I bellowed at the priest, slamming him with viciously high relative gravity. It was enough to cause his arm to slam into the floorboards and whip his head back until he was completely supine.

  “ENOUGH!”

  He couldn’t move a muscle as he lay there struggling just to breathe.

  “I’ll be back for you, priest. Try not to suffocate in the meantime.”

  Though I hoped he did. I let my disgust and resentment soak my voice as it came out more of a hiss than words.

  “Seta, I think I’ve found your parents.”

  Opening a rift into the room, I stepped through to the sight of two heavily injured people. A woman and a man, bound to chairs, surrounded by blood and teeth. Seta cried out.

  “MOTHER!!! FATHER?!!”

  She struggled to leap off my shoulder, so I grabbed her and set her down. There was a low, painful moan from Corlun’s chair. The poor man had been beaten black and blue. Both his eyes were swollen shut, his lips were bloody and swollen, his ears were cut and discoloured, and he had gashes and bruises across his body.

  Seta’s mother was in somewhat better condition, but her blouse had been torn from her chest, and her face was also heavily bruised and cut.

  They couldn’t have been restrained for more than an hour, if that; I didn’t imagine the church had enough time to do anything more than simply beat the tar out of them.

  That fucker downstairs was going to pay.

  I intruded on Armela’s mind, allowing the urgency I felt to permeate my message.

  “Armela, see if any of the villagers can heal wounds. There must be someone nearby who can help Seta’s parents. They’re hurt badly. If they’re reluctant, offer them silver. If they’re still hesitant, let me know.”

  There was a positive signal through the connection, and she began making her way down the street.

  I spoke softly to Seta, trying to blunt the horror unfolding before her.

  “Armela is looking for help; your parents will be all better soon. Let’s get them out of these chairs and into a more comfortable position as gently as we can.”

  Seta simply nodded and helped to get the ropes loose. I was worried about what kind of effect this would have on her, but hoped that her intelligence would help balance the damage the trauma would inflict. I also felt somewhat guilty for this; if I hadn’t gotten myself involved with them, then none of this would have happened.

  But this was evened out by the thought that even if I’d gone another way, Seta and the other children would be in the cages at the camp right now, or worse. And it would still be the fault of the church for funding it. My gaze shifted back to the priest being crushed against the floor, and my rage built.

  This little girl had done nothing to deserve the torment she was being put through. Her parents didn’t deserve to be beaten to within an inch of their lives. The other people at the camp didn’t deserve to give up their lives for the profit and whims of others.

  He would know a fear few humans had experienced by the time I was through with him.

  “Found a healer, Vita, on our way.”

  Without waiting, I opened a rift in front of them and beckoned them across the threshold.

  “Come. Quickly now.”

  Armela bodily pushed the small man she’d found through the rift and into the small office space. He was thoroughly flustered, and altogether uncomprehending of his current situation.

  I grabbed the man by the shoulder and steadied him.

  “Ask your questions later, healer. Can you tend to these two or not?”

  He blinked at me before cranking his head down to regard both of Seta’s parents, at which point the doctor in him took over. Scuttling to the Mother’s side, he slid to his knees and chanted. A small green sigil flared to life between his palm and her abdomen.

  “This… will take some time… if I’d known I’d have brought mana potions. I don’t think I’ll be able to do much.”

  He was concentrating furiously on maintaining the skill while talking out of the side of his mouth.

  “Which building is yours, healer? Armela, do you know what he’s talking about?”

  Armela nodded as the man answered.

  “It’s three doors down, cobblestone walk along the north face, red door, stained glass Shoppe windows.”

  I opened a rift directly on the other side of the red door, presumably into the building’s main foyer.

  “Armela, grab whatever this man instructs you to, as non-destructively as you can, please.”

  The man’s eyes widened and his breathing picked up to an even more feverish pace, but he held his tongue. Armela stepped through the rift, and Seta… Seta knelt by her mother’s side and clung to her hand. Nothing else in the world mattered to her at that moment.

