  Vene blinked, turning his nose to the side, tightening it in disgust. “She is doing this on purpose.”

  Isboern chuckled, nodding, and genuinely amused. “Yes, sir, she is.”

  “You are not afraid of her. Tell me why.”

  “What I reported. Word came to me of a black creature stealthing toward the city on the backend. I took a contingent to seek this creature. We caught her and she stabbed me.”

  “You seem well.”

  “Thank you. I didn’t see a flare of aura even under this basic threat of capture. I haven’t seen one since. She eats and pisses and shits like any of us.”

  “And passes gas toward our noses.”

  “And she knows it’s funny.” Isboern grinned again as he shrugged. “She hasn’t changed her shape, hasn’t slipped her chains, hasn’t altered her clothing, and if you would get any closer, you’ll see she hasn’t wounded herself pulling uselessly on them. She isn’t in a panic. She still needs to accomplish something.”

  “Hm.” Vene rubbed his clean-shaven jaw, intrigued despite himself. “It seems you have pulled some truths from her before I arrived, Capitan.”

  “A start, given she doesn’t speak Manalari and her Trade is extremely confusing.”

  “Mimic without comprehension?”

  “I think so. Although we got one word right.”

  “What word?”

  “’Shield.’”

  “Shield?”

  “A relic, I think. She wants to find it, but neither she nor I know where it is.”

  The Inquisitor looked about him, mildly amused how bloodlessly this interrogation was going so far, and what he’d be reporting to the Archbishop at the end of the day. He felt calm. This made an odd sort of sense.

  “Likely to steal it for the dark forces of the North,” Vene murmured. “Which suggests we should find it first.”

  “My thoughts as well, Inquisitor.”

  “There are many shields at Manalar, Capitan, some reasonably enchanted.”

  “I doubt this is recent. Are there old legends of an exceptional one?”

  Vene frowned in concentration, somehow staring at the creature’s well-rounded backside but less offended doing so. He was over the surprise, and his interrogation practices rarely, if ever, required him to make use of another’s nudity personally.

  “I have heard some legends, yes,” he said thoughtfully. “But they are prior to the Theocracy. All of those records
were burned when Archbishop Tefornin cleansed Pisc’sagrad.”

  “Unfortunate. They might have provided some clues.”

  “I wager we possess greater libraries than you, Westerner.”

  The Capitan chuckled. “You’d win that wager, Catechist. Where else might we seek?”

  “Hmm.”

  The demoness rolled over then, showing him her naked breasts and flat belly with her full, frosty pelt. She reached down and ruffled it, then stroked her woman’s folds. The God Warriors would have gone mad to watch.

  They would kill her for this display alone.

  “I see why you do not want Dyos Guerrimos as her guards, Capitan.”

  “Hm, do you, sir?”

  “Yes. She is attempting to be killed, since she cannot kill herself.”

  “Ah, you see it as well.”

  “Indeed. Best keep the Templars as the sole guards for now, until we learn more about this shield.”

  “Is that your recommendation to Archbishop Keros?”

  Vene nodded smartly. “It is, Capitan.”

  “I’d request my Templars not be dragged into a long interrogation, if you please. We are preparing for the Ma’ab and running out of time.”

  “I need neither them nor God’s Warriors to conduct my work.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Vene forced himself to approach the demoness, then. He could not go to Keros saying he had stayed at the door the entire time. The creature’s large, angled eyes fixed on him like two burning-red coals; she showed him her belly and—curse her stupidity—even opened her legs wider.

  She seemed young.

  The High Inquisitor smiled harshly down at her. “Do not act this way around the Archbishop when you meet him, demoness. He enjoys breaking libidinous girls of their wayward attempts to ruin good men.”

  She closed her legs and sat up, leaning against the wall with a scowl and a roll of her eyes.

  Insolent bitch.

  “Isboern… you said she doesn’t speak Manalari.”

  “She doesn’t understand a word. She is a good read of body and tone, though, and is trying to learn what riles you up, Inquisitor.”