When it was done, they left the dark room behind. Lucas wasn’t paying much attention to where they were going, but in the darkness he was sure he wouldn’t have been able to keep track anyway. Even so, he kept his eyes forwards, not daring to look back at Valerie and what she carried. He didn’t even spread out his mana sense.

  It was clear Florence had a new destination in mind. She moved with purpose through the all-concealing darkness, taking them on a long and winding route until the air around them abruptly changed, their footsteps echoing off the walls like they were suddenly in a cavern. After a moment, Florence’s glaive appeared in her hand, and its red blade glowed like a torch. She kept it low, illuminating the ground as she slowly moved around the large room, searching for something. It all looked like damp dirt to Lucas, but she eventually came to a stop and let the tip of her blade sink an inch into the ground.

  “Here,” she said.

  A burst of magical energy followed, and the room seemed to groan. The floor trembled. Lucas barely had a moment to wonder what was happening before the ground parted beneath Florence’s glaive like a trap door had been opened. It wasn’t large, barely a metre squared. Within, the darkness seemed to swallow the light of Florence’s weapon. There was a metallic smell in the air, all of a sudden.

  Lucas swallowed.

  Valerie stepped past him, hefting her burden over one shoulder. With no ceremony, she let the dark sack drop into the hole, where it vanished. There was no sound of it hitting the bottom, even after long seconds. A beat later, the hole closed without a hint of the noise it had made upon opening.

  “So that’s it?” Lucas asked.

  “That’s it,” Valerie replied. “The body will swiftly find its way to another area, where people will be waiting to perform his fifth rites.” Shadows danced on her face, mixing with the rosy reds of the light from Florence’s glaive. She was looking at him. He found he couldn’t meet her eyes. “You made the correct decision today,” she said.

  “You feared I’d take pity on him,” Lucas said.

  “I was prepared for an argument,” she admitted. “But not the one we ended up having.”

  “For what it's worth,” Florence added, “I believe that was brave of you. In a way, one might even call it noble.”

  Lucas shook his head so hard he felt something twinge in his neck. “No fucking way am I ever going to call something like that noble. It’s… He was a person. I keep thinking back to when I first woke up in this place, when I found a bunch of old human remains in Pentaburgh. I spent so long thinking about them, agonising over who they were, their hopes and dreams, and stuff like that. It haunted me, for a little while.” He let out a sigh, looking up as if he might see the sky through however many metres of earth and rock stood between them and the surface. “I know some of that stuff about him already, but I still wonder how long I’m gonna end up thinking about Ser Nial.”

  “You shouldn’t devote much thought to him at all,” Valerie said. “Men who work against the interests of Aerth deserve no pity, Lord Lucas.”

  “He thought he was working for the interests of Aerth. That’s the problem. How many more people like him will I have to face before all this is done, do you think?”

  “Too many to count,” Florence said.

  “New Dawn, for a start,” Valerie said.

  Lucas considered that. He drew in a shaky breath. His hands wouldn’t stop trembling at his sides, and he dearly wished he had some pockets to stuff them in to hide it. The best he could do for now was pull his cloak around himself, but that just made him look even more vulnerable. “How much of what he said was true?” He wondered aloud.

  “Much of it lines up with what I already knew about the group,” Valerie said. “They were founded on the 100th anniversary of the Great Summoning by people who were discontent with the current strategy employed by the Order and humanity as a whole. They wanted to devote all of society in its entirety to the war effort against the Demon Lord, which sounds logical on the surface of it, but the reality of the Blighted Lands is not so simply solved as sending more people at the problem.”

  “But the actual plan?” Lucas asked.

  “If you can even call that a plan,” Florence grumbled.

  “I got the impression Ser Nial didn’t know most of it,” Valerie admitted. “He was, as he said, a low-level grunt.”

  Lucas sighed. “Yeah.”

  They hadn’t needed to torture the man, in the end. Lucas didn’t know what had been going through Nial’s head, but he’d been much more willing to answer questions after Lucas’ little speech. Perhaps too willing. He'd sometimes been in such a rush to speak, it was like his words were getting jumbled up and tripping over themselves. It had seemed like they needed to stop him every other sentence to clarify what the hell he was saying.

  First, he’d told them of the group’s immediate goals.

  “The most important thing,” he’d said with a trembling voice, any sense of bravado having vanished, “is getting people to see the… uh, the truth as we saw it. Not just recruiting, but for stirring people up, getting them thinking about the Order and how ineffective they are. I weren’t lying, earlier. My job’s only to talk and hope people listen. I ain’t a warrior. Or an assassin. Not even bonded with any of the classes. I can just talk loud. But that was enough for now. The goal is to push the people of Dawnguard and beyond to take our side when things get messy.” He’d paused, swallowed. “Like, say, if a skycloak gets ambushed down a dark alley. Maybe in that situation we’d want people thinking about the things we’ve been saying, and they might decide to look the other way, forget to call for help, y’know? Maybe some of them would even join in on our guys’ side.”

