The door swung wide open, revealing a passageway into the ground that would’ve looked like a pretty average tunnel if it hadn’t been for the fact that it was apparently the Church’s secret domain.

Before we could take more than a step inside, a sickly green cloud exploded into an existence, an audible pop the only sign that someone deeper within had decided to cast a spell.

I brought up my magic instantly, drawing on the not-memories I had gained just before Lady Laur had come to get us. There were any number of things that could deal with what was probably a Voci oath’s Oathstorm, even if I wasn't sure what kind of crazy additional effects it might hold within itself.

I was unable to use any of them before the cloud of magic hit Seb. He froze up as it hit him, and though I could only see his back from where I was, I could tell that he wasn't going to be moving of his own volition anytime soon.

Behind Seb, the rest of us were loosely gathered in a crowd in the empty storage room that led to the crypt. Nobody else was hit at first, but it was going to come towards us soon enough.

A stealthy glance at Lady Laur revealed that the veiled woman was moderately surprised, but nothing more than that. She has measures.

I readied a spell, forming the frame of and pouring the fuel for a Prismatic Shield, but I didn't add the spark to it. I didn't know if I was being controlled—and hell, if she didn’t die I knew I was never going to be sure—but if I was, I had enough of my own volition left to know that I wanted her dead. Exhausting her own resources was a good first step towards that.

“Are you not an oathholder?” she asked me. “Can you not defend?”

“I can’t,” I lied. “I’m primarily focused on offense. My solution to this is usually ‘kill everyone in the immediate vicinity’.”

“Don’t lie to me,” she ordered, but the words felt… weaker this time. I didn’t know why.

I fought them. It was a stupid, petty matter, but I wasn’t going to bend the knee to her every whim. I’d learned enough about that all those years ago to know that I never wanted to do that again.

The oathtongue acted almost like it was a beast of its own, tendrils of influence reaching deep inside my mind, but it was slower than before and it was something I dearly wished to disobey.

To counteract it, I reached deep within as well, searching for the resolve I needed. I found two aspects of myself most suited to doing so—love and hatred, two diametrically opposed beliefs, but somehow it felt right to pull on both and—

[INDIFFERENCE]

—and memories were flying through my mind, someone else’s memories of being attacked by powerful magic and simply ignoring it and moving on and being stronger and—and just like that, the tendrils were gone and I could think properly.

“I’m not lying,” I said. The lie felt like a thousand kilos of weight taken off my shoulders, an oppressive influence removed when I’d been barely aware that it’d been there.

Lady Laur looked at me suspiciously. Perhaps my drawing on the attributes of Inome hadn’t been the stealthiest operation. I wouldn’t know—it wasn’t like my mind was here when I was getting those images piped into it.

“If you say so,” she said, clearly unwilling to let the issue drop.

“I do say so,” I said. “Now can you get someone to stop that before it takes all of us down too?”

She sighed. “You do not order me around, little Lily.”

That hadn’t been a no. A moment later, she gestured towards one of the people in the crowd. Not one that I recognized—either that, or they’d decided to put on the white uniform at some point between the last time I’d seen them and now and were unrecognizable because of that. She has more oathholders?

Whoever they were, they stepped forward and thrust out a hand. At first, I couldn’t recognize what was being done, but I figured it out when the hazy green cloud started to condense on a point just in front of the white-clad oathholders hand. A Vacuum Point. It was a Ceretian spell, but it was high-level and restricted to certain oaths. That would make this one an oathholder of… Caël? Either that or one of the minor gods.

Kyle whistled, and I could sympathize with the move. Lady Laur had some serious firepower on her side, and though I was pretty sure I could easily take any of them one-on-one, taking on the combined forces under her influence was going to be tricky.

Which is why we cut it off at the head. I couldn’t kill her now. I knew that Jasmine and the others were in the catacombs somewhere, yes, but I didn’t know where. Lady Laur apparently did, and I wasn’t going to give up the one navigation tool I could muster up. Once we were within striking range of the final enemy, though, I was going to take any opportunity I could.

