Chapter 2 - The Congregation

The empty air above the altar spoke.

“Closer.”

I felt the word in my teeth.

Every candle in the chamber bent toward the same point. Flames stretched thin and blue. Smoke twisted upward in one dark rope, and the space around it puckered like skin around a blade.

The cultists stopped mangling their chant.

For half a breath, the entire congregation stared.

A heartbeat later, thirty comfortable citizens of Ashbourne lost their damned minds.

Some fell to their knees. One woman shrieked with joy. The man in spectacles fumbled his prayer card, stepped on it, and crawled under the people behind him trying to get it back. A fat cultist near the outer circle lifted both arms and shouted, “It heard us!”

The voice pressed through the chamber again.

“Closer.”

Blood jumped in the channels.

It rose in round, wobbling beads, thousands of them hanging above the floor. The clots came too. Pale little scraps lifted from the grooves and drifted toward the altar while the attendants stared at their spoons.

My stomach rolled hard enough to threaten breakfast, lunch, and several meals I hadn’t eaten yet.

Felix caught my wrist.

“Samuel.”

I knew. The knife hung above the wine merchant’s chest. The gaunt leader was speaking again, forcing each word through a grin that showed too much gum. Whatever waited behind that pucker in the air wanted the blood. Everyone in the room wanted to see what happened next, except the man strapped to the altar and the two people who had arrived with enough sense to ruin it.

That made it possibly three, if the Tome ever acted like itself again.

Its cover lay still against my back. The eye stayed shut, and for once it wasn’t screaming ancient obscenities into my shirt.

That frightened me more than the floating blood.

Felix leaned close. “We need to get to the inner circle.”

Three rings of cultists and six attendants in embroidered robes stood between us and the dais. Most watched the tear forming above the altar. Two watched the doors.

I pulled my hood lower. “Follow my lead.”

“That sentence has preceded several disasters.” His hand slipped inside my robe at the small of my back and slid down over my ass, slow, and stayed there. “Lead, then.”

“Only several?” I said, and my voice cracked on it, which killed the whole effect of a man in command of the situation.

We slipped through the doors.

The congregation pressed toward the dais, which made moving inward easier. Everyone wanted a better look at the end of the world. Felix and I shouldered between a pair of merchants arguing over who had been promised a position closer to the altar.

“Founding members,” one hissed.

“Your dues were late.”

“My bank was closed for Founder’s Day.”

I stepped on the second man’s robe. He lurched backward into the first, and their dispute became physical without either noticing us pass.

We were through one circle.

The leader dragged the knife across his palm. Blood ran over his fingers and down the blade.

“By the opened vein,” he called.

The congregation answered from their cards. “We nourish the mouth.”

“By the willing flesh.”

“We fashion the door.”

The wine merchant bucked against his straps and howled through the gag. His blue slipper kicked so hard it knocked a silver cup off the dais.

The tear widened.

It had no proper edges. Looking straight at it made my eyes water. Something moved on the other side, too big for me to see more than a piece of it at a time. Wet red folds showed through with a row of pale hooks, and an eye that opened sideways and found the room far too quickly.

The eye swung toward me.

Every scar on my body pulled tight at once.

The diagonal mark down my chest burned. My cut palm throbbed where Malkor’s ritual knife had opened it. For one hideous instant I smelled Blackrock again: hot metal and the sweet rot from the pit.

Without lingering, the eye moved past me.

I breathed.

Felix found my hand, squeezed it once, and let go.

I was hard again. I had a tear in the world thirty feet ahead of me and a sideways eye that had just looked through my scars, and my cock had gone stiff against my thigh anyway. In the alcove I had told Felix everything made me horny, and in a room full of floating blood I was proving it.

That made two circles.

An attendant blocked our way. She wore a silver half-mask and carried a ceremonial spike long enough to reach my heart from several useful distances.

“Tokens,” she whispered.

I showed her the brass disk from the weapons table.

She frowned. “That is a weapons token.”

“Master Henslow sent us.”

The name worked again. Her shoulders drew inward.

“He said there was a problem with the volume,” I continued.

