Guthethya found herself in the sprawling, artificially lit room with walls lined with half-finished gimmicks and weapons. The floor was a polished marble, and the only exit was behind the Grand Priest she set out to confront: Kumer.
He raised his arms, almost as if in prayer, and muttered something intelligible under his breath. Guthethya, not in the mood to fool around, moved her hands to her hips and unsheathed a heavy, forward-curved blade. "Kumer, I challenge you to a duel. If I win, you'll give me answers."
The Grand Priest, Kumer, lowered his hands and faced her for the first time. Then, his hands dropped limp to his sides, then leaning forward, he made a sudden charge with speed blinding even for her. She barely managed to sidestep enough for Kumer to charge past her, tripping face-first on the ground. He laid there, unmoving.
"…"
Was he messing with her? Or was he drunk? After all she did to finally confront him, this is what she was met with?
She turned around to face him, now on guard. "What are you doing? Stop fooling around and get up!"
Kumer finally moved. Raising his hands sluggishly, he pushed himself up to his knees and then stood up. The whole process took far too long for Guthethya's patience to handle, and in her irritation brought her foot down, slamming his head down to the ground. "
"What game is this?" Guthethya snarled, pressing her kopis against the back of his neck. "Where is the man who sold weapons to the Barrow Dogs? Where is the mastermind of the Krolian massacre?"
Kumer's voice, muffled by the floor, was high-pitched and fragile, the complete opposite of what she had expected. "Mastermind...? No, no. I just... sign the documents. The quartermaster... yes. The tools go where they're needed. For peace. For order."
The realization would hit her like a physical blow. The man she'd hunted for years, whose name she'd whispered in her nightmares, was just a paper-pusher who approved shipments. The true architect was higher up, perhaps even the founder of the Crimson Sun itself.
A Grand Priest who was a simple clerk wasn't something she could've foreseen. Pressing tip of her blade to his neck, she hissed "But you must know something. Who was in charge of the attack on the Krolian tribe?"
"K-Krolian? Oh, are you perhaps a tenebrim? I understand that you might be frustrated, I have nothing to do with it. Intican, Krolian, or Mentis, none of that is my job to keep track of.."
The blade bit deeper, a bead of dark blood welling up. "You sent the weapons. You signed the order. That makes you responsible."
Kumer let out a wet, rattling sigh, as if explaining a basic accounting error to a slow child. "Responsibility… is a chain. I receive manifests from the Royal Logistics Bureau, then I stamp them. The artifacts go to the Quartermaster General of the Eastern March. From there…" He made a vague gesture with one limp hand. "They are distributed to mercenary captains and garrison troops. Who uses them and where… is an operational matter. My duty is allocation, not application."
Every word crushed her hopes of vengeance. All this time, she had just been chasing after another wheel in the cog, not the true mastermind.
"Names," Guthethya demanded, her voice colder than the marble floor beneath them. "Who in the Bureau? Who in the March?"
"Oh, I couldn't possibly…" Kumer began, then yelped as the kopis pressed insistently into his neck. "Th-the manifests! They're in the ledger! The black ledger with the sun clasp, in the scriptorium! It has all the seals, all the signatures! Please, that's all I know!"
A ledger that might contain what she searched for, and the knowledge that the kingdom was part of this plot. A chain of command linking the Crimson Sun's forges directly to the Royal Army's supply lines, and from there to massacres.
Before she could process this, Kumer's hand, trembling, reached into his robes and pulled out an orange pendant, clutching it tightly to his chest as he muttered something. A wave of primal danger screamed through Guthethya's senses. She threw herself backward just as a wall of fire erupted where he had lain, the heat scorching the air where she'd stood a heartbeat before.
The flames gradually diminished, but not fully. From within the flames, a figure rose, unharmed by the flames. Kumer stepped out of the fire just as it diminished, his body covered in residual flames but no scorch mark. "Behold, the [Blessing of Irma]!"
A Skill. She had not expected that at all. His frail appearance had lowered her guard, something that she lamented. "You dirty geezer. You completely fooled me…"
Kumer now stood without a slumped back or trembling form, the flames having melted off his mask to reveal the coarse violet skin underneath, his eyes blazing. "It as a necessary deception." He spoke, his voice clear, stripped of his previous fragility. "The Order's work is too vital to be undone by personal vendettas. Your strength is noted, Krolian. But it is misplaced."
Guthethya settled back into her combat stance, kopis held low and ready. The heat from the lingering flames filled the air, but her body was made for harsh temperatures. "Misplaced? You armed the killers of my family."
"We armed the pacifiers of a potential threat," Kumer corrected, as if lecturing a stubborn student. He raised a hand, and the flames around him merged into a shimmering, heat-haze shield before his palm. "The Krolian chieftain was hoarding lumenite crystals. He could have attracted a Lumenari decades ahead of the cycle. We could not allow one clan's greed to jeopardize the continent, or the world."
