For a moment, sound itself seemed to lose coherency as the wailing chant boomed out from within the shrine, drowning out everything else.

  It rose to a fever pitch, now, faint slivers of understanding punching through every now and again, only to be sink back below the waves of the ebb and flow of cacophony. The crystal in his chest flashed sparks of light in a staccato fashion, and for a moment Henry was unsure what was tripping it up. While it did generally operate of its own accord, he lived long enough with it to have a fair sense of the rules governing it, making this current discrepancy momentarily confusing.

  It wasn’t until he glanced over at the other conscious members of their exploratory group that he got a clue as to what the issue was. From both Layla and the Harpy, there was a faint trickle of blood slowly dribbling down the side of their ears and onto the floor. Clearly not good, but apparently not debilitating, either, thankfully enough.

  Despite the obvious wound, the Harpy remained aloof and alert, while his old friend kept a wary eye out and discreetly checked the strength of her bindings.

  Henry wondered if his own ears were bleeding similarly, not that he could check with his hands tied up as they were. If he were to guess, this wasn’t so much an attack rather than a not-so-pleasant side effect of whatever strange magic the Subway Wizards were invoking with their words. Gordon, after all, was having no such problems, unconscious as he was on the floor currently.

  Those idle musings were quickly shoved to the backburner as he tried to blot the rest of the noise out of his mind and focus on the situation at hand.

  Option number one. it was almost certain now that they’d gotten what they’d came for, so hypothetically they could make a break for it now and try to get back to Guillaume before whatever was happening here reared its ugly head. There were, however, a few critical issues with that.

  One, they’d need to bring Gordon back with them alive. The Harpy, their only active fighter, was currently duty-bound to the short-tempered little psycho by Guillaume’s directives. It wasn’t likely to be leaving his side anytime soon, either, without exploiting the hard reset trick they’d stumbled on earlier. Which… would leave them completely defenseless for far longer than he’d like.

  It all came back around to getting themselves tied up. Try to break free of them, and the Harpy would be forced to turn them into mincemeat. Even if they did manage to make a break for it, all that accomplished was being zip-tied somewhere else.

  Not to mention the complications with returning empty handed and the two members of the Gentleman’s Club that brought them here.

  That left Option 2, taking Gordon with them, or Option 3, wait for him to wake up. The former was… medically inadvisable, due to magic interference, but on the other hand there was no indication that the latter would happen on a convenient time scale.

  Quite the trolley problem, all told. It was a shame that his time to assess it came to an abrupt end.

  The chanting ceased after one last crescendo, echoing through the heavily adorned halls around them until it petered out somewhere far away in the distance. From within the adjoining room, scraping and shuffling could be heard as those who had prostrated themselves before rose to their feet.

  With a low hum like a choir, the mages formed a procession and filed out of the room one by one. Henry had taken a brief glance at their attire earlier, but now that the entire congregation moved to block the hallway in front of them, their attire was even more apparent.

  Every last one stood before the conscious trio clad in long, draping cloaks made from scraps of salvaged furs and cloths. Werewolves, dangerous as they were when confronted directly, did actually kick the bucket from time to time. And, for those daring enough, they also left behind a lot of usable material on account of their sheer size.

  In his travels, he’d seen more than a few adventurous scrappers try their hand at skinning a presumably dead wolf. To their credit, it tended to pan out when they presumed correctly…

  The Subway Wizards certainly received their fair share of unwanted foot traffic from werewolves. The traps they scattered through the tunnels of the London Underground didn’t typically finish them off, but evidently, they could finish off . Upon closer inspection, it was apparent that each cloak was painstakingly crafted from anywhere between one or multiple pelts, the more complex patterns being worn by those closer to the front of the procession.

  One Morlock with rigidly straight posture and dressed in a particularly complicated robe stepped forward. He carried a worn, wooden staff, a crosspiece lashed across it with hemp rope near head height from which dangled by smaller threads were , of all things. Imperiously, he pounded the base of the shaft against the stone tile floor, the wrought iron band around the bottom stamping loudly against the surface as the elk horns rattled against each other.

