The Changeling Game, Chapter 94

94.
The Vengeance God’s Devotee

“You’re wrong about the Riddick, Chantesa.”

It was, Dame Vaako thought, the first time her husband had ever said such a thing to her.

She was used to him doubting her, questioning her, especially whenever he’d intuited that she was preparing to demolish a rival to their rising power. But he had never told her that she was wrong before.

“What makes you think that?” she asked, hiding her unease as she removed her makeup.

“I spoke to him. He is planning on marrying his Jack. They are currently negotiating the terms between them.” Vaako was pacing, the way he often did when something was bothering him. “He expressed concerns that the wives of other Lords might not have been consulted about their marriages.”

“I know what I saw, husband.” She sighed, taking a plundered tub of lotion out of a drawer. “The girl was terrified. Stammering. Shaking.”

“I remember you shaking and stammering when you sold me the lie about your first husband committing heresy. You even had tears in your eyes.”

Damn it. But… he had a point. She’d had to manipulate eight different men into challenging the Lord Vath before one of them survived doing so and killed him for her… and she had been much the same age that “Audrey” was now.

“You believe she was duping me?” It was an unsettling, unpleasant thought.

“The Riddick thinks so.”

“To what end?” she asked.

“I don’t know, Chantesa. You tell me what your games were. Why did you want Lord Vath dead?”

She frowned at him, staying silent. That was nobody’s business but hers. Even the Quasi-Dead had no idea. She had already been in love with Amahle before she had been old enough to really understand what love was, and she had finally managed to crawl into his heart, to make him feel the same way about her. It had been their wedding day when the Necromongers had attacked, when she’d been forced to watch, screaming, as Amahle was cut down before her, still in his wedding attire, and that slime of a “Lord” had declared her his…

And the Lord Marshal had let him claim her…

Her hatred of both men was something she had concealed as best she could. Her awareness that she’d barely escaped being used up in one of the many “Stews” scattered throughout the Armada had only added to her rage. A Breeder Pit or the bed of the man who had murdered her soulmate: what kinds of choices were those? She’d succeeded in engineering both men’s destructions, but what she wished for most of all, control over the Armada itself, eluded her. As wife of the seventh Lord Marshal, she could have—

“The Riddick made a policy change today, and has hinted he will make more,” Vaako continued at that moment. His gaze on her was intense.

“What change is that?” It had been nearly a year since he’d created any edicts. She supposed he needed a new one now that his Jack had been found.

“He closed down the Stews and ordered all of their inhabitants converted. With the assent and backing of our god. We could all feel it.”

Given that that was one of the things she’d wanted to do most of all, she wasn’t sure why it peeved her so, aside from the fact that she’d wanted to be the one to do it. “The Breeder Pits are no more?”

“None remain. From this day forth, no one in the Armada, except members of the Riddick’s own entourage, may be unconverted humans.”

“Curious.” Her makeup removed and her hair braided for sleep, she undressed and joined her husband in bed. “Do you think the other Lords will accept it?”

“I think our god will not give them an alternative.”

She closed her eyes, focusing on her connection to Him. In her heart, she called Him Tokoloshe. He was vengeance. As much as she had hated the conquerors who had destroyed her world and her true love, they had brought her to Him. The god of her soul. And she knew that He had watched over her for years, guiding her hand as she worked to destroy first Vath and then Zhylaw, who had taken so much from her.

And she felt it, just as Vaako had said. Her god—their god—was… pleased.

And, she realized, would be displeased if anyone attempted to disarrange things.

Why, she wondered, had the Riddick waited a whole year to do it? What did he intend to do next?

And what, she asked herself as she let her husband draw her into his arms, was the role of this Jack—or Audrey—in all of these changes?

By lunch the next day, she decided that she wanted to meet the girl again. But first she needed to speak to the witch. She had several pressing matters to attend to before then—the politics of the Court had only grown more convoluted in the year since Riddick’s ascension, and the spreading word of the Stews’ closure had generated some consternation among the Court’s Ladies—but she finally managed to return to Lord Irgun’s old quarters, now the abode of the witch Aereon, as evening fell.

“I need to understand more about who this girl was,” she told the Elemental. “Who she is. You said that a mercenary told you about her; what else did he say?”

