"The crazed old man?" Zavros's eyebrows shot up. "He has something to do with this?" Zavros suddenly laughed. "We've been keeping him in the dungeons in Salvation, but he's dead now. The Primate sent for him before he left, asking for him to be sent to the interrogation room. No one ever leaves the interrogation room alive, not once the Primate's had his way with them."

As the approaching footsteps echoed through the vaulted cavern, growing louder, Killian pushed Zavros away from him. Zavros immediately dropped to the ground, fumbling until he found his oculars and placed them back on his nose.

Killian was gone.

~

KILLIAN was both furious and filled with fear. Evrin had been in the dungeons in Salvation, right under his nose this whole time. The lightly-secured gaol for drunks and thieves was the last place Killian would have thought to look for the man who could change his appearance with a few spoken words, or create objects as powerful as the destructive cubes.

The cube he'd fabricated and threatened Zavros with was so false that only Zavros, half-blind and with a templar's ignorance of runes, could have believed it was anything else. While Zavros might have knowledge, when it came to lore the man knew little, particularly compared with someone like Ella or Evrin.

The conversation with Zavros has filled him with confusion, but with the templar's slip he'd managed to learn something about what had actually happened.

Evrin had gone to the Pinnacle to find and destroy this book, and the chamber along with it. Something had gone wrong, and he'd been captured, but the templars thought he was just another pilgrim. Whatever the book was, it hadn't been destroyed, and was now in the Primate's possession.

And now the Primate had tortured the old man. Had Evrin divulged? Did the Primate now have the knowledge that Killian himself longed for? Could Killian have done anything to change Evrin's fate?

Killian ran towards Salvation, to the only place where Evrin might have left him a message. He would need to find Evrin's cell. Surely the old man had left him something?

When Killian arrived at the dungeons in Salvation, he stopped in shock. The gaol, where he himself had been held so many times in his youth, was a smoking ruin. Charred bodies sat hunched inside the remnants of cells, prisoners who would now never leave. Two of the bodies closer to the front must have been guards; one had a key ring at his belt, and the other had bits of white cloth still attached to the red flesh that had been his back.

A solitary guard in white crouched, staring at one of the corpses.

"What happened?" Killian asked.