Under Darkness

The village pub was a squat old building set into the side of a rocky hill. Adrian sat at a small, beer-stained table in the back corner with Christine and Rhys. The inside was kept dim; lanterns would not have felt out of place. A few locals sat at other tables or up at the bar, but none of them paid the tourists any mind. He’d found them to be a very welcoming people, excited to talk about the nearby hiking trails that they thought he was in town for, but they had proved completely useless in his search for the cloak. It had been two days of fruitless effort, and not even the admittedly exceptional local ale could soothe his growing frustration.

“There’s got to be something we’re missing,” Rhys said. They spoke in hushed tones in the quiet room.

“Or it’s not here,” Christine replied. She had been checking out more and more as their efforts continued to bear no fruit. Adrian was at risk of losing her. He knew she had serious doubts. Only their tenuous agreement, signed and dotted, to let her use the book after they were done kept her from giving up entirely.

“It’s here somewhere,” Adrian told them. “It has to be. We just need to keep looking.”

“There could be deeper parts of the caves that we missed,” Rhys thought aloud.

Christine took a sip from her mug. “If that’s the case, it’s hopeless. If the cloak is well enough hidden, we could look for hidden tunnels for months and never stumble across it.”

They’d spent thirteen hours the day before sweeping flashlights over the shallow caves up in the hills that overshadowed Kravisburgh. They’d turned up empty. It was always possible that there was some cave they’d missed, just over the next rise, or a tunnel they’d overlooked, nestled between the rocks, but they’d been as thorough as they could be and found nothing.

“None of the local maps have any caves on them that we haven’t checked,” Adrian said. “I don’t think that’s it.”

“Maybe it's time we let it go,” Christine said. “We have one day left. We could spend it sightseeing instead of crawling over the ground looking for something that probably doesn’t exist.”

“It’s real,” Rhys said fiercely. “Stay focused.”

Christine ignored him. “I’m just saying, if you made it all up, Adrian, now would be the time to come clean.”

“I’m not doing this again,” Adrian groaned. “Rhys is right. We’re missing something.”

“We could check out the church,” Christine said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. She’d brought it up before, and Adrian had always shut it down.

“It’s not the church,” Christine said in time with him. “Why not, huh?”

“It just isn’t,” he insisted. “It’s a waste of time.”

“Maybe you could bother to explain why?” Christine pressed. “Because it’s as good a lead as any. It’s an old catholic missionary outpost. The Gunpowder Plot was a catholic insurrection. Seeing as how we have literally nothing else to go on, I can’t see why we shouldn’t at least pay it a visit.”

“Because the cloak's not there.”

“How do you know?”

“My gut says it isn’t. End of story.”

Christine glared at him. She didn’t like being overruled.

“Actually…” Rhys said hesitantly, “I think she might be right.”

That caught Adrian's attention. Rhys agreeing with Christine? He just wished they'd found common ground on something other than her dead-end theory. “I just told you that-“

“I know,” Rhys interjected. “But…I think I have an idea.”

He seemed almost embarrassed. Adrian had to prod him to go on.

“Well, it’s just…let me ask you this. How sure are you that the cloak isn’t there?”

“One hundred percent,” Adrian replied, growing tired of the conversation.

“No doubts at all?” Rhys asked.

“No,” Adrian said in exasperation.

“And that doesn’t seem weird to you?”

“Why would it?”

“I’m just saying…you seem really convinced for no real reason.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying,” Christine butted in.

“No, you’re not understanding me,” Rhys clarified. “You’re too convinced. It’s weird.”

“Spit it out,” Adrian told him. “What are you suggesting?”

Clearly uncomfortable speaking up, Rhys almost crumpled under the weight of Adrian's stare, but the young man pulled himself together and **** out the words. “Maybe something is making you convinced that it isn’t there.”

“Something like what?” Christine asked flatly. “Magic?”

“Maybe,” Rhys said hesitantly. “I mean, we’re after a magical cloak, aren’t we? Maybe it’s magically hidden.”