“Not so very much,” Aereon, seated in a chair with her gown draped to artfully hide the chains she still wore, told her. “She was one of three survivors of a spaceship crash. Riddick was another. Later, all three were captured by mercenaries. Toombs claimed that she had proven her loyalty to Riddick then, but he would never say how. I believe he was among the mercenaries involved in the capture. She was hospitalized in a psychiatric facility not long after. Toombs told me that he initially believed she had been traumatized by ‘what Riddick made her do,’ but said that later he began to suspect she had been Riddick’s accomplice the whole time, especially once Riddick himself returned and broke her, and Kyra Wittier-Collins, out of the facility.”

“So,” Dame Vaako mused, “she has a history of fooling people.”

“Possibly so,” Aereon said. “Why?”

“When I met her yesterday, she seemed terrified. But my husband believes she may have been toying with me.” Damn it, why was she confiding in this unbeliever? Just because there was no one else for her to talk to… “What possible reason would she have to run a game like that?”

“They are both criminals,” Aereon said, her voice smugly complacent. “Like the girl who died last year. Deception is what they live for, undoubtedly.”

The witch rose from her seat and walked across the room, her chains—the ones the old Lord Marshal had called “cherry bombs”—rattling behind her as she did. She glanced down at them as she poured both of them glasses of water. “Bloody things…”

“Why are you still wearing them?” It had struck Chantesa as odd that, after all the help the Elemental was supposed to have given the Riddick, he would still keep her chained.

“Your new Lord Marshal trusts me no more than the last one,” Aereon told her. “I think he believes I knew more about the girls than I told him. Although I admit, I only just realized their connection to Toombs’ stories when last we spoke, so perhaps he was right in that regard.”

“So he keeps you chained up? For not knowing more?” She wasn’t entirely sure why that fueled a small kernel of anger in her—she found the Elemental off-putting at best—but it did.

“Indeed.” Aereon sighed. “They aren’t the most comfortable things to sleep in. Or shower in.”

“The guards make you wear them even when you change clothes?” This was, she thought, sounding worse and worse. And to think that Niels’s news about the Breeder Pits almost made me like the Riddick for a moment!

“There is a young lady who comes and supervises while I change,” Aereon told her, “and shower… anything where the cuffs must come off. She only frees one wrist at a time.”

“What the hell does he think you’re going to do if they come off completely?” It was hard not to seethe over it all.

“Perhaps he imagines I will spout new ‘prophecies’ at people to turn them against him.”

That arrested her attention. “New ones? Do you mean that you were the source of the prophecy that sent our last Lord Marshal to Furya?”

“We Elementals rely upon calculation, not divination. But from time to time, we do forecast major events before they happen. And when the odds bear them out, we share what we know.” The elderly woman smiled a thin, humorless smile. “More than thirty years ago, we had two such forecasts, both of which seemed impossible, especially in combination with each other. In one, the Lord Marshal of the Necromongers joined forces with the Lord Shirah of Furya to bring an end to the Federacy itself. But in the other, a Furyan warrior killed the Lord Marshal, taking his place and, within a few years, bringing the Necromonger campaign to its close by opening a gateway into the Underverse.”

Could Riddick actually do that, unconverted as he was? Had Zhylaw actually been holding back Underverse Come by trying to prevent their confrontation?

“Soon after that discovery, a Necromonger Lord came to us to try to gain insights into how to find the Threshold to the Underverse.” Another thin smile from the Elemental. “He was the First Among Commanders and hoped to be able to lead the Armada across the Threshold when he ascended to the role of Lord Marshal. I told him about the dueling forecasts and how, strangely enough, all of our calculations were insisting that they were, somehow, simultaneously true. And he—”

“He only cared about the one that said he might die at the hands of a Furyan warrior,” Dame Vaako breathed, understanding. “But by attacking Furya…”

“I believe that he made the first forecast impossible while making the second inevitable,” Aereon confirmed. “Furya is a ruined world now, for all that the Federacy has been attempting to get it back on its feet. The Lord Shirah is no more, and his successor is a woman with little diplomatic skill and no heirs. And Riddick, having heard both fore­casts… blames me for the fall of his world. I suppose he thinks I might concoct more trouble for him if I had leave to roam the ship and speak to its people.”

He’d probably have been right even a few days ago, Dame Vaako reflected, before the tides shifted and somehow, even unconverted, the Riddick became Tokoloshe’s chosen instrument. She had felt the change, herself, even if she hadn’t wanted to; the instinctive feeling that the Furyan was unworthy, an intruder, something the Armada needed protection from, had van­ished… and left her with what, exactly?

