Over the years, Ekari had heard all sorts of speculation about what existed behind the locked doors at a Church. Some of it was lurid, rich and lavish. While that did exist on Aeon, it wasn’t the standard for a small Church like this one; few Churches on Lyka had anything of note in the private areas.

Sometimes Ekari thought that part of the reason they were kept locked was to hide just how simple the quarters were compared to the public areas. This church was no exception.

Ekari stood in a plain hallway; the wallboard wasn’t even painted. The floor was planks of finished wood, but that was because there was no better flooring than simple finished wood; stone and tile were both harder to lay. The entryway always had tile or stone because it wore better.

She shook her head and continued on towards the priest’s work area. It was close to the sanctuary, of course; some churches even had a direct connection. This one didn’t, which meant the priest was supposed to never allow any laymen in.

There would be problems if anyone caught her here; she wasn’t dressed as an initiate. Ekari didn’t think that would be a problem, however; she hadn’t heard anything yet that meant there were people here. More than that, the Eternal Flame in the sanctuary was unwatched. That was enough to tell her that there truly wasn’t anyone here who would cause problems.

There was no one in the work area; when Ekari looked through the papers, it looked like the typical sort of stuff you’d find in a priest’s office. Half-completed sermons, letters from other priests, and notes on various passages of the Book of Eternity were common. One diary recorded the priest’s everyday dealings with his parishioners, everything from people who brought donations to those who asked for help of one sort or another.

Ekari didn’t spend much time with the diary. She didn’t need to know who had marital trouble or whose grandfather was dying.

Far more interesting was the missing message crystal. It wasn’t anywhere obvious, but every Church had one and that was almost always in the priest’s work area.

It took her some time to find it, but she knew it had to be there somewhere. Of course she’d managed to come across a priest that actually took the dictate to keep it hidden seriously! Most of the time, she was able to find it sitting on a shelf somewhere in the work area, secured mostly by the fact that no one other than initiates came into the area, but it simply wasn’t there.

Ekari searched the desk and both bookcases. None of the books had hidden compartments; when she opened them, they were all real books. There was nothing special about the one chair; it was a simple wooden frame and hiding anything in it would be difficult.

If there was a secret compartment she’d missed, it had to be in the desk.

Ekari tapped the desk from different angles, searching for a sound that wasn’t right. She eventually found it on the bottom, a slightly hollow sound that solid wood wouldn’t make. At that point, it was simply a matter of finding the hidden catch. If she had to, she’d break the desk, but the best infiltration was the one no one knew happened.

Ekari was grateful there was absolutely no one here. If she’d been having to hide normally, she’d have skipped the search for the message crystal, but with the place empty she could afford the extra time and noise.

Ekari sat in the wooden chair and pulled it up to the desk. Wherever the catch was, it was probably somewhere the priest could reach easily. She ran her hands over the front side, but nothing caught her finger. Underneath, then, maybe?

This time, her questions fingers found a recess, mostly filled with a small bit of wood. It was near a corner, so Ekari checked the other corner. There was a matching recess.

Ekari reached into her bag and pulled on a specific pair of gloves. They wouldn’t prevent punctures, but suella hide was sturdy stuff; they’d help. They were a compromise between keeping the flexibility and sensitivity she needed to do her work and protection. It was better to be safe than punctured, even though she didn’t expect anything like that here.

Ekari pressed on the pair of recesses and the bottom of the desk dropped half an inch, creating a drawer that slid out easily. The drawer held a surprising amount of Eternite, the money of the Church, a number of letters, the message crystal, and what she’d been searching for: a stack of messages.

Ekari would check the letters for anything interesting after she checked the messages, but she couldn’t resist starting with the top message.

RECALL NOTICE: Bring all assigned initiates to Abiding One - Reception and Greeting immediately upon receipt. Further instructions will be provided after arrival.

Ekari stared at the message. That explained why the Church and the streets were empty of initiates, but what now? Should she head back or should she press forward?

She’d look through everything else in the drawer then put it all back carefully before she made a decision. This was huge and she needed to decide who to take it to first.

Blaze leaned back after the latest patient and tried to relax. He was low on mana and exhausted; it had been one patient after another. The aid station was desperate and thrilled he showed up, but there were simply too many hurt people. He’d long since stopped fully healing people and was taking care of only life-threatening injuries, but there were so many.

Blaze was getting most of the head injuries because no one else felt comfortable healing them. He had to admit that head injuries were harder, but they should be well within these peoples’ capability.