“Somebody pick the man up,” the veiled woman ordered. “He’s made a mess.”

Making a mess apparently entailed lying down on the floor spread-eagle, which poor Seb had fallen into. I still suspected he was an oathholder of some kind—I could still remember how eerily prescient he’d been on detecting my lies, and no way that he had that much insight on things as a mundane—but if he was, he wasn’t a Nacea oath. Not one that could heal himself, at least. Two men picked him up by the arms and the legs, situating him on a third man’s back. He had to be held down in order to not fall—looking at him, I could tell that he could still move his eyes, but nothing else seemed to be working.

His eyes made contact with mine, and I could swear he started blinking more purposefully, almost as if he was trying to tell me something.

“We have a healer here?” I asked, pointedly not addressing Lady Laur.

“Not here,” the woman replied, not a single other person in the crowd even attempting an answer.

“I can,” Kyle volunteered. “I don’t have much, but I have a few anti-plague spells stored from a stint in a hospital.”

“No,” Lady Laur snapped. “Not now.”

Kyle shrugged. “Sure. It’s your show.”

There was still a Church oathholder somewhere inside that tunnel, but during the conversation we’d been having, they’d fled. Maybe they’d taken a look at the array of people we’d had lined up and realized that no, it wasn’t worth it to try to take us down when there were just so many of us.

“They’ll know we’re coming,” Laur said, taking her attention off Kyle. “We were unable to kill the enemy oathholder.”

She looked at me when she said that last line, judgment in her eyes, and I shrugged.

“Explain yourself.”

I wasn’t able to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. “You didn’t order me to kill them, my lady.”

“Kneel,” she said, and I could feel how I could push it away now.

All I needed to do was reach inside, pull on the roiling mess of emotion and the connection it granted me to my god, and I could push it aside. Push the lady aside, maybe with a fresh hole or two through her.

I knelt. Now was not the time. Patience.

“Good,” she said. “Know your place, little Lily.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see one of Kyle’s spheres glowing bright red, then white. He was standing next to the man that was carrying Seb, making conversation. Taking advantage of the distraction I’d oh so conveniently provided him, I realized.

I smiled despite myself. She’d paid too much attention to me, and whether or not it had an impact, Kyle was going to be able to do something she explicitly disallowed because she didn’t deem him important enough to waste her magic on.

“I will lead the way,” she said. “Follow.”

Now that I’d figured out how to do it, it was no more complicated than flexing a muscle in my arm. I reached into my oath, and it reached back with memories of [INDIFFERENCE]. The words slid off my mind like water. When I followed Lady Laur, it was my choice to do so, not hers.

And soon enough, she was going to find out exactly what my choices had to say about someone like her.

________________________________

“Left,” Lady Laur called, and we followed.

According to her earlier claim, there would be another few cells of influenced civilians with us at the same time. Our group was already a few dozen strong, all of them equipped with her oathtongue-induced training and high-class weapons that I hadn’t bothered questioning the origin of. There were even a couple military-grade guns in the mix, which I hadn’t seen out of the oathholders that had been attacking us earlier. Weapons she hadn’t wanted to lose before the final operation, at a guess.

I’d caught a glimpse of the map back at the warehouse, and it had been positively mind-boggling in scale. The catacombs stretched underneath the entire city and then some, and they were packed with twists, turns, and dead ends that ensured any errant visitor would have a bad time trying to navigate them. I’d done my best to commit it to memory, but if someone asked me whether we were going the right way right now, I wouldn’t be able to give them an accurate answer.

We’d encountered little direct resistance, but…

“Back!” the teenaged boy who’d drawn the short stick managed to cry out, and then the pathway in front of us exploded, purple fire scorching the stone walls for a brief second. At my position a little further behind the front of the pack, I could still feel the wash of heat acutely, as if I’d just opened a hot oven. I hope he’s okay.

