(THOB) Chapter 133: Lord Emelloi Varnagris (Patreon)

Ezril dropped ten feet and landed quietly on his feet on the other side of the stone fence. But somehow, it still managed to feel as if he disturbed the serenity of the night. He turned his head both sides before moving on and unto the vast expanse of manila grass between him and the mansion he sought to invade. Certain no one was watching, he crossed it in three steps.

At the site of the door, he changed his plan. Initially, his intent was to pick its lock. Not all the skills learned in the underbelly were lost to him. Actually, none of them ever left him. But this door was fashioned from sturdy oak, and even if he did pick its advanced lock, which would take him longer than he needed, he knew it was double bolted from within. No. This wasn’t a door to be picked, it was a door to be rammed. Sure, skilled thieves could have easily found their way into it without breaching the silence, but as good as he was, he wouldn’t hesitate to admit he wasn’t one of those.

He snuck around the house, ensuring none of the stationed guards saw him. He found a window at one of the upper floors a moment sooner and went to work. Climbing the house was an easier feat than scaling the compound’s walls, and soon, he dangled from the ledge of the window. Easily, he took out a needle and attacked the lock with a calculated calm. Most people never remembered to lock their bathroom windows over ten feet above ground level. The false sense of security was borne from the thought that no one would have the discipline to climb so high just to get in. They were wrong. The fact that these people locked theirs said a few things about them. In a few heartbeats he heard a mild click and pushed the window. It opened without the creaking he expected and he pulled himself in quickly, growling against the pain in his bruised rib. The pain was a lesson never to let his guard when faced with a mountain of a man, be him Hallowed or not. Rich people, he thought as he landed on his feet, always keeping everything topnotch.

The window opened into the bathroom, and he held himself back from offering a prayer of thanks to Truth that it wasn’t into one of the rooms.

He pulled the door open soundlessly and found his way into the hallway. It was dark and unlit, and anyone else would have needed caution to traverse it. A door on his right revealed an empty room, and he went on, not bothering to close it. If tonight was successful, then there would be no need to ensure things remained the way he met them; the owner would know he’d been here. It had always been the plan.

The hood of his cassock covered his face, blindsiding him on both sides. There was only forward, so he moved. Down the stairs and into the next hallway, he opened another door. This room had two occupants hidden beneath the sheets of the bed gone in a peaceful slumber. None of them was his target so he moved on.

He found his aim behind the third door he opened. Both of them slept soundly. Needing nothing from a sleeping person, he tapped his Sunder against the door’s wedge, letting out a mild clang, and a body stirred. This was fine by him. He didn’t need both people awake. One of them would suffice.

He struck the wedge mildly again and the body stirred more. When it moved to rise, he stepped out of sight. Gently, he made his way for the stairs, leaving a trail of mild sounds behind him to be followed. As he climbed the stairs further down, it failed to creak under his weight as had the one before it and he was forced to tap metal to wooden rails. Rich people, he thought a second time, always keeping things topnotch. A creaking flight of stairs was always an unorthodox security measure.

Seated on one of the comfortable chairs in the living room he waited for his host.

When he’d left the cathedral he’d gone straight to moonshine, a brothel northwest of the city, close to the seminary. It was an open secret that it was run by the Venin guild using girls with no place else to go. He had no doubt there would be useful information there. News traveled fast, and within five days there was no way word of what the guild had done wouldn’t have reached the ears of those who ran its most lucrative establishments in the realm’s capital. All he had to go on as proof they were behind Lenaria’s disappearance was her word against them. It was more than sufficient.

He’d stormed the place, his cassock marking him as a priest but his face hidden by its hood. Pandemonium broke out, and in a matter of time every patron with an ability to walk rushed out, breaches dangling as they struggled to fasten them.

The employees had refused to talk. At first he’d been attacked, but having no patience for decorum, he’d spilled blood just as quickly as they came, asking for where he could find the priestess from no one. The question simply tossed to everyone. It wasn’t hard to spot the person he was certain would tell him what he needed. He was a corpulent man with rings on every stubby finger his hands could carry, which was all of them, and a purple snake tattoo coiled around his wrist. There’d been a terror in his eyes, and though he held his silence even when the question was directed at him from a distance, somehow, depending on the men he paid, he maintained his silence.

