by Billy Wong
Rose shook her head spiritedly. "I sure wouldn't either! Anyway, I think I can still handle myself. I was okay the last time I fought; hearing him scream just... affected me strangely this time for some reason, that's all. So do we know where they meet now?"
Finn grinned. "I wouldn't have stopped otherwise, would I? Turns out they came here from Seil." They had both been there before. A city near the center of Kayland, it did well for itself as a waypoint for traders and other people traveling across the nation.
"What about the identity of their leader, or other members? Did you get that out of him?"
"He said they don't even share their identities among themselves and only know each other as kindred spirits, and I believed him. The leader probably knows who the members are, but... Any idea why you think they meet in Seil?"
"I can't think of anything about Seil specifically that would make it attractive to such a group. I mean, it could good for getting recruits with all the people traveling through, but it might also just be convenient or where their leader lives."
"Either way, they're about to get some comeuppance. Hope they put up a tougher fight this time."
"Hell no! It was hard enough as it was!"
Finn gave an exasperated shake of his head. "You really are getting soft."
"No... I mean, it taxed me a little more than you might expect. But it's mainly that I didn't get hurt last time, so when I say it was hard enough, I just mean I don't want it to be harder hence me getting hurt."
He found he could readily agree with that.
#
Surprised at how tired she felt after the long but hardly strenuous ride to Seil, Rose brushed aside her worries as she dismounted. "Here we are. You know what particular building they met in, right?"
"He gave an address. I guess it'll be safer to buy a map to find it, instead of ask around and risk tipping off the wrong person."
They located the address they had acquired, set below street level with short stairs leading down to a door in a niche in the ground. "A basement? Suits these dark denizens," Finn mused, and tried the handle. Locked, of course. He knocked several times to no response. "Should we go in now or wait for them to come back?"
"Let's just go and see what we can find. They might be down there and just not answering, anyway." Finn kicked the portal down, revealing stairs which led deeper into the earth, and Rose sighed. "Ugh... I'm getting a bad feeling about this. Hope they don't have any nasty pets holed up in here." She drew her sword, him his mace, and they started down.
The stairs were fairly long and steep for a single flight inside a building, but they reached the bottom a little more than ten feet down. Standing a few feet ahead were two blue-armored figures with thick swords in hand, obviously waiting for them after hearing the door forcefully opened. "Only two of you?" Finn said. "This shouldn't take long."
The men fixed them with apprehensive stares, apparently aware of the couple's prowess, and Rose thought to ask for their surrender. But she knew they wouldn't likely give it so easily, and besides, she couldn't help hating the members of this fiendish organization with a passion. To a degree she rarely felt against human foes, she wanted to fight, hurt, and yes, kill them. So if they surrendered on their own, she'd accept it. Otherwise... "Prepare to die, monsters."
Finn glanced at her with a look of surprise—though she'd slain thousands, she was rarely one to declare her intent to kill with such conviction beforehand—and charged the larger of the enemies. She appreciated that he always tried to protect her, whether she needed it or not. She stepped forward to meet the other man; a few sounds of metal ringing on metal echoed through the passage, then a scream quickly followed by another. The battle over, Finn proclaimed, "Looks like I got my man first." A twitching body with a shattered skull lay at his feet, his metal boots stained with blood.
"Yeah, but I kept us one for questioning." Rose's opponent was still alive, though he no longer screamed, only moaning softly as he sat against the wall staring at his severed right arm before him. Rose knelt, applied a tourniquet and cut off the blood flow to his stump by turning the windlass. "He's all yours," she told Finn.
"No, wait!" he managed to gasp. "I'll answer your questions."
"Okay... how many of you are there, exactly?" She'd have been happy for him to tell her he was the last, but knew that wouldn't be the case.
"There are over a hundred of us, and some of them far more skilled than me. Sooner or later, we will overwhelm you."
