Screams echoed down the abyssal passageway.

The damp and frigid air of the stony undercroft nearly stole the young acolyte’s breath on her hurried flight toward the guttural cries. Her heart hammered against her ribs.

“Slow your pace, infernal child,” Sacton Crain grumbled from behind, as he hobbled to keep up with her.

Each cell she passed housed no less than a half dozen women and children—most of them Lyverians seized by the Red Men. While the putrid odor of death, defecation, and decay surely must have nauseated Sacton Crain, the girl had grown used to it, having spent most of her days in the temple’s rotting bowels.

The cries led her to a cell in which a Lyverian woman, not much older than herself, lay writhing, kicking, and screaming on the gritty floor. Her limbs and forehead bore the carvings of the cross, cut by a crude knife, all of them trickling fresh blood. Arms pinned at either side of her body by three other Red Veils, she lay drowning beneath a cluster of red robes.

“Give her to me!” Her Lyverian accent clung heavily to her hoarse words, as fresh blood leaked from her nose where she must’ve been struck. “Give me my child!”

Sacton Crain slipped past the acolyte into the room. “What was so pressing that you dragged me out of bed as if the dead were afoot?”

“A birth, Your Grace.” Mother Vona, the only Red Veil who’d been permitted to keep her tongue, loomed over the fussing woman, her stern eyes dulled with apathy. “See for yourself.”

Beside Mother Vona stood another prisoner—a Vonkovyan, given the filthy golden tone of her hair—in threadbare clothes that barely clung to her body. She held a small bundle in her trembling arms.

Sacton Crain hobbled over to her, and the moment he peered down at the child, his brows lowered. “Was it you who assisted?”

“Yes, Your Grace,” the Vonkovyan prisoner answered. “I heard her whisper to someone in tongues.” She glanced at the woman on the floor, betrayal twisting the Vonkovyan’s expression. “There was nothing but shadows there.”