Akkali spent hours only vaguely aware of the fact she was on a horse but snapped out of her daze abruptly when the sky opened up and began to soak them from head to hoof. At that point it was very hard to ignore the fact she was sitting in front of an Inquisitor who insisted on attempting to keep her dry by hovering his hand and half of his coattails above her head. Not only was it very awkward, but it was doing absolutely nothing to fend off the deluge. She would have pointed out the utter waste of his time it was but the Inquisitor seemed too stubborn to listen, so she decided she wasn't going to waste her time restating the fact he was being an idiot.
She guessed it was not too long after midnight the day after they had set themselves on the path through the Shalewarrens. Luckily Arathron remembered the way out of the tunnels; there had been so many images of the stone walls blurring together in her vision she wouldn't have been able to find the path they had taken if she had marked it out in magically glowing chalk. She couldn't remember the last time she had taken a blow to the head that had left her feeling so sick and dazed that she actually had to rely on someone else to tell her which direction was left and right. It was infuriating, and the angrier she became the worse her head hurt. Eventually she forced herself not to care as best she could, and thankfully Drystan's mocking her had been put to an end, likely by Arathron, whose worried face she could swear she saw half the time when she closed her eyes.
They had come up during sunset, having taken longer than they should have due to Tiernan's fussing over the gash in her head and insisting they stop and rest every hour or two so he could check on her. He hadn't taken his own advice, however, as before she had unwillingly fallen asleep several times he was still busy writing whatever it was that he wrote about in his leather-bound notebook with scholarly zeal. She would have found it admirable if she wasn't well aware of the fact he was taking notes that would likely end up in some compendium distributed throughout the Inquisition on how to disable and dispatch people like her.
Drystan had shifted between keeping her awake by reciting his exhaustive list of ridiculous tavern jokes and becoming an oddly somber version of himself where he looked almost... guilty. He obviously didn't like lying to his friend and after their run-in with death in the Shalewarrens the truth and his obligation to keep it from the Inquisition was draped over his shoulders like a hangman's noose. None of them were certain of how Tiernan would react when Drystan kept his promise and told his old friend what he had become after abandoning the church.
Arathron seemed to be of the opinion that Tiernan, while not completely unbiased, was completely trustworthy and wouldn't betray them. Akkali was already planning on where she was going to stash his body once she killed him for trying to run back to father church with news the man had a stripped soul bound to him. She held no illusions that Tiernan would agree with anything they had to say about their partnership being strictly of their own choosing. There were no gray areas in the religious doctrines of Junan, none that she had ever seen.
At least not for those who couldn't afford to buy themselves an indulgence or two. She had always found that if one had enough coin their morality could be as convoluted as a basket of knitting yarn that had been attacked by a dozen drunken cats.
It was hard to see Baedorn until they were nearly at the Grand Gate for the sheets of rain that were lashing the highlands. She made ready to leap off the horse the moment they turned down the road leading to the Inquisition’s barracks and was stunned when they continued on towards the Fiddler's Pipe under Tiernan's lead. They stabled their horses and after some bargaining with the innkeeper, as well as Tiernan's showing the man his saddle which bore the Circle of Junan stitched into the leather to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were not in fact corpse-collecting demons come for his firstborn, he finally opened up the alley-side door and allowed them all inside. The sheet-white pallor to the man's face when he saw her passing almost made her laugh. Evidently she looked bad enough that she ought to be dead.
They retired to the two-bed room where Akkali was greeted happily by the stray mutt she had rescued and paid the Enkiri scullery maids to keep out of the stew pots while she was away. The dog had put on a little healthy weight and nearly knocked her over in her enthusiasm as she stepped inside the door. Scratching the dog behind the ears she walked over to the bed she had staked out for herself and located her dry set of clothing. She quickly stripped out of her sopping garments, laughing as she heard Tiernan turn face-first into the door frame trying to maintain his modesty in the presence of a naked woman. After laying her wet things out on the floor in a reasonably clean spot between the beds she re-dressed in a set of wonderfully bone-dry trousers and tunic and immediately pulled the sleeves over her fingers to try and break the chill that had settled into her joints.
“Can you give a little warning before you do that... ever?” he muttered, keeping his hands over his entire face until he was well and sure she was fully dressed again.
She rolled her eyes and felt her head start to swim in puddles of black splotches yet again. “Optimistic of you, thinking there's ever going to be a next time.”
“Please don't, Akkali,” said Drystan quietly, sitting down in the chair next to the tightly shut and triple-locked window at the opposite end of the room from the door. He began to peel his boots off and looked at the dog curiously. “Where'd you find a dog in Baedorn? I could swear they've eaten them all.”
“She kept following me around, and then one of the Returners hurt her leg when they found me. I asked the scullery maids downstairs to keep an eye on her, fatten her up to healthy if they could spare the scraps.” She smiled and patted the dog on the head and it nuzzled her hand happily before curling up at the foot of her bed and returning to sleep. “I'm calling her Jansa.”
A bittersweet smile formed on the man's face as he nodded. Neither of them would forget the woman whose name it had been, nor her slightly more cynical companion. “I wonder how she'd take that.”
“She'd like it,” mused Akkali in a soft voice, “knowing that we still remember her and Syrill.”
Tiernan locked the door behind himself and crossed the room to sit on the edge of the table set up in the corner near Drystan's chair. With as long as his legs were he was still able to keep his feet on the floor. He looked across at her and asked, “How's your head?”
“Healing.” She nodded slightly, deciding against being rude to the man out of respect for his aid instead of pointing out whose fault it was she had taken a chunk of granite to the skull. “Thank you.”
