Chapter 41
Symond
Symond watched vapor curl from a cracked alchemical lamp across the narrow alley, dissipating into the hazy Aszona twilight.
The fog mixed with the residue of spent potions creating weird patterns if you stared long enough.
Like faces, maybe, or memories trying to take shape.
Not that he cared much about shapes or memories these days.
"Are you smiling?" Violette asked. Her eyes were wild, bewildered, like she’d never thought he was even capable of the act.
"Am I?" Symond touched his face, found his lips curved upward. "Huh. Guess I am."
The mercenaries trudged ahead of them, four figures in black leather with three painted tangerine yellow stripes along their backs, daggers and potion pouches hanging from their belts.
Their boots scuffed against the worn cobblestone streets, echoing off the crumbling faded paint facades that lined this poorer quarter of Aszona.
Symond found the rhythm almost musical. Scuff-step, scuff-step, scuff-step.
"Why?" Violette said, studying him with the same intensity she'd used when sharpening her daggers. "Something changed overnight. Yesterday you were... well, you. Today you're..." she gestured vaguely at his face, his posture, his everything.
"Just feeling better," Symond offered, still watching the vapor curl through the dim alley. "Amazing what a good night's sleep can do."
One of the mercenaries, a woman with a face like a clenched fist and fingertips stained purple from handling unstable compounds, turned back to glare at them. "Keep it down," she hissed. "Rylok has ears everywhere in these streets."
"Does he?" Symond mused. "Actual ears? Or just potion traps? Because if it's actual ears, that's pretty impressive alchemy. Little disembodied ears crawling up walls and hiding in shadows."
The mercenary—whose name he hadn't bothered to learn despite Violette's introductions earlier—stared at him like he'd grown a second head, then turned away with a disgusted grunt.
Violette grabbed his arm, fingers digging in. "What is wrong with you? This isn't some joke. Rylok betrayed the Hive. You said you wanted another chance to prove you can be more than an enchanter. Prove it. Take this seriously."
She searched his face, the concern in her eyes genuine. He knew that look—she'd worn it the day she'd found him, half-starved and full of rage, picking fights in the Lower Market with anyone who looked at him wrong. "The anger that drove you," she whispered, "what happened to it?"
Something flickered in the back of Symond's mind, not a memory exactly, but the shadow where one should be.
The Institute had taught him to follow orders without question, that much he remembered allowing himself to keep—the useful parts, the survival instincts, without all the messy details of how he'd learned them.
"I'm fine," he said, though he felt nothing about Rylok’s betrayal. Who even was he?
The lead mercenary held up a fist, and the group stopped moving.
Ahead lay a narrow townhouse wedged between a perfumer's shop and a dilapidated counting house.
The building's upper stories were fashioned in the ornate Tudor style of the rising merchant class, with carved window frames and delicate ironwork.
A warm amber glow filtered through the stained glass windows, throwing strange patterns onto the wet cobblestones.
"That's his safe house," the mercenary whispered. "Savaric, go around back. Dorn and Elise, take the sides. Watch for trigger-vials. We go in fast and hard."
"Ready?" Violette asked him, her eyes searching his face for.
.. something. Recognition, maybe. Attachment to this mission they were on.
The rage she'd been channeling since she met him, transforming his raw fury into something controlled and precise.
She had no idea it was gone now, bottled and stored, never to be reopened.
"Sure," Symond said with a shrug. "Let's go catch the betrayer. I'll try to look appropriately vengeful."
As they moved toward the townhouse, keeping to the shadows between pools of alchemical lamplight, Symond felt strangely detached, like he was watching himself from above.
Part of him knew this should be important—Violette had been training him for moments like this.
But he'd joined the Hive for reasons tied to the Institute, reasons that now existed only as blank spaces in his memory.
The mercenaries kicked in the door with a splintering crack, vials of combat elixirs already uncorked in their hands.
Symond followed, dagger raised, feeling like an actor who'd wandered onto the wrong stage.
Inside, a man in a fine waistcoat sat at a desk covered in manuscripts and glowing alchemical instruments, resigned and unsurprised.
"Ah," the man—Rylok, presumably—said softly. "The Hive sends its little worker bees."
The mercenaries rushed forward, pinning Rylok against his desk. Papers scattered, and a small glass vial tumbled to the floor, its contents emitting a faint purple luminescence even as the liquid seeped between the floorboards.
The purple liquid began to smoke, tendrils of violet vapor curling upward like curious fingers.
Funny how nobody but him seemed to notice it at first. People get so caught up in the big dramatic moments—the captured traitor, the triumphant mercenaries—that they miss the little details.
Like poison turning to gas. Like a man who isn't struggling nearly enough for someone who's been caught.
"Hm," Symond said to nobody in particular. "That's probably not good."
The first mercenary dropped to her knees, eyes unfocused, hands clawing at her throat. The others followed in rapid succession, stumbling, vision swimming as the purple haze climbed higher. Symond felt his own thoughts begin to wander, edges of the room blurring.