“That…” Adrian began, but stopped. He had been about to say that it made no sense. But didn’t it? Suddenly, it was like a wall came down. What had he been thinking? Maybe the cloak wasn’t there, but to not even check? It was insane. It was, like Rhys had said, _suspiciously _insane. “Shit," Adrian said, surprised. "You’re right.”

Rhys beamed.

“So you listen to the kid when he says what I’ve been saying for days?” Christine complained.

“No,” Adrian said. “You were right, too. But I think Rhys is right about why I wouldn’t listen. Jesus, it’s like I’ve had blinders on.”

“Like you’ve been too stubborn to listen,” Christine grumbled.

“Exactly,” Adrian agreed, ignoring her tone. “We need to check out that church. Now. Tonight.”

---

It was a winding, two-mile walk across treacherous, rocky ground to get to where the church rested at the bottom of a shallow valley. If it weren’t for the light of the moon, so recently full, they may not have been able to make it. Now they stood looking down at the mossy stone chapel, a hundred and fifty yards ahead. It looked like a great boulder that had broken off the valley’s top and rolled down into its base. Off to the side, fifty or so feet away from the church’s entrance, was a wooden shack with dark windows.

The trio carefully picked their way down the grass-covered slope, a brook flowing gently beside them. Halfway down, Adrian held up a hand, signaling the group to stop. He'd spotted something in a patch of mud and soft grass, wet with the night’s dew.

In a whisper, Adrian warned, “Fresh footprint.” His eyes darted to the unlit shack. “We may not be alone.”

Rhys looked scared, but Christine nodded like she’d expected it all along. Taking extra care to be silent, they tread the rest of the way on light feet. Adrian’s eyes were glued to the shack’s door, but if somebody was in there, they didn’t stir. The going was slow, but eventually, the group stood before the old church. Its stone brick was pitted from rain, and its front steeple bore the shattered remains of a stained glass window. The doors were wide and wooden, thick, but soft with age. In stark contrast to the building’s otherwise dilapidated condition, a gray keypad had been mounted beside the entrance, sticking out of the ground on a black metal spoke. Someone had installed a security system.

“You have got to be shitting me,” Adrian muttered under his breath. The others saw the problem too. He motioned for them to go around, hoping to find an unsecured window in the stolid building, but Rhys grabbed his arm.

“Let me see if I can figure something out real quick,” he said in a hushed voice.

Adrian looked over at the shack. They were completely in the open, no cover for dozens of feet. “Hurry up,” he whispered back. Then he and Christine began scouting the building’s perimeter. No surprise, there was no other way in but the front doors; just solid stone walls. When they got back around Rhys was staring intently at his phone.

“Got something?” Adrian asked quietly.

Rhys bit his lip. “Maybe. But if it doesn’t work, it might give us away.”

Adrian thought it over, but he didn’t have any other ideas. He gave Rhys a nod. “If it goes wrong, we run that way.” Adrian pointed to a sparse patch of trees on the far side of the church from the shack.

Rhys stepped up to the keypad and took a breath. Then, nervously, he keyed in a code. Everyone held their breath. The diode flashed red once, twice, then held green. All three let out a collective breath.

Adrian walked up to the doors, slapping Rhys on the back as he passed, and gave them a push. They made no sound as they opened. Well oiled then. The place was better cared for than it might have seemed. He peeked his head in and looked around.

The church was a single, empty room. Moonlight floated in from the broken window above to illuminate the sparse interior. Two columns of rotten pews stood facing a raised wooden platform, on which was a pulpit and a well-polished, marble altar. Adrian looked down and spied the sensor that would have triggered had they not disabled the alarm system. He looked up and saw a similar sensor on the inside of the window. Someone didn’t want them in here. He stepped inside.

Christine and Rhys followed. With the heavy walls to hide their voices, Adrian turned to Rhys and said, “Nice work. Did you hack it or something?”

