closed.
He could try. But like on the boat, his left eye refused to close and he was forced to watch as terrifying shadows with too many teeth and too many eyes slunk about in the dark corners of the church.
He had stepped into the domain of something large and ancient and its gaze had turned upon him.
Sweat beaded at his temples. His vision snapped back back back until there was no church, no boulder to carve it from, only a clearing and an ancient stone slab, blood dripping down its sides. A blade stained crimson lying in the dust. The eye of the gods on a sacred place.
There was movement around the altar, or the memory of it. Of people long turned to nothing more than dust and ashes, and an action, committed so many times that the bones of the earth remembered it. A life taken on that altar again and again and again, a circle returning to its origin point.
Everything Serefin knew about the Kalyazi was turning out to be fantastically deluded. He had thought them pious, backward people, afraid of magic that wasn’t sanctioned by their gods. But he also thought their gods only sanctioned a specific kind of magic—that of clerics. He was no longer certain that was true.
It answered why Kalyazin had spent a century fighting a war against a country that used a great deal of magic when they had very little. But what magic were they using and how had it gone unnoticed by Tranavia for this long?
He had a terrible feeling he was about to find out.
“Take him downstairs,” Yekaterina said, sounding bored. “I want more answers before I deal with him.”
His arm was gripped by a middle-aged man. He was unassuming in appearance; blond hair, dark eyes, half his face in shadow from his lopsided hood, not particularly memorable, unlike the cult members in Tranavia.
Until he pushed his hood back and Serefin got a look at the scars ravaging half his face. Made by claws—claws with the right distance between them to be fingers. He wore a necklace of teeth like the one around Yekaterina’s neck.
“You’re back early,” the man said, eyeing Serefin.
“Yes, well, my plans were changed by this one,” she said. “I’ll be with you both shortly.”
The man yanked Serefin down the hall, opening a door that led to a set of stairs, descending into darkness. The man took a torch from the wall and went first. The hallway stretched on and on—it seemed like they would never reach the end—but finally the man stopped. He did not open the door, instead turning to Serefin after placing his torch in a sconce.
“None have passed through these halls not of the order in a very long time. Especially not the enemy,” the man said.
“No? How shocking.”
The man watched him a bit longer. Serefin let out a sigh of relief. He had no idea who Serefin was. Likely the tsarevna only knew what he looked like—as he knew what she looked like—on the off chance they met in battle.
This was exactly the kind of mess he would get into without Kacper around to keep him from doing something senseless. The man shoved Serefin into the room, a dimly lit study. He indicated for Serefin to sit, and waited by the door.
The man was clearly Voldah Gorovni, same as Yekaterina. Though ?ywia had mentioned that the Vulture hunters had had a resurgence, Serefin hadn’t expected to find them. This was the luck that he needed, strangely enough. This was the answer to his Malachiasz problem.
Maybe he could talk his way out of this, after all.
Yekaterina appeared a few minutes later. “What do you know about what happened at Kartevka?”
Serefin stared up at her blankly. What? He considered the mountain of military reports Ostyia had shoved in his face back in Grazyk. He had read maybe half of them before falling asleep at his desk. Kacper had woken him, gently dragging him back to his chambers, talking the whole way about how he should have let Serefin stay there so maybe the ache in his back the next day would be enough to get him to take care of himself.
“I understand this is something of an interrogation, but can I ask questions?” he asked hopefully.
Yekaterina’s lips twitched. He thought she was going to refuse, but she nodded, gesturing for him to continue.
“Do you actually kill Vultures, or are the teeth for show?”
Yekaterina quirked an eyebrow.
“Because,” Serefin continued, “I haven’t really heard of any