Rewrite That Witch
CH416 · Rewrite
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Chapter 416: Retreat

Nightingale followed the path she’d scouted and dropped through three floors in succession, landing in the Marquess’s cell at the bottom of the tower.

Spear Passi startled up, eyes wide. “How did you—”

A finger to her lips.

Nightingale limped to the cell door, examined the corridor, and found two guards in church livery standing at the passage entrance. They hadn’t heard her come through the ceiling. She stepped up behind them inside the Mist—they never turned—and opened their throats with her dagger. They slid down the wall in silence.

Back in the cell, she finally looked at her leg.

The wind-resistant trousers Soraya had made for her were sliced open at the shin. Blood was moving freely through the cut, a wound half an inch deep in the meat of the calf, clean enough to see the white of tissue at the bottom. No bone, thank God. If the coating on those trousers had been any thinner the whip would have taken something she couldn’t get back.

“You’re hurt,” Spear said.

“We need to leave before they turn you into a corpse.” Nightingale kept her voice level. She didn’t tell the Marquess about the plan to deliver her to Hermes alive—dead in the square was bad enough; what the Saint had proposed was considerably worse. “They didn’t know you were a witch before they arrested you. This whole operation was a conspiracy to seize your