Finn wanted to punch him, but Rose raised a hand. "And who are 'you' exactly? You wear blue armor, read Path of the Lost, and slaughter innocent people, but why do you do these things and what is your goal? By the way, does your organization have a name?"
After a pause, he said, "We call ourselves The Lost." It figured. "We are people who have lost everything, or what gave our life meaning." Even Leland who had a family and successful career, or the wealthy and powerful Duke of Gelby? But she supposed it was possible Leland had aspired to another profession he never got a chance to pursue, or the duke lost his one true love and never gotten over it. The man continued, "Therefore, as we were forced to suffer as we did not deserve, we won't rest until balance is restored."
She had read of this horrific outlook, but to hear it spoken raised her ire more. "So since you suffered unjustly," she spat, "everybody else should suffer unjustly too and that would make it just to you?"
"Yes. The world is unfair because some people suffer worse than others. If all suffer the same, why would it not be fair?" A mad look came into his eyes. "The world should burn... everything should burn."
"So that's why you want to revive the demon lord," she whispered. "If the world is destroyed, then unfairness will be wiped away, right?"
"Yes. You finally get it, don't you you stupid cow? Even though you're my enemy, I don't think you are an evil person, or selfish, or even misguided. You are a very good person, generous and heroic, a true paragon. But you don't understand. We're not evil either, we merely see the truth. The world has favored you, and given you more than the rest of us. Why are you so strong, so brave, so resilient? Because you deserved it? You did not earn these traits, the potential for them was in you when you were born and who's to say if I or one of my Lost comrades had the same gifts, we would not be even better than you? The world is unfair, and such unfairness should not exist."
"The world may not be completely fair, but it's the only world we've got!"
"Then the world should not exist."
Rose shivered from the sheer insanity of his perspective. She'd fought many she considered evil, but the evil she'd faced was usually born out of comprehensible things like greed, or pride, or hate. Even the lust of rapists, she found more understandable than these, these... Lost, whose motives were more alien than those of the monsters from the stars she'd once fought.
She rallied enough of her bravado to grab him by the collar of his breastplate and slam him back against the wall. "What does sacrificing to the demon lord do? Is it to help him come back?"
"Yes, although there are several schools of thought on the matter. Some of us believe any sacrifice in his name will help him regain a foothold in the world, while others think only sacrifices done in proximity to his remains have an effect. A few even think sacrifices do nothing at all, and his revival hinges solely on the time having come."
"We've heard enough about your deranged beliefs. Now tell me where all of your friends are, and maybe I won't kill you." Herself, anyway. The authorities would likely execute him anyway, if she didn't let Finn have his way with him first.
He smiled then. "No." Finn started forward, and he shook his head. "Go ahead, torture me. I'm not afraid to die. So what if I burn first... I'll die happy knowing you're soon to follow."
He was telling the truth, Rose knew. No matter what they did to him, he wouldn't likely break. Apparently The Lost varied in resolve too, given the difference in attitude between the one at the inn and him. She got an urge to murder him,
to beat him with her bare hands until his face was hanging off. But as much rage as she felt towards him, she couldn't bring herself to kill a defenseless man, even if he was a human monster. She stood there impotently, fists clenched without use, his eyes mocking her.
Those eyes widened when Finn's mace swept in from the side, crumpling his face and smashing his brains out the back of his skull onto the wall. Rose didn't even complain, just turned with her husband to search the rest of the basement. The passage opened up into a much larger room, with some chairs and tables pushed off to the sides. A walled off back corner with a door might have served for an office, or used to. But it was empty, not a single man or any clues regarding where they were now to be found. No sign of Justin, either.
"I guess I'm no prophet," Rose said with a sigh of relief.
"Huh?" Finn asked.
