Akaris glared at Ashinaro when he entered her shop. “Who died?”

  “What?”

  “For you to show your face, someone must have died.”

  “I need a blood filter.”

  She stared at him without expression.

  He stared back.

  “That’s it?” she finally said. “After everything that happened, the first thing you say is you need a blood filter?”

  “The first thing I said was ‘what’.”

  She glared at him.

  He reached into his bag and pulled out a handful of cores. “I have cores. I’ll pay double your normal price.”

  “Now I’m really suspicious.” She shook her head. “But I’m not so flush I can turn down a dumb customer willing to overpay. All my filters are in use right now. Next availability is in eight days. Come back then.”

  “I need one sooner than that.”

  She crossed her arms. “How soon?”

  “Now.”

  “Oh? And how much are you willing to pay? I’ll have to cut my corpsebalm manufacturing short, which will cost me money.”

  “How does double sound?”

  “Like what you’ve already offered me.” She frowned. “Wait, did you have something to do with those arnaphen that attacked earlier?”

  “Arnaphen attacked? Where?”

  She squinted at him. “You didn’t hear about Basorik losing himself while in the Ripper? They had to deactivate it, and it still took all the guards to subdue him.”

  “Huh. Sounds exciting.”

  “Shift into your battleform.”

  “Why?”

  She let out a weary sigh. “What do you need a blood filter for?”

  “An experiment.”

  She studied him suspiciously for several moments longer, then shook her head. “Fine. Come back in a couple thousand breaths, I’ll have one ready. And the cost is triple: six corens.”

  “That’s an absurd price.”

  “It’s an absurd request. With how much I’ll lose on the corpsebalm, I’m barely making a profit. If you don’t like it, go rent one from Kakoris when he opens.”

  “I just stick you with it?” Zanas asked, turning the gleaming metal syringe over in his grasp, the painted frown on his mask looking dubious.

  “Yes.” Ashinaro was lying on his back, heavy chains that reeked of old smoke were looped across his torso and legs, attached securely to thick metal rungs embedded in the floor—remnants of the forge that once dominated this former workspace from an age before Jarnik had been the proprietor and the whole building had been dedicated to creating supplies day and night for the Demon War.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  Two gold lances already jutted from his neck and thigh, connected by flexible tubing to the blood filter he’d rented from Akaris. “But wait until I shift into my battleform. The reagent begins the filtering process and if you inject it now, it won’t work.”

  The skeleton’s painted eyes squinted at the chains binding Ashinaro to the floor.

  Ashinaro wondered why the mask had two faces if it was so capable of expression. And of drinking poison. And of making you appear like an entire other person.

  “Are these chains necessary?” Zanas asked. “I feel like you’re putting me in danger here.”

  “They’re just a precaution. Once I shift into my battleform, I’ll be in delirium until my blood’s filtered. It doesn’t necessarily make you aggressive; it’s more for my safety than your own so I don’t walk off a roof or fall into a river and get eaten.”

  “I don’t see any river.”

  “Not here. Without the chains, I’d likely wander off. It makes you want to roam.”

  “But this is going to extract the poison?”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t work right away. It takes time for it to process all my blood.”

  “You do seem like you have a lot of blood.”

  The reagent would allow the machine to target and extract the arnaphen poison from his blood. It also had the benefit of turning it into a liquid, which would be much easier to work with. And now thanks to Zanas’s mask, instead of needing to flood the ritual chamber with gas, all he’d need to do was open a wound on the high priest with an arnaphen barb, then squirt a few drops of the liquid poison into it. Two Beasts with a single arrow, as killing the high priest would most certainly disrupt the Ritual of Return.

  While waiting on Akaris to prepare the blood filter, Ashinaro had discovered where the ritual would be held. As expected, it was at Joy’s temple.

  He just hoped they had enough time. It would take several cycles of filtering before the poison was all removed, as it had by this point soaked into his battleform’s tissues, and the blood moon rose tomorrow night.

  And they still had a lot of preparations to make, and he couldn’t send Zanas out to make them. He needed him here to keep an eye on him while he was in delirium.

  Zanas tapped a bony finger against his sternum. “You do realize I’m stuck in you, right? If you descend into a mindless rage, guess who gets dragged along for the ride?”

  “You’re the one who shouted me out of it back in the Fen.”

  The mask spun around to the grinning side. “Oh. I did do that, didn’t I?” A pause. “But I’ll be trapped inside you, so I don’t see how I can possibly inject this after you shift to your battleform. Bit difficult to wield a syringe without a body. And like legs, my scepter also lacks arms or hands. I suppose it has fingers, but they can’t move, so what good are they?”

  “You weren’t trapped before, were you?” He actually wasn’t sure. All he remembered was Zanas running past him holding the arnaphen’s corpse after he’d shifted to his humanform.

  The mask spun to the frowning side. “You know, I don’t like how often you’ve been right lately. Have you been replaced?”

  “Just inject me as soon as I shift. And don’t go anywhere. I’m only a Defender, but I still might be able to break these chains under delirium.”

  “Does it make you stronger?”

  “Not so much stronger, as you lose any sense of self-preservation and can push yourself harder. It’s easy to push past limits when you don’t notice the pain and damage its causing.”

  “Too bad it doesn’t work on me.”

  “And don’t try to drink it!”

  “Can you read my thoughts? I can read yours, but I thought that was a one-way thing. I’m not liking this turn of events.”

  Ashinaro closed his eyes. “Start the process as soon as I shift, okay?”

  Zanas sighed. “Yes yes, no need to go over the plan again. Stick the pointy thing in the big angry dragon the moment it appears. Honestly, for someone whose mind I can read, you’re remarkably repetitive.”

  “All right,” Ashinaro murmured. “Here goes.”

  Ashinaro’s eyes peeled open.

  Dim light filtered in through the window, smoke from the smithy rose up between the floorboards, and he could hear Jarnik humming Senliksar’s battle hymn as he chopped wood for the forge.

  Strange he was doing that in the morning. He normally had all of it chopped after closing the night before. Must have had a good night last night to put off his chores. Maybe Vaunelis had unbroken up with him and come calling.

  Ashinaro rubbed at his eyes and sat up, taking stock.

  He was still in his battleform, but had no hint of delirium.

  It had worked. The poison was gone.

  Next to him, the blood filter sat, its gears still. The glass vial at its pinnacle was filled with a pale red liquid. The arnaphen poison.

  Strange there was so little of it. It would be plenty for his purposes, but he’d have expected there to be a lot more given the quantity of gas he’d inhaled.

  On the table in the corner, the partial arnaphen corpse was laid out. A knife covered in arnaphen goo sat next to it.

  “Zanas?”

  He peered inside himself, wondering if the jester was sleeping again.

  His heart lurched. The scepter was there, still impossibly bound to his battleform. But it was empty.

  Zanas was gone.