“I…can’t do that,” he replied sheepishly. “All I did was do a quick search on some forums. The company that put that keypad in had a leak about a year ago. Whoever's watching this place is still using the default code.”

Adrian blinked. They had gotten lucky. “Well, good job.” Adrian tried not to think about what would have happened if the caretakers had bothered to change the PIN.

Rhys smiled at the praise anyway. “Thanks.”

“That may have got us in,” Christine whispered, “but I don’t know if it did us any good. I don’t see a cloak around here.”

Adrian scanned the room. It was a scant affair, and he couldn’t see anywhere where the cloak might be hiding, but nobody would bother to set up security on an empty church miles away from the nearest town. “This has got to be it,” he told them. “Look around. See if we can find anything.”

The three spread out to search the room. Adrian checked under pews, behind the pulpit, amongst the small piles of rubble that were strewn about haphazardly, but found nothing.

“It isn’t in here,” Christine finally spoke.

“I’m not finding anything either,” Rhys added. “But we should keep looking.”

“This is a waste of time,” Christine said.

“Wasn’t this your idea?” Rhys asked, exasperated.

“It might be nearby, but this place is empty.”

“They put up an alarm system for a reason,” Rhys insisted.

“We should come back in the morning and check out the shack. If we knock on their door now, it'll be suspicious, but in the daytime we can pretend to be lost hikers.”

Rhys was growing angry. “I am not leaving when we are this close!”

“Quiet!” Adrian hissed. The two had been getting gradually louder as they fought, and while he’d cut them off before they had started to actually yell, it had still gone on for too long.

The church fell back into nervous silence as the group listened to see if anyone had heard them. When nothing stirred, Adrian spoke quietly, “We’ll look around for a little longer. If we can’t find anything here, we’ll go check out the shack.” While Christine had a point, they couldn't afford to leave and come back the next day. He wasn’t going to risk whoever lived there discovering evidence of their intrusion and running away with the cloak. His life was on the line. If it came down to breaking into that shack, he’d figure something out.

Rhys and Christine went back to picking over the church’s bones, nothing more than a few grumbles between them. Adrian had sounded confident, but he had no idea what he was hoping to find. The cloak was not there. He was, he realized, stalling. Somebody lived in that shack, and he didn’t want to confront them. Adrian was inspecting the altar in the back of the church, trying to work up the nerve to do what needed to come next, when the decision was made for him. A voice cut through the night.

“Who’s in there?” They spoke in a thick French accent.

Adrian whirled around to find the silhouette of a man standing in the church’s entrance, dressed in the cassock and white collar of a priest. Rhys and Christine watched, frozen. The man stepped forward, giving Adrian a better look at his features. He was old, with white hair, a mostly bald pate, and deep wrinkles. Despite this, he carried himself well; he stood tall and confidently between the church's doors. A bible was cradled in the crook of his arm.

The stranger's eyes locked with Adrian’s and grew wroth. “Hellspawn!” he shouted. “I know what it is you seek, a seed from which to grow your dark powers. You shall not have it!”

Adrian wasted no time. While his two would-be squires stood in shock, he charged. The priest knew about the cloak, and that meant that Adrian needed him to talk. He had barely made it five feet before the priest began chanting, one hand held out, the other holding his book.

The words slammed into Adrian like a freight train. He felt heavy, as if chains had burst forth from the ground to pull him down, and the chains burned. His skin began to sear; although there was no physical damage, the pain was indescribable. There was something else; the voices, always present with Adrian since he had first agreed to Araqiel's deal, were gone, their absence ominous.

Adrian took a heavy step forward, then a second. He roared against the **** that bound him, but he couldn’t make the third step come. He fell to one knee, pain shooting up his leg as he slammed into the ground.

A skinny youth sprinted from outside the church past the priest, a boy no older than fifteen with a mop of curly red hair. The newcomer ran straight at Adrian. Thinking he was about to be tackled, Adrian tried to brace himself, but it was already taking all of his strength merely to avoid crumpling to the ground.

