TIME August 3rd LOCATION The donjon, Lord Valden's keep
BACKGROUND:
The ambush had been arranged from the start – a wolf pack, a Lieutenant named Karver, and Overseer Kaleb’s fingerprints all over it.
The Agents woke up in chains.
WHAT HAPPENED
The cell was standard dungeon fare – stone, damp, manacled to the wall, hands bound in mitt-like restraints specifically to stop any spell that needed a free hand.
Kaleb’s first visit got him nothing; the Agents gave him no more than silence and open hostility, and he left without pressing the point.
He came back later with an explanation nobody had asked for – not out of guilt, he made clear, but because he thought they’d earned some professional respect for what they’d survived so far.
“It’s not that I want to do this, you understand,” he said, with what almost passed for sincerity. “Truth be told, I don’t much care either way. The project’s integrity comes first – knowledge of this facility can’t reach the NIL. Six months, perhaps less, and we’re done here. The results so far have been excellent, genuinely. You won’t be remembered in any bard’s song for it, but there’s a footnote waiting in the Dranathess annals, for those with the authority to read them. It’s for the King, in the end. We all make sacrifices. Yours is just a little time.”
“There is a war coming. And soon. We need Troopers that don’t need to rest, that survive wounds that would leave a normal soldier combat-ineffective. Troll and lycan. A heady combination, and difficult to keep sane – but if it works, it’s decisive.”
Overseer Kaleb
The dog-soldiers, the werewolves, Devon’s stitched pelt, the troll pinned regenerating and screaming in a cell down the corridor – all of it was Kaleb’s own research, a Dranathess military program to breed soldiers that couldn’t be killed the normal way.
He seemed to take real pride in it, and pressed hard for anything they knew about the medallions they carried, and about Asquith.
The medallions led him somewhere specific – a long, almost wistful digression on Akatha C’Dartris, Guardian of the Tree, sworn knight of the King he still serves: how his two children had been executed by royal order before the Battle of Dunrath Fields, to deny the enemy any leverage over him, and how he’d taken up arms and won that battle anyway rather than break. “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why,” Kaleb quoted, almost admiringly. “Is he even still alive, I wonder.”
Their letters of introduction got the same scrutiny – confirmed identities, a sponsor in Captain Brin, nothing that actually explained what they wanted here. “If our roles were reversed,” he mused aloud, more to himself than to them, “would you take the gamble? Let your captives go, and hope nothing they’d seen here was worth thousands of lives if it got out. Or wait five or six months, and be sure.” He didn’t answer his own question before he left.
Time passed with no obvious way out, the drip of water in the dark the only company, until a soft whoosh and pop interrupted it – Deville, materialising out of the shadows near the doorway, her heels clacking softly across the flagstones like a clock ticking down. “Hey sugars,” she said, looking them over, “y’all look like a mess of fried catfish.”
Her offer was simple and entirely self-interested: help her get free of whatever bound her here, and she’d help them escape in return.
She hadn’t quite accounted for the fact that the Agents were still chained – the weapons and holy symbol she smuggled in were useless without free hands to use them.
“This is some rescue!”
she said, unimpressed.
“I bring you weaponry, but you have a plan for getting out?”
Her binding came with limits of its own, it turned out – barred from using her particular talents on anyone already inside the keep, and from enlisting any of the Lord’s own people to help her.
Strangers, apparently, hadn’t been covered.
All she was asking in return was small, by her account: break the circle scored into the floor of her own cell, and their door would open in turn.
Kaleb came back before they’d gotten far with the chains, apparently unaware anything had changed.
“I hear DeVille had visited – I believe she, ahem, saw you. Not any more… I did suggest that you be gagged, but no, Deville thought the manacles were enough. Told her so.”
He left satisfied, none the wiser about the smuggled weapons.
Deville, checking in not long after, was characteristically unbothered about how she’d gotten past the door at the top of the steps.
“Well, sugars, Kevin thinks he locked it. Maybe he was a bit distracted at the time. Just my natural feminine charms… why don’t y’all try it?”
It took a long, grinding effort – melted chain links, shattered bolts, a knife worked patiently through iron – but between Ash’s scorching rays, Krusha’s own strength, and Raven’s sheer refusal to quit, the Agents finally broke free of their bonds, howls and unfamiliar keening drifting in from somewhere else in the donjon as they did.
The corridor beyond was dim and sconce-lit, lined with cells the Agents hadn’t been shown on the way in.
A guardroom opened off to one side – a table, cards left mid-game, food going cold – empty for the moment, whoever’d been sitting there drawn off by the noise.
One held two men bitten by Karver himself and chained for tissue harvesting, snarling and sobbing by turns behind a barred window, eyes glowing yellow in the torchlight.
Another held the source of at least some of the howling – a troll pinned to the wall by its own regeneration, metal stakes driven through flesh that had grown back around them.