.The Cathedral of the Divine Path sat at the end of a long street that was too clean for the rest of Prence City. The kind of clean that gets maintained deliberately, which is its own kind of statement.
Naxys walked through the front entrance without pausing.
She had collected Anat and Nanna from where they were hiding or trying to hide, which in Nanna's case had involved a bush that was too small.
Come with me. The golden flames were gone by then but something in her bearing made the instruction feel less like a request than a fact about what was going to happen next.
They followed.
The nuns and priests inside the cathedral tracked their entrance the way still water tracks a stone dropped into it, a ripple of attention moving outward from Naxys as she passed, faces turning, expressions settling into careful neutrality, hiding lust and hostility.
Naxys didn't acknowledge any of it.
She moved through the cathedral with the certainty of someone who had memorized a floor plan she had no business having and stopped at a door near the back. Opened it without knocking.
Marilyn looked up from her desk.
She was surrounded by open texts, three of them stacked at different angles, a fourth open flat with notes pressed against the margin in handwriting too small to read from the doorway. She looked at Naxys.
Then at the unconscious figure across her shoulder. Then back at Naxys.
Naxys crossed the room and deposited Andreas onto Marilyn's bed with the efficiency of someone returning a borrowed item.
His arm settled. His head tilted. He looked extraordinarily peaceful for someone with no detectable heartbeat.
"Miss Naxys." Marilyn's voice was even.
"Why did you bring him here."
"To be protected." Naxys straightened and looked at her. "It doesn't matter whether anyone here can kill him or not. He'll come back either way." A brief pause. "He spoke to Dang before I left. He'll return when that's finished."
Marilyn looked at Andreas for a moment with an expression that was doing several things at once.
Naxys left without further explanation, pulling the door most of the way closed behind her.
The three of them stood in the sudden quiet of the room. Anat looked at Andreas. Looked at Nanna. Looked at the window, which faced approximately the direction she wanted to be going.
"Nanna."
"Mm."
"Can you go home."
Nanna considered this with the gravity it deserved. "My home is close from here."
"Great."
Anat asked for the glass box Nannawas holding.
She held out five wands, opened her book and placed them in between the pages and closed it.
She gave the three 6 wands in the glass box, back to Nanna.
"Go. We'll probably meet again soon."
"Probably." Nanna's mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile. "With my luck."
"With your luck."
Nanna left through the door.
Anat stood in the middle of Marilyn's room.
Marilyn had returned to her desk but wasn't reading. She was looking at Andreas with pity.
"Will you stop me," she asked Anat.
Nanna thought about it. "My position is the same as Naxys." She looked at Andreas.
"But if he survives all of this and becomes your enemy..." she didn't finish the sentence because the end of it was obvious.
"Then you will too."
"Then I will too."
Marilyn absorbed this. "Why."
Anat didn't answer immediately. She looked at Andreas for a long moment, at the complete stillness of him, the tremor still faintly present behind his eyelids, the way he managed to look like someone in the middle of a thought even while unconscious.
Forty minutes later, in one of cathedral's hallways.
Marilyn looked up.
Kihoko was wearing a charcoal business suit that had started the day as something expensive and precise and had since acquired blood and dirt.
"Marilyn." She bowed politely.
Two more figures appeared in the doorway behind her, Katlego and Marcel, also bearing dirty evidence of their journey.
" such a decent morning isn't it?" she asked.
"It okay." Marilyn said.
"Did you find Aldric yet."
"No."
"Hmmm."
The words landed flatly.
"You've been going back and forth since yesterday. That must be exhausting."She paused and considered her words carefully. "Your hours could be extended if you wanted. The reward would reflect that. The going back and forth, must be."
"Tiring," Kihoko said in a mocking tone "But I'm not here to help you."
Marilyn waited.
"I want to see Aldric." She said it simply, the way you state the terms of something that isn't up for negotiation. "When I find him I'll follow whatever he decides."
"..."
"I'd like to show you something," Marilyn said.
Kihoko looked at her and something in her expression shifted into a one that was almost warm. "Sure." The corner of her mouth moved. "I like surprises."
Behind Kihoko, Katlego glanced sideways at Marcel.
Marcel was looking at a fixed point somewhere between Kihoko and the middle distance with the expression of someone doing considerable internal work to keep their face from smiling.
His expression was tense and full of silent rage.
Katlego looked away and decided to say nothing.
***
The first thing Andreas registered was the specific cold of air against skin that should have fabric between them. His eyes opened on a ceiling that was stone and grey and hung with things he didn't want to look at directly. His arms were behind him. The chair beneath him had a hole in it in the precise location that communicated, without ambiguity, exactly what category of situation this was.
He looked down.
Then he looked around the room and saw various torture devices.
to his left someone was screaming.
Somewhere to his right something metal moved against another metal surface.
Andreas's heat felt crushed as fear overwhelmed him.
The fear arrived the way it does when the body processes information faster than the mind, before he had finished understanding what he was looking at.
He looked at the room, again. Searching for danger.
Stone walls. Drains in the floor for reasons he identified and immediately wished he hadn't. Instruments on a far table arranged with the particular care of someone who took their work seriously. Two figures in the middle distance who had not yet noticed he was awake. The screaming continuing from behind a door to his left that was not fully closed.
Andreas breathed heavily.
The temperature dropped and it simply became very cold in the room all at once, the kind of cold that has no natural business existing at that speed, frost moving across the stone floor outward from the chair in every direction simultaneously, climbing the walls in lines that branched like something alive, and the two figures who had not noticed him turned at the sudden change in the air and then they were on the floor.
They stopped being properly supported, the cold reaching into the specific systems that keep a body vertical and taking something out of them, and they went down the way poorly assembled statues go down.
The screaming stopped.
Andreas sat in the silence he had made and looked at the frost on the floor and breathed.
The chair had a hole in it.
He looked at the ceiling again.
"..."
"Okay," he said, to no one. His voice came out smaller than he intended and he didn't try again immediately.
He sat in the frozen room, naked, tied to a chair with a hole in it, surrounded by people crumbled on the floor like collapsed architecture, and the frost continued spreading quietly outward and the silence continued and Andreas continued looking at the ceiling and told himselfto calm down.