Christine intercepted the teen three-quarters of the way through the room, snatching his arm and spinning around in the process. The two lost their footing and fell in a graceless tangle of limbs. Neither knowing what they were doing, Christine and the boy scrabbled across the ground, limbs flailing against one another as they desperately tried to gain purchase.

“Help me!” Christine cried.

Rhys started; he was still standing off to the side, mouth open and eyes terrified. He looked at where Christine rolled on the floor with the boy, but didn't move.

"Do something!" Christine called out again.

Rhys hesitated again. His hands were shaking. Finally, he screwed his eyes shut and ran to join the fray. Adrian had to hope that they could handle themselves; his attention was fixed on the priest.

Every muscle in Adrian’s body surged. Straining with effort, he dropped onto his stomach and began to crawl. His fingers dug into the floor as he wormed his way forward, dragging himself an inch, then pushing an inch further with his feet. All the while, the invisible chains tightened, wrapping around him. His body was on fire, but he didn’t surrender. Somewhere to his left, Christine and Rhys continued their brawl. Adrian knew the sound of fist on flesh; it had come to blows, but there was nothing he could do for them.

Adrian was beginning to near the priest now, who stared down at him with eyes wide in surprise. He took a tentative step backwards, careful not to break his liturgy. Adrian was only ten feet away, but he was losing control. Each time he moved, he made it less and less far. His body was going to give out. He wasn’t even sure what he was planning to do if he got there.

But the priest knew none of that. As he stared down at Adrian, all he saw was grim determination, and the old man grew fearful.

“Father!” shouted someone behind Adrian. The boy. There was the patter of feet as he tried to run up and stop Adrian, but it was cut short by a scream of rage from Rhys. Adrian listened as his squire tied up the younger boy long enough for him to drag himself just that little bit closer to the priest.

Five feet now, Adrian thought. He could make it. He could do it. But his body protested. His world was burning. His vision began to swim and darken at the edges. He was pushing himself too hard. The pain was too much. It threatened to swallow him whole. Adrian screamed, in defiance and in agony.

The priest started back at Adrian's sudden outburst, terrified by his advance. The chanting took on a nervous tone, and the priest took another step back, then a third, trying to keep a distance between himself and the madman clawing his way forward across the church floor. The fourth step back carried the priest across the chapel's threshold, out onto the grass outside. His words continued, but their effect was gone.

The weight that had pinned Adrian down shattered like glass. The all-consuming fire vanished, and the voices roared back like a tidal wave. Adrian could feel their fury; they demanded vengeance.

In an instant, buoyed by the spirits' rage, Adrian leapt to his feet and ran straight at the priest. Too surprised to do anything else, the priest continued to chant right up until Adrian knocked him to the ground. The priest thrashed beneath him, but Adrian was the stronger by far. It wasn’t hard to pin his arms to the dew-coated grass.

Only once the priest was well in hand did Adrian turn his head to look back. The boy had somehow ended up on the other side of the church, near the altar, with Rhys and Christine between him and the door. Christine's right hand held her left arm protectively, while Rhys gently felt at his face.

“It’s over!” Adrian shouted. “Give it up!”

The boy's eyes darted between Adrian, Christine, and Rhys.

“Tell him,” Adrian barked at the priest. “I’m not trying to hurt anyone tonight. Just tell him to stand down.”

“I know you for what you are,” the priest spat in a warbling voice. “I don’t believe your lies.”

“I’ve been told we don’t lie,” Adrian muttered. Then, louder, “I’ve already won. If I wanted to hurt you, I’d be doing it. Tell him. To stop. Fighting.”

The priest glared back, but the fight had left him. He sagged beneath Adrian’s weight. “Give it up, Tommy,” he croaked.

Adrian turned to look. The boy, Tommy evidently, didn't look happy about it, but he listened. He backed up to the altar and raised his hands in surrender.

“Christine!” Adrian yelled. “Go into the shack. Find some rope and something to use as a gag.”

