51 LURKING IN THE DARK

He didn't want to be crippled.

It was the only thought in his mind at the moment when Glax plunged headlong into his opponent's belly, and the two fell to the floor of the corridor. At the same time, the heavy door fell on them.

This time, however, the door slammed the wall at an angle. Both men stayed under the door, in the gap between the plank and the wall. Debris from the plaster fell on both of them, blinding Glax momentarily.

Glax took an unexpected punch, and noticed the stranger running away, as the heavy door slid over them. Glax still tried to grab the Mech-Eye by the foot, but the man easily got rid of him while Glax was trapped under the door.

"RAS! He's running away!" he shouted, hoping his friend would capture the man, while Glax crawled away from the huge piece of solid wood about to collapse on his back.

Thinking about the clock mechanism, Glax stopped the time for as little as he could, enough that he could escape without further damage. The door fell over the place where he was standing with a BOOM that shook the entire floor, just as Glax pulled his foot under it.

He still didn't know if it really worked or was it something he was just fantasizing about. Having fallen off the stairs with his knee destroyed was just a hallucination of his mind? Had his connection to TIME and the vselys clock been real? At that moment, Glax really wanted everything to be a clear as water system and he had an AI explaining everything to him. Even though it was annoying at times.

Or at least, a walkthrough.

In the next moment, Rasmus was pulling the door out of the way and looking at him in amazement. "Guy! Are you okay?"

"RAS! Go after him! Hurry!" Glax got up and also did what he had suggested.

But it was too late. The man had simply disappeared into the maze-like alleys of that neighborhood.

Rasmus was apologizing for missing their target, but not for choosing to rescue his friend first. And Glax was in a bad mood for letting Mech-eye get away. But there was no point in bashing his friend for his failed attempt.

If Rasmus had hit the man, Mech-eye would be dead by now, and it would be useless for them. For they would not know what he had against Chriseis.

And Glax might also need a new knee.

But now, he had bruises, wounds, and his face was even more swollen than before. He could pay a good amount for a potion like Charikleia's, or an iatromancer 'total fix' like Crionte's.

"Let's go back to that store. He may have left important things there," he suggested to stop Rasmus from apologizing.

His head hurt a lot, and he could still hear the ticking and buzzing sounds of the clockwork in his mind. The small inaccuracy irritated him, as if a drip dropped continuously, at constant intervals.

Even before entering the door, or rather, the space where there was a door before, they heard the groans of pain.

Upon entering, the two Valosians saw a girl trying to bring a person on her back, while a small boy, no more than 4 years old, was carrying a small bundle behind them.

Both men came to help her with the strenuous task. And they discovered the girl was carrying an elderly man, who had no legs from the knee down. The man had a badly injured face, and Glax had no doubt Mech-Eye had done it to him.

And he was dying.

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Glax discovered there was a temple outside the city gates, dedicated to healing. At first, they didn't want to take care of the man Glax brought.

First because he was a foreigner, then because he was a cripple. And lastly, because he was going to die either way. Only when Glax questioned the gods' cure skills and the knowledge of their acolytes, did they accept the old man to close his wounds and relieve his pain.

While an apprentice priestess tended to Glax's wounds, Rasmus took the girl and the child to eat something. They were held hostage all afternoon.

Glax was eager to know everything, but he took advantage of medical care for the second time in less than 10 hours.

The devotees of Iaso, a kind of patron of healing, took care of this temple. He was in the men's recovering ward, while the old man was receiving intensive care in another part of the temple complex. For Glax, the place was basically a charity hospital, since nobody was treated with prayers or divine light, but with medicines and antiseptics.

After giving him a towel soaked in a calming ointment for him to put on his face, the 'nurse' pulled the curtain that separated his mat from the others, so that he could rest.

Glax already imagined that Nikandros would be even more furious with his second failure. He had come so close to capturing the man who tried to blackmail Chriseis!

Mech-eye was an accomplished warrior, with keen reflexes. Glax knew he was no match for him yet.