What she’d always had. Her desire to destroy the old Lord Marshal hadn’t come from Tokoloshe, either.

I need to find out what side the girl is truly on, she decided. And how likely it really is that simply allowing the Riddick to rule will bring on Underverse Come.

She didn’t want to repeat Zhylaw’s hubristic mistake; the Underverse was all. She would not work against her god. If He wished the Riddick to lead them, she would accept that. Provisionally.

But in the meantime, with the Riddick in Tokoloshe’s good graces and the random assassination attempts likely brought to an end… what harm could it do…?

“I will speak to your attendants,” she promised the Elemental.

The Riddick had been unavailable for consultation on the issue of the “cherry bombs,” once more in the Chamber of the Quasi-Dead, where he had apparently been meditating for just over a day. That, however, had made it easier to simply command the attendants to remove the Elemental witch’s chains. Dame Vaako felt a small glow of virtuous achievement at that; witch or not, no woman should be forced to sleep in bonds, much less dress and undress under watchful eyes. She set off for the Lord Marshal’s Quarters feeling a little more balanced.

The wing that housed the Quarters, previously echoingly empty except for the guards on the Riddick’s doors, was cluttered with things and occupied by a dozen people. Tables had been set up and covered with random objects; furniture and statuary littered the space between them. A group of young men and women were going through the objects casually, chatting with each other, surprising her by randomly breaking into bits of song. And among them—

Apparently I’m not the only one who refuses to live in shades of black, she thought with an amused sense of kindred.

Dressed in a mixture of greens and blues, the Riddick’s Jack—Audrey, as she recalled—was crouched over a box, sorting through the books inside it.

“What is all this?” Dame Vaako asked, gratified when those closest to her bowed upon spotting her. There was something different about all of them, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

Audrey looked up and smiled at her, no trace of fear about her now.

Niels was right, she thought in astonishment. Either she and the Riddick resolved their differences al­ready… or she was never really afraid to begin with.

She watched as the girl climbed to her feet, dusting her hands against the sides of the forest green leggings she had probably acquired from one of the many piles of heaped clothing on the tables. What remained was almost entirely boring black.

“All this,” the girl gestured around the hallway, “is stuff we pulled out from the suites in this wing. They’re being cleaned out so my, uh… detail can occupy them. Riddick wants to surround me with bodyguards, I guess.”

“We,” one of the young men near them said in reply, “Are an entourage.” That set his companions off into a gale of laughter, making Jack—or, perhaps, Audrey—grin.

Chantesa could understand why the girl would need companions, especially bodyguards. Dressed in Necromonger attire or not, she was clearly unconverted and would be a thousand times more alluring than ever, to the men on the ship, with all the Breeder Pits shut down. Single women of the court had hoped to gain the Riddick’s attention, for one night if nothing else, because of his unconverted state; even if they didn’t personally win him over to the Way, they’d said in prurient whispers, they could still know once more the feeling of having a warm cock inside them…

A pun had come to mind to her when they’d told her that, one she had never shared with them. It was only funny when she didn’t let herself think of how true it had been for the women trapped in the Breeder Pits—the “Stews,” as everyone else had called them—and it was far too crass to let anyone attribute to her.

None of those Court Ladies, she reflected, had ever succeeded in their aims. The Riddick had spent his first year of rulership living like a monk. Her husband had hinted at the reasons why, which had made it all the more perplexing when word circulated that he refused to frequent the Stews.

“What are you going to do with all of these things?” she asked after a moment. There were some astonishing treasures among the discards.

“Well, now that we pulled it all out,” Audrey replied, “everybody can go through it all to look for anything they want to keep. If you see anything you want, feel free to take it. The rest can, I guess… be donated? Do you guys have a donation center or anything? For new recruits?”

“The Necromonger Way is ‘you keep what you kill,’” Chantesa told the girl, feeling a rueful smile cross her face. “You acquire your possessions from your vanquished foes. New converts come with nothing of their own except the clothes we put on them. They must either claim more through battle or, occasionally, from rewards given to them by their commanders. A donation cen­ter… I haven’t heard of such a thing since before I was converted.”

The girl glanced around the hallway, frowning as she took in the sheer mass of clutter filling it. “That’s a problem.”

