“We aren’t playing your silly games, Penitent,” I call over my shoulder irritably. I am tense. Not just because I am marching to my own death.
The golems stride past us easily and set themselves between us and the outer room.
“What if it ends the trial if you leave?” Sir Owalan pleads.
“Do you love building demons that much, Sir Owalan?” the Vagabond asks, spinning around.
“I will be a Saint,” Sir Owalan says gravely.
“And then what? Will you unleash it upon the world?” she asks him, anguish in her voice when her eyes snag on me. I don’t like being the cause of her pain, but I see no other way forward. She may mourn me — as I have mourned Marigold. But I have learned such sorrows can be set aside. Perhaps, in time, she will set this aside, too.
Sir Owalan appears affronted, but before he can speak, there’s a commotion and he is forced to scramble to control his demon. He lets out a cry as his pen flies to his page.
The High Saint is writing madly. He looks up just long enough to meet my eye again, and in it, I see determination and understanding and something that sings of repentance. His shadow demon rages wildly as his pen dances, bits of horrors flicking out from it in every direction. Its massive hand reaches out — actually, it’s a tangle of multiple hands, some ghastly and pale as slugs — catches Cleft, who had strayed into the demon’s circle, grabs him by the foot, and flings him against the wall. The huge golem crashes with a boom like a stone falling in a quarry.
Sir Sorken lets fly a foul curse.
I grab the Vagabond’s arm and shove her clear of his range while Brindle barks and dances wildly. He wants in on this fight and the lady paladin is barely holding him back.
Sir Sorken’s demon is reaching its own tangled arms. Some of them have tentacles lacing between them and everything — arms, hands, tentacles — are wriggling as they stretch. It tries to grab the High Saint’s demon but it can’t quite reach, and the sound it makes when it strains for the other of its kind sounds like the gnashing of teeth from dozens of different-shaped mouths.
Sir Owalan’s demon joins the fray with a screaming roar that sounds fearful and trembling. Rather than helping, it swipes at Sir Sorken’s demon, who stumbles into Suture, and for a moment there is pure chaos. Arms, faces, shadows, and screaming voices tangle one over the other.
I look up to see Joran Rue — the High Saint — scramble in his straps. He’s trying to get out. The look on his face is sheer panic.
His pen falls to the sand and his ink is right behind it. His face has the look of a man who has just watched his own knife turn on him. He opens his mouth but no scream escapes.
The shadow beneath him rises up, snatches the book in its insubstantial hand, and — against all reason — tears into it with the teeth of multiple mouths at once. Everyone is shouting and then the Vagabond grabs me by the collar and drags me after her. I am running, following her lead, but my eyes are behind me, watching the High Saint.
Suture goes flying past me and hits the wall in front of us. I stumble at the near miss, my breath rasping in my lungs. We’re nearly to the door out — nearly, but not quite.
Sir Owalan starts keening in sharp little high-pitched bursts and I risk another glance over my shoulder.
The demon the high saint was creating is climbing upward using straps from the High Saint’s harness. It’s a tangle of mouths and fingers and something almost swollen that looks like bodies curling in on one another. It’s still chewing — chewing around its own eldritch tangled screams and laughter — when it reaches for the High Saint, snatches his struggling form from the half-broken straps, and opens its mouth wide.
One last lunge and the High Saint disappears down the demon’s throat like a baitfish dropped into the mouth of a trout.
I feel like my heart has frozen to ice.
The straps break. A dark light bursts in all directions, blinding me for just a moment, and then it is gone, and so are the High Saint and his demon.
The other two demons are flung backward, away from the disintegration of their fellow, and the harnesses holding Sir Owalan and Sir Sorken in place swing with wild abandon.
The High Saint’s harness drifts down to the platform like a fallen leaf on the wind.
I choke on my own breath for a moment and am seized by a fit of coughing, but there is no appropriate response for this and I do not try to find one.
I think that in the end, Joran Rue turned his heart from evil. I think that he was a good man caught in a trap he did not know was there.
But now there are only four of us. And two of us are monsters.
“What … what in the fires of hell just happened?” Sir Owalan asks plaintively.
Sir Sorken snorts. “He was eaten by his demon, wasn’t he? Didn’t craft it like he should. What did you think would happen? We aren’t playing games here, no matter what the Poisoned One thinks. We are crafting great souls to enact our dreams.”
I don’t think he’s right. Not about anything.
I think the High Saint sabotaged his devil on purpose. I think he did — to a small degree — what I’m about to do. And I honor him for it. Some things are worth dying to prevent.
