Chapter 94: His Keeper’s Game

Raziel had gone three days without seeing natural light and he had already stopped missing it.

What he did hear was everything.

That was the problem with activating [Trauma Acoustics] in a stone building: stone didn’t filter anything.

Every footstep, every whisper, every dry cough from some prisoner on the upper level reached his cell with the clarity of someone speaking directly into his ear.

The iron door in front of him looked locked, but it was a lie: the padlock was broken, hanging loose thanks to Lucian’s dagger.

He could leave whenever he wanted.

But leaving now would be suicide.

The plan was simple: wait for Lucian to start the riot on Level 1.

As soon as the first scream was heard, Celestine would go up to control the chaos, and that would be Raziel’s moment to go down to Level 3 for the Oracle.

“Just wait for the signal,” he repeated to himself.

But then, he heard Six pairs of boots with military step, coordinated.

So when Thaddeus entered the sanatorium, Raziel knew it before the man said a single word.

Raziel closed his eyes and leaned his back against the cold wall.

’Good,’ he thought.

’Forty-eight hours of delay, more or less. Depending on how much Celestine holds out.’

Then he heard Celestine’s voice and adjusted that calculation upwards.

“Inquisitor, this sanatorium has been under my care for thirty years.”

Celestine’s voice didn’t rise even a tone. “Do you think I’m going to let a kid in a hood tell me what to do?”

Raziel almost smiled.

Thaddeus answered without pausing. “I am not a kid, Mother. I am the High Inquisitor’s hand.”

“Then tell your hand that my patients don’t move without my signature.”

“Patient Raziel Celeste is under formal suspicion of heresy,” Thaddeus said. “The order comes directly from High Inquisitor Aldric. Your jurisdiction doesn’t-”

“My jurisdiction,” Celestine interrupted him, and this time there was an edge to her voice, “is the Council of Exarchs, not the High Inquisitor and the Council hasn’t sent me any transfer order.”

Pause.

“And if I obtain an order from the Exarch?”

Celestine took a second to answer. Raziel imagined the expression on her face: that smile without warmth he had seen in the dungeon.

“Then bring one, but until then… get out of my sanatorium.”

THUMP.

Raziel opened his eyes.

The level of intent coming from above hadn’t left.

It had moved.

Shifted laterally, towards the north wing of the building, where the guest rooms had a fireplace and a desk and a window with a view of the main road.

Raziel activated [Shadow Echo] in a low pulse, enough to map without making noise.

The parasite responded with a lazy buzz.

It had been still for three days and had gotten used to the stillness.

Raziel pushed it anyway and the echo expanded through the building like an invisible wave.

Six silhouettes in the north wing.

Five static, one moving.

Thaddeus, sitting before a desk.

Writing.

Raziel processed that for several seconds.

’He didn’t leave.’

He didn’t leave because he never planned to leave.

He had come with luggage, with provisions and with enough time to wait for an answer from the Exarch or force a different situation.

Raziel expanded the pulse a little more, ignoring the prick of pain that it cost him behind his eyes.

Thaddeus’s killing intent wasn’t pointing towards the lower level.

It wasn’t pointing at Raziel.

It was pointing at Celestine.

Raziel stayed very still in the darkness of his cell.

’Ah,’ he thought. ’So he didn’t come just for me.’

Thaddeus had an order for Raziel, yes. But Thaddeus also had another agenda and that agenda didn’t need Raziel to exist to work.

It needed Celestine to fall.

Which meant that the St. Sophia sanatorium wasn’t just a warehouse of stolen Gifts and ecclesiastical prisoners.

It was a piece on someone bigger’s board.

And Thaddeus had come to remove it.

’Perfect,’ Raziel thought. ’Two factions of the Church about to kill each other, me locked in the middle, forty-eight hours before someone wins the argument and comes looking for me. Completely manageable situation.’

He pinched the bridge of his nose.

He needed to contact Lucian.

[Secret Whisperer] worked by resonance.

It wasn’t telepathy, it wasn’t communication magic in any conventional sense.

It was more like touching a specific frequency in the fabric of ambient mana, a frequency that only someone with the right bond could distinguish from the background noise.

The problem was that the sanatorium had suppressors in the walls of the lower level.

The suppressors blocked active magic, projections, anything that left the body with offensive intent or direct communication.

[Secret Whisperer] wasn’t any of those things.

It was passive and technically subtle, just a disturbance in the natural frequency of ambient mana.

Raziel had spent three days wondering if that was enough to slip through the suppressors or not.

He decided it was a good time to find out.

He closed his eyes.

He concentrated his attention on the bond with Lucian, that stupid and unbreakable thread that had formed on its own without either of them asking for it.

He found it without difficulty because Lucian had never been subtle in any aspect of his existence, including his presence in the mana fabric.

He was on Level 1.

’Good. He’s alive.’

Raziel pushed the message through the bond with information compressed into emotion, which was the only thing [Secret Whisperer] could transmit through interference.

Urgency.

North.

Time.

Three simple concepts, enough for Lucian to understand that something had changed and that the clock they had before now had half the hours.

The suppressor on the wall flickered, Raziel felt it as resistance but the message passed.

[SECRET WHISPERER: Transmission degraded to 34%. Message received: Probable.]

Raziel let out the air slowly.

’Probable’ was enough with Lucian.

Lucian had the political instinct of someone raised among courtiers who smiled at each other while stabbing each other, so when something smelled like urgency, he acted before confirming.

It was his biggest flaw and right now it was exactly what Raziel needed.

Upstairs, in the north wing, Thaddeus finished his first letter and started the second.

Raziel knew it because the parasite’s echo had never stopped monitoring him.

The killing intent didn’t flicker or waver.

Thaddeus believed he was doing the right thing.

And that made him more dangerous than Celestine, than Marius, than any corrupt figure Raziel had faced in this cycle, because corruption at least had a price.

Conviction didn’t.

Raziel rested his head against the cold wall and looked at the ceiling he couldn’t see in the dark.

Forty-eight hours.

Less, probably, if Thaddeus was as efficient writing letters as he was walking in formation.

The Oracle was still on the lowest level.

Lucian had Roderic and forty-seven prisoners who didn’t know yet that they were going to fight.

Lara had six new inquisitors to monitor with a gift that exhausted her more and more.

And Raziel had a parasite in his core, Gifts suppressed by half, and a plan that didn’t work anymore.

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