Chapter 9: An Offer of Ashes

Chapter 9: An Offer of Ashes

Panic was a physical force, a wave of shrieks and shoving bodies that Alex had to fight through. He kept his eyes locked on Lord Valois, who was now backing away from the main floor, melting into the relative shadow of a long corridor that led to the palace’s tapestry gallery. The heretic knew he was made. He was looking for an escape.

Alex moved faster, his shoulder brushing past a weeping countess, his feet sidestepping a fallen candelabra. The corridor was cooler, quieter. The screams from the ballroom became a muffled roar behind them. Here, under the woven gazes of long-dead heroes, the confrontation felt stark and intimate.

"It's over, Valois," Alex said, his voice low and steady. He stopped ten feet from the nobleman, blocking his path.

Lord Valois turned. The mask of the grieving patriot was gone, burned away to reveal a man consumed by a cold, righteous fury. His face was pale, his eyes alight with the fever of fanaticism. The fine tremor in his hand had ceased, replaced by a defiant stillness.

"Over?" Valois sneered, his voice dripping with contempt. "Because a charlatan who cheats death with parlor tricks points a finger? No, Lord Alistair. It is just beginning."

"The Duke is dying," Alex stated flatly. "End it. Release the charm."

Valois laughed, a sharp, bitter sound that echoed in the corridor. "Let him die! Let the whole rotten edifice of this Imperium collapse! What has it ever done but protect its own gilded cage?"

This was not the ranting of a simple traitor. This was the voice of profound, personal pain. Alex saw it in the lines around the man's eyes, in the hollows of his cheeks. This was a grief that had curdled into hatred.

"Why?" Alex asked, the single word cutting through the man’s tirade. It wasn't just an investigative question; he felt a genuine, morbid curiosity. What could drive a man like this to burn down his entire world?

The question seemed to break Valois’s momentum. The fury in his eyes flickered, revealing the raw wound beneath. "My daughter," he said, his voice cracking. "Her name was Elodie. She had a lung fever. The finest Imperial physicians bled her and purged her and could do nothing. So I went to the Chantry. I begged them for a magical healing, a simple restoration of vitality. I would have given my entire fortune."

He took a shuffling step forward, his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. "And do you know what the high-and-mighty Master Sorcerers told me? They told me her ailment was 'God's will.' That the Grand Principles of Thaumaturgy could not be used for such 'mundane' healings, that it would be a perversion of the Art. They had the power to save her, the raw, untamed power… and they refused. They let her die because of their rules."

The confession hung in the air, heavy and suffocating. Here was the core of the Choronzon heresy, not as a political theory, but as a father's desperate, unanswered prayer. The Church had the means to save his child, and their dogma had stayed their hand.

"The Choronzon," Valois whispered, his eyes shining with tears and zeal, "they understand. They know that magic is a force of life, a birthright to be used, not hoarded and regulated by priests who let children die. They showed me how to take the power for myself. The Duke, the Church, the whole damnable system… they are the disease. We are the cure."

He was lost, a man so consumed by his righteous grief that he couldn't see the hypocrisy of his own actions—inflicting a different kind of pain on countless others. Before Alex could formulate a reply, to argue or to sympathize, there was a faint, almost inaudible hiss.

Lord Valois’s eyes went wide. The fanatical light vanished, replaced by sheer, stupid surprise. He looked down at his own chest. A tiny, black-feathered dart, no larger than a needle, protruded from the lapel of his coat, a single drop of blood welling around it.

His mouth opened, but only a gurgle escaped. He took one staggering step backward, his hand flying to his throat, and then collapsed against the woven depiction of the Battle of Angiers, sliding down the tapestry to land in a graceless heap on the cold marble floor. He was dead before he stopped moving.

Alex stared, his heart hammering against his ribs. He hadn't even seen where the dart had come from. He spun around, his eyes scanning the shadowed archways of the corridor.

From the deepest shadow, a figure detached itself. It was not Countess Katarina Volkov, but a man in the severe, dark livery of her personal guard. He was lean, hawk-faced, and held a small, elegant blowpipe in one hand. He gave Alex a curt, professional nod, as if they were colleagues finishing a job, before melting back into the darkness.

Footsteps, light and unhurried, clicked on the marble behind him. Alex turned back to see Katarina standing there, her expression calm, her crimson gown a bloody slash in the dimly lit corridor. She looked down at Valois's body, then back at Alex, a flicker of something—approval? assessment?—in her silver eyes.

"It seems," she said, her voice a cool counterpoint to the distant chaos, "that I have cleaned up your mess."

Alex stared at her, dumbfounded. "You… you killed him."

"I silenced a traitor before he could reveal sensitive information in a public trial," she corrected him smoothly, stepping around the body as if it were a piece of misplaced furniture. "My government has patrons, as I told you. Had he been taken alive, his testimony would have been twisted. It would have become the spark that lights the very fire my foolish countrymen think they can control. I did your Duke, and my own Chancellor, a great service."

Her audacity was breathtaking. She had executed a man in the heart of the Ducal Palace and was framing it as a favor.

From the far end of the corridor, a triumphant shout echoed. "The link is severed! The Duke is safe!" It was Valerius. The immediate danger was over.

Katarina’s gaze sharpened, her focus narrowing entirely on Alex. She knew their time was short. "Lord Valois was a symptom, Alistair. A single, festering sore. The disease runs deeper, through the veins of both our empires. These heretics, these Children of Choronzon, are playing us all."

She stopped directly in front of him, the intensity of her presence a physical force. "You and I are the only ones who seem to understand the true nature of the game. Your sorcerer is bound by rules that make him weak, and my masters are blinded by ambition. They are all dancing to a tune played by madmen."

She extended a gloved hand, not in greeting, but as a scale upon which two futures were weighed.

"So you have a choice," she said, her voice dropping to a deadly serious whisper. "You can continue to chase my shadow, treating me as your primary foe, while the cultists burn our world down around us. Or, you can work with me. A quiet, unacknowledged alliance. We pool our knowledge, we hunt the real monsters together, and we protect our nations from the inside out."

She let the offer hang in the air, a promise laced with poison.

"Choose, Lord Alistair. Become my partner in this shadow war… or become my next target. Because if you are not with me, then you are in my way. And I am very, very good at removing obstacles."

The footsteps of Valerius and the palace guard grew louder, approaching fast. Alex looked from Katarina's unwavering, challenging eyes to the corpse of the man who had died for a righteous cause, and felt the walls of his new world closing in. He was trapped between a sorcerer’s dogma, a fanatic’s fire, and a spy’s deadly logic. And he had seconds to decide which poison he was willing to swallow.