She slowly backed her way out of the church, eying Adrian and the priest warily as she passed, then ran to the shack. She was only gone a minute, but that minute was tense. Adrian wasn’t sure that Rhys could take the boy on his own if he decided to start fighting again. Thankfully, Tommy didn't start anything.

Christine ran back with an armload of bedsheets. “I couldn’t find any rope,” she panted. “But we can use these.”

“We’ll make it work,” Adrian said. “Go help Rhys.”

Christine went back to guard Tommy while Adrian worked to tie up the priest. When the old man's hands were bound up in the sheets as well as Adrian could manage, he took a large dishtowel and used it to gag the priest. He couldn't afford any more of that chanting.

“Can you stand?” Adrian asked.

The priest nodded.

Adrian gave a look around. The valley seemed empty, but then, it had before, too. Making a tough call, Adrian marched the priest back into the church. He was betting that the priest needed to be able to speak to do whatever it was that he had done, and so as long as he was gagged, it was safer to hide from prying eyes inside than to interrogate the pair outside. Adrian tensed as they crossed the threshold back into the old stone building, but the chains didn’t return. He breathed a sigh of relief.

“Your turn,” Adrian told his companions, tossing the remaining bed sheet onto the ground. “Tie the kid up.”

Rhys and Christine seemed unsure of themselves as they set about the task, but the boy cooperated, even if he did so while glaring hatefully at Adrian. Once the two were as secure as they were going to get, Adrian sat them down on one of the pews.

“First things first,” Adrian began. “Who are you?”

“Fuck off,” Tommy spat.

“Tell him to be a little less dramatic,” Adrian said to the priest, who turned to the boy and nodded.

The boy's face was sour, but he seemed to respect the priest a great deal. Compelled to obey, he answered Adrian's question. “He’s Father Lambert. I’m Tommy, his apprentice. We watch the church.”

“You watch the church for what?” Adrian asked. “The cloak. Is it here?”

Tommy looked over to Father Lambert again, but the priest averted his eyes, ashamed. Tommy’s demeanor only grew fiercer. “To hell with this. You might have given up,” he said to the priest, “but I haven’t. I’m not saying anything.”

Adrian shook his head. “Does this need to get ugly?”

He felt Christine and Rhys stiffen behind him. Neither would have the stomach for what was necessary if Tommy stonewalled them, but for now, they stayed quiet.

Father Lambert’s eyes watered as he cast a pleading look Tommy’s way. Adrian understood then that he’d surrendered for the boy’s sake, not his own.

“I’m not scared of you,” Tommy said, staring Adrian down. “The Lord awaits me in heaven. What waits for you?”

A chilling question, but not one Adrian had time for. There was one thing left that he could try before things devolved. He studied Tommy's face, then, bluntly, he asked, “Where’s the cloak?”

In response, the boy hawked a glob of spit at Adrian's feet, but not before his eyes darted to the back of the room. Adrian caught it. “Watch them,” he said, then stalked back up onto the raised wooden platform where the pulpit stood.

He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he knew it was there. He carefully ran his fingers across the altar, knocking on it to check if it was hollow, but found nothing. He looked down. Dropping to his knees, Adrian peered between the boards that made up the platform. It was too dark to make anything out, so he took out his phone and shined its flashlight through the cracks. Adrian's heart leaped; there was a tunnel beneath the platform.

Now that he was clued in, Adrian quickly found the narrow lines, running perpendicular to the direction of the boards, that had been so well hidden by the wood’s rough texture. A trap door. He dug his fingers in and lifted. Beneath it, a ladder led down ten or so feet to a dirt floor. The tunnel ran past where he could see from his vantage point.

Adrian walked back over to his captives and moved them onto the floor, on opposite sides of the pew, working their makeshift bindings into the pew's legs so that they couldn’t stand up.

“Rhys," Adrian said. "Stay back and watch them. Shout if they try anything. Christine, let’s go get the cloak.”

Rhys did his best to square up, but was obviously uncomfortable with the assignment. Hopefully, with their prisoners tied up, there wasn't much they could do.

