Ludwig stood in the dim chamber beneath the Sacrosanctum and stared at the bodies.
For several breaths, none of the three moved. Even Redd, who had seen battlefields, slaughterhouses thief dens, slums, and the kind of cruelty that people dressed up as necessity, had gone completely still.
The cells ahead of them were not prisons in the normal sense. They were storage rooms for suffering, stone pockets carved into the underbelly of the holy city, each one holding children in different stages of being used up.
So were alive and pressed against the corners with hollow eyes, too exhausted to cry properly. So were dead, though Ludwig quickly realized that death had not been allowed to finish its work here.
That was the thing that turned the disgust in his chest into sothing much colder.
The corpses were wrong.
He had seen death too many tis to mistake it. A body after the soul left was just at cooling into silence, an empty shell returning to whatever rot and law claid it afterward. These children were dead, yet sothing inside them still clung to the remains, not by choice, not by curse born from resentnt, but by force. Their souls were trapped in their corpses, sealed so tightly that even the natural pull of Death could not take them. The air around the bodies trembled faintly with a sickly kind of magic, holy in structure but rotten in purpose, like soone had taken a hymn and used it to sew a mouth shut.
The Soul Letting Lantern at Ludwig’s side trembled.
It was not the gentle shudder it sotis gave when souls were near. This was different. The lantern shook like sothing furious was pressing from the other side of the glass, and for a mont the shadows around Ludwig lengthened without his command.
Right now, looking at the dead children whose souls had been nailed into their own ruined bodies, the reward for the Existence QUest only made the act feel worse. Necros was paying that much because the insult was that deep.
Kaiser’s empty gaze moved across the cells, his hand tightening slightly around the edge of his robe. "This is not simple murder," he said, his voice lower than usual. "This is containnt. They are using the body as an anchor."
Redd’s jaw clenched so hard Ludwig heard the teeth grind. The ghostly presence behind him, the woman that clung to him like a wound that refused to heal, flickered with a dim reddish pressure. "Why children?" he asked, though the question sounded less like confusion and more like a warning that his patience was already gone.
Ludwig did not answer imdiately. His first instinct was simple and ugly. Go forward. Break every door. Kill everything wearing white robes under this damned building and pull the truth out of whatever remained. There was a ti not long ago when he would have done exactly that, and he would have called it efficient.
Wrath stirred at the back of his thoughts, warm and eager, telling him that the fastest answer was blood. There were people ahead who had done this. People breathing, walking, speaking, and likely praying with hands still clean enough to fool the world above. Every part of him wanted to correct that.
But Pride was colder than Wrath.
Pride did not burn forward blindly. Pride stood above impulse and judged whether rage deserved obedience. Ludwig hated how useful that lesson had beco. The Crown of Pride rested with him now, not as a voice, not as sothing alive enough to whisper, but as a weight in his being that made declarations and choices feel sharper.
Wrath wanted him to charge.
Pride told him that if he charged without knowing where the magic began, he might kill several insects and leave the hive intact.
He had already lost several tilines by arriving too late and acting too bluntly. He was not about to repeat that mistake because anger felt satisfying.
So Ludwig breathed once, though he did not need to, and forced his hands to unclench.
He turned toward the children who were still alive. The nearest one had pulled himself halfway behind a cracked stone basin as if that could hide him from three monsters standing in the hallway. He was small, younger than Ludwig wanted to guess, with one arm ending in a wrapped stump and one eye covered by a filthy bandage that had long since stopped being white. His remaining eye stared at Ludwig with the kind of fear that had no energy left to express itself properly. It simply sat there, expecting pain because pain was what usually followed footsteps.
Ludwig crouched down far enough that he no longer towered over him. "I’m not here to hurt you," he said, and imdiately hated how useless the words sounded in a place like this. People who hurt children probably said the sa thing. People in cleric robes probably said it with softer voices.
The child did not answer.
Redd took a step back, as if understanding that his presence, half-beast and tense with barely restrained violence, was not helping. Kaiser remained behind Ludwig, silent as a grave and just as comforting. Ludwig lowered his voice slightly and pointed at the bandage over the boy’s eye, then to the stump where the arm should have been. "Who did this?"
The child swallowed. His throat worked twice before sound ca out. "The n in robes," he whispered. "They said it was helping."
Ludwig’s face did not move. "Helping with what?"
"The bad spirits," the boy said, glancing toward the dead children in the other cells. "They said the evil gets inside so parts. If they remove the corrupted parts, we live longer. They said the pain ans the evil is leaving."
Redd made a sound behind him that was almost a growl. Kaiser’s gaze lowered by a fraction. Ludwig kept his face calm because if he did not, the child might stop talking.
"Did they say where the evil ca from?" Ludwig asked.
The boy shook his head, then flinched as if the movent hurt. "No. They just check us. Sotis they take blood. Sotis they make us drink light. Sotis..." His voice thinned there, eyes flicking toward the corpses. "Sotis they say soone is too full of it."
Ludwig looked past him at the dead bodies, then at the faint shimr of soul-binding magic clinging around them. Removing corrupted parts. Drinking light. Purging spirits. Lies with enough holy vocabulary to sound clean if said from a pulpit. The kind of lies that let cowards carve children while calling themselves saviors.
"When do they co?" Ludwig asked.
The boy’s one eye widened with fresh panic. "Soon."
"How soon?"
"They co after the guards check," the boy whispered. "The guards co first. Then the old one cos. He chooses."
Kaiser turned his head slightly toward the corridor behind them. Earlier, he had dropped two guards with asphyxia before either could cry out, their unconscious bodies hidden behind a bend in the passage. At the ti, Ludwig had considered them obstacles. Now he understood they were part of a routine.
"About now, then," Kaiser said.
Ludwig stood slowly. The anger inside him settled into sothing much worse than heat. It beca shape. Purpose. "Redd, don’t let the children look if you can help it."
Redd’s eyes were still fixed on the cells. "What are you going to do?"
"Ask questions," Ludwig said, and the words ca out calm enough that even Kaiser looked at him.
They moved quickly. The cell across from the children held only bodies, most of them small, stacked with the careless practicality of people who no longer considered them people. The sll inside was thick enough to make even Redd’s nose wrinkle, but Ludwig entered without hesitation and motioned for the others to follow. Kaiser stepped into the darkest corner, becoming little more than a deeper shadow among dead things. Redd crouched near the entrance, muscles coiled. Ludwig stood behind the half-open cell door, one hand resting against the stone wall rather than on either weapon. Nightbreaker would bring the ceiling down if he lost his temper. Durandal’s edge was too clean too rciful for what he intended.
Footsteps arrived a few monts later.
There were three of them. Two guards in white-and-silver armor, faces covered by the kind of stern indifference n wore when duty had replaced conscience. Between them walked an old bishop with a hunched back, a narrow mouth, and eyes sunken so deep into his skull that he looked half-dead already. His robes had once been fine, embroidered with gold thread and holy sigils, but age and use had made the edges yellow. He slled faintly of incense, rot, and dicinal spirits. In one hand he carried a leather satchel that clinked softly with tools.
The bishop did not look into the corpse cell as he passed. Why would he? To him, it was only storage.
"Bring the one with the strong pulse," he said to one of the guards. "The vessel has held longer than expected. We may extract twice today if the binding does not tear."
The guard nodded and turned toward the children’s cell.
Ludwig moved.
Reviews
All reviews (0)