“Or an opportunity to create something new, perhaps,” Dame Vaako told her. “The biggest problem will simply be the way most Necromongers view each other’s discards. If we keep what we kill, what we don’t wish to keep is what we have decided is unworthy. Your Riddick created some trouble last year when he discarded and banished the old Lord Marshal’s wives. Such a thing had never been done before. They had no rank or standing to take with them, and what the Lord Marshal casts off, no one else wishes to touch. I believe they now work as servants on other ships in the Armada.”

The girl, to her credit, looked appalled, even more than Chantesa had ever felt. She had never liked the other women, and had always been uncomfortably aware of the fact that, if her plans had failed and, instead of killing the Lord Marshal, Vaako had been killed by him, she would have ended up below all six of them as a very junior wife of the man she’d hated most in the ’verse, seventh in line for his repulsive atten­tions… if he hadn’t simply discarded her as unworthy and stripped away her last hopes of sticking a knife in him while he slept—

“That’s terrible. Why’d he do that?”

“To be fair, one of them had tried to assassinate him. I suppose he had no reason to trust the surviving wives—”

“Wait, he killed one of them?”

“Only after she made multiple attempts to kill him,” Dame Vaako admitted. “I heard a little bit about it from the other wives as they were being escorted off of the Basilica. He tried to disarm her without killing her. She didn’t cooperate. She was the Lord Marshal’s first wife, you see. The one he had chosen, not one he acquired from a vanquished rival.”

The girl grimaced as she pulled out another box and began rifling through it. “Guess there was no way around that…”

“Are you looking for something?” Chantesa asked. There were things she needed to learn from this girl that she couldn’t if the child remained preoccupied.

“Yeah, a book.” The girl turned and gave her a quirky smile as she finished sorting through the box. “Back when the Tenth Crusade launched, like four hundred years ago, its owner brought a set of three books with him, all written by Minnie Sulis. I found two of them already. I’m looking for the third. Could be impor­tant…”

For a moment, the girl stopped, frowning quizzically as if trying to hear a far-off note of music or recall an elusive memory.

“Might not be,” she shrugged after she came back to herself. “But I want to find it if I can.”

Minnie Sulis…?

“I may be able to help you,” Dame Vaako told her. “The name is familiar to me. Could the third book be a diary?”

“Might be. I don’t know. I just know that this guy Joren mentioned a set of three in a note to Chapman Marshal. I guess Marshal was a big fan of Minnie’s magic act.”

“When I first came to the Basilica,” Chantesa said after a moment of thought, “I lived in this wing, in the rooms that once belonged to Lord Vath. He gave them up for better rooms as he rose in power and vanquished rivals. The original rooms had a small library. Most of the books were revolting in the ex­treme—”

“By John Norman?”

The knowing look that passed between them made Chantesa feel an even deeper sense of kinship with the girl.

“Yes. There were a few, though, that were worth reading. For a while, there was a vacant room I would spend time in, to meditate. I always felt closest to our god when I was there. I took some of the books with me, thinking I might read them undisturbed in that space. When Lord Vath ordered a stop to my ‘wanderings,’ they were still there. I hadn’t thought of them in years.”

Audrey looked excited. “Can we go there?”

“Of course.” If Dame Vaako was remembering right, the book in question was a diary, or at least a hand-written journal of some kind. She’d found, once she was in her little sanctuary, that she had little focus for reading and only wanted to commune with Tokoloshe—

“Is it okay if we go now? It might be important.”

Interesting. Did the girl not realize she outranked almost everyone in the Armada and could command people as she pleased?

Maybe she’s just a polite child. There had been few enough of those in a long time.

“Certainly. I should warn you that it is in one of the oldest parts of this ship. A vacant area near a placard with the name you mentioned, Tenth Crusade, on it.”

Audrey had been rising; for a second she froze. Then she shrugged and gave herself a little shake, standing up the rest of the way. “Guess I’d better hope the Moribund’s not feeling peckish,” she muttered.

What does that mean? Whatever it was, she set it aside. “Shall we?”

They started out of a corridor when a voice called out behind them. “Hold!”

A dark haired woman, plain of face and determined of jaw, was hurrying over to them. “You can’t go anywhere alone, Jack.”

The girl blinked. “I’m not alone, Lola.”

The woman—Lola—sighed. “Sorry. Let me rephrase. You can’t go anywhere unguarded. I’m coming with you.”