  “So it would seem that the most holy Founding Mages seek to test their faithful successors once again in these dark times,” the spokesperson spoke vehemently. “What other purpose would there be for the arrival of of the Thirteen Profligates in our most inner sanctum, caught red-handed pilfering the gift of Hendriksson?”

  All but his mouth and the absolute lowest part of his nose was obscured by both a hood and a piece of yellowing parchment on which was drawn the universal symbol for the Ten Domains in dark, splotchy ink. It hung from his forehead as if it had been pinned there, but Henry could see no sign of a nail or otherwise. Despite that handicap, he was still more than capable of practically radiating his barely contained hatred.

  “Perhaps, you seek to pay penance for your sickened magicks?”, he asked thoughtfully. “It would seem that rather than take away more of our talented brethren into the waiting arms of death, you have instead gifted us with a new brother to welcome into the fold.”

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  From within the depths of what must be the head priest’s scruffy black beard, a crooked grin formed. The smile of someone who believed proselytizing held more value than dental hygiene. Henry looked away disgusted as the shamanistic-looking figure delivered his demands.

  “Leave him and the Gift with us, and we would see you return from whence you came to redeem yourselves another day.”

  But, as much as the fervent man gave British dentists the world over a bad name, the deal, all told, wasn’t too bad. Certainly was miles better than any they’d ever given him before, even if most of that willingness to negotiate likely arose from wanting to tactfully avoid a fight with the half-human, half robot killing machine in their midst.

  Which made it a crying shame when those efforts turned out to be dead on arrival.

  “Negative,” came the Harpy’s curt, synthetic reply. “Directive clear. Subject must be protected at all costs.”

  That was machines for you. Powerful, yes, but also powerfully inflexible.

  Not that he blamed the Harpy for the response. Had the human underneath been at all able to take the wheel, they would have come to a much better conclusion long before.

  “You think to throw your lives away over the one untainted relic in this prison?!”, yelled the head priest through gnashing teeth. “Do you find it so insulting that the power of the Gift is beyond the reach of your kind?! That every other splintered piece of the once immutable Domains reeks of foul, chaotic energies is not enough for you?! No! You will leave this place empty-handed, or you will not leave at all.”

  “Ultimatum detected. Defensive protocols initiated.”

  “Have you nothing to say for yourself, wretched creature?!”

  Weights shifted subtly amidst the crowd, circling around the Harpy to give more of the crazed mages lines of fire. For its part, the Harpy also noticed the way the winds were blowing and adopted a defensive stance. The wings mounted to it’s back swiveled low and around the hips, providing itself with chest-high cover that protected both itself and its charge sprawled unceremoniously behind it.

  A tense standoff began, each side waiting for the other to make the first move. Henry was unsure why they thought it wise to try and intimidate a robot into backing down, but now that they were here Henry wanted to at least make sure he was out of the crossfire. He gave Layla a subtle nod to get her attention followed by a quick jerk of his neck to indicate that they should

  As she took a few careful steps back, he himself ducked into an alcove that held a one-to-one replica statue of Socrates, expecting the worst.

  The first noise to break the silence, however, was not the incantations of the Morlocks casting magic or the whine of turbines as the Harpy entered full-on battle mode. Instead, the sound that interrupted them was a spluttering cough.

  From Gordon.

  The congregated mages burst into a wave of hushed murmurs as he retched on the floor, to which the Harpy backed off to properly tend to its master. As Guillaume’s left-hand man sat up to better address his heaving dry cough, the Magic 8-Ball artifact rolled back down the hall towards Layla, momentarily forgotten by the onlookers.

  Moving as little as possible, she discreetly glanced down at the black orb, using one leg to roll the ball behind her while no one was paying attention to where it went. Smart. Out of sight, out of mind, and all.

  Finally, Gordon stopped coughing intensely enough to draw so much attention. After gulping down a few deep breaths, his voice came hoarse and dry like sandpaper.

  “Thirsty,” he croaked plainly. “Bring me water.”

