The atmosphere inside the Smoldering Hearth was stretched so tight it felt like a physical wire about to snap.

  Ten heavy polearms were leveled directly at Li Yu and Demon Lord Malos. The Ash Guard captain stared at the gray robed scholar with a mixture of suspicion and barely contained fury. In the hyper disciplined domain of Sovereign Ignis, ordinary travelers did not casually analyze the death Qi of an assassinated prince.

  Li Yu slowly raised his hands and kept them perfectly visible. They were resting on the wooden table.

  "Captain," Li Yu said with a calm voice. He applied the same diplomatic tone he had used countless times to de-escalate conflicts with overly aggressive people. "My companion is an eccentric scholar. He studies Qi signatures and historical arrays. We arrived at the city gates exactly one hour ago. You can verify this with the gate logs. We have been sitting in this tavern the entire time."

  The captain didn't lower his weapon. "Gate logs can be forged. Bribes can be paid. And scholars do not casually identify high tier shadow arts by glancing at a smoke plume through a tavern window."

  "I assure you, a keen eye requires no bribes!" Malos chimed in without any worry. He was still practically bouncing in his seat. He was treating the lethal standoff with the same enthusiasm a child might show at a festival.

  The captain’s eyes narrowed behind his iron visor. He seemed to weigh the option of simply executing them right there against the possibility that they actually held critical information. The order was to investigate and interrogate. If this eccentric old man actually knew how the arrays were bypassed, the high inquisitors would want to extract that knowledge from his mind.

  "You are coming with us," the captain barked. He gestured sharply with his free hand. "Bind them. Bring them to the keep. The Chief Inquisitor will see if your intellect holds up under the searing irons."

  Four guards moved forward and were producing heavy shackles. The shackles were forged from a dark metal.

  "There is no need for restraints," Li Yu said smoothly while standing up. "We will cooperate fully. We have nothing to hide and we are happy to assist the investigation to clear our names."

  The captain sneered. "I did not ask for your preference, human."

  Li Yu sighed internally. He allowed the guards to slap the heavy shackles onto his wrists. The metal was uncomfortably hot and designed to burn the Qi of anyone trying to channel energy through them. For Li Yu’s Devouring Abyssal Leviathan Physique, it felt like wearing a slightly warm bracelet. He was confident that he could escape from them at any time. He could escape from this place at any time.

  Demon Lord Malos was the same way. These people could not keep the two of them here but they didn’t want to escape. They wanted to see what would happen. Malos was enjoying the event and Li Yu had no urgent place he needed to be.

  Malos held out his wrists with dramatic flair and was allowing himself to be shackled as well. "Oh, the plot thickens! Taken into custody by the local authorities. I wonder if they will throw us into a damp dungeon?"

  They were marched out of the tavern and into the deserted streets of Cinderholme.

  The city was a ghost town. The absolute compliance of the citizenry was terrifying to behold. Not a single face peered out from the shuttered windows. The only sound was the synchronized marching of the Ash Guard patrols and the bubbling of the magma trenches lining the grid like avenues.

  The local lord's keep sat at the dead center of the city. It was a blocky structure of polished stone and surrounded by a moat of flowing lava. The drawbridge was lowered just enough to let them pass before being immediately raised again.

  Inside the keep, the atmosphere was chaotic but highly organized. Servants, lesser nobles and minor officials were lined up in the massive entry hall. They were kneeling on the stone floor with their heads bowed. Guards paced back and forth and were dragging individuals into side rooms for aggressive interrogations. The sounds of localized beatings and muffled screams echoed off the high vaulted ceilings.

  Li Yu and Malos were not placed with the common suspects. Because Malos had demonstrated specific knowledge of the crime, they were marched past the holding pens and directly up a grand and sweeping staircase toward the upper levels.

  "Notice the architecture, Li Yu," Malos whispered. He was completely ignoring the guards surrounding them. "Heavy reliance on defensive choke points. No windows on the lower three floors. If someone infiltrated this place, they didn't do it by walking through the front door."

  "Quiet," a guard snapped and was shoving Malos lightly in the back. If he actually knew who he was shoving, he could probably brag about it for nine generations. That or be scared of his family being completely wiped out at any time.

  They were brought into a spacious and heavily reinforced chamber that served as a tactical command room. In the center of the room stood a circular table displaying a glowing, three dimensional map of the city.

