Chapter 93: His Whispered Rebellion

Lucian didn’t have a nursing assistant uniform.

He had the gray novice tunic, empty hands, and the face of someone who clearly didn’t belong down there.

So he improvised.

He found an abandoned metal cart at the first crossing of Level 1, with dirty rags and a bucket of water smelling like cheap disinfectant.

He pushed it in front of him. The cart squeaked at every joint in the stone floor.

SQUEAK. SQUEAK. SQUEAK.

It was enough to sound like he had a reason to be there.

Level 1 was different from the corridor where Raziel was.

The cells here had barred doors instead of solid wood, and light came from torches every thirty feet.

It was enough to see the faces.

Lucian would have preferred not to see the faces.

The first man was sitting against the back wall, back straight and mouth open.

Like he had started saying something weeks ago and never finished.

He had his fingers over the strings of an imaginary lute, moving them slowly in a repetitive pattern.

Lucian stopped.

“Hey,” he said in a low voice.

The man looked at him.

His eyes were intelligent, completely present, absolutely aware of everything.

But he didn’t answer.

He opened his mouth wider, like straining, and the only thing that came out was air.

Lucian looked at his throat.

He saw the thin and perfect scar, too clean to be an accident.

’They drained his voice.’ Literally.

He kept walking.

The second cell had a girl, ten years old, maybe less.

Tangled dark hair and knees bent against her chest. She was sleeping, or pretending to sleep, curled up in the corner furthest from the bars.

The stones around her were blackened.

Lucian stood still for a moment, looking at the burn marks on the floor, the walls, even the ceiling.

There was a charred hand silhouette three feet from the bars, on the corridor side.

Someone had tried to get too close.

The girl opened an eye and looked at him.

She said nothing.

Lucian didn’t either.

He kept pushing the cart.

Ser Roderic was in the last cell of the corridor.

He knew it before reading anything, just by the posture.

The man was sitting in the center of the cell, not against the wall, with legs crossed and hands on his knees.

Back completely straight. As if he was meditating, or waiting for an audience.

He was sixty years old, maybe less.

Shaved head with old scars on the scalp.

An arm with marks Lucian recognized as paladin rank tattoos, half erased with something that wasn’t ink.

He had been watching him without blinking since Lucian entered the corridor.

“You took your time,” Roderic said.

Lucian blinked. “What?”

“I heard the cart since you entered.” The man tilted his head. “You walk like a noble, you guys never learn how not to make noise with your feet.”

Lucian squeezed the cart’s handle. “I am a novice of St. Celeste.”

“And I am the Luminary of Zhalyr.” Roderic kept looking at him. “What do you want, kid?”

Lucian let go of the cart.

He looked at the corridor in both directions.

The closest torch was twenty-five feet away and flickering.

He crouched in front of the bars. “I want to get you out of here.”

Roderic didn’t move. “Everyone?”

“Those who want to get out.”

“Do you know what happens to those who rebel here?” Roderic said.

“No.”

“They drain everything from them.” His voice had no inflection, it was just a fact. “Until not even the will to breathe remains.”

Lucian said nothing.

“I saw a man try three months ago, he was strong, had the Gift of Terramancy and hit the bars until he broke his knuckles.” Roderic looked down at his own hands.

“They took him, but he came back two days later, now he sits in the corner and smiles at the ceiling.”

Lucian heard that and didn’t answer immediately because the coward part of his brain wanted to say “thanks for the info” and turn around.

He didn’t do it.

“And you still want to try?” Roderic said.

“My friend is locked down here.” Lucian looked straight at him. “And if I don’t do something, he will die.”

Roderic looked at him for so long that Lucian started feeling the cold of the floor seeping through the knees of his tunic.

Then the old man smiled.

“Then we have something in common.” He stood up.

He did it without leaning on anything, in a single and controlled movement that spoke of decades of training that no chalice could erase completely. “I also came to save someone, but I arrived too late.”

He crossed the cell and stood in front of the bars.

Up close he was taller than Lucian had calculated.

“This time I won’t be late.”

***

They spent twenty minutes talking in low voices.

Roderic was Ser Roderic Ashfen, ex-Commander of the Third Company of Paladins of Phaedra.

The Inquisition had declared him a heretic four years ago for refusing to execute an entire village of alleged cultists, half of whom were children.

His Gift had been drained in the first week.

But as he said himself: “A paladin without magic is still a paladin. I am fifty-eight years old and I can split a jaw with one hand, they didn’t take that away from me.”

“How many more would listen?” Lucian asked.

Roderic thought. “The bard in the corridor can’t speak, but he understands everything, so if you show him what you need to do with your hands, he will do it.” He looked toward the girl’s cell. “Mira doesn’t participate.”

“The girl?”

“Mira is nine years old and is more afraid of herself than of the Sisters.” Roderic shook his head. “Don’t use her because if she panics, she burns everything.”

Lucian nodded.

“When?” Roderic said.

“When you hear noise from below. From Level 3.” Lucian thought about Raziel, about Lara, about what they still had to do. “I don’t know how long they take.”

“Then we wait.”

“Can you convince more prisoners tonight?”

Roderic looked at him with something that wasn’t exactly mockery but looked like it. “I’ve been down here four years, kid. I know every person on this level, their names, their Gifts, their fears, and their limits.” He paused. “That is the only thing they let me do: know them.”

Lucian stood up and picked up the cart’s handle. “Ser Roderic.”

“Lucian?”

“Thanks.”

The old man had already returned to the center of the cell, back straight and hands on his knees.

“Don’t thank me yet.”

***

Lara had been alone in the Level 2 corridor for forty minutes when she felt it.

It wasn’t gradual.

It was like opening a window in winter: the temperature change was immediate and complete and it cut her breath.

Six new presences entered through the main door of the sanatorium.

They didn’t bring fear nor did they bring pain.

They brought the emotion of someone who knows they are right and has the power to prove it.

Fanaticism.

Lara stuck to the corridor wall, she counted six presences with red cloaks, because the color arrived too, somehow, like it always arrived when the emotion was strong enough.

Inquisitors.

And in front of everyone, a presence she knew.

Thaddeus.

What he brought with him wasn’t a sword nor was it an arrest warrant.

It was a paper.

Lara couldn’t read it from down there but she felt the weight it carried.

Someone upstairs, at the reception level, asked Thaddeus why they were coming.

The answer came down the hallways with the clarity of something no one had tried to hide.

“Custody transfer. Patient Raziel Celeste. Order from High Inquisitor Aldric for formal interrogation.”

Lara closed her eyes, the plan had three phases and none of the three were finished.

The time they had to spare didn’t exist anymore.

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