Glax also knew he could not keep that farce forever, pretending to be a warrior when in fact he wasn't. He needed to learn, and fast.

But he hadn't had time for anything that wasn't related to Chriseis. How would he guess he would become a widower there too? And this would cause more problems than he imagined?

The Kroton didn't realize he was falling asleep, as thoughts came and went as if he were awake, without coming to any conclusion.

Glax noticed the curtain being pulled away carefully, and something in his mind said it was related to the strange sound he had heard before.

The sound of a person dying.

He woke up completely, rolling onto his side on the mat and grabbing the first thing his fingers could catch. A water jug that shattered in his hand when he parried the blow the person delivered with a scythe.

The hooded figure turned its bloody fist with the shards of pottery, and tried to hit Glax's chest. The scythe came to touch the fabric on his chest.

The Valosian stepped back twice, stumbling over the person lying on the mat next to him. "Sorry!"

The person did not respond. And to his horror, Glax realized he just stepped over a dead body. Glax got up, and pulled the mat under the feet of the assassin trying to kill him.

"Am I not going to have a fucking minute's peace in this city?!" he snarled.

Trying to disarm the assassin proved impossible without a weapon for himself. She could keep him at a distance with swinging moves of the scythe and also was coming dangerously close to hurt him.

He realized it was a woman, even though the light from the lamps was dim. Glax ran to an adjacent atrium, knowing that the killer would have to follow him.

He reached for a torch, which he would use without mercy, and cornered the assassin against a wall. He took advantage that she had a short-range weapon, and he, a torch with a long handle.

The hooded woman was agile enough, and Glax did some work in trying to keep her from escaping.

"Son of the dead?" she asked, looking up defiantly at him when she realized she had no escape.

He had forgotten that he didn't have his mask on. But it didn't give her the pleasure of showing it openly.

"You do not know how to read? That is not what is written," he scoffed, lowering the torch to his face.

She was confused for a moment, her eyes trying to confirm the information. Glax leaned over to take the scythe she was holding now, lunging on her from the right.

He heard the buzz and the object passing before his eyes. One arrow hit the woman's arm, and the second, her face.

She slipped to the floor, immediately. Glax threw the torch away and protected himself behind a wall for the next shots. But they didn't come.

He just heard the rushing that followed, warning whistles, and people coming in that direction.

He went back to the assassin with the torch that had not gone out before they got there.

Plucking a piece of fabric from the woman's hood, he covered his face, taking advantage of the religious taboo to conceal his stigma.

What a bitch!

The arrow had pierced the woman's right cheek, and a trickle of blood dripped from the wound and also from her eye. She was pretty dead.

Glax felt around for clues. He just found a bag of money, and a tattoo on her wrist, covered by a bracelet.

But then people started to come and question him. The recovering people next to Glax had also been silently murdered. The reasons were apparent.

"What is happening?! Priests? Murders where there should be a cure?" A familiar voice stood out among all the murmurs around, while Glax told the priestess responsible for the night shift for the second time what had happened.

"Guardian Iasos! They tried to assassinate Lord Glax in the temple of Iaso, founded by your pious mother!" exclaimed the woman, suddenly even more agitated by the nobleman's arrival.

"I don't want to say how you should handle this, priestess. But I suppose the place has become impure for those who seek recovery here," the newcomer Iasos spoke in a benevolent and ironic tone.

"Lord Glax brought a foreigner, a banished man! We knew we shouldn't be sheltering this sort of people under our roof, but Lord Glax insisted so much..."

'Oh, you didn't miss the chance to use that against me at first, what a bitch!' Glax did not look at the woman, but at Iasos.

"Do you always come by surprise at this temple? You don't look like you need medical help."

"Not often, brother-in-law. But I was told you were here, hurt. What foreigner is the priestess talking about?"

"I don't know who he is. He was taken hostage by the body thief. And he was tortured. If he survives, he can tell us anything about this man." Glax, who was sitting on the mat, finally stood up.

In doing so, he noticed a long reddish bruise on his brother-in-law's forearm.