  Leaning over the map was a towering demon whose presence filled the room with a suffocating and dry heat. He wore no armor, only simple black robes. His entire face and bare arms were covered in horrific, swirling burn scars that pulsed with a faint orange light. This was a being firmly established in the late Nascent Soul realm.

  "Chief Inquisitor Morok," the guard captain announced while dropping to one knee. "We have secured the perimeter of the commercial district. I have brought two suspects from the Smoldering Hearth. They are travelers who arrived an hour ago but the older one accurately identified the method of assassination from the street."

  Morok slowly turned his scarred face toward Li Yu and Malos. His eyes were devoid of pupils and was instead filled entirely with a fiery light.

  "Is that so?" Morok’s voice was like grinding ash. He slowly walked around the tactical table and stopped a few feet from the prisoners. "A human and an old scholar. You do not look like elite assassins. But looks in the chaotic realms are often a lie. How did you know about the shadow arts?"

  "By looking up, my good sir!" Malos said cheerfully. "The plume of smoke was a dead giveaway to anyone with a fundamental understanding."

  Morok stared at Malos for a long and heavy moment. The heat radiating from the Inquisitor increased. He was raising the temperature in the room to a blistering degree. Li Yu felt the wooden table nearby begin to smoke but he kept his expression perfectly neutral.

  "Lord Vael was an expert in the Law of Flame," Morok said slowly and was stepping closer to Malos. "His private sanctum was warded with the highest tier of arrays. The doors were sealed from the inside. There are no secret passages. Yet, someone bypassed the arrays without triggering a single alarm, severed his head and vanished. Tell me how they got in."

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  "I haven't the faintest idea," Malos replied honestly but his smile never wavering. "I haven't seen the crime scene yet!"

  Morok’s eyes flared dangerously. He raised a scarred hand and a whip of concentrated fire coalesced in his grip. "You mock the Inquisition. I will peel the flesh from your bones until you tell me who hired you."

  "Inquisitor," Li Yu spoke up as his voice cut through the rising tension. "If you torture us, you will eventually realize we are exactly what we say we are: wandering travelers with an alibi verified by your own gate guards. By the time you finish with us, the real assassin will have had hours to cover their tracks or slip through a crack in your lockdown."

  Morok paused with the fire whip crackling in his hand. He turned his glowing eyes to the human.

  "We want to prove our innocence so we can continue our journey," Li Yu continued while meeting the terrifying demon's gaze without flinching. "My companion possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of arrays and Qi signatures. Let us see the sanctum. We will find the flaw in the defense that your guards missed. If we don't find anything useful within an hour, you can execute us both. If we give you the killer's method, you release us."

  "A wager of lives?" Morok let out a harsh, rasping laugh. "You humans are always so eager to bargain when the blade is at your throat. But you are correct about one thing. Time is wasting and my guards have found nothing but terrified servants."

  Morok extinguished the fire whip with a flick of his wrist. "Unlock their shackles. Escort them to the sanctum. If they try anything, sever their legs."

  The heavy metal cuffs were removed. Li Yu rubbed his wrists for show while Malos eagerly dusted off his robes. They were escorted up another flight of stairs and deeper into the most secure section of the keep. The ambient heat grew thicker, carrying a sharp, metallic tang.

  Lord Vael's private sanctum was located at the end of a long, narrow hallway warded by glowing runes. The heavy stone doors had been blasted open by the Ash Guards when they responded to the alarm.

  Morok led them inside.

  The sanctum was a display of aggressive, volcanic opulence. The floor was made of polished fire jade. Tapestries woven from the silk of fire spiders hung on the walls. In the center of the room sat a massive meditation dais.

  There was no body. The corpse had already been removed to be preserved for Sovereign Ignis’s arrival. However, the exact outline of where Lord Vael had died was burned permanently into the jade floor in a silhouette of black, necrotic ash.

  "The arrays are completely intact," Morok stated while gesturing to the glowing runes along the walls and ceiling. "They are designed to trigger if an unrecognized Qi signature enters the room. The only way in is through that door, which was guarded by two of my best men. They saw nothing. They heard nothing."

  Malos immediately began wandering around the room while humming to himself. He leaned down to inspect the ash outline, then strolled over to the tapestries and was entirely unbothered by the heavy death Qi lingering in the air.

  Li Yu took a different approach. While Malos looked at the profound and the esoteric, Li Yu looked for the mundane. He understood that no matter how powerful an assassin was, they still inhabited a physical space.