She revealed what had been bothering her for a while, but that she'd kept from him so that he wouldn't worry needlessly too. "On the way here, I had a dream we found the leader of The Lost—though I didn't know they were called that yet—and I was chasing him through some tunnels. Then he activated a trap, and an iron portcullis came plummeting down at me. I saw it coming, but couldn't jump out of the way in time, and could only lean back so it didn't go through my face... and it pierced me lower, pinning me to the ground with three spikes through the chest and shoulder."
His expression grew uneasy as he imagined the scene, and he asked, "You'd survive being impaled by a portcullis, right?"
"I have, remember! When I was younger, before I met you, I was chasing that bandit king through his lair—he tripped me up with some oil under my feet, and then..." She touched her chest and shoulder, remembering the thick spikes piercing her lungs. Naturally, she'd still lifted the portcullis off herself and gone on to kill her adversary. "Got me in the same places as in the dream, so I guess my imagination was drawing on old memories."
"Yeah, you told me that story before; slipped my mind for a second. Makes more sense though that he used oil first to set you up for such a cumbersome trap. But in the dream, without something else to hinder you, shouldn't you have been quick enough to avoid a falling gate?"
"I should have been, but in the dream... seems like I just wasn't." And she realized that deep inside, she too worried about herself possibly slowing down. "Anyway," she said, purposely changing the subject, "this line of investigation has gone nowhere. So what now?"
He shrugged. "Now that we don't have to worry about scaring The Lost out of this basement anymore? I guess we can try asking around Seil and see if anyone knows anything."
#
"Try to run away one more time," Justin told the tied up Evan as he walked a short distance away to take a piss, "and I'll kill you."
The seer spat at his captor, missing by a fair bit. "You wouldn't do that. Your lord wants me alive."
"True, but my patience is wearing thin." Evan had delayed them much, having tried to flee a total of three times. On the second attempt he'd even gotten the soldier's horse to bolt by setting its tail on fire, greatly increasing the amount of time they would need to reach their destination. Now they'd have to stop in Seil for food, as said steed had taken much of Justin's supplies with it. But he wished he had actually managed to escape. "Why are you trying so hard to avoid something that'll do people good?" Justin continued.
"Who says it'll do who good? Prophecy's proven itself more trouble than it's worth as far I'm concerned."
"Maybe you gave the wrong people access to the powerful tool that is foresight."
Though Evan didn't want to listen to anything his kidnapper said, he had to admit he hadn't exactly been discriminating in choosing who to give his services as a prophet to. Isolated on his little island, he'd allowed anyone able to give ample payment insight from his visions, and hadn't really understood the harm his words were capable of until he met Rose and Finn. He truly regretted putting their beloved children in danger by revealing the future predicted by his dreams.
"So what is this Prince Victor like, then?" he asked.
"He's... practical." Justin walked back to Evan's side, hauled him up from his defiantly seated position by the back of his shirt.
Practical? That didn't reassure him much. A common compliment towards leaders known for being heartless or cruel was to call them "practical." Hell, even Victor's brother Lawrence, who Rose insisted to be a good man, had almost committed the unforgivable deed of killing children in the name of doing the practical thing.
"You do know my gifts don't work here, right?" he asked Justin, who started to walk, dragging him along. He had to be on his island, whatever made it so special.
"That's for you to discuss with Prince Victor. My task is merely to bring you to him."
"Why do you hate Rose so much, anyway? I can't believe she allowed your family to die—never have I seen anything to make me think she's one to ignore people in need."
Justin sneered. "You act so sure about what she's like, when you barely know her. Ha, I was just as gullible as you. When I first met her, it didn't take me even a whole day to consider her my friend. But when she and my uncle who led the army got into an argument over her selfishly leaving the battle, she let him die at the hands of the enemy when she could have saved his life."
"Are you sure she did it on purpose? Rose wouldn't let an ally die over an argument."
Justin walked in silence for a while before saying, "She could have saved him. She's accomplished more difficult feats."