Her gaze flew toward the blood channels.

Felix looked down at them and frowned. He could make silence feel like an official reprimand. Watching him do it was beautiful, and it went straight to my cock every time. My cock had not been consulted on the plan, and it did not care.

“The measurements were checked twice,” she said.

“He expected three.”

“That was never specified.”

“Would you like to explain that to him?”

She stepped aside so fast the spike nearly caught another cultist in the ear.

Felix and I entered the inner circle.

The people here wore better robes. Gold thread curled around their sleeves. Jewels flashed on soft hands raised toward the growing tear. Three men carried ornate swords because rich men got to break the rules even at the end of the world.

I counted nine paces to the dais.

The leader raised his bleeding hand. “By the final gift—”

Felix yanked the locking pin out of the nearest tall iron candle stand.

The stand folded beautifully.

Its iron arms crashed into the inner circle. Candles scattered across robes and rushes. A woman screamed as fire caught her sleeve. The man beside her slapped at it with his prayer card, fanning the flames up into her hood.

I grabbed a silver basin full of blood and threw it into the next circle.

Blood hit six cultists at chest height.

They screamed, slipped, collided, and abandoned every promise they had made to the thing above them.

The chant broke.

The tear shuddered.

“Intruders!” the leader shrieked.

Felix threw back his hood. His hair spilled over his shoulders, bright in the candlelight, and half the inner circle stared at him instead of drawing their weapons.

I had stared at him the same way under safer circumstances, and I was doing it again now. My cock twitched in my breeches while he shook his hair loose, and I told myself I was checking his position. That excuse cost me the half step I should have spent getting out of my robe so I could fight.

He drove his elbow into the closest man’s throat.

I dropped my robe.

My daggers cleared their sheaths as the chamber erupted.

The first swordsman came at me with his blade over his head. A fencing master had probably taught him that stance in a courtyard where nobody tried to kill him. His front foot pointed the wrong way. His jeweled guard snagged his wide sleeve. He still brought three feet of sharpened steel down at my face.

I moved left.

His sword struck stone. Sparks jumped. I cut across the inside of his wrist, turned under his arm, and opened his throat before he could decide which injury deserved his attention.

Heat spilled over my knuckles.

He clutched his neck. Blood forced through his fingers in bright, rhythmic jets, painting the gold trim of the woman behind him. She stood frozen until he collapsed against her.

Shoving his body off her, she tried to stab me with a candle.

The brass spike beneath it was sharp. She was panicking, which made it dangerous. She thrust at my belly with both hands, eyes squeezed shut, and nearly got me because I had been busy wondering whether a candle counted as a weapon or religious furniture.

I knocked it aside. The spike scraped my ribs. “Eyes open,” I told her.

She opened them.

I punched her in the mouth.

She went down with a noise of expensive surprise.

Across the chamber, Felix ducked beneath a decorative saber and drove his dagger into a man’s stomach. The cultist stumbled forward. Felix caught his shoulder and carved the blade from navel to hip.

The wound came apart, and I looked before I could stop myself.

Pink coils of gut pushed through the man’s fingers when he tried to hold himself closed. He gaped at them, and he looked stunned and offended that money had failed to negotiate with his own insides.

Felix shoved him into two others and kept moving.

The leader’s voice rose above the screams. He had abandoned the prayer and shouted the final line over and over, trying to force it through without the congregation.

The thing beyond the tear answered with pressure.

My ears popped. Blood ran warm from my nose. The hanging beads above the channels shot toward the dais and struck the air in wet taps. Each one made the opening flex wider. “Felix!”

He looked at the leader, then at the six cultists still standing between us and the steps.

We moved.

A cultist with a jeweled rapier lunged at Felix. The point passed close enough to cut a strand of his hair. Felix caught the man’s wrist, stepped inside his reach, and sank his teeth into the bridge of the man’s nose.

The scream was magnificent. So was Felix with his teeth buried in a man’s face, and my cock jerked at the sight, which told me I had a thing for biting, and a knife fight was no time to discuss it.