  With things relatively controlled, I opened another rift back down to the main floor. The priest was struggling against the increased gravity to little effect. His fingers had gone pale, and his neck and forehead bulged with swollen veins.

  I released the effect, and his limbs sprang up and hovered above him as the resistance disappeared.

  I spoke cooly. Calmly. Not allowing the rage I felt roiling behind my eyes to give the sack of shit the satisfaction of irking me.

  “Your words were: ‘I’ll have you bound to a pyre’. Tell me, priest, before I pass your judgement, is there a name you wish to die with? Or shall you forever be known simply as ‘priest’?”

  He rose to a knee, breathing heavily and fighting to maintain his commanding disposition. Even the situation he was in now wasn’t enough to beat the pride and superiority out of him, not completely.

  “You dare ask my name? After your blatant and disgusting display of heresy and crimes against our faith? As if one so lowly as you could have such an honour bestowed upon them. I will tell you this, though: I am just one of the Cardinals serving Rel in Eprie, and the youngest among them.”

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  His smug tone prickled across my skin as he spoke. He was stalling for time, trying to get his bearings to mount a counteroffensive against me. The twitching in his fingers, the shifty darting of his eyes to the door and windows, the licking of his lips… he was weighing his options.

  “Calling me a mere priest is as deep an insult as your wretched existence! If you have half a mind, you’ll run back to whatever pit spat you out and spend your days sleeping with one eye open.”

  He slid a hand behind his back and moved his fingers in articulate patterns. Was sigil activation not tied to verbal commands? Were motions capable of launching ‘spells’? The movement of his fingers didn’t trigger my pattern recognition for language. I couldn’t decipher it.

  “The Inquisition is coming for you, heretic. And if I do not smite you here, others far more powerful than I will, eventually. You have no recourse now.”

  The arrogance in his words made my ears burn. He did not know what this sad little gaggle of chirping cardinals had stumbled upon. And based on the message that had been given to me by the Brigand Leader, I was fairly confident they’d misinterpreted whatever divine proclamation their God had made to them.

  I doubted Rel would have given two separate messages to two separate priests. The more I listened to this idiot’s monologuing, the more I came to understand how easy it would have been for him to misinterpret a divine revelation from his god.

  He was nothing but bluster and unrestrained narcissism, projecting his desperate need to maintain power and control onto people who posed even a moderate risk to his position.

  Persecuting little girls… This man had fully accepted the corruption of his church and wanted nothing more than to see it upheld.

  “Where are the other children, shitbag? What has been done with their parents? You said they’d cooperated with your ‘activities’. Does this mean they were spared and released?”

  He smirked, sensing another poker chip he could hold for bargaining.

  “What I do, or do not do, with the assets of the church is of no consequence to you. For all I know, you wish to further manipulate them into serving your false god like all the other heathens muddying this glorious country.”

  I could sense a spike of power from his fingers. What he was doing seemed to take much longer than any of the other sigils I’d seen used so far. I would need to intervene before he activated whatever spell he was attempting to cast.

  “No, I don’t believe I’ll tell you where they are or what’s been done to them. Though perhaps if you handed over that disgusting little witch, I may be willing to barter that information.”

  So, communication had broken down to this.

  I’d extracted all the information I would get from this piece of shit. It was time to put an end to his time on this planet, ruining other people’s lives.

  “I can see that reasoning with you was a lost cause. But let me explain this so that you understand it before I kill you. It will never matter how many of you come. It does not matter what armies come to collect my head, and it does not matter what your God instructs your ilk on.”

  I restrained his hand with the vice-like grip of one of my tendrils. His alarm was immediate and satisfying.

  “I will not be claimed. You have caused great harm to someone I care for, and have done so to many others. You will be made to answer for those crimes at my hands. The laws of this country, and the edicts of your God, will not save you.”

  I stepped closer to him, and he fought like a trapped fox, scrabbling at my tendril, attempting to break my grip.

