The tall Priest nodded so fast that blood dripped from the wounds on his face and hit the floor. The woman Priest was already trying to speak, though her words ca out hoarse since her throat was raw from the screaming. The young one just nodded and kept nodding, as if stopping would bring the insects back.
"Good," Reidar said. He sat down on the crate again. "Start from the beginning. Tell everything about the Church's operations in Kingsgate."
They talked. All five of them. They interrupted each other, corrected each other, and desperately competed for "Most Cooperative Interrogation Subject" like it was an Olympic sport—because apparently, spending an hour as an all-you-can-eat buffet for wasp-sized nightmares did wonders for one's willingness to share.
Reidar listened.
Half an hour later, he stood outside the stone building, and the five Priests were dead behind him.
He had killed them after the interrogation. Not because he enjoyed it, but because they were mutated humans—monsters, technically—and leaving them alive served no purpose. They couldn't be cured, they couldn't be trusted, and they would have gone straight back to the Church if he let them go.
Reidar stood on the corpse of the tall Priest, though he didn't look down because his mind was elsewhere, sorting through everything the Priest had told him.
The Priests had verified what both Lena and Jake had told him. The Church of Unbinding was going to distribute the infected rations to the civilian population of Kingsgate.
The parasitic eggs would hatch inside the hosts, and over a period of several weeks, the hosts would transform into monsters that the Church could unleash. The plan was to turn Kingsgate's population into a weapon—an army of monsters that the Church would use to take control of the region.
But that wasn't the part that made Reidar's jaw tighten.
The Priests didn't know where exactly the two were hiding inside the city, which was not a surprise since the Church operated on a need-to-know basis that kept lower-ranking mbers in the dark about leadership locations, among the many things.
However, what the Priests knew was that both the Progenitor and Jorik had been in Kingsgate for at least two months, coordinating the operation from within the city itself. That also ant that the church fuckers were preparing this since around when he got sent to the Ignis world. This was no doubt another one of Mara's plans.
That ant the head of the snake was right there, inside the walls of the city where Reidar's wife and son lived.
The thought hit him like a punch to the chest, and Reidar took a breath to steady himself. His family was in the sa city as the two most dangerous mbers of the Church of Unbinding, and they had no idea.
Most likely, not even the Aegis had any idea.
The other thing the Priests knew was sothing Reidar hadn't expected. They gave him locations. Not just one or two, but an entire list of buildings, warehouses, shops, and underground chambers that the Church controlled inside Kingsgate without the knowledge of the survivors or the Aegis Phalanx.
Safe houses where Church mbers lived as survivors. Storage facilities where the infected rations were being stockpiled before distribution. eting points where orders were passed from Jorik's inner circle to the cells operating throughout the city.
Reidar had morized every single location; besides, he knew Kingsgate like his pockets.
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