Felix tore free with blood on his mouth and swept the man’s legs from under him. The rapier spun away.

I was still staring at Felix’s bloody mouth when the rapier skidded past my boot. I kicked it into the crowd and never looked where it went.

Someone yelled, “My foot!”

Another man charged me with both hands around a short sword. His robe was tucked into his belt, showing polished boots and bare knees. He swung from his shoulders with enough force to split a fence post.

I caught his wrist between my crossed daggers and turned.

The sword missed me. His boots slipped in the blood.

He went down on his back, slid across the floor, and dropped sideways into one of the channels. His head cracked on the edge of the channel. Before he could rise, the masked attendant from the inner circle tripped over him.

She fell with the spike still in her hands.

The point punched through his cheek, shattered teeth, and came out behind his ear.

His legs hammered against the floor. She wailed and tried to pull the spike free, which made the sounds coming from him worse.

I kept moving.

I could be horrified later. With blood under my nose and someone’s broken tooth stuck to my boot, I wanted to puke.

The outer circle collapsed as people fought for the exits. Some tore off their robes. Others crawled beneath their neighbors. A broad man with a merchant crest on his chain planted himself in my path and produced a knife from his sleeve.

He held it correctly.

Nobody else I had fought that night had held one right.

He slashed low, turned his wrist, and came back for my throat. I caught the second cut on my dagger. Steel rang. Pain shot through my fingers.

He smiled.

“Blackrock,” he said.

My forehead hit his nose. Bone crunched. He staggered, and I drove my knee into his groin. When he folded, I buried a dagger beneath his ribs and felt it scrape across a rib.

He grabbed my shoulder. His breath smelled of cloves.

“He saw you,” the man wheezed.

I twisted the blade and wrenched it out. “He should have looked away.”

The broad man fell.

Felix reached the dais first. Two attendants came down the steps together. He threw a dagger into the nearer one’s thigh, caught the second by the embroidered collar, and sent him face-first into the altar’s corner.

The man’s jaw crunched.

Teeth bounced across the dais.

The gaunt leader turned the ceremonial knife toward Felix.

Red light crawled under the leader’s skin.

He came at Felix faster than I could follow.

Felix barely got his blade up. The impact threw him off the dais. He landed on one shoulder, rolled, and came up on a knee with his eyes wide, the first time all night I had seen him surprised.

The leader grinned down at him.

“It rewards the faithful.”

The tear pulsed behind his head. A long limb uncurled inside it, joint after joint, reaching toward the wine merchant.

I climbed the steps. Putting Felix on his back was my job, and that gaunt bastard hadn’t earned it.

The leader heard me. He spun, knife cutting a red arc through the air.

Ashara had spent months teaching me what to do when a stronger opponent knew exactly where I was. Most lessons involved pain, humiliation, or both. One memorable afternoon had involved a blindfold and a bucket suspended over a doorway.

I threw my left dagger at his face.

He flinched aside.

I went low.

The ritual knife passed through my hood and cut a strip from the cloth. I hit his knees shoulder-first. We crashed onto the altar beside the bound merchant, and he rolled on top of me.

The leader smelled of incense and old sweat. His fingers closed around my throat. Red light flooded his eyes.

“It knows you,” he whispered.

That was an alarming thing to hear from anyone, particularly a man kneeling on my chest beneath an interdimensional wound.

I drove my thumb into his cut palm.

He bellowed. His grip loosened.

I brought up the dagger still in my right hand and shoved it through his throat.

The point came out the back of his neck.

His final word became a bubbling cough. Blood filled his mouth, ran over his lips, and poured down onto my chest. I held the hilt with both hands while he thrashed. His knife clattered beside my ear.

Above us, the opening convulsed.

The sideways eye returned.

It looked at me.

The attention hit like a hand pushed into my skull. Images flashed behind my eyes: a mouth swallowing stars, cities kneeling beneath red rain, Malkor smiling at me, alive. The thing behind the tear dug through my head, hungry, looking for something.

The Tome stayed silent.

I ripped the dagger sideways.

The leader’s throat opened to the spine.