“I'll go down and see if the innkeeper has any fresh bandages later.” He shifted his gaze towards Drystan. “Out with it, Drys. I'm tired of your hiding whatever it is Antenox did to you when you joined them.”
“Antenox did nothing to me,” snapped Drystan reflexively, then took a deep breath and calmed himself. “First, you need to give me your word, Tier. What I'm going to tell you... it can't get into any notebook you keep or get any mention in any report you're going to file. What I'm going to tell you, I'm telling you because you're Tiernan Brennan, the quiet guy in Whiteshire with the always-bloody scar, not the Inquisitor Captain of the Mid-Oribian Scouting Regiment, youngest man ever with the rank.”
Tiernan eyed his friend in silence, his lips pressed into a thin line, his black hair laying slick to his forehead from the rain and occasionally dripping water down his face in rivulets that flowed along his high cheekbones. Minutes ticked by and Akkali shifted to lean back against the wall, nearly ready to fall asleep now that she was dry and reasonably warm. Finally, the Inquisitor extended his right hand towards the Inferi. They shook in what Akkali guessed was some sort of agreement not to go running to the nearest church tattling.
“All right,” he said with a nod. “But if you tell me you've a bastard child out there somewhere I'm going to beat you within an inch of your life.”
Drystan grinned and replied, “That'd probably be a little easier to wrap your head around than what I'm about to tell you.”
For the next hour Akkali sat and listened as Drystan regaled his best friend with the tale of how he had become an Inferi. While he gave it a little bit of a more heroic spin, she knew that it was truly a complete accident that he had ever survived in the first place. The Inferi Taskmaster that had met him in Whiteshire had needed his still-living blood to break a seal on a tower where an Oratio was busy creating a way to enter the City of Daeis, hoping to gain immortality by drinking from the frozen well of Leilenheim which sat at the city's heart. Drystan had followed her impulsively, using the portal constructed of Enkiri limbs and blood the Oratio had created under the tutelage of an intelligent demon. Once there he had gotten himself killed, or nearly killed, by one of the roaming Exiles, fallen Inferi who had failed to accept death and instead struggled to live on by stealing the life from whatever they crossed paths with.
It was at that point he met Arathron, one of the spirits of the people who had plunged the City into winter to destroy the creatures of Pandemonium which had overrun everything. Making their pact, Arathron joined Drystan as a revenant, a spirit bound willingly to him that could not only sense and defend against Pandemonium magic, but could heal him of virtually any mortal wound so long as it wasn't dealt by something of Pandemonium itself. From there they had joined up with Sacha Farseeth, Drystan's current Taskmaster, exorcised the Oratio's spirit from the Exile he had taken over, and saved the day. At least, that was how the Inferi related the story to his friend.
When he had finally told the story to her years ago, it had been quite a bit more detailed. He was leaving out a lot of things, such as the fact that the battle at the Gate of Pandemonium had resulted in the death of the Taskmaster that had brought him there in the first place, Erminhild Coord. Knowing she had absorbed too much magic from Pandemonium, she and her revenant Samalyn had walked into the well of Leilenheim and disappeared rather than suffer the shared fate of the Inferi; what that fate was, neither Drystan nor Arathron knew precisely. And the fact that the Exile which had been possessed by the Oratio was once an Enkiri Inferi with whom Arathron's son had made a pact, and that by finally killing it, they had managed to set the young man's spirit free.
Akkali was nearly asleep when he had finally finished the tale but forced herself to stay awake in case she really did have to kill Tiernan. The Inquisitor, still sopping wet from the rain, sat rigid and unblinking on the edge of the table. Then he abruptly sneezed, shook his head, and said, “That is a load of the worst-smelling horse shit you've ever related to me.”
Drystan stared at the man as a mix of insult and shock washed over his face. “What?”
“You run off south for eight years and come back saying that you're now sharing a body with a spirit from the City fighting off possessed witches? That you're now some kind of vagabond demon detector roaming the countryside for the good of Eral?” Tiernan shook his head and got to his feet, pacing from one end of the room to the other waving his hands as though doing so would make everything he had just heard completely untrue. “How in the hell were you expecting me to react to this? Drys, the only thing you used to give a damn about was how many women you could charm with that lie of your being the youngest Inquisitor in the Oribian! The only thing you shared were crazy stories which, now that I've heard this one, were the most rational bloody things to ever come from your mouth!”
The shorter man stood up himself and followed his friend step-for-step. “Do you want to talk with him?”
Tiernan froze solid mid-stride and his spine stiffened like a stone column. “With a dead man?” He shuddered and flung his hands out to the sides of the room, barely missing slamming his knuckles into the wall. “Saints no! I do not want to speak to the dead! I want nothing to do with this... blasphemous thing that you've gone and done! Trespassing in the City, disturbing dead souls, bringing one back? It's completely mad!”
Sensing the coming fight Akkali gathered her feet beneath herself and made ready to tackle the Inquisitor. Her head hurt just as bad as her markings did right then but there was no way she was going to let the man harm Drystan or Arathron. They both caught her movement and the Inferi said quickly, “Please, Akkali. Just let us fight this out.”
“I told you he'd react like this,” she said crossly. “I warned the both of you.”
Beside her bed Jansa gave a warning growl and hopped up beside her, laying down in front of the woman who had plucked her up out of the slums and mended her broken leg defensively. Tiernan glared back at the dog and said, “I don't want to hear it from you, mutt.”
Jansa barked at him reprovingly and curled her tail around her feet. Patting the dog on the head Akkali said, “If he runs off to warn the church I'm going to kill him before he hits the street.”