  A request which, surprisingly, the head priest seemed more than happy to fulfill.

  “Our new brother has risen from his tribulations! Quick, bring that which he needs to recover his strength!”

  From somewhere in the crowd, an unassuming metal hip flask materialized and was passed to the priest, who in turn knelt in front of Gordon and passed it to him. The antlers hanging from the staff rattled slightly as he supported most of his weight on it coming down, and Gordon accepted the offering without a word.

  That wasn’t to say that he wasn’t skeptical about the contents, though. Henry supposed that he wouldn’t have risen so far within the Gentleman’s Club’s ranks if he wasn’t consistently wary of the rations he was offered. Matter of fact, there was a high chance Gordon had done his fair share of poisoning himself. Something about how he knew exactly what to look for and how.

  First, he poured a few drops into the palm of his hand. Indeed, it looked like water. He took a gentle whiff of the liquid, and it must have smelled like clean water, too. Lastly, he dabbed one of his fingers into the small puddle, and rubbed the tiny droplet of it onto the inside of his lip. Apparently satisfied, he finally took a long draught from the flask, eyeing the mages warily as he did so.

  “He shows wisdom in his methods,” the priest intoned delightedly. “This bodes well for his initiation, as well as his newfound ability.”

  “Ability?”, Gordon asked confused. “What do you mean? All I remember is getting knocked out by that… Hm. You wouldn’t happen to have a name for that artifact, would you?”

  The priest nodded. “It is the Gift. Those who have no place in the world of Domains may find their way to its promised land through it. Through it, you have been charged with the mana needed to see the higher order delivered on high from the Ten Domains! A glorious day, is it not?”

  The scientific term for Ghost of Tolkien was ‘mana-charged phenomenon’. Surely, that didn’t mean that…

  “Tell me, brother, which symbol did you see in the depths of its ocean?”

  “Symbol? If I remember correct, that was… Water…”

  Gordon’s gaze returned to the hip flask in his hand. Taking a deep breath, he furrowed his brow in concentration. It reminded Henry of the expression kids had when they wanted to believe they could harness the ultra-rare Law Domain to pick up a household object from across the room, but on a grown adult.

  It probably would have been funny, too, if it wasn’t .

  From his piece of cover a few paces away from the action, he saw a thin, steady stream of water slowly snake out of the hip flask, motes of glowing blue light shining within. However, As it condensed into a larger and larger sphere about the size of a small marble, the surface started to quiver as the sounds of concentration from Gordon grew louder.

  First one droplet fell from the mass. Then a second. By the time the third was removed, Gordon apparently changed tack and took a different approach with his control.

  The quantity of water under his control dropped off significantly, stretching into a thin, more threadlike shape about a third of the volume of the marble. At that size, however, he seemed considerably more capable of managing control, the lessened amount gradually zipping around at faster speeds and in ever more convoluted paths. Just when it seemed he reached the limit of what he was willing to try, the thin streak began cycling even faster, causing the onlooking mages to gawk in surprise.

  “By the Founders!”, the head priest exclaimed. “While your volume control might leave something to be desired, that level of fine-point mastery typically requires an apprenticeship to achieve! You have a bright future in our brotherhood, friend!”

  Gordon smirked, admiring his own handiwork as the intricate pattern he made accelerated faster and faster. At this point, it seemed like he was showing off to himself.

  “Thank you for the information,” he responded politely.

  With a dismissive flick, he sent the half-thimbleful streak of water careening towards the crowd. Most barely had a time to register a look of shock as the wavy line of blue light pierced cleanly through the forehead of the priest, coring through his brain in a split second.

  They barely had time, because the rest of them were all next. With the force of a pressure hose concentrated to the width of a pencil lead, the gathered mages fell one after another in a boneless heap.

  He didn’t even bother to watch the last body drop. “We’re leaving,” he commanded to the group. “Grab the artifact and prepare to move ou-”

  Before he could finish that sentence, however, a deep, unsettling noise rumbled from within the pile that turned Henry’s blood to ice.

  It sounded like knuckles cracking, but slower. And at a lower pitch.