But no one could match their best performances all the time, not even a warrior on the level of Rose. Evan suspected that Justin knew this in his heart, and continued to blame her because he needed someone to blame. "You can't hold onto this grudge forever, it does nobody any good. I really don't think Rose meant to let your uncle come to harm. But if she did make such a moral misstep, I'm sure she's suffered enough from guilt over it by now, for it to be more than adequate punishment considering all the other good deeds she's done to balance it out."
"Good deeds don't excuse the wrongs of the past."
"Maybe not. But what is done's done, and what do you mean to do about it? There's no point in continuing to obsess over something you can't change."
Justin shook his head. "But I don't obsess over it. I'd almost forgotten about Rose and my uncle, as much as a man could, when it was brought back by proximity to her."
"And whose fault is that?" Evan immediately regretted that question when he realized the obvious answer to be Victor. The dutiful Justin wouldn't likely appreciate what he might take to be a shifting of blame to the authority he respected.
Predictably, he said, "Whoever made the bad memories in the first place is the one responsible—in other words, Rose."
Evan gave up, supposing Justin would always hate his friend for the supposed wrong she'd done his family. He walked on, forced to go at an uncomfortable pace for someone whose ankles were bound to prevent running. He felt so tired by the time they neared Seil that he barely paid the sound of approaching hoofsteps any heed until he heard Finn's familiar voice yell, "Look, Rose, a Lost... and Justin?" He looked to see Rose and Finn riding towards them, apparently having just left the city. Finn's eyes widened when he took in Evan's face, exposed as Justin had at least let him remove his helmet. "You're a member of The Lost?!"
Almost afraid his friend might brain him despite him being a prisoner, he hastily explained, "No! I disguised myself as one, and then after helping Justin he took me captive, and..." He noticed Justin backing up a step or two while he talked.
Close now, Rose and Finn regarded the bruise still on his face where Justin had hit him with his hilt. "So you just decided to beat up Evan after he aided you and spirit him away?!" Rose demanded. "To think we were actually worried about you—we thought you'd been taken by The Lost, you ass!"
She looked a little pale, and trying to distract from the tension Evan asked, "Are you injured, Rose? You don't look great."
"I'm not hurt. Just tired, and a tad fr
ustrated." Finn drew a dagger and slit the ropes binding Evan, who walked over next to Rose with her husband. She glared at his former captor. "As for you, you might want to think about running away... before I'm tempted to finish the job you blame me for." That was a harsher threat than Evan would've imagined from her, though he didn't expect her to follow through. Still, she must be feeling a lot of anger lately just to speak so.
"Prince Victor specifically instructed us to bring him. You defy him, your ruler's brother and second?"
Rose took a deep breath and said, "After what you just pulled, I hardly trust you to take him back alone. My mother's house isn't far. You can come there with us if you want, and we can discuss this further after Evan's patched up and rested. But don't you lay another finger on him, or guilt or no guilt over what happened to your kin, you will face my wrath."
Joining Rose on her horse, as she was lighter than Finn and thus better to ride with for her mount's sake, Evan told Justin, "Yeah, you walk. Keep up if you can." Addressing Rose and Finn, he added, "Thank goodness you two came along. I was getting miserable!"
"Yeah, he does that to people," Finn replied, and they rode.
#
Watching Justin lay himself down on the old mattress stuffed into the corner of Lise's dining room, Evan asked nervously, "Rose, aren't you worried he might try something while he's here? He just kidnapped me, remember?"
"No, I doubt he'll do anything while we're around," she said offhand while her daughter Amber suckled at her scar-covered breast. But she wasn't as confident as she tried to sound; she'd also thought Justin not such a bad or dishonorable person despite his anger towards her, and after what he had done to Evan behind her back, she began to think she might have misjudged his character.
"You're right. Who would dare try hurting me when you're here?"
She laughed, thinking it would take a brave soul even if she didn't exactly feel in top shape right now. Just then, Finn walked over. "How are you feeling, my love?"