Ezril had been forced to spill more blood before the man cried for peace on the agreement that he would talk. Apparently, the establishment was worth more than his silence.

From what he gathered from the fat employer, the women had never been held atGreen Horn. The city had simply been a resting point where the merchandise—as he called them—were to change hands. The man claimed the last place he’d heard was in some tavern out in Amnifat named The Laggermouth. Another Venin establishment.

Before Ezril left, he killed every person with a purple snake tattoo in the building including the man, then set the building ablaze.

Amnifat was a three-day journey from the capital, but on aAtle wolf he covered it in a day. The roads between cities were mostly forests and planes, and he crossed them on wolf-back. And for every city he had no intentions of stopping at, he went around.

At Amnifat, he left Shade outside the city. Like most cities of the realm, it was walled off on all sides, leaving only two entrances which also served as exits. Like Ardin, it had stone roads and stone buildings fashioned from bricks. But likeGreen Horn, it was easy to notice its slums.

The Laggermouth was a finer establishment than moonshine. And he’d almost felt remorse for what he’d had to do to the place. Still, one thing was more important than all. As he had the moonshine, a hooded priest wreaked havoc and scared away customers before proceeding to shedding blood, finding who was in charge, gaining information, shedding what blood was left, and torching the place.

Amnifat proved to hold him a while, and the city was in chaos as he moved from fine establishment to finer establishment, killing and burning as information led him. He’d gone through three cities leaving chaos in his wake before he held anything truly tangible.

It seemed the realm had an underworld and the Venin guild held sway over it, and within this underworld he heard whispers of a name too many times to be left alone. Tired of running around, he went after the name.

And now, he was in its house.

But above everything he had seen and done in the week since he left his brothers, only one thing held him in a shock almost strong enough to disrupt his quest. A picture he’d seen not long after entering Amnifat. A picture he’d seen in Varfnot, Tarashit, and Wardi. A picture he stared at now, as his host descended the stares with a lit lantern in hand, casting light across a once black room and giving it a warm glow.

There was a shocked gasp, then a silence as she saw his face unSundered from the hood when he sat down.

“Father Ezril.”

He ignored the woman’s motherly voice and continued to study the poster on the wall while keeping her within his peripheral view. It was an obituary poster. One inviting the entire realm to the casting of the body of a noble named Lord Emelloi Varnagris the third to the flame. The man had died over two months ago. The death on the poster put the man’s death at around the time he was in the Arlyn forest.

But by all he was worth, the face belonged to Cyrinth. The old man had died nearly two weeks before the last time they met. Which meant Cyrinth was royalty by birth?

“Who is he?” he asked the woman, pointing at the poster.

“Oh, I keep telling little Holly to stop putting it back up, but she never listens,” she said in a soft voice, crossing the threshold to tear the poster from the wall. It came away smoothly. “You know you didn’t have to break into the house, dear child,” she added, taking a sit opposite him and setting the lamp on the wide miniature table between them, casting them both in its warmth. “You could have used the front door. You’re always welcome within these walls. Urden would want that I treat you as I would him. And we were quite close.”

Ezril shrugged away the assurance. “What kind of lady leaves the safety of her room to confront a possible intrusion in the middle of the night when her husband is asleep next to her?” he asked Lady Fionis Nirlu, daughter of Lord EdaVi Antari and sister to Urden Antari, defrocked priest of the seminary.

Fionis shrugged. “A woman who can handle herself.”

Ezril had no doubt of that but betrayed nothing with his face. “Tell me about the dead noble.”

Fionis shot him a look as a mother would a disrespectful child, but she answered him. “Lord Emelloi Varnagris the third,” she said. “He was the head of the richest merchant family in the realm and the king’s advisor on matters of trade. Despite the position he held, he was prone to excessive travels in his youth which he continued to indulge in his old age, which left his eldest son to handle the affairs of his trade and consultations with the king. He would always return when commanded to, but a message can only travel so fast, and its recipient could only return so quickly. His son sufficed, so in time the king only troubled him when the matter seemed too grave. However, that was unnecessary, because the old man always had a way of returning to the realm just before things got grave. By all accounts an enigmatic man. I wish I could’ve met him.”

