The legacy of the dark blood

Chapter 42

The moment of truth

Liz stared at the ring with dismay, she could not tolerate disloyalty, but she was forced to restrain her desire to throw it away, acknowledging that it would be an important piece in the investigation. She had no words to describe what had happened, deep down she sought to comfort herself with the idea that she had no real reason to take Nick's words for true. Bernard tried to comfort her.

"Come on," he said calmly and pursed his lips, "it looks like we're done here for now."

"What about the others," Liz asked, closing her eyes, inhaling and sighing.

"If we release them now, we will only put them in mortal danger," affirmed Bernard taking the keys to the cells, "The best thing to do is to be patient and look for a way to get in touch with our people, it seems that now it's just you and me in this."

Liz hid her gun, watched the incinerated body of the Knochenbrecher with even more vivid flames, but in the wake of everything she felt by then, she would have preferred to be crushed by his pulverizing hands. That feeling of frustration grew even more when she remembered that Chris was in possession of the queen's crown, and that if all of Nick's stories were true, the only one of the four relics they would have to get was the goblet.

"Come on," Liz mumbled, for the first time in no mood to go forward with her work, "There's still Max; if he's alive, maybe there's still something we can do."

She moved along the path Nick had chosen in the hope that she could find a quicker way out than going all the way back to the main hall. Bernard had never seen her so depressed, even in the face of the most adverse situations they had ever experienced together. The agent looked once more at the monster's body with the flames less alive and prayed to God that it really was dead. Normally it was Liz who encouraged him to keep going, and he didn't know if he was ready for a role reversal now.

The huge chamber had only one hidden exit in the middle of a gloom through which they fled, thus arriving back in the corridor of cells, again catching the sorrow that consumed the inmates day after day until they encountered the worst of the faces of merciless death. Liz felt it more and more closely, she had a lot of mixed feelings that she sought to release.

The lighting in the corridor was by then precarious, in a few cases they had to use their lamps, letting themselves be astonished by the traces that pain and death left in their path after attacking their victims: blood, bones and foul smells. Eventually, soft voices startled them from another of the corridors; they felt like frightened children in the middle of a labyrinth. Peeking through one of the brick walls, they found the black-robed beings in charge of the prisoners, and next to them, several of the guards guarding the palace entrances leading some of them toward what they identified as a possible exit.

"Mach weiter, Bewegung! (Go on, move!)" a hoarse voice shouted with an echo that shook the agents. In a few minutes, the marchers were gone.

They waited for just the right moment to follow the monsters, not with the aim of confronting them, but in the hope that they could leave the dungeon area as quickly as possible; Liz soon realized that they had made a circular movement through the area, to find the cells where David Rowland and the Swedish lady were locked up, although this time, they found them empty. Liz came to imagine the worst-case scenario for those they had found there a short time ago; with nothing else to do, she moved along with Bernard through the gloomy corridors until they came upon a spiral staircase next to a mechanical elevator that was no longer on the first floor.

For several minutes, Liz and Bernard did not speak to each other and moved through the area in anticipation of another unpleasant surprise. They climbed up the spiral staircase, in a myriad of steps that stretched towards a direction unknown to them; despite this, they had the idea in mind that no place in the palace could have such a terribly grotesque and dark atmosphere as the dungeons.