  He hauled back against me, trying to pull himself bodily further away from me. His booted feet clattered against the floor as they slid on the hardwood.

  “The Committee of Cardinals will not come to your rescue, and the Endless Legion of The Great Song shall scorn you. Please do your best to savour every second of what is about to happen to you, as it will only last a moment.”

  His eyes narrowed, and his brows knitted together at the mention of The Great Song. A flicker of recognition crossed behind his eyes for only a moment before disappearing.

  With that, I opened a rift directly into a spot above the planet’s atmosphere that would cause a decaying orbit.

  The priest was instantly ejected from the room by the push of air violently forcing itself through the hole and into the pitch black of space. The depressurization was so intense that unlocked doors flung open, stacks of paper and candles were dragged through the opening, and the chandeliers hanging from the ceiling were pulled toward the hole.

  Several windows burst inward as air desperately tried to enter the vacuum rapidly forming on the inside of the building. The rift was only open for about a second before I slammed it shut behind the Cardinal, but it was long enough to cause substantial chaos throughout the interior.

  Even if the Cardinal had a skill capable of allowing him to breathe underwater, or resist the high pressure of the sea’s bottom, I doubted he had one that would account for the negative pressure of space. The air in his lungs and bowels had likely already been forcefully ejected from his body, and the blood beneath his skin and eyes would boil shortly.

  The pain would be indescribable for the short period he was conscious. And even if he somehow stayed conscious and prevented the water in his skin from boiling off and freezing, it wouldn’t save him from re-entry into the planet’s atmosphere, where he would likely burn up because of the friction against the air.

  Even then, if he shielded himself from the fiery re-entry, he’d still need to survive the impact with the planet’s surface at terminal velocity. Assuming he could not fly might be an oversight, so I ejected a drone to track his path and notify me if the projected trajectory changed, or if signs of life were detected so that I could stamp out whatever was left of him by the time he made planet-fall.

  I opened a second, much smaller rift, and sent the drone through to track the Cardinals descent. I hoped his last painful, terrified moments were spent looking down at the planet he’d made worse by inhabiting. I hoped that—as his eyes glazed over with ice—he was hit with the stupendous truth of his irrelevance.

  Observing Armela stepping back through the rift in the room upstairs for the second time with an armload of bottles, I chose to canvas the gathering crowd of concerned villagers outside.

  Opening the door, I stepped out to a dozen injured and unconscious guards, and roughly double that number of worried civilians. A drone carrying Armela's sword silently flitted by me and into the building. There still weren’t any signs of the other priests who had accompanied the Cardinal.

  Seta had mentioned there being multiple, but I hadn’t actually observed anyone beyond the guards before arriving here. My guess was that the other priests had either already left or had taken up residence at a different location. The drones I’d given the children remained in the village leader’s house, undisturbed.

  I recalled them to my body and directed Seta’s drone to return to her side. After my business in Hilst was concluded, I would ensure that she did not need to hide it moving forward.

  I addressed the crowd as they stood around the defeated guards. Some of them were attempting to attend to wounds, but most just spoke softly amongst themselves with concerned looks.

  “There’s a healer currently working on Seta’s parents on the upper floor of this building. Once his work is done there, I will have him come look after these guards. Do any of you know of other healers that could assist? And where is the village leader? I’ve news I must discuss with him urgently.”

  An older man rose from the side of one of the guards and dusted his pant legs. He had a slight hunch to his shoulders and curly white hair that frizzed out to the sides. Wrinkles along his laugh lines complemented his bushy eyebrows to form a rather jovial-looking man.

  “I’m here, lad.”

  He didn’t seem terribly old, and there was a vitality about him that helped to lower my expectations of how old he actually was. He looked around at the guards on the ground, and the people shifted their attention to the conversation that was about to take place.

  I needed to find out what this man planned to do about this blatant injustice.

  “The priests from Eprie have come here to conduct an ad hoc inquisition of some of your village folk. I’m aware that you had called them here for the relics I provided to the children; however, I have evidence with me that implicates the Church of Rel in the raiding and abduction of those same children.”