“By all means,” Dame Vaako told her. “One can never be too careful.”

Why did that suddenly send a pang of concern through her? A sense of something left undone or done wrongly?

The route to her meditation place was one she hadn’t taken in years, but her feet still knew the way. Whenever things had been too much, it was the path she had taken to find her balance, her peace, again. And to renew her commitment to vengeance. She hadn’t needed it as much once she had become Dame Vaako instead of Dame Vath; Niels had never been someone she’d needed to retreat from. It hadn’t occurred to her to return to it.

“I’m curious,” she said after a moment to break the silence. “Lola here calls you ‘Jack,’ but when we spoke yesterday morning, you said your name is Audrey. Which are you going by?”

“Oh. Yeah.” The girl grimaced. “I’ve gone by a lot of names over the years. Kid on the run and all… pretending to be a boy doesn’t work as well as it used to, though. But Riddick knew me as Jack, so…”

“Ah.” Dame Vaako gazed over at her, considering. No, she could no longer pretend to be a boy, even if she had the height of one. She was slender enough that her curves would be difficult to conceal. Perhaps they hadn’t been when she was younger. “Was that your preference? Masquerading as a boy? As ‘Jack?’”

“For a while. Like I said, I used a lot of names. I went by ‘Peter’ once.” Amusement twinkled in her eyes for a moment. “They’re just names. But ‘Jack’ is pretty special to Riddick, so I figured I’d go back to it for him.”

“And you aren’t afraid of him.” Chantesa raised an eyebrow at Jack.

Jack’s expression turned impish. “Yeah, sorry about that. You guys are pretty damn terrifying, you know, and when I got here, I really was scared out of my head. I’d calmed down before you came to the room, but I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone to know that yet.”

“I did much the same thing, years ago,” she reflected. Her “wedding night” had been a night of horror; in its aftermath, she’d tested out different ways of hiding her true feelings, of presenting herself to the Court, and Lord Vath, of finding a way to survive among them without them realizing she had plans for them…

All her targets were dead now, dead before their time, cut off from the Underverse forever. Maybe she could console herself with that.

There was no other foot traffic in the quiet hallway she had led them to, but suddenly Jack stopped, cocking her head and looking around, frowning. “Did you guys see that?”

“See what?” Lola asked, her hand moving to her gun.

The hallway was empty. Nothing stirred except an errant draft that ruffled against the back of Dame Vaako’s neck for a moment.

Jack frowned. “I could have sworn…” She shook her head. “It’s probably nothing. I’m just a little jumpy about getting so close to the Moribund. So. Where to now?”

Further down the corridor, Jack stopped again. This time, however, it was to admire the plaque on the wall naming the vessel as the Tenth Crusade. The girl whistled, looking impressed.

“Damn. Wish I could tell Mr. Reilly what I’m looking at. He’d shit himself.” She suddenly grinned and pulled a comm unit out of one of her pockets. “You never know! Maybe I’ll be in a position to send this to him when all of this is over.”

She captured several images of the plaque before pocketing her comm again.

“It’s not much farther,” Chantesa told her companions. “Near the ruins of the old engine room.”

“This part of the ship is more than four hundred years old,” Jack chattered as they continued walking. “I did a report on it years ago. Never expected to actually be in it, though.”

I was never that young, Dame Vaako told herself, but felt a pang move through her. She remembered being that young. Being innocent. Being in love with the world and secure in the knowledge that the world loved her back…

She missed that girl. The nostalgia of meeting one so much like her had her heart in its fist.

“It’s through here,” she said a moment later, leading them into a control room with a thick steel door on its other end. The door stood open, as it had for decades before she’d found it and would probably stand for decades more. “I know what it used to be, but the inner room was the perfect place to meditate, to feel close to our god.”

“You prayed in a reactor core chamber?” Lola looked both disbelieving and amused.

“I think it’s been thoroughly decommissioned. Probably long ago when the Basilica’s new engines were constructed. We use other energy sources than mere nuclear power now.” The Dame shrugged, walking through the thick doorway and into that inner room. “No one ever bothered me here. That was a blessing in itself. And I felt closest to Him here.”

She could see the things she’d left behind when she’d been forced to stop visiting: pillows, a lap blanket, a reading lamp, snacks…

“This was your sanctuary,” Jack said, her voice soft as she followed her in. Behind them, Lola had taken up a guard post at the outer door. Jack walked over to the little lamp and switched it on. “Oh man, you did find some good books in that Lord’s apartment.”

