My eyes then held the greatest of their disbeliefs.

Werlyle was on his knees, clutching his throat with both hands. His vocal tubing gave a rubbery squeak as the thin blade of a rapier returned to its scabbard. As Werlyle hit the ground, the boy stood over him.

In the open door, atop the small flight of its steps, stood Morlia and someone else. This second person, a man, I could have sworn I had known.

Maybe it was the moonlight, the lightning strike, or my blood rushing away from me, but her face, as the boy’s, was not the same. Some form of unlife had replaced them, and its new demeanor I dared not guess. Their features were somehow more canine, their eyes beady.

Standing like figures claiming the summit of a nightmare wedding cake, I then knew with absolute certainty who the other person was.

“Morden,” spoke the Ordrid. The boy ascended the stairs, coming to his father’s side. Morden turned toward the graves. A pang of sheer terror erupted once more when they cast their eyes on me.

You’d think I would have run, but I didn’t—couldn’t. I stood as lifeless as a statue in that long-gone mule cart.

—

The necromancer’s disappearance from the dungeon surprised no one. Those with a penchant for gambling placed bets on the manner in which he would bust loose, while those prone to superstition debated what manner of ghost or beast would be summoned to assist in his freeing. All were wrong, and it was the nonchalant reaction of Warden Rogaire that now made sense.

Soon after the necromancer was paraded, in that most ridiculous presentation of chains, I was fulfilling some trustee role on the outskirts of the head office when the warden had him brought in. They remained in his office long past when I was returned. I always assumed some long-winded interrogation had taken place.

The Ordrid’s escape happened to follow that fateful meeting. In conjunction with a curious guard change that night, Warden Rogaire had his lower tiersmen come join in one of the dungeon’s most famed spectator sports.

Prisoners who’d failed on debts to royal houses, or who particularly irritated the guards, would be tied to a stone altar. Naked as the day they were born, a guardsman would soak the backside of the flailing prisoner with bitch urine and then release a pack of deprived Imperial Hounds. The fight to get to the scent was as brutal as the unsettling result. The honor to attend was normally reserved for only the ranking cadre and occasional whores that occupied the key-vaults in the not so quiet hours of roll call and gruel distribution.

Rinlot couldn’t have known that the sorcerer, or necromancer, or whatever title best fit the man who came to him in chains before leaving at leisure, and who he foolishly bartered some deal with, was the very man who sired Morden.

Was imprisonment itself a part of the Ordrid’s plan?

—