  I produced the letter from the church that was meant for the orc warlord and handed it to the village leader.

  “It’s possible that some of the priests are unaware of this operation, and it’s possible that some guards are, as well. However, it is imperative that we locate the remaining priests and have both the children and their parents returned to their rightful lives.”

  The dim look of incomprehension remained fixed in his eyes. I withheld my concern, chalking it up to simple shock and confusion. I didn’t want to think the leader of Hilst was incompetent.

  “The church has conducted itself here with little to no authority beyond the desire for wealth at the expense of your people. Do you have any information about their whereabouts, or any knowledge of where they may be at this time?”

  He looked up from the paper in his hands, clearly trying to wrap his mind around what was happening.

  “You said they had Corlun and Peela up there?”

  He pointed to the second story.

  I didn’t think that needed clarification.

  “And that a healer was working on them? How do we know it wasn’t you who hurt them?”

  I was stunned momentarily. I gawked at him as the accusation hung between us.

  “Sir… I just arrived here. The cardinal from Eprie exited this building to confront me on the steps. Why in all the stars would I go into the building with the Cardinal, and attack Seta’s parents?”

  My mind was screaming at me to stop wasting my time arguing with an idiot, but I continued.

  “Only to turn around and then send for a healer to heal them immediately after? I understand this situation is stressful, but please try to keep your wits about you.”

  The man looked like he wanted to continue hunting for more excuses to put the church back in a good light, and I rolled my eyes.

  “I do not currently have the other children with me, do I? Do I look like I have the parents with me as well? Why would I be asking you for their location if I knew where they were?”

  I tried to rein in my frustration—first the cardinal and now this dimwitted leader. What was going on here?

  He took a step back, raising a hand to forestall further words, but I continued.

  “Further to that, why would I have rescued the children from the goblins if my intention were to hurt any of you? Wouldn’t I simply let the goblins take them? Why not take them myself when the opportunity arose? Why would I spend that time granting them a boon of my God if my intentions were malicious?”

  He was glancing around at the gathered people, who were all looking back at him with mixed expressions of confusion and concern now.

  “I understand both your hesitancy and trepidation when dealing with someone outside your community, I also understand your concern over my beliefs, however I do not wish to prolong any potential suffering they may be going through, so please set aside your worry and aid me in getting the children and their families back home!”

  The village leader crumpled. I wasn’t unsympathetic to his plight—a strange man had come in, disrupted the operations of trusted church officials, and injured their personal guard. If anything, I probably looked to them like an enemy.

  I understood that a kindness like saving the children wouldn’t go a very long way in establishing any deep level of trust, but it had to be worth at least hearing me out. Even if I’d been labelled a heretic, it was still village families that had been taken away.

  This had always seemed so much easier in the stories I’d read and watched back when I was a normal man. People were grateful when the hero came in and saved the day, vanquished the evil fiends, and set everyone back to rights.

  That wasn’t happening here.

  The leader spoke reluctantly, almost resentfully.

  “There isn’t really much of a choice here, is there? If I didn’t help you, you’d go off hunting for the holy cardinals on your own, anyway. And I’d wager, based on the fact the Cardinal isn’t here now—and what happened to the building you dragged him into—I’m assuming he’s likely not going to come back out of it.”

  His jovial disposition receded further as his tone darkened, painting me with a rather malicious brush.

  “I don’t want anyone else to get hurt, so I’ll do what I can to help you.”

  The unspoken part of his sentiment was that he didn’t want any more of the church people to get hurt.

  He’d already given up on his citizens and didn’t care one way or another if they’d be found. In all likelihood, he actively supported the efforts of the church here, regardless of whether he knew of its involvement in the slave operations.

  I suspected that if the church had come for him or his own family, his allegiance would have fallen on the other side of the fence rather abruptly. Whatever help this man could provide me would probably end up leading me on a wild goose chase across their village or turn out to be an attempt to stall my progress to buy the church members time.