There was a longing in her voice at the end.

“So our family didn’t know him?”

“Oh, no. Not at all. I believe father only met him a handful of times, and that was in recent years, perhaps the last decade, or even half that.”

“So you don’t know if he had any other names or monikers he went by.”

“Besides the dead merchant? No.”

Ezril’s brows furrowed. “The dead merchant?”

“Yes.” She chuckled. “Funniest thing really. Apparently, after he died, and while the morticians were preparing him for his burning, it was said that he got up one night and left, only to return days later. At least these were the claims of the mortician in charge of him at the time. People twisted a tale of how he loved to travel so much that even in death he continued. It was why he was given to the fire so long after his passing.” Then she dismissed the notion with a flick of her wrist. “If you ask me it’s just a lie spun by the morgue for losing a body. It’s a good thing they found it though.”

Her story made sense in a nonsensical way. If things were true, then it explained the smell during the time Cyrinth visited him, as well as the sluggishness and strain. But not how swiftly he moved when we trained, Ezril argued. Whatever it was, one thing was certain: Cyrinth had already been dead when he visited.

Somehow, he felt he should be in mourning, but he had already accepted the man’s death long ago.

He had already mourned.

His contemplation must have shown on his face because Urden’s sister spoke again. “Did you know him?”

“I’m not sure.”

A silence settled between them but with no interest in it, Fionis broke it.

“Now,” she crossed a leg over the other, “is this the reason you’ve broken into my house in the dead of night instead of using the front gate?”

“No,” he answered. “I’m here about the Venin guild.”

It came and went in a blink, but he’d caught it. The recognition and realization in her eyes had been unmistakable, the disturbance in her near transparent wisps, unsettled.

“They have something of mine,” he continued. “Something I would like back.”

Fionis uncrossed her leg, crossed them in reverse, then leaned forward. “You’re the priest that’s been causing them so much trouble.”

It wasn’t a question.

“I am.”

“And what of yours have they taken?”

Ezril didn’t move. “A priestess and a Nun.”

Fionis chuckled slightly louder than the last, a hand on her lips. “It seems you know nothing, boy,” she shook her head and leaned back, whatever nervousness he’d seen with the realization, gone as quickly as the expression, and her wisps settled into a calm. “These are greater matters than you,” she continued. “I advise you return to the seminary and fight this coming war. These things of yours are as good as gone.”

Ezril couldn’t disagree with one thing. The Lady sitting before him knew vastly more about the situation than he did. In this game, she was far above him. He needed her if he was going to move forward quickly, if not he’d dally killing useless drones. If her name was grand enough to be whispered of so much, then she definitely knew enough to help him.

“You love your brother dearly, correct, Aunt Fionis?” he said.

“Yes,” she stretched the word, skeptical.

“Then how about rather than offering me the hospitality of your home as an extension of that love, you point me in a direction?”

She sighed. Evidently, he wasn’t listening to her. “What part of gone do you not understand?”

“That shouldn’t bother you,” he bit back, almost losing his temper. Killing her would be pointless, and despite how casually she regarded him, he didn’t doubt he could. At best it would be tasking. He’d killed enough Hallowed and Tainted in one week than he cared to count and still bore the bruises from some of his encounters. So, capping his rising anger, he shoved it back into its recesses and added, “Just point me in the direction. Please.”

She sighed again in acquiescence, then said, “Heldrag.”

He got up from his chair, wincing from the bruise in his side, and made his way to the door. Indeed, it was bolted doubly on the inside. He almost smiled.

“Do you need help with that?” Fionis called from behind him.

Unsure if she was speaking of the door or his injury—if only she knew how many his cassock covered—he shook his head and began unlocking the door. The night’s air spilling into the house, he breathed it in and bit back a pained retort. He might have to get the rib checked.

“I’ve seen the carnage you’ve wrought, Ezril,” Fionis spoke again from behind him. “I fear to ask, but I feel it is my duty to…” She inhaled, and let out a nervous breath. “Are my guards dead?”

You’ve seen it? he noted but said, “No.”

Then he left, veiled by the night from the guards’ eyes, just as he’d entered.