She gazed at the lock and chains, confused. A red glittering magic protected the metal. She reached out to touch the lock with her hands, her magical senses following, examining the work. It felt like armor—hard and unyielding. A protection spell. The faded color suggested the spell was old—perhaps it had been cast when the gates were locked—but it was clearly the work of an experienced mage. The spell was simple but bold and unusually strong. The color also suggested a disciple of Jok—the warrior’s god. Whoever it was, they’d wandered a long way from home.

She frowned. The girl in the forest had told her the Justice was executing mages—and besides, Duke’s Forest was famously anti-magic. The masked lady knew that better than anyone. And yet, it seemed a spell had been used to prevent the citizens of Duke’s Forest from escaping.

Or, perhaps, anyone else from getting in.

Who had cast this spell to keep the chains from rusting, to keep the lock jammed tight? And had it been cast from the inside or the outside? How had the mage-girl escaped? A weakness in the wall somewhere?

You don’t have time for this. Not now. Just focus on getting inside.

She drew on her dwindling reserves to unpick the spell, the tremor in her left hand growing more pronounced as she laid her cane against the chains and burned the red magic to frays. “Gods’ balls,” she cursed, clenching her fist harder to steady the shaking. The old rusted metal shuddered and glowed purple, the lock on the other side clicking open and falling to the ground with a thunk. The lady pulled the chain loose with her steadier right hand, breathing heavily behind her brass grille, and slipped through the slender gap she’d created.

Home sweet home, she thought bitterly.

Her ruined kid boots crunched on a pile of bones. She glanced around, turning the mechanism on her mask to bring the scene into focus, the spell-scape shimmering into the background. A human skull stared back at her from a pile of detritus. And then she spotted a thighbone. A rib cage still ragged with the remnants of flesh.

She crouched, picked up a medium-size bone that must have been the upper part of an arm. Holding it up to the eyeholes of her mask, she spied tiny serrations in the white. Chew marks. She peered through the shifting gloom again, anger sharpening her vision. The mess of human remains pressed up against the gates as if they were still trying to escape. She glimpsed the tiny hand of a child.

A mage hunt? The girl had told her the Justice had been convicting mages, but she could never have imagined anything on this scale. On top of the Pestilence. She remembered what the mage-girl had said: this was the Justice’s doing. How had the Duke let this happen?