The light under his skin went out.

The tear snapped shut.

Air slammed into the space it left behind. Candles died across the chamber. Smoke burst outward. The floating blood dropped all at once, pattering over the stone and over the three of us on the altar.

Darkness lasted half a heartbeat.

Guttering back up one by one, the remaining lamps steadied.

The leader sagged across me.

I shoved him away and sucked in air that tasted of copper and smoke, with somebody’s sandalwood incense on top. My hands shook. My chest was soaked with his blood.

The wine merchant stared at me over his gag.

“Hello,” I said.

He made a furious sound through his nose.

Felix climbed onto the dais with blood coating his chin. He looked from me to the dead leader and touched two fingers to my throat where bruises were already forming. My pulse kicked hard under his fingertips, he felt it, and I covered it with the first joke I had. “Still attached,” I said.

“A demanding standard.”

He cut the merchant’s wrist straps.

I worked on the ankles. The knots were elaborate and completely useless once introduced to a sharp blade. The merchant sat up before we finished and tore the gag from his mouth himself.

“I am going to kill Henslow,” he announced.

His voice was rich and carried, built for crowded dining rooms.

“Take a number,” I said.

He looked down at his stomach. Blood seeped from the shallow symbols carved there, running into the thick hair below his navel. His nightshirt was ruined. One expensive slipper remained.

“They took me from my bed.”

“That explains the outfit.”

“This was imported silk.”

Felix handed him a discarded robe.

The merchant wrapped it around himself with great dignity and no trousers.

Around us, the last of the congregation fled. They left bodies, weapons, shoes, prayer cards, and several friends behind. A woman tried to drag the disemboweled man toward the door until his exposed guts caught around the base of a candle stand. She let go and ran.

The ink-fingered weapons attendant crouched beneath his table in the antechamber. Felix found him while I helped the merchant off the dais.

“You,” the merchant said when he saw the attendant. “Name.”

“P-Perrin, sir.”

“You will take me to the surface, Perrin. You will tell me where Henslow lives. Then you will find a constable and confess everything you have done since birth.”

Perrin nodded so hard his hood fell over his eyes.

I gave the merchant the leader’s ceremonial knife.

“In case he changes his mind.”

The merchant tested its weight. “He won’t.”

I believed him.

They left together, Perrin leading and the merchant following in one slipper with a bloody knife pressed between his shoulder blades. Felix watched until their footsteps faded.

“Should we follow?” I asked.

“He sells wine to half the upper terraces. By sunrise, every constable in Ashbourne will know precisely how much his nightshirt cost.”

That sounded safer than anything I had planned.

I pulled three rings from the dead leader’s fingers before we searched the side rooms. Symbols covered each band. I might have cared what they meant if they hadn’t been gold.

Calling it evidence collection would have made Blackthorn happier. I called it looting because I respected accuracy.

The leader had turned an old corpse chamber into an office. Shelves covered the burial alcoves. Ledgers filled one, bottles filled another, and a human skull occupied the third with a pair of spectacles balanced across its nose. The desk held a purse fat with gold and a black iron lockbox small enough to carry, which made it my favorite room in the catacombs.

I found a canvas pack under the desk and swept all of it in.

Felix opened a cabinet and found six silver ritual cups, three knives, a bundle of red cord, and a polished stone shaped like a tongue.

“Evidence?” he asked.

“Blackthorn will adore it.”

He handed me the stone.

We found more coin in a robe chest, along with a stack of membership receipts tied in ribbon. Henslow had paid for twelve candles, one altar repair, and something listed as premium revelation access. I took the receipts. Blackthorn would want names. I took the ribbon because Kaniz liked pretty things and because my standards for criminal acquisition remained flexible. I also pictured it knotted around her throat with nothing else on her, all those full dark curves bare under it, and I liked the picture so much that I stood there hard while Felix emptied the rest of the chest without me.

By the time we returned to the main chamber, the dead had stopped making noises.

The blood in the channels had begun to settle. Smoke layered the ceiling. Felix stood in the middle of it with his stolen robe open, blonde hair loose, mouth stained red from another man’s nose, and a dark bruise rising along his shoulder.

