Chapter Text
Dismas winced as blood dripped from his clenched fist to the worn wooden floor, landing perfectly in the center of the sigil. He stepped back to admire their handiwork: candles dotted the painted glyph in precise locations, standing guard over the objects he’d spent countless hours hunting down for this exact purpose. The cauldron was the only other lightsource in the room, casting the occultist’s long, slender shadow over the dusty library shelves as he approached from behind.
Wordlessly, the two men assumed their positions: Dismas slowly knelt in the center of the sigil as the occultist paced its outer rim, murmuring a soft chant as he scattered a silvery dust behind him. The other man’s robe brushed lightly over a large, heavy sack on one end of the sigil, the bottom stained black with old blood. Through his vest and overcoat, Dismas felt the cool touch of silk against his bare spine and he shivered. He refused to think any further about the sack’s contents.
After covering the glyph, he pocketed the powder and retrieved a couple items from the desk by the cauldron, its surface piled high with books and stray parchment. Products of research. The occultist stopped in front of the rogue and produced a goblet from one billowing sleeve, its contents still steaming from the cauldron. His voice was smooth and even-toned; Dismas would not have noticed the subtle note of concern had they not spent so long together working for this moment.
“Are you certain you want this?”
Dismas stared into the eye sockets of the man’s spellcasting focus. The human skull stared back, the candle affixed to the top of it flickering merrily, almost mockingly.
Look around you, the skull seemed to say. Even if this works, he’ll never agree to it. You’ll drive yourself mad for nothing.
“We’ve come too far to back out now,” Dismas told the skull. He looked up at Alhazred. “Do it.” The occultist pressed his mouth into a thin line and nodded. He brought the goblet to Dismas’s lips, gently tipping it as he began to chant anew.
He almost choked at the first mouthful of black fluid. The foul concoction seemed to come alive as it touched flesh, bubbling and popping as it slid thickly down his throat. Its acrid scent stung his nose and throat and clung to his insides like hot pitch. Alhazred did not slow down; more of the stuff started to fill his mouth. Dismas screwed his eyes shut and muscled through the first swallow.
He’d had worse. But not by much.
Shutting his eyes was a mistake: Dismas felt the floor start to lurch beneath him and it was immediately a fight to stay upright. He braced himself with one hand on the floor and looked up at the occultist through the second and third floods of liquid. Alhazred’s eyes locked with his, intense and unblinking, and Dismas suddenly felt as though he could not move. Pinned in place like an insect on display. The occultist did not stop his chanting, but his message was as clear as if he’d said it aloud. Do not give in. We cannot stop now.
Four, five swallows. His head swam and his tongue burned. The skull floated several inches above his outstretched palm, flames licking its eye sockets. Alhazred’s voice was louder now, but the pounding in Dismas’s ears threatened to drown him out. His chest tightened and ached like an animal was clawing at his ribcage, desperate to escape. He’d forgotten to breathe.
The sixth gulp was the last. The cup finally left him and clattered to the floor, taking Dismas along with it. Saliva dripped from his mouth and his stomach heaved, threatening to empty its contents onto the wooden floorboards and ruin the other man’s delicate, expensive-looking slippers, along with everything they had worked toward. Not gonna happen. He bit down on his tongue, hard, the taste of blood replacing the caustic, unholy foulness that clinged to it.
A pressure from above — Alhazred’s hand on his head, leaning heavily as if he, too, were reeling, but the chanting did not stop. It grew still louder, trading blows with the drumming in the rogue’s head and the howling of a strange wind in a pandemonic cacophony of noise. Dismas felt like his skull would crack between the pounding within and the pressure above. He wanted so badly to scream, but he could not trust himself to open his mouth.
He fell to his forearms and heard a faint metallic clink somewhere. Sweat dripped from his nose to the cold stone of the dungeon floor. The flesh-covered walls pulsated in time with his hammering heart, rapidfire beats like a fox running at the hound’s bay. A rat in a trap. Dismas clutched his chest, clawed at it. He couldn’t breathe. His heart was going to kill him.
No — no, not his.
