Arc 7: Chapter 15: To Hunt A Wizard
“Here.” Delphine raised her lantern and pointed to a section of wall. We stood inside the cramped confines of a catacomb tunnel, one of a labyrinth of similar corridors lying beneath Tol’s streets. It wasn’t quite as rank as Garihelm’s sewers, but the stale air still cloyed at my senses.
So did the ghosts. They practically boiled inside the niches, and more than once I’d had to use my powers to scare them away before Delphine noticed anything. Ghosts in burial grounds are normal, but the way I drew them was not.
Moving cautiously, mindful of my armored bulk and the narrow space, I shuffled up next to the scholar and studied the innocuous wall. “This will lead into the complex?”
The Priory had been in Tol a very long time. More than a century, and while they’d centered their operations in the northeast they’d always maintained an enclave here. This included a dungeon hidden beneath one of the town’s churches near the southern gate.
It was the morning after my encounter with the two immortals at Lyda’s Cathedral. I hadn’t slept. Neither, apparently, had Delphine. Her complaints about it taking days to find a way into the Inquisition’s storehouse turned out to be pessimistic.
“It’s an old escape route,” the doctor told me. “The wall is weak. The priorguard had it blocked off when they were restoring the old Inquisition complex beneath the town. Apparently they kept getting attacked by rattlewights. The catacombs in Tol are unusually active, and don’t like being disturbed.”
I glanced back at the tunnel behind us. “You could have warned me.”
Delphine sniffed. “What, are you afraid of the dead? Aren’t you some kind of warrior?”
“Most soldiers are afraid of the dead,” I noted dryly.
Delphine turned to face the wall. “Guilty consciouses, maybe?”
This woman really didn’t like me. Sighing, I followed the direction of her gaze. “Is this place going to be guarded?”