  He walked slowly around the perimeter of the room. He didn't use his divine sense; he just used his eyes. He looked at the dust motes dancing in the ambient light. He looked at the exact angles of the tapestries.

  He stopped near a reinforced window that looked out over the city. The glass was thick, designed to withstand a siege, but a tiny almost imperceptible spiderweb fracture marred the bottom corner of the pane.

  "The guards outside the door heard nothing," Li Yu said thoughtfully while crouching down near the window. "Because the assassin didn't use the door."

  "Impossible," Morok sneered. "The window is sealed shut. If it were broken it would have triggered the warding bell."

  "They didn't break it. They melted a pinhole through it," Li Yu pointed out, tracing a finger near the fracture. There was a tiny, perfectly smooth hole. It is no larger than a needle and drilled directly through the reinforced glass.

  Morok marched over and his glowing eyes narrowed as he spotted the hole. "A needle hole?"

  The Demon Lord was currently holding a magnifying glass he had pulled from his burlap sack. How and when he got it Li Yu wasn’t sure. Malos was examining the necrotic ash. "Brilliant! Simply brilliant! Come look at this!"

  Li Yu walked over to the ash outline.

  "Notice the dispersion pattern of the death Qi," Malos instructed while pointing with his wooden spoon. "It isn't an explosive spread. It is highly concentrated, pooling entirely around where the neck would be. The assassin didn't fight Lord Vael. They executed him in a single, instantaneous strike while he was meditating."

  "We know that," Morok growled impatiently. "How did they get past the arrays? And then best Lord Vael."

  "They didn't bypass the arrays. They tricked them," Malos smiled. "To use a shadow art potent enough to sever a Nascent Soul's head in one strike requires a massive influx of necrotic energy."

  "You're saying they injected an artifact through the hole to block any detection while simultaneously sneaking a shadow form assassin through the same hole?"

  "Exactly!" Malos beamed and was clapping his hands together. "It requires microscopic precision. Two operatives working in perfect synchronization. One outside the window manipulating the arrays and one slipping inside in a shadow state to deliver the strike. Both of them are very powerful. Very skilled."

  Morok stared at the tiny hole in the window and then at the ash on the floor. The Inquisitor's scarred face twisted into a mask of pure rage. He realized the deduction made sense.

  "A two man team," Morok hissed. "Highly coordinated. Supreme mastery of both shadow arts and manipulation. But the keep is surrounded by a moat of magma."

  Li Yu looked out the window. The sanctum was on the highest floor. From this vantage point, he could see the entire courtyard below, the high outer walls of the keep and the inner guard towers.

  He followed the line of sight directly out from the window. His gaze landed on one of the inner guard towers that was located precisely across the courtyard. It was level with the sanctum's window.

  "They shot it from there. A condensed needle of shadow and whatever else. Fired simultaneously from the tower across the courtyard and directly through the glass."

  Morok froze. The Inquisitor looked out the window and was tracing the trajectory. The angle was perfect. A sniper's shot, executed with terrifying precision.

  "That guard tower," Morok whispered, the flames beneath his scars flaring violently, "is currently manned by the elite inner rotation. My own men."

  "Which means," Malos concluded with a theatrical bow, "the assassin, or at least the accomplice, didn't need to break into the keep, Inquisitor Morok. They were already inside. Wearing your uniform."

  The heavy silence that fell over the sanctum was suffocating. The realization that the impenetrable fortress had been breached from within, by someone wearing the armor of the Ash Guard. Morok turned around and his glowing eyes burned with a cold, terrifying purpose.

  "Lock down the inner barracks," Morok ordered the captain standing nervously by the door. "Summon every guard who was stationed in the eastern tower during the time of the murder. Strip them of their weapons. Strip them of their armor."

  "Yes, Inquisitor!" The captain saluted frantically and sprinted down the hall. Morok looked back at Li Yu and Malos.

  "You have won your wager, travelers. At least for now." Morok stated. "You have given me the method and narrowed my suspects. But you will not leave the keep just yet."

  Li Yu frowned. "That wasn't the deal."

  "The deal was I wouldn't execute you," Morok countered flatly. "But the killer is still inside these walls. And Sovereign Ignis is arriving personally by nightfall to claim her son's remains. Until the traitor's head is separated from their shoulders, no one leaves. You will assist me in the interrogations. I need eyes that are not blinded by loyalty."

  Malos looked absolutely thrilled at the prospect of interrogating suspects.

  Li Yu just looked out the fractured window at the ash filled sky. Sovereign Ignis was coming.