He… remembered…
He remembered…
“Come on, let’s get going already!” The girl reached from her perch on the stagecoach roof and rapped her poker on its wall several times. It groaned in protest as she leaned her mop of black hair far over its edge. “We’re burnin’ daylight.”
Reynauld huffed in annoyance as he carried a final crate from the inn, shoving it into place before saying to no one in particular, “It would not take so long to depart if loading the coach were not left to one man.”
“Yeah, but you’re so good at it. We didn’t want to get in your way,” smirked Dismas, thumping Reynauld on the shoulder as he walked by. A faint snicker came from the stagecoach roof. “C’mon, let’s get going. Now where is—”
He found the fourth member of the party just as he was about to take his place in one half of the driver’s box. The duelist — Sahar, if memory served — sat primly at the front of the coach, running an oiled cloth over the already mirror-bright rapier in her hand.
“Not sure if you knew this, but shotgun’s usually my spot.” Sahar inclined her head slightly to one side, barely affording him a glance in acknowledgement. Her rapier glinted as it caught the early morning light.
“Then you’d do well to wake up earlier and claim it,” she replied evenly before returning her eyes to her blade. It was Dismas’s turn to huff, though much quieter with the kerchief over his face to muffle him. He considered saying something more, but there was no sense in starting an argument before they’d even left the inn. Reynauld took the reins in the spot next to Sahar, effectively finalizing the decision.
For a moment, Dismas thought he saw a faint smirk on the duelist’s face as he turned and clambered into the coach. The girl from the roof was already seated in the far corner — when she had gotten there, he couldn’t guess — staring through the window at the burning city in the distance. Dismas had hardly shut the door when the coach jumped to life and a seat was chosen for him.
\\\
It was strange enough for Dismas, riding in the driver’s box of a coach. It was altogether foreign to sit in the coach itself and watch the land roll by: the autumnal trees of the valley gradually gave up their leaves for a gray layer of ash, seeming to wither from the heat the closer they got to the city of flames. The girl across from him kept her eyes fixed on the horizon, almost transfixed.
She was around eighteen or nineteen, Dismas guessed, and a little thing for that age. The pack on her back was about half her size and must have been heavy, but she’d made no effort to remove it or lighten the load. Even with the pack taking up so much of the seat her feet dangled, not quite reaching the floor of the coach. A shag of black hair surrounded her chalky face like a lion’s mane. It didn’t look like it had been brushed in… well, maybe ever.
“It’s Bonnie, right?” She jumped at the sound of his voice and looked at Dismas for only a moment before returning her gaze to the window.
“Yeah.” A beat of silence. No follow up.
“Dismas.”
“I know.” Again, no follow up. Has this kid ever had a conversation before? Or maybe she didn’t want one. Too bad for her either way.
“‘You know?’ How’s that?”
“Heard you and the knight talking. By the fire. He called you that.”
That explained the flicker of movement he saw at the inn’s staircase the night before. He’d felt one too many sets of eyes on him.
“What else did you hear?”
“Not much.” Bonnie picked at a charred place on her poker. A lattice of raised scars covered her arm. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”
An obvious lie, but one not worth calling. It didn’t matter anyway, there hadn’t been much to eavesdrop on: last night’s “conversation” consisted largely of Dismas breaking long spells of silence with jumbled, half-formed thoughts and a truly awful joke or two, only earning the occasional clipped word in response. And yeah, maybe he’d had a few. He hadn’t known what to say. Things had been so different since—
danger.
“Is it true, what you said? That’cha saved that knight from a warlord and busted him out of a cage?”
He stiffened, every sense knife-sharp and every hair on end. His response was an afterthought.
“Er, yeah. It is.”
Bonnie leaned in to look at him, forcing his attention to her eyes. Ash gray, beady, suspicious… curious. A shadow moved outside the window. His hand hovered by the pistol in his coat.
“Why?”
Ka-THUM!
A singular strike against the coach. The world tilted.
Thunk!
Dismas’s back slammed against the door. Bonnie landed just beside him with a shout.
Crack!
The door gave way. The cobbled street rose to meet them.