Blaze glanced around the cordoned-off, curtained outdoor “room” he’d been given to handle. They hadn’t sent anyone in for a while, even to check on him. It told Blaze that this was a massive disaster they weren’t prepared for.

More than anything, it reminded Blaze of a bad earthquake. The injuries were similar, even; mostly blunt trauma and crushing damage. It wasn’t the injuries he’d expected. These weren’t the injuries of people savaged by monsters, these were the injuries of people who didn’t get out of the way of a disaster. Who couldn’t get out of the way of a disaster.

Blaze looked at the lines of patients and shook his head. They were mostly not life-threatening injuries, which meant they could wait. He went ahead and spent the mana he needed to check that on people as he passed them, but only two had potentially life-threatening internal bleeding. He didn’t stop to heal them; he simply made sure to stop the bleeding and move on.

Chances were they’d never know they’d been healed. He preferred it that way. It was less stressful than the production he had to do to seem like a normal healer.

A sad grin crossed Blaze’s face from a moment. It was enough to make him miss being around Serenity; one of these days he really was going to have to sit that man down and find out who trained him. He was the oddest mix of Intent and directed casting. Blaze was confident they could learn some things from each other.

There were several other curtained “treatment areas” in sight when Blaze left the one he’d been sent to. Blaze peeked into each and found that the others all had more than one person; generally, there were one or two orderlies supporting each healer. It wasn’t fair, but Blaze was far too used to being given only scraps while being expected to achieve more to feel upset about the treatment.

Healing people was more important.

What was interesting was that all of the healers outside were low ranking. Blaze knew he fit that category, but it was still interesting.

Blaze headed into the aid station itself. It wasn’t exactly secure and most of the staff knew him, so no one questioned the healer walking into an aid station in the middle of an emergency. An ongoing emergency if Blaze didn’t miss his guess.

The aid station wasn’t as large as an Earthling hospital, but it was still fairly sizable; it was only a single story, but it was still large enough that it could take a good ten minutes to walk from one end to the other. There were several areas Blaze had never been to, but he decided not to start with them. They’d be harder to explain if he saw someone.

Instead, Blaze headed to the largest theater. This wasn’t a training school, but healers still liked to watch each other work and trade tips, so there were areas set aside for advice and collaboration. The biggest ones were theaters because they could hold up to a dozen observers; when they weren’t full of healers, they might instead be occupied by friends or family on other worlds. Blaze had never seen them used that way on Lyka.

The largest theater had been converted into a temporary morgue. Other than the fact that the people were dead and closer together than the people Blaze had been treating, there were two major differences.

First, most of them wore the tattered remains of the maroon-and-black robes of acolytes of the Church of Aeons.

Second, the acolytes had completely different injuries. Most seemed to be stab wounds, tears, or gashes. While there were still quite a few crushing injuries, these injuries were different. They were exactly the sort of injuries Blaze hadn’t seen in the people he healed: injuries from monsters.

When he put that together with the knowledge of Ita’s conversation with the planet and the sudden dungeon break Serenity saw, Blaze put the pieces together and came to an interesting conclusion: there were many more dungeon breaks and the monsters were somehow targeting acolytes. He’d never heard of anything like it, but the conclusion seemed straightforward.

It even matched what Serenity had told them about his fight. The monster hadn’t fixated on the flyer; it had fixated on the two acolytes in the flyer.

This was exactly the sort of information he was looking for when he came here, but Blaze wasn’t certain he should leave yet. There was one thing he hadn’t done yet. He hadn’t talked to the chief healer. She was a priest, of course, so Blaze wasn’t certain if talking to her was the best choice.

On the other hand, he wasn’t certain he had a better option. He was fairly certain she was under a compulsion similar to the one High Priestess Karin was under, and he wasn’t going to experiment on Ekari’s mother.

He wanted to free her, not kill her.

There was no chance he’d be able to get Priest-Healer Tirina alone for long enough to try now, but perhaps he could lay the groundwork. He only really had two options and he didn’t really want to use his diehar heritage. Still, he could at least find out if he needed to.

Blaze searched the rest of the relatively public areas without finding the Priest-Healer. There were a number of times where an orderly snagged him and pulled him off to a patient’s bedside; Blaze did what he could but by the time he quit searching he was having to explain that he was out of mana.

He wasn’t just out, he was positively wrung dry. There just wasn’t anything left to give.

There were only two places left to search: Priest-Healer Tirina’s private rooms and an inconspicuous door that was always locked.

Blaze badly wanted to know what was behind the door but didn’t really want to head that way when he was magicless. The Priest-Healer’s rooms were more than risky enough.