"Violette," he managed, finding her among the confusion. "Maybe step back from the—"
The windows shattered inward, and suddenly the room was full of bodies. Men and women in dark clothes, faces covered with masks, daggers already wet with something green and caustic that sizzled in the air. Not good at all.
"Perfect timing," Rylok said pleasantly, straightening his waistcoat as the mercenaries holding him slumped to the floor. He plucked a vial from his pocket and tossed it to one of the newcomers. "Make sure they stay confused. I want them aware enough to feel everything."
Symond blinked slowly, fighting the fog in his mind.
Somewhere to his left, Violette had fallen against a bookcase, her movements sluggish as she tried to uncork a vial at her belt.
The lead mercenary was already down, a dagger buried in his throat, blood spreading across the ornate carpet in a pattern that reminded Symond of spilled wine at a boring party.
One of Rylok's masked associates approached Symond, blade extended.
Symond laughed—couldn't help it, really.
Death approaching and here he was, feeling nothing much at all.
Instincts kicked in somewhere beneath the fog, a place the purple vapors couldn't quite reach.
A place the alchemical forgetting hadn't quite erased.
The attacker lunged, and Symond moved with the cool mechanics of muscle memory. He sidestepped, grabbed the outstretched arm, and redirected the blade into its owner's gut. Twist, pull. Simple. Like stirring tea.
The room had descended into chaos. Mercenaries fought through their confusion, some more successfully than others.
Across the room, the Hive woman with the purple-stained fingers hurled a vial that exploded into a corrosive green flame where it struck, consuming two of Rylok's people instantly.
Their screams were surprisingly melodic, like off-key singing.
Violette had managed to drink something from her belt, her movements suddenly fluid again as she drove her dagger into a masked attacker's eye. Brutal, but efficient. He'd always admired that about her.
"Symond!" she shouted. "The door!"
He turned to see Rylok slipping out through a hidden passage behind a bookcase. Probably should stop him, he supposed. That seemed to be the point of this whole excursion, after all.
Another attacker came at him, this one wielding twin blades dripping with something that smelled of almonds and death.
Symond ducked under the first swipe, feeling the air above his head sizzle.
The second blade caught his sleeve, the fabric dissolving instantly along with a thin layer of skin beneath.
Interesting sensation, pain. Remote, like something happening to someone else.
"That stings," he observed, driving his own blade up under the attacker's ribs. "Is that acid? Seems excessive."
The man collapsed, gurgling, as Symond stepped over him toward the bookcase. Behind him, someone screamed in a way that suggested they wouldn't be getting up again. One of theirs or one of Rylok's? Hard to tell, and harder to care.
The fog was thinning as fresh air poured in through the broken windows, but bodies littered the floor.
The woman with purple fingers lay motionless by the desk, half her face melted away.
The lead mercenary stared at the ceiling, a look of mild surprise frozen on his features, a dagger still protruding from his throat.
Two of Rylok's masked allies had been reduced to smoking husks by whatever had been in that green vial.
Symond reached the hidden door just as Violette appeared at his side, blood splattered across her face like freckles.
"Are you hit?" she demanded, eyes scanning him.
"Just a sleeve," he replied, gesturing to the dissolved fabric and the red welt beneath. "Barely counts."
"Four of ours dead," she spat. "That bastard knew we were coming."
Symond followed Violette through the narrow passage behind the bookcase, the stone walls slick with dampness that smelled vaguely of sulfur and something else he couldn't place—maybe regret, if regret had a smell. Probably didn't.
The passageway curved downward in a lazy spiral, like a drunk snake trying to remember how to slither properly.
"Stay close," Violette whispered. "And for the love of whatever you believe in, try to act like you care about what we're doing."
"I'm here, aren't I?" Symond replied, absently trailing his fingers along the wall as they descended.
The stone felt warm in places, cool in others.
Interesting how temperature worked in confined spaces.
"Following you down a damp hole to catch a man who apparently did something terrible to people I met yesterday. Seems like commitment to me."
Violette shot him a look that might have hurt if he still remembered how to feel properly wounded. Her eyes had that mix of disappointment and confusion he was starting to get used to—like she was trying to read a familiar book only to find all the pages had been rewritten in Al’teran.
The passage leveled out, opening into what looked like an old wine cellar that had been repurposed into a living space of sorts.
Wooden crates served as makeshift furniture, and alchemical lamps cast a soft amber glow over everything, lengthening shadows into strange, distorted shapes that danced across the floor.
Symond thought it looked rather cozy, in a desperate-fugitive sort of way.
Violette held up her hand, signaling him to stop.
They pressed themselves against the wall, just outside the cellar's entrance.
Symond peered around the corner, curiosity getting the better of his caution.
Rylok was hurriedly stuffing items into a leather satchel—vials wrapped in cloth, papers, what looked like a journal bound in red leather.
There was a large metal grate on the back wall leading into a dark tunnel beyond. His escape route, no doubt.
“He’s gonna run. We need to stop him now,” Symond whispered to Violette.
“No, we should follow him, see where that tunnel leads.”
But Symond was already moving, stepping into the cellar with his dagger drawn. Funny how bodies knew what to do sometimes, even when minds didn't particularly care about the reasons.