I was hard before my brain had finished deciding he looked beautiful.

This was the least appropriate thought available to me.

I had it anyway.

His eyes went over my blood-soaked shirt, the cut along my ribs, and the front of my breeches, and when they got there, he smiled.

“Debt,” he said.

I was still shaking from the fight, and now I was shaking for a different reason. “The bodies aren’t cold.”

He walked toward me.

“You objected to the timing before.”

“I was young then.”

“It was twenty minutes ago.”

“I’ve seen things.”

Felix caught the front of my shirt and pulled me into him.

The kiss tasted of blood.

Some belonged to us. Most didn’t. It should have turned my stomach, but I was too hard to care.

I kissed him harder.

Felix laughed into my mouth. I loved that sound. We were alive, and so was the merchant. Every sensible reaction could wait until after I had my hands under Felix’s robe.

He pushed me backward until my shoulders struck a tomb wall. Old stone pressed cold through my shirt. His knee slid between mine, just like in the alcove, and my cock hardened before he touched it.

“You planned that,” I said.

“I learn from experience.”

His fingers opened my belt.

Mine found bare skin beneath his robe and followed the line of his back to his ass. He shivered when I gripped him. He bit his lip and pushed back into my hands.

I liked Felix composed. I loved ruining the composition.

He pulled my cock free and wrapped his hand around it. My head hit stone. It hurt, and with his hand on me I didn’t care. I laughed because apparently attempted sacrifice had done nothing for my coordination.

“Careful,” Felix murmured. “You’ve already survived the impressive dangers.”

“This one has excellent hair.”

He tightened his grip.

I stopped being clever.

Felix stroked me slowly, watching every reaction with those violet eyes. He used the same patience he brought to locks and traps, learning what pressure made my breath catch, which turn of his wrist pulled a curse from me, how long he could make me wait before my hips chased his hand.

I tried to reach for him.

He grabbed my wrist and pinned it beside my head.

“Debt,” he reminded me.

“This feels like interest.”

“You made me wait.”

He had a point.

He dropped to his knees.

The sight alone nearly finished me. Felix looked up through loose blonde hair, mouth swollen, blood dark at one corner, and while I was still looking, his tongue moved over the head of my cock and every useful thought evacuated the catacombs.

His lips closed around me.

His hot mouth swallowed half my length. He took more with a slow roll of his tongue, one hand gripping my hip while the other stroked the part of my cock his mouth hadn’t reached. I threaded my fingers into his hair and forced myself to keep my hips against the wall.

Felix hated being rushed when he had chosen the pace.

He also loved making that difficult.

He drew back until only the tip rested between his lips, smiled when I groaned, and sank down again. My scar pulled as my stomach tightened. Every breath scraped my bruised throat. Blood dried cold under my shirt while his mouth made the rest of me burn.

“Felix.”

He hummed around me.

My knees nearly folded.

I tugged his hair, because I wanted to be inside him when I finished and I was sure I could make him beg for it first. He released me with a wet sound and stood, wiping his mouth with the back of one hand.

“Turn around,” I said.

His eyebrow lifted.

“Please.”

“Better.”

He faced the tomb wall and braced both palms against the stone. I shoved the stolen robe up around his waist. Of course he wore nothing underneath. Felix had prepared for infiltration with daggers, lockpicks, and no smallclothes.

I ran both hands over his ass and took my time about it. Felix had a lean, tight ass that flexed every time he braced, and I considered myself the leading authority on it. His muscles tightened beneath my palms. A fading smear of blood marked one pale hip, and I wiped it away with the cleaner edge of my sleeve. “Still want this?” I asked.

He looked back over his shoulder. “Collecting requires cooperation.”

I spat into my palm and worked two slick fingers against him. He opened easily, pushing back when I pressed inside. His head lowered. A quiet breath escaped him.

I forgot the dead, the blood, the wrecked altar, and the eye above it. All I cared about was Felix tightening around my fingers, the pale curve of his ass, and the little impatient movement of his hips.