It bothered Chantesa for a moment, seeing the girl pick up her books, but she forced that feeling down. “Hopefully the one you’re looking for is among them.”

“Dame Vaako!” Lola called behind her, her voice suddenly sharp.

“Yes?” She returned to the doorway between the inner and outer room. Through the inner room’s thick steelglass window, she could see Jack sitting down, legs crossed, to hold books up to the lamp and read each one’s title.

“Are you sure we’re alone down here?” Lola’s expression was uneasy. “I could’ve sworn I felt something move past me a moment ago.”

“In truth, I’m not sure of anything about this part of the ship,” she admitted, walking over to Lola. “But the only presence I’ve ever felt down here is our god. Perhaps you felt his touch…?”

“Found it!” Jack crowed behind them. “The Magic Journal and Book of Shadows of Minnie Sulis! Oh my God, this is the best—”

The lights in the room, which Dame Vaako had never been able to find or make work, suddenly turned on. Beyond the steelglass window, the inner chamber filled with light, too.

“What in the hell… fuck!” Lola’s eyes had gone wide. “Jack! Get out of there!”

The huge, thick steel door, Dame Vaako realized, was closing of its own accord.

Jack lifted her head, startled comprehension filling her face. She leapt to her feet, the journal clutched to her chest, and raced for the door. Too late.

“No!” Dame Vaako clawed at the shrinking gap, trying to pull the obdurate door back before she was forced to snatch her hand away.

“What the fuck is happening?” Lola demanded, glaring at her.

“I don’t know! I couldn’t ever even get the lights to turn on, much less—”

The control panel had come to life, its instrumentation lights glittering. She and Lola both turned to look.

“Guys?” Jack asked behind the glass. “What’s going on?”

“Fuck!” Lola shouted. “Decommissioned my ass! The reactor’s restarting!”

Sick horror pooled in Dame Vaako’s belly as she read one of the screens.

Core priming, preparing to unshield in 00:05:47 for energy transference

“What have you done?” Lola demanded, grabbing the collar of her dress.

“Nothing! I swear to you. I never touched the panel. I don’t know what’s happen­ing…”

The other woman glared at her for a moment before releasing her. “Jack? I’m going for help! I’ll be back in just a minute, okay? You,” she added, her tone still bordering on accusatory, “stay with her. Try to figure out a way to shut this thing the fuck down.”

Jack had her back to them, still holding the diary to her chest as she stared toward the opposite end of the room, where a heavily shielded column was rising from the floor.

As Lola’s racing footsteps receded behind her, Dame Vaako turned her attention to the panel, looking for any kind of abort switch, an emergency override button, anything that she could use to turn the damn thing back off or at least get Jack out of the room before disaster struck.

Nothing. Not a damned thing.

“There has to be a failsafe of some kind here,” she yelled at the panel, verging on pressing buttons at random. She didn’t dare do something so risky, but what if—

Gripping the edge of the panel, feeling tears threatening to escape, she closed her eyes and reached out to Him. To Tokoloshe. Help me, my Lord, please help me… help your humble servant in her time of desperate need…

I hear you, Chantesa. I always hear you. You were betrayed today. You made a mistake. But it will be all right.

How do I get her out, my Lord?

You do not.

She’ll die! Please, I don’t want her to die!

All of this was foreseen. All of this is necessary. What happens next is necessary, too. You must allow it.

But my Lord, she’ll die! And the Riddick will kill me… If Lola didn’t first… “Oh God…”

Tokoloshe, she remembered from the stories her mother had told her when she was small, was very good at vengeance, but sooner or later he always exacted a price. And it was rarely what those who had sought him out had expected to pay. Had he waited, all this time, for her to begin bonding with someone? Or—

“It’s okay, Chantesa,” she heard Jack say from beyond the window. “This isn’t your fault.”

But it was. Somehow it was. Tokoloshe had said she’d made a mistake and been betrayed. And this was the result. What had she done…?

Oh… oh no… She’d been a stupid fool.

“Jack, I’m so sorry…” she sobbed, falling to the floor. “It is my fault…”

She hadn’t felt this much fear since the day the Necromonger tower had fallen, like a javelin, from the sky above her wedding.