The corridor stretched before him.
From magnificence he had seen on the outside, Kaelen had expected gold. He had expected tapestries, chandeliers, the quiet opulence of a cult. What he got was stone. Bare stone, grey and damp, the walls weeping moisture that glistened in the candlelight like sweat on a fevered brow. The floor was worn flagstone, uneven, treacherous. Every few steps, his bare feet found a dip or a rise.
The gaunt man walked ahead of him, his grey robes dragging against the floor, making a soft whispering sound, the sound was soft and eerie.
"The estate looks… diminished," he said sarcastically, the gaunt man kept on walking, after a while he spoke.
His voice was low but it echoed off the stone, returning in fragments, each syllable arriving at a different time. "We heard you had fallen on hard times. We were sorry to hear it."
"I am called Silas," the gaunt man continued. "I am the Keeper of the Inner Door, the chorus has decided to allow you privilege of entering the inner door."
"Lucky me," Kaelen said.
Silas's shoulders moved in something that might have been a suppressed laugh. "You still have your humor. That is good, we were afraid the attempts had broken your spirit."
"You sent a letter," Kaelen said, keeping his voice flat. "I came. What do you want?"
Silas stopped and turned.
From this angle he looked…dead?
His eyes were pale, so pale they were almost soulless; it was like something and not someone was staring at him. Kaelen felt a cold sense of unease, because those eyes did not blink they simply rested on him, vacant.
Silas's face was young barely twenty, but his skin lacked any flush of blood or warmth; it had the dull, waxen sheen of a body that died along time ago, his skin was stretched too tightly over his cheekbones. No stubble, no pores, no small imperfection. Just a smooth, terrible perfection.
What was the word? Uncanny.
"We want what we have always wanted," Silas said and turned.
He now noticed what he had somehow missed at first: the man's way of walking. It wasn't obvious unless one looked closely, but once seen, it could not be unseen. He did not swing his arms in rhythm. His feet did not roll heel-to-toe. Instead, he moved with a mechanical, jointed precision…like a puppet…or something not used to having a body. Each step landed flat and silent, and his torso remained unnaturally level still the terrible perfection.
Pelt-takers
The thought was sudden, the eyes, the skin, the gait none of it was human hesitation or illness, It was the perfect imitation of a living man by something that had never been alive at all that that did not understand humans.
In the novel they had been mentioned in passing. They stole human skin and wove it into the perfect body, no blemishes. He had not considered that they were part of the cult.
Dead, but not yet. Empty, but not sad. And still it stared "The Sleeping King to wake. The old world to burn. The new world to rise from its ashes."
It was the chant the cult members in the book sang when they were recruiting people to awaken the first 'god'.
Silas paused and tilted his head in an odd angle, and the candlelight caught the hollows beneath his cheekbones. "And we want your continued patronage, of course. The King requires sacrifice. Sacrifice requires infrastructure. Infrastructure requires gold."
Kaelen blinked. The audacity was almost beautiful.
"You tried to kill me," Kaelen said with a deadpan look, "and yet you still want me to keep giving you money?"
Silas's smile widened, It was not a pleasant smile it felt like the skin was smiling and the body was not.
Then the smile faltered.
"Yes," Silas said. He tilted his head. The candlelight slid across his cheekbone. "The attempt was unsuccessful. Therefore, it does not affect the arrangement."
Kaelen stared at him.
Silas stared back.
"You tried to kill me," Kaelen repeated, slower now, as if speaking to a child. Or maybe a stone would have been a better comparison.
"I heard you the first time," Silas said, then he paused as if realizing something "Is the repetition meant to clarify something? I already acknowledged the attempt. I confirmed its failure. The logical path forward is unchanged. Considering the fact that you are still alive it nothing seems to have changed."
Kaelen opened his mouth. Closed it.
The thing in front of him went from being scary to being idiotic, the more he thought about the conversation the more he became angry, what was this thing actually saying?
Silas's gaze drifted to Kaelen's trembling hands.
"Your heartbeat has increased," Silas observed. "Your jaw is clenched. Your pupils are dilated." He tilted his head to the other side. The seam at his neck caught the light. "These are all fear responses, but you do not seem to be scared."
He sounded fascinated. Like a naturalist describing a beetle's mating dance.