“Samuel.”

I withdrew my hand, wet my cock, and lined myself up.

He pushed back as I pressed forward.

Tight heat took me inch by inch. I held his hip and went slowly until I was all the way in. Felix shuddered against the wall. His fingers curled against stone.

For three breaths, neither of us moved.

Felix was the one who broke it, looking back at me. “Is the debt becoming complicated?”

I pulled almost all the way out and drove back into him.

His laugh broke into a gasp.

“Accounting error,” I said.

I found a hard rhythm. The tomb wall gave Felix nowhere to go except back against me, which he did with increasing enthusiasm. My hand closed around his cock, slick at the tip, and stroked him in time with each thrust.

He made more noise than he had in the alcove. So did I. Only the dead remained to hear us, and they had endured worse company.

Felix reached back and hooked my neck. He pulled me over him until my chest met his shoulders, turning his face enough to find my mouth. The angle drove me deeper. His tongue slid over mine. He tasted of blood and sweat, and he was laughing into my mouth.

“Harder,” he said against my lips.

I gave him harder.

The slap of skin echoed off the burial vaults. My thighs struck his. His cock moved through my fist. Each thrust wound the pressure in my belly tighter. Everything hurt and everything felt good, and I couldn’t have told the two apart.

Felix came with his teeth against my lower lip.

His body clenched around me. His cum spilled hot over my fingers and onto the stone below. Watching him come finished me. I buried myself deep, held him tight against me, and came hard enough to empty every remaining thought from my skull.

For a while, we leaned against the wall together and breathed.

Felix recovered first. He usually did. He straightened his robe and pushed his hair back before he looked over the mess.

“Paid,” he said.

I rested my forehead against the stone. “I may need a receipt.”

“Your legs are shaking.”

“Documentation matters.”

He kissed my cheek and stepped away before I could grab him again.

We cleaned ourselves with the least bloody cloth we could find, which was an appalling standard for cleanliness and the best the congregation had left us. I checked the Tome while fastening my belt.

Its eye remained closed.

My stomach knotted up again.

Felix looked at my face and stopped smiling.

“Surface first,” he said.

I put the pack over one shoulder and adjusted the Tome against my spine. “If monks won’t frighten it, I’m out of ideas.”

We climbed.

The catacombs felt larger with nobody chanting in them. We passed the corpse with candles in his mouth and the butchered goat. The trap’s spikes remained locked together across the main passage. Somewhere ahead, a cultist sobbed in the dark and went quiet when our footsteps approached. I was too wrung out to hunt him.

Cold blue light showed at the top of the stairs.

Dawn had reached Ashbourne.

We emerged through the collapsed archway into the alley. Felix’s hair looked pale gold in the early light, and the stolen robe clung to his ass all the way up the alley. My dick, emptied against a tomb wall not an hour ago, stirred anyway, and I stubbed my toe on a loose cobble. Blood covered both of us. My pack clinked with evidence, profit, and one stone tongue I had already begun to regret stealing.

The Tome opened its eye.

“That,” it said, low for once, “was inadequately handled.”

I stopped in the middle of the alley. “You can talk.”

“Your powers of observation remain breathtaking.”

Relief made me want to hug it. Experience stopped me.

Felix watched the eye narrow. “Why did you go quiet?”

The Tome’s brass corners pressed into my back.

“The congregation summoned nothing.”

“I saw the hole,” I said.

“A peephole, perhaps. An invitation. What answered them was already listening.”

The alley felt colder.

I remembered the sideways eye moving across the chamber. I remembered it passing over me, returning when the leader died, and reaching into my head, hunting for something familiar.

“Listening for what?”

The Tome closed its eye.

“Breakfast,” it said. “If I must endure another hour against your sweaty spine, I shall begin eating vertebrae.”

Felix and I looked at each other.

The sun edged over the roofs. Somewhere beyond the alley, carts rattled toward market while bakers opened their shutters, and Ashbourne began an ordinary morning without knowing how close it had come to becoming breakfast for something else.

I didn’t ask it again. I was scared it would tell me.