Arc 4: Chapter 23: Accusation
Keeping my dagger in hand, I left the hidden fountain behind and all but sprinted back toward the groves.
Emma caught me just out of the maze. She held a large pack over one shoulder, and her forehead beaded with sweat. She’d been looking for me. I caught a flash of something feline with sharp claws and cheshire teeth in the branches of a nearby tree — Qoth.
“What’s going on?” I asked, still speed-walking back to the distant event.
“It’s the Inquisition,” she said. That was enough. I quickened my pace, eyes fixed forward.
“An attack?” I asked.
“There was a scuffle at the gate,” Emma said, breathing hard as she quickened her pace to keep up, almost running. “I think some of the younger nobles took issue with the veils barging in. They brought one of those war carriages, and there are a lot of them. Faisa Dance managed to get things calmed down, but…”
Rosanna had warned me the Priory had been too quiet after the night of the storm. I’d known they were operating with crowfriar support — I should have suspected something like this the instant I recognized Myrddin for what he was.
I’d let him lead me on, put more noise into my already busy mind. Damn it.
We navigated through the groves, which had become eerily empty. I moved around to the front of the estate, and there found near two hundred people gathered before the front steps of the Dance mansion like a well-dressed army. They all stared at the wide street beyond the hedge rows.
And there, claiming a central spot, rose a priorguard armored carriage. Fashioned of dark oak and black iron, decorated with barbed and sacred filigree, it rose like a mobile castle above the vehicles which had brought most of the party’s guests. Above the black carriage, a shimmering copper phantasm rose into the night air, shaped into the barbed trident of Inquisition.
Veiled and robed priorguard arrayed around the carriage, more than thirty of them. They all held iron-shod staves, man-catchers, and steel hooks attached to long chains. They stood still, a congregation of shadows with red tridents for faces, eerie in their quietude.