The Sunsword was still burning in Freyja’s hand, and Lady Wachter could not stop looking at it.
“Is that real? Is it sunlight?”
It seemed so, Freyja said. They had been told to look for a kind of sunlight, and Madam Eva’s cards had led them to it. “Perhaps then all is not lost,” said Fiona. And then, because she could not stop thinking about it: “She’s going to kill them.”
Zorya came back ten minutes later. Fiona spread a map of Vallaki on the table, and the little dragon studied it, got her bearings, and tapped her tail on the Arasek Stockyard.
The warehouse
Fergus went ahead and found boarded windows, a small door at the back, and a figure on the roof that ducked out of sight. They had been seen. There was no point creeping.
Freyja kicked the front doors in so hard they would never close again.
Crates stood twenty feet high in lanes. Two wights waited, and at the far end Eliza stood with her arms crossed and her wounds healed.
“I wasn’t terribly satisfied with the way our last meeting ended, but I have a feeling this one’s going to go a little bit better.”Eliza
Fergus saw the pit just inside the door and told everyone not to step there.
Crates and spikes
Altair’s prayer filled the wights with dread. Fergus’s words left one of them so confused it turned on the other. Bats dropped from the rafters. Three vampire spawn crawled along the crates and walls and tried to shove Freyja into the pit, and missed and missed in the Sunsword’s glare, until one of them got her.
She fell twenty feet onto spikes, and the light went down with her. She stood up, turned the Sunsword into a whip, caught the edge, and climbed out in one breath.
Altair’s hymn tore both swarms apart. His holy symbol sent the spawn scattering. Aleksander loosed the storm in his spear and the Huntress’s boon with it. Then Altair poured out one great prayer, and two of the spawn simply came apart in it. Ireena finished the last.
The roof
Eliza fought off the holy symbol’s grip and looked straight at Lady Wachter.
“You’re going to regret ever defying our Lord, but your children are going to regret it more.”Eliza
She climbed for the roof. Everyone went after her. Ezmerelda boosted Freyja, who leapt, caught the wall with her whip and tripped Eliza on the roof’s edge from below. Fergus’s arrow sprouted vines around her legs. Altair’s spell slowed her. Aleksander broke into a flock of ravens and was suddenly standing beside her.
She still went over the back edge, heading for a hole in the boards fifteen feet down. Freyja ran across the roof, turned the Sunsword into a gauntlet, spread her shadow wings, went over the edge after her, and caught her.
Inside, Ezmerelda found a closed office, and a tripwire, by way of her ankle. Lady Wachter tried the door. It was locked.