While the battle in the castle was reaching its conclusion, the Hiyori Nightclub had taken on a very different quality.
The main dance floor on the first level had been cleared. The people who had been brought here against their will, human and beast-kin both, were seated on the floor in concentric rings, arranged outward from the center according to the severity of what had been done to them.
The outer ring had received the least damage. Mostly young men and women who had arrived more recently, their collars not yet triggered, the sacrifice process not yet underway on their bodies.
They sat with expressions divided between confusion and fear, watching the old man who was pacing back and forth near the inner ring’s edge.
Archbishop Michelle stood at the boundary between the rings, holding a magic circle open, his focus directed inward toward the more severely affected.
The inner ring’s people had been here longer. A number of them had lost consciousness. Their bodies carried cumulative damage from the captivity itself, and the collars had apparently been working on them continuously, eroding something over time in addition to the immediate threat.
The earliest captives, those who had been here longest, had not survived long enough for Michelle to reach them. The sacrifice ritual had taken them before he arrived.
The manner of their deaths was difficult to look at. The collars had extracted every drop of blood, the bodies left in a state that resembled something that had dried for a century rather than died minutes ago, the tissue dessicated, the features collapsed, the posture of someone who had simply run out of whatever kept the form together.
Michelle hadn’t allowed himself to pause at that sight. He’d moved immediately to the people who still had time and hadn’t stopped since.
His left hand blazed green, the specific green of something living, lush and insistent, the faint suggestion of a serpent coiled around a staff visible in the light’s texture.
The healing energy the deity was channeling through him fought the collars at the cellular level, repairing exactly as fast as the collars damaged, a direct and continuous contest between construction and destruction.
Keeping more than a hundred people in this state simultaneously was the kind of sustained effort that even a grand archbishop could feel, the mental resources depleting steadily alongside the arcane ones.
He looked at them. Men and women, the extended captivity having left marks that the healing magic couldn’t fully address, disease, dependency, damage that was both physical and something harder to name.
The door out of this was right here. He wasn’t going to let them die in the last hours before it opened.
The pain he couldn’t prevent, the collars caused something that felt like a heavy cord tightening continuously around the neck, and a number of the inner ring captives had gone into shock from the sustained pressure, but they were alive. The healing magic held the thread.
"I don’t know whether Miguel and his partner can stop it in time. If they can’t, I’ll have to use the other option, can’t save everyone that way, but it gets half of them clear."
Decades of experience had taught him not to commit his entire position to one outcome. He began the invocation for the deity of wisdom under his breath.
At his level, a verbal invocation was sufficient, the parchment intermediaries that younger practitioners required weren’t necessary when the connection between the practitioner and the divine had been built across a lifetime.
His right hand opened a second circle, this one a deep, shifting blue, dense with moving lines, the appearance of something between a blueprint and a mechanism in the process of being decoded. He directed it at the nearest collar.
The circle mapped the collar’s structure immediately, materials, components, the micro-scale magic circles that ran through it at every junction.
Each element charted, analyzed, broken down. The process of reverse-engineering a pathway to disrupt the function without triggering the lethal mechanism moved forward.
Then all of it stopped.
The collars went dark. Every one of them simultaneously, the magic in them extinguishing as if a single switch controlling all of them had been thrown from somewhere far away.
The abrupt termination caused backlash, the internal structure of each collar cracking and fragmenting under the uncontrolled shutdown, the mechanisms that had been running continuously unable to stop cleanly, the collars breaking themselves apart from within and falling away in pieces.
The inner ring captives collapsed into unconsciousness as the pressure ended.
The outer ring exploded.
Whatever had been held in check, the relief, the disbelief, the realization that this was real and that it was over, came out all at once in a sound that the dance floor’s sound system had been built to produce but had never received like this, the voices layering and compounding until the whole space resonated with it.
Michelle exhaled once. Whatever had happened in the castle, the sacrifice process had been terminated from the source.
He looked around, noted that the larger situation wasn’t fully resolved, and moved to the wall. He closed his eyes and extended his perception, his awareness traveling the distance like light across a vast space, resolving at Miguel’s location.
Miguel had just emerged from the castle. He was standing in the open air, staring at the problem of having used his last teleportation parchment, when the Archbishop’s incorporeal presence materialized beside him like a calm ghost.
Miguel startled. He recovered quickly and gave a compressed account of the situation, the castle, the stairwell, the captives, what was needed, carefully leaving out the specific role and identity of the person who had been fighting inside. He made the request for support.
Michelle’s projection looked at the castle with a particular kind of attention.
"The half-moon count’s castle was hidden here this entire time. Interesting. I came to this city a number of times in my early years and never detected it. Which means it was deliberately concealed by someone more recently." He seemed to file this for later examination. "Very interesting."
Miguel recognized that the nightclub situation must be stable if the Archbishop had attention to spare for architectural curiosity. He exhaled in relief and then, carefully, nudged.
"Archbishop, could you possibly come a little faster? I have a friend who knows quite a lot about what’s here, and I can ask him for details later. Right now people need."
"You always underestimate what high-level transcendents can do."
Michelle’s voice in the projection form had the same quality it had in person.
"This form is a fragment of my consciousness, running as a passenger on one of your hairs. Its function is communication and giving my body a location to teleport to. My body itself, which shares this consciousness, has been setting up the teleportation array since approximately the moment this conversation began."
Miguel made a somewhat embarrassed face.
The projection took the opportunity to continue.
"I’ll say this while I have your attention: I know you enjoy mixing and matching, taking the outer forms of several divine domains and working with all of them simultaneously.
It’s creative. But you should at least establish a genuine devotion with one or two of the gods, enough that you can receive their direct responses through spoken invocation alone. Then you wouldn’t be standing outside a castle with no parchments left and no teleportation and nothing to work with."
Miguel listened without interrupting, nodding at each point. In his private ranking of people whose criticism he accepted without reservation, this man occupied a position no one else came close to reaching.
He’d raised Miguel from early childhood. The relationship had long since become something the formal title of Archbishop didn’t fully describe.
A father correcting his son. Familiar and completely ordinary.
The doorway opened beside him.
It led onto what appeared to be open space, stars in every direction, the light stretched into long lines by the traversal, the sense of vast distance compressed into a single step. Michelle walked through it, snapped his fingers to close the portal behind him, and dispersed the projected form with a casual tap.
"See? No parchment required. Direct invocation, sustained connection, no intermediary materials." He looked at Miguel with mild satisfaction. "The investment pays back."
He didn’t continue the lecture. He walked with Miguel into the castle.
At the entrance, Raphael was standing with his arms folded and his back against the wall. He watched them arrive, gave both of them a single nod, and then stepped past without speaking, walking out of the castle without looking back.
Michelle watched him go with something amused in the corner of his expression, and then nodded to himself slowly.
"So that’s him. Raphael Alanster." He let out a quiet sound. "You’ve found a remarkable friend."
Miguel followed up with a question about who Raphael was. Michelle didn’t answer immediately. He extended one hand and released a healing working into the stairwell’s air, a sustained distribution that reached the life-signs of every occupied cocoon and stabilized them with the same ease someone used when giving medicine to a patient.
Without the sacrifice ritual’s active interference, keeping these people alive was simple maintenance, nothing that required any particular technique.
He let the working run and turned to Miguel.
"He’s on IFSA’s wanted list. Complicated history. He began as a Black Gloves operative, was later part of the Red Gloves, and at some point was implicated in the deaths of two of his partners. He refused to cooperate with the investigation and disappeared. The case is still open."
Miguel absorbed this as the healing light continued to move through the stairwell around them.
"That’s..."
He didn’t finish the sentence.