Adrian and Christine approached the trap door, and she leaned over to peer down inside.

“Believe me now?” Adrian asked under his breath.

“We’ll see,” she replied, shining her phone light into the tunnel.

The pair climbed down the rusty ladder and landed on the hard-packed earth at its bottom. The dirt tunnel ran for ten yards before it opened up into a dark catacomb. Six plain, stone coffins lined each side, with one more coffin standing at the end, bearing an intricately carved depiction of a man.

Adrian approached the bier and knelt in front of it. He ran his hands over the smooth stone, but he couldn’t find any cracks or creases to indicate how it opened.

“Damn it," he muttered. "We’re going to need to come back here with a hammer or something.”

“Let me look,” Christine said, stepping past him. She began to poke and prod the carving, checking for moving parts or hidden mechanisms. “Wait. What’s this?”

Adrian stood up and checked. A small inscription had been delicately carved between the wrinkles of the man’s clothing. Adrian read it out loud.

I crept beneath the chambered hall,
With flint and steel and oath and gall.
They sought my face when sparks were drawn,
A zealot’s mask at break of dawn.
They chained my name to treason’s mark,
And lit it like a fire in dark.
Yet in their books, you’ll find me twice:
One face for truth,
And one for vice.

“Strange epigraph,” Christine wondered aloud.

“I think it’s a riddle,” Adrian answered.

“Solve the riddle and open the tomb?” Christine asked incredulously.

“Rhys had the right idea," Adrian told her. "These are strange circumstances. We need to start thinking a little more…exotically.”

“This isn’t a movie,” Christine countered. “However this thing opens, there has to be a button or a lever or something.”

“How are you still not getting the picture?” Adrian asked. “After what that priest did up there?”

“And what, exactly, did he do? Because all I saw was you fall down.”

He wanted to scream at Christine's stubborn refusal to see what was right before her eyes, but he had to admit that he had no good explanation for what he'd just gone through. Adrian felt the whispers perk up in the back of his mind, eager to join the conversation, but he didn't let them out. Now was not the time; he needed to stay focused. “You’ll get it sooner or later, I guess.” He let the matter drop.

Adrian read the inscription over again. “They 'chained his name'…Guy Fawkes, right? That was the leader?”

Christine raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t you research this at all?”

“Of course I did,” Adrian replied defensively.

“Guy Fawkes was in charge of the undercroft, but he wasn’t the leader. That was Robert Catesby.”

“Huh. Robert Catesby then.” Adrian waited, but nothing happened. Christine was looking at him pointedly. “You arranged an international trip to get an artifact from the Gunpowder Plot, and you don't even know who planned it?”

“I know enough.”

“What, did you skim the Wikipedia page?"

"I mean..." Adrian felt called out; that was exactly what he'd done.

Christine rolled her eyes. "I spent hours going through everything the university has on it. If it's a riddle, I’m going to be disappointed that the answer is so simple.”

“Well, I don't know what the answer is, so if you do, let's hear it,” he pushed.

“It says that he’s ‘in their books twice’, right? He had ‘two faces’?”

“Mhm.”

“Guy Fawkes didn’t give his actual name during the plot. Why would he? He used an alias; he told everyone his name was John Johnson.”

Christine jumped and let out a gasp as a loud cracking sound reverberated through the catacombs. The top of the coffin broke free from the base and retracted into the wall behind it, filling the air with the sound of grating stone. Beneath it lay the coffin's contents: a long-decayed skeleton, dressed in a tattered, black cloak.

Adrian could feel its presence. The cloak glowed to some sense that he was only just discovering he had. He reached out for it, heart in his throat, but Christine slapped his hand away.

“That cloak is four hundred years old,” she chided. “Don’t manhandle it.” She pulled a pair of white cotton gloves out of her pocket and gingerly slid them on.

“Have you had those the whole time?” Adrian asked.