When the trap dissipated, the boy was still standing. For a certain value of standing, that was. He’d managed to get himself further back than I would’ve expected—an athletic one, it looked like—and he’d tried diving back towards where the bulk of the group was concentrated. He’d… kind of made it, but he came out much worse the wear for it. His legs were burnt beyond saving, blackened and burned as if they were no more than charcoal, and a good half of his body had been heavily marred by the flames.

“Someone take him back,” Lady Laur ordered.

She wasn’t completely merciless—I knew certain people that would have ordered their followers to be mercy-killed and then left behind for the wolves—but I suspected that was more of a utility issue than anything else. The catacombs were narrow, only wide enough for two or three people to walk side-by-side, and there were a lot of us. A group was only as fast as its slowest member, and a cripple certainly wasn’t going to help with that. Losing one extra potentially capable person was little cost to prevent ourselves from slowing down.

One of the younger boys in the back cried out upon seeing the stricken teen. A friend?

“You,” Laur said. “Get him back.”

He made a noise halfway between despair and acknowledgment, and so he came to the front of the group to pick the injured man up. A minute or two later, he came back with his friend on his shoulders, head bowed.

“I know the way,” he said as he passed me, and it sounded more like he was trying to reassure himself than demonstrate his confidence in his own abilities. “I know the way.”

That made three people down to traps. After Seb had fallen to the sneak attack at the door, Laur had decided that she didn’t want to risk her safety—or the safety of the oathholders she’d scrounged up, apparently—and had randomly assigned some teenager to lead the way at a comfortable ten meters in front of everyone else. She’d lost an arm and almost her life when she’d rounded a corner and run into an Altered bull of some sort. The white-clad oathholders had put it down before the bull could reorient its horns and charge her again, but she’d been sent back regardless.

“One has to question… why she doesn’t use her own men,” someone grumbled.

I turned a sidelong glance onto the man who’d decided to walk next to me for the duration of our journey.

“Is that so, Seb?” I asked. “You up yet?”

Kyle shook his head, readjusting the rebel leader’s arms to keep him from falling off the jester’s back. “He’s not fully lucid, I don’t think.”

Seb had been the only one of the three that hadn’t been sent back, most likely because he was the leader and fully losing him would mean that Lady Laur would have to take a more direct hand in controlling the commoners under him. With him here, she could at least act under the pretense of speaking for Seb.

Whatever the gas had done to him, it seemed to have removed some of his artificial inhibitions. Just an hour ago, he’d been little more than the veiled woman’s sock puppet, but now, half-paralyzed and half-unconscious, he was speaking with the bitterly cynical words that I remembered coming from the vagrant savant.

“Just make sure he doesn’t get too loud?” I asked. We were a fair bit behind the Lady, since she’d apparently trusted the orders that she’d given us to be enough to keep us in line when combined with the mass of others here.

They weren’t. I hadn’t been listening to any of the shit she’d told us to follow ever since I’d figured out how to draw on my oath, and given that we’d had some time to prepare between our arrival at the warehouse and the entrance into the catacombs, I could hope that Kyle had done something too.

At the very least, he wasn’t reporting Seb to Lady Laur and he was cooperating with me, so there was that.

“Little Lily! And the clown with her!” Lady Laur shouted, catching me off guard. “Come to me!”

I drew on memories of [INDIFFERENCE], letting the spell wash over me and casting it aside, and I stepped forward anyway. Kyle was a beat behind me.

That’s a good sign.

Less good was the fact that we now had Seb in the front. Kyle had taken him off the man who’d initially taken the poor sap, ostensibly so that the man could get some rest, but in actuality for… fuck, I didn’t actually know. The level of influence that the lady had over me was an unknown to me right now, and it wasn’t like I could ask.

Still, bringing the paralyzed man who might hold critical information that Lady Laur had told him in confidence to the front, where we’d just seen others get crippled and nearly killed…

We made our way there nonetheless.