Lies. Justifications. The same poison she'd heard from every human who'd ever raised a sword to her people. Her rage, cooled momentarily by confusion, now returned. Now she just saw another liar hiding behind grand words, and she was done listening.
"You don't get to use Doomsday to wash the blood from your ledger," she snarled.
She then moved, rushing past him towards the scriptorium. Her target was no longer him, but the black ledger. She had to reach the truth before he could burn it.
Using the inherited strength of her legs, she shot forward and reached the door in an instant, creating a gust of wind that fed the flames. Kumer reacted too slowly, lashing out with a whip of fire that hit empty space just as she broke out of the room.
The hallway was a long and arched corridor lined with conduits in neat lines. The scriptorium had to be close, otherwise Krumer wouldn't have mentioned it if it wasn't. She could hear his enraged shouts echoing behind her, the rustle of his robes and the crackle of gathering fire.
She didn't look back, her eyes instead scanning the doorways. Her mind filtered the layout Torren had briefly explained during their descent. Storage, forge, archives… There. Her eyes laid upon a heavier wooden door with an iron frame, marked with a quill-and-scroll symbol.
She hit it shoulder-first, but the door held. Tenebrim strength wasn't just for combat, and it was made clear when the second impact splintered the frame. She burst into a room smelling of old parchment and ink, shelves stretched to the ceiling. They were crammed with ledgers, scroll cases, and slates. In the center of the room, on a polished obsidian desk, sat a single, ominous black ledger, its brass sun-clasp gleaming in the light of a single desk lamp.
Her hand shot out to grab it. But before she could, a blast of superheated air slammed into the doorframe beside her, charring the wood instantly. Kumer stood in the ruined doorway, panting, his hand outstretched. The flames around him were darker now, his expression tinged with frustration.
"That," he said, his voice no longer frail but seething, "is state property."
Despite that, it was clear in the way he hesitated that he couldn't use his abilities freely here. After all, the mellets valued information, and burning it down was like a grave sin to them. Guthethya knew full well of this, and would take advantage of it.
Grabbing the ledger, she dropped to a roll and charged to the shelves, keeping near heavily stacked ones. Kumer got more enraged at this, and in a fit of rage merged the flames from his back into a solid whip that charged at her, focusing the heat only on what it touched.
The fiery whip lashed out with precision, slicing through the air where her head had been a moment ago. It seared a clean, blackened line across a shelf of scrolls, but it didn't ignite into flames.
He's controlling it, she realized, ducking behind another towering bookcase. He has to. One stray ember, and this whole place goes up.
She could hear Kumer's furious, measured steps as he walked between the aisles, the hiss-crackle of his whip the only warning before it struck.
"You think hiding among knowledge will save you?" his voice echoed, cold and close. "You are a beast in a library. You don't belong here."
Guthethya didn't respond, her eyes scanning her surroundings for an exit. She needed to find another way out, one that wasn't the scorched doorway. Her gaze landed on the ventilation grille high on the wall, partly hidden by a stack of ledgers. The conduits Torren mentioned had to run somewhere.
The whip snapped again through the corner of her hiding place. She lunged sideways as heavy books and slates fell to the floor. In the chaos, she moved deeper into the maze of shelves, leading him away from her real exit.
Sneaking behind a bookshelf, she pushed it enough for it to start falling down. Kumer immediately noticed it and tried to catch it before it fell, just to realize that he couldn't prevent it without burning the wood. Guthethya took that moment of hesitation as her opening, rushing towards the ventilation. Punching through the metal, she then crawled inside just as Kumer noticed her absence.
But just as she entered the ducts, she heard Kumer shout an order that sent a chill down her spine:
"Lock down the inner sanctum! Flood the chambers with Still-Air gas!"
It was a danger not only to her, but to everyone inside this building. If these people were crazy enough to poison their own people, then she was truly dealing with fanatics.
The metal duct was cold and tight, her shoulders scraping against the sides as she crawled through it. Distant hisses echoed through the shafts, the gas already begun its flow.
She crawled, ledger tight to her chest, following the faint smell of fresher air. Find Torren. Find the hero. Before the gas does.
The gas was slow, but not slow enough. She had to find an exit, then find them before the gas pulled them all into a sleep they might never wake from. Failing a direct order from the Queen, losing the client and his bounty, and letting the ledger burn? That wouldn't be a mere setback – it'd be the end of her career, and she'd be damned if she let a bunch of paper-pushing fanatics and their gas be the end of her.
Up ahead, she finally saw light shining through a grille. She scrambled towards it, ignoring the burn in her muscles. Peering through the slots, she saw a small, stark medical chamber with a cot, cabinets of vials and restraints on the walls.
And there, collapsed on the floor amidst scattered vials and broken glass, was a large, dark-skinned tenebrim, his body limp.