"So I will ask," Silas continued, taking one precise, flat-footed step closer, "Why does it interfere with our transaction? You are alive. I am here. The gold is still gold."
Kaelen's breathing stalled. He imagined Han telling him that since he had not died and he had gone to another world they should forgive and move on.
"You are trembling," Silas said. He looked down at his own hand, then back at Kaelen's face.
His pale eyes scanned Kaelen's face again. Searching. Finding nothing.
"I am missing something," Silas said flatly. "The attempt on your life was last week. You survived. The gold is still needed. The King still requires sacrifice. Nothing has changed."
This time it sounded more rhetoric.
Kaelen realized, with a cold that settled into his bones like lead, Yes this was not human, Silas was not pretending to misunderstand. He genuinely could not see the problem, so he needed to calm down and not argue with an idiot.
Yes calm down.
mm…calm down.
Calm…it was not working.
Kaelen's hand moved before his mind caught up.
The punch connected with Silas's jaw and it was like hitting iron. The shock of it raced up Kaelen's arm, through his wrist, into his elbow. Pain bloomed bright and immediate.
[Damage assessment: 10%]
But Silas staggered back and his spine hit the stone wall with a dull, heavy thud.
He lay there for a while before standing, then hecontinued standing there, pressed against the wall, his pale eyes looking at Kaelen with something that might have been curiosity. The seam on his jaw where Kaelen's fist had landed had split slightly and that was it, the face was not flushed and the cut was not bleeding.
Silas raised one hand and the split seam.
Then he pushed off the wall, straightened his too-straight spine, and walked back to his original spot.
He had not even swayed.
"Are you better now?" Silas asked.
Kaelen stared at him not blinking but his knuckles were screaming.
"Will you give us the gold now?"
Kaelen hit him again.
This time Silas's head snapped to the side, and a small piece of something dry and flaky like old paper fell from his split seam onto the floor.
Silas turned his head back.
He touched his jaw again, examined the damage. Then looked at Kaelen with those pale, pale eyes.
"Are you better now?" he repeated. Same tone, flat, patient emptiness. "Will you give me the gold?"
Kaelen's chest was heaving. His hand was bleeding. And the thing in front of him was not angry, not hurt, not even annoyed.
"why am I so angry?" Kaelen thought. "I figure it out later."
He pulled on his mana. He would-
A door opened.
Not the main door. A smaller door, set into the shadows of the left wall, so flush with the stone that Kaelen had not even seen it there.
A man stepped through.
He was tall. Dressed simply dark coat, dark boots, no ornament. His face was young, like Silas's. His skin was smooth, like Silas's. But where Silas was 'wrong'…too right, this man was…
Almost right…somehow wrong.
He blinked at a normal pace. His mouth had the faint asymmetry of someone who had smiled recently, or was about to. When he walked, his arms swung. His feet rolled heel to toe. He looked, like a perfectly ordinary man stepping into a perfectly ordinary room.
And yet.
Kaelen still knew he was not human.
Because the man's eyes did not quite move correctly, there was a 'lag'. A fraction of a heartbeat where nothing was there.
This one was better at being human.
That made him infinitely worse.
The man looked at Silas. Looked at the split seam on his jaw.
Then he looked at Kaelen.
"Oh," the man said, and his voice was warm, almost kind, the voice of a man who had learned sympathy from a book and practiced it in a mirror. "You've been speaking to Silas. I apologize. I presume your first day at the inner door had not been good."
He stepped forward, extended a hand. The nails were clean, the skin was warm. Kaelen could feel the heat radiating off it from a foot away.
"I'm Theron," the man said.
He smiled.
It was a perfect smile.
"My brother tried to kill you," Theron said, gesturing vaguely at Silas. "That was wrong of him."
He said it like, the attempt on Kaelen's life was, to him, simply a failed logistical step. No more personal than a letter lost in the post.
He tilted his head.
"So. Let's start over." His warm brown eyes held Kaelen's. "You're angry. I understand your anger. I will have Silas be punished for harming our beneficiary or would you like to hit me instead? I bruise more convincingly. It might help."
Kaelen sighed suddenly tired
He could tell that he thought he was appeasing him. That was the worst part.
"I want my money."