“It’s four hundred years old,” Christine repeated in bewilderment. She delicately removed the cloak, seemingly undisturbed by the skeleton it adorned, and carefully folded it up for carrying.

Meanwhile, Adrian was coming to terms with their success. They'd found the cloak, and the realization of what that meant had his body buzzing with excitement. He wasn’t going to die. “We did it,” he laughed. “We actually did it!”

He tried to hug Christine, but she pushed him back. “What part of four hundred years old is not sinking in?” she demanded, protectively hiding the cloak.

“Sorry, right, yeah. Guard that thing with your life." He grew earnest. "Thank you. I mean it. You have no idea how much you're doing for me here.”

Christine pursed her lips, still harboring doubts, but said, “You’re welcome. That’s what friends are for, I guess.”

Adrian paused. Was that what they were? He shook his head. He could think about it later. There was still work to be done.

The two climbed up out of the tunnel and reemerged into the chapel. Rhys was still watching their prisoners, who hadn’t moved, and was as tightly wound as Adrian had ever seen him. His nervous energy evaporated as he saw Christine walking over with the cloak. “You found it!” he shouted, elated.

The prisoners didn't share Rhys' enthusiasm. The priest looked crushed, and Tommy scowled. “You’re damned for this,” the boy told them.

“I’m damned without it,” Adrian countered.

“What do we do about them?” Christine asked. “Those bedsheets won’t hold for long once we leave.”

That same question had been gnawing at Adrian the whole time. There was an obvious answer, of course. “We can’t let them leave,” he said.

The words hung in the air like the first clouds of a storm. Rhys’ short-lived glee faded fast.

“Obviously not,” Christine said, her tone light enough that Adrian didn’t think she’d caught his drift. “We’ll need to figure something out.”

“Do it,” Tommy glared. “It’s what you are.”

Adrian struggled with himself. He knew what the smart thing to do was, and he knew what the right thing to do was. But then, he hadn’t ended up where he was by doing either the smart thing or the right thing.

“Let’s get them outside,” he said. Adrian took responsibility for Tommy, letting Christine and Rhys handle the weaker Father Lambert. Once they were no longer in the church, he removed Father Lambert’s gag. “Make your case,” he demanded.

The cleric looked up at each of his three captors, searching for mercy. Rhys looked like he might be sick, Cristine was thoughtful, and Adrian was hard set. “You don’t have to do this,” Lambert pleaded. “We won’t follow you. It isn’t worth it, and we couldn’t stop you if it were.”

“Swear it to me," Adrian insisted. "On your god.”

“I swear it by the Lord that this matter is settled. We failed, and we’ll need his mercy on that count, but we will let it rest.”

“Think he’s pious enough to mean that?” Adrian asked his companions.

“Him maybe,” Christine answered, “but not the boy.”

“He’ll do as I say,” Lambert interjected quickly. “He won’t be any trouble, right Tommy?” Father Lambert's eyes pleaded with the boy, terrified of what might happen otherwise.

Tommy stared at the grass angrily, but he obeyed. “Yes.”

The truth was that Adrian didn’t have it in him. Maybe one day his hand would be ****; he knew he was on a dark path, but right now, tonight, it wasn’t. An old man and a young boy swearing to leave him alone weren’t going to be his first, even if it would be safer to do so. “We’ll tie them up to those trees over there," Adrian said. "They’ll be able to work their way out eventually.”

“Thank you,” Lambert breathed. “God bl-, well, wherever it is you find your clemency, bless you for it.”

“Let’s just get this over with,” Adrian sighed.

They did as good a job tying the two up as they could, given what they were working with. Adrian didn’t think it would take more than an hour tops for one of them to slip free and untie the other. Hopefully that would give him and the others enough of a head start if the pair did decide to pursue them. Despite his cynical nature, though, Adrian trusted the priest's word. Besides, as far as he could tell, Father Lambert wasn't much of a threat outside of that church.

Leaving their prisoners behind, the three began the long walk back to their inn, the cloak secure under Christine’s watch. They were going to pull this off.