“The previous scouts were too weak,” Lady Laur said, and though I couldn’t see her face through her veil, I could feel the weight of her glare on me. “Are you weak?”

“Yes, my lady,” I said, completely deadpan. “That’s why you decided to conscript me, isn’t it?”

“To the front,” she said, ignoring the jab. “Before I set them on you.”

I didn’t have to ask who them was. I was pretty sure that every single person here that wasn’t named Lily Syashan and maybe also Kyle had some degree of Lady Laur’s influence embedded into their minds.

“Stay behind me,” I murmured to Kyle once we were far away enough from the Lady that I was reasonably confident she wouldn’t be able to hear a whisper. “Seb can’t get hurt.”

“Got it,” Kyle said, exaggerating his volume. “I’ll keep you safe.”

That he had replied like that told me enough. Even if there was some influence buried in there, it wasn’t sufficient to overpower the defenses of an oathholder as powerful and versatile as the joker king that Kyle was.

“To the right,” Laur ordered from behind us, still solidly ten meters away.

“You really have to wonder how they get around in here,” I said. “And what the hell do they even use this for?”

“Good question,” the jester replied. “I don’t think I’ve even seen an actual tomb of any sort, which I’m pretty sure these are supposed to be used for. Is it really just unused?”

“Facade…” the still-frozen body on Kyle’s back mumbled. “For… smuggle…”

Huh. Now that was something.

“He seems lucid enough to me,” I said. “Kinda.”

“I don’t think he’s fully awake,” Kyle said. “Responding to stimuli, not much more.”

“Or he is, and he’s faking,” I said. “I mean, it’s not like he can move much besides his eyes and mouth.”

I couldn’t quite make it out in the dim hallway, the catacombs lit only by the oathlights that we’d brought with us, but I could swear I saw the whites of Seb’s eyes turn to me.

“Something to say?” I whispered.

“Straight ahead!” It wasn’t Lady Laur that said it this time but one of her little minions. I wasn’t sure if it was a commoner or one of her oathholders.

“Got it!” I shouted back.

Seb blinked, and that I could see.

“Blink twice if you can hear me,” I said. “I know you can speak, but…”

But I can’t risk Lady Laur overhearing you. From the looks of it, whatever the gas had done to him had knocked the brainwashing out of him. I didn’t know why a trap would be able to do that and also paralyze its target, but I suspected it was a byproduct that nobody had foreseen.

Whatever the case, I couldn’t risk the Lady realizing that Seb was no longer under her thumb. He was the greatest asset I potentially had in terms of information, and I wasn’t going to let him get taken away on me.

He blinked once, twice, his actions slow and deliberate.

“Okay,” I said. “Then—“

“Look out,” Kyle warned, not bothering to shout.

I cast a wall of force instinctively, the Ceretian spell one that I wasn’t totally familiar with but that the false memories I’d gained certainly were. However the god had managed to get that through to me, it was proving to be a fantastic asset in the moment.

An flurry of spears made up of a material that I was pretty sure was ice bounced off the spell, dropping to the floor and dissipating harmlessly.

“Thanks for the heads-up,” I said, dropping my spell.

“Anytime.”

“Anyway,” I said, turning my eyes but not my head to look at Seb. “Can I get another two if you know where the captured oathholders are being held?”

He blinked, and just when I thought he hadn’t heard me, he did it again, accompanying it with a nod.

I paused. I hadn’t expected a yes from that, and that really only meant one thing.

Before I could stop myself, realize that this was absolutely not the time, I had turned around.

“Lily?” Kyle asked.

Within seconds, I was in front of the veiled lady again, my hands under my cloak at my belt.

“Return to your post,” she ordered, irritated. “Listen to me.”

I didn’t even bother going for the memories this time. Her time was up, so I pulled on my oath as tendrils of magic invaded my mind.

I felt the oathtongue creeping towards me, and I ruined it.

“Fuck off,” I said, and I stabbed her in the throat.