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?

—

The Ordrid looked at me, or through me. I felt as if I would fall and never stand again.

Not through my own mind did I see what I say to you now, but through where my eyes may have been if I had been in league with the Ordrid and standing, fittingly, a bit to his rear:

I knew the place all too well. The gate of the Municipal Dungeon was built as if for giants. In front of its iron scales, each alone as large as a shield, two guards leaned on their halberds. Standing in front of them, the Ordrid was clad in black leggings and a dark coat. Its hood hung behind him, tapering down to a point near a thin waist. His head was bald like an onion. His hands moved along with his plea, reassuring and coy.

The bewildered guards couldn’t decide who to gape at longer, one another or this man, in the midst of a full confession stating he practiced all the outlawed magic. Some time must have passed between that image and the next, but the Ordrid—surely this fiend who rose Morlia and Morden—the Ordrid then turned to me.