  “Are there any specific plans for ambushes?” Valerie had asked. Lucas had been staring at Nial, but he’d heard the dark undertone in Valerie’s voice, and knew what Nial had likely been seeing in her visage just from the way the man reared back like a beast had just appeared in the dark underground room.

  “I don’t know the specifics,” he’d cried. Then he’d flinched back further, practically falling from his chair. “I just know general locations. Areas we went people more stirred up, more angry.”

  Valerie had extracted those locations from him. Many of the names were familiar only as terms Lucas had heard in lessons, while others were new, but he assumed Valerie and Florence knew them all.

  After that was done, and Nial had regained some of his composure, he had spoke of how he’d been recruited to New Dawn.

  “Well, that’s the thing. I was doing it for free, before. Getting too deep in my cups and going on all these rants about the shit that dissatisfied me about the world. Order included. Someone heard me in the tavern one night, a man called Harald, and he had some opinions of his own, and they brought all my thoughts together. They sounded right.” Nial briefly regained his backbone then. He’d looked Lucas in the eye. “I still do believe it, you know. That we’d be better off fighting our own war, all of us together. An army of millions.”

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  It took a bit longer to get a semi-coherent picture of New Dawn’s organisation, not least because Nial wasn’t clear on it himself.

  “A guy like me don’t need to know everything. I showed up to a few meetings and heard a few names: Harald who recruited me, of course. Then there’s Malle, Tym, and Ella, who seemed to be the big shots. Wands, I reckon. Wore those special robes with the hoods that hide half their faces. They’re who Harald reported to, at least, and I figure there were a bunch of others like him, recruiting. People he talked to like they were equals rather than subordinates. Mykael, Lorean, Domar, Zere, and a load more. The group had resources, plenty of coin to go around and weapons for people who do that sort of thing. I know a guy who they gave a sword to bond with.

  “And obviously, there’s the guys you saw with me back at the tavern. All New Dawn guys. Fighters, the lot. There to make sure everyone knew I wasn’t some drunk fool to be ignored, but just one among many who thought that way. Good men, all of them. I’d call them friends. If you can spare anyone from New Dawn, it should be them.”

  Then, Nial had largely shifted into speculation, narrating how he imagined it all would have gone, in his perfect world.

  “Once we’d bashed a few heads in, and the people had taken our side, the Order would have had to see that the will of Dawnguard and Mornlunn’s populace were against them, and stepped down. Maybe they even would have brought Lady Claire to us in order to spare themselves. We would have allowed them to redeem themselves, because every Aerthian should have a right to take up arms in defence of our world, and the fact is they know the Blight and how to fight it. They would’a trained us all, armed everyone to go after the demons. The Order has been holding the lines with, what? A hundred thousand warriors, is it? That’s what they say, isn't it? Imagine how we’d do with millions. Tens of millions. The Demon Lord wouldn’t stand a chance, as long as Aerth stood up on its own two feet and took the future into its own hands.”

  Valerie had slapped him then, and something had flown from his mouth and clinked on the stone floor. Closer inspection revealed a broken tooth. She’d had to retreat to the other side of the room after that, barely able to even look at the man without descending into rage. Lucas had done his best with lunar mana, but she was as agitated as he’d ever seen her.

  They’d only gotten a bit more useful information from Nial after that. Hints at other cells working in other places. Speculation about potential ambushes. Key figures the group had been discussing in their meetings, such as the Masters of the Order, Stewards, Generals, Captains, and other prominent individuals they suspected would be too loyal to back down. Florence and Valerie’s names were both known to the man, but he hadn’t been able to say whether they were targets for ambush.

  Finally, Nial had spoken about himself. Lucas wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was a play for sympathy, a last desperate attempt from a man who was facing his own end and held out some vain hope he could hold it off if he just found the right combination of words.

  “I’m descended from Aeyemi refugees,” he’d said, despondent eyes fixed on the ground beneath his feet. “My homeland was the first to be overrun, a hundred years ago. Our people never fit in anywhere because of it. Stupid fucking superstitions. Whether it’s idiots thinking we caused the Blight directly, paranoid bastards calling us agents of the Demon Lord, or uneducated peasants who reckon the current state of the world is a punishment for some ancient crime Aeyem committed, folk don’t trust us. That’s why I try to hide it. Perfect fucking Mornish accent. No one knows I’m an Aeyemi descendant unless I tell them, and I sure as the five hells don’t tell anyone that.”

  “And how did you come to hate the Order because of that?” Lucas had asked, morbidly curious. “I met a woman who hated us because we were too late to save her home. But your ancestral home was literally the first. Seems unreasonable to resent the Order for failing to prevent a disaster it had no reason to know was coming.”

  “I saw skycloaks every day, strutting around like they own the place, like they’re a gift to the world because they happen to work for one of the great heroes. Our people should have the chance to forge our own destiny, and fight for our world in the way we see fit, not how some summoned hero from another world tells us is the best way.” His eyes had flicked to Valerie, probably sensing he wasn’t winning sympathy here, then back to Lucas. He looked pleading. “All my life, I’ve had people look at me like I’m a fucking soldier for the Demon Lord himself as soon as I opened my mouth and they heard my accent, before I learned to speak all proper Mornish. I just want to prove I’m human. I’m a man of Aerth. That’s all it is.”

  It wasn’t a bad play, admittedly. A part of Lucas had wanted to give him clemency, to trust that the man would be able to give his word and go hide out without giving away any of Lucas’ secrets. But he just couldn’t take that chance. Two people had already died for his secret, and he’d been a lot more attached to them at the time than this man. He couldn’t let Jyn and Rena’s deaths be for nothing.

  But then came a problem, of sorts.

  When they’d gotten all they could out of the man, Valerie had summoned her moonlight blade. He’d tried to scramble away, but Florence was faster, grabbing him by the shoulders and holding him in place.

  Lucas’ stomach had squirmed, and at first he’d had the impulse to look away, just as he had when Valerie had been roughing him up. But then something had snapped again, and it was like acid was pouring down his throat and burning his lungs. A burning had spread through him, but somehow it wasn’t painful.

  Jam had stirred in his chest, the alert monster cutting its attention to its immediate surroundings and acknowledging Lucas’ actions for the first time since the forces from Harwyck had returned. Lucas had stepped up to Valerie and grabbed her arm. She’d turned to him then with a look of deep irritation which she quickly wiped away, and he knew she’d been expecting him to order that they spare the man.

  He had given her an order. But not the one she’d anticipated.

  “Give me your sword,” he’d commanded her. “And show me how to do this in the least painful way possible.”

  They’d both tried to argue against it, clearly anticipating the stress it would put on him, but he’d been adamant.

  If someone was going to die to keep his secret safe, he wasn’t going to take the cowardly way of letting someone else do the dirty work. People were going to lose their lives at his command and his hand, and he needed to start somewhere.

  Now, staring at the spot in the floor where Valerie had dumped Nial’s lifeless body, he wondered about that decision. His hands still shook. He still felt like he was sucking in every breath through a straw. He’d be surprised if the rattling sound the man had made would ever stop echoing in his head. It had been too simple, too easy. The sword had plunged straight through Nial’s chest like the ribs didn’t even exist. Nial’s eyes had been wide, and his mouth had been moving, desperate pleas tumbling out and falling on deaf ears.

  And when it was done, the man’s soul—or whatever the hell that energy was—had risen from his body like a ghost and made a beeline right for Lucas’ chest. The familiar feeling of power had surged through him, with Jam drinking his own fill. There’d been a dichotomy, then, between the physical and the mental. How could one part of him feel so good while the other was screaming?

  Lucas closed his eyes, took another breath. “We offer mercy where we can,” he said. “If we can spare people, we should. But we give them only one chance.”

  “Agreed,” Florence said.

  “We will offer no recourse to anyone who attacks us first,” Valerie said.

  “Of course not,” Lucas said. “If they leave us with no other choice, then that’s it. We kill them. These New Dawn people… I can’t imagine any of them will be convinced, if they’re like Ser Nial. We’re probably going to see a lot more violence.”

  “No one likes taking a life,” Valerie said.

  “No one sane, anyway,” Florence agreed. “It’s good that you feel this way about it. But you mustn’t let it linger. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that men who want to kill you will stand in your way, and the only way to move them aside will be to kill them.”

  “Yeah,” Lucas said, feeling like the weight of the world was on his shoulders. “That’s why I asked you to let me do it. I hoped it would… I don’t know, help me desensitise. I didn’t want my first kill to be in the heat of the moment, something that might distract me at a critical time like in the midst of a battle.”

  “It was brave of you to do so,” Florence said, repeating her earlier compliment.

  “Doesn’t feel like it,” Lucas said. He shook his head. “But I guess I’ll have more chances to learn to feel courageous for killing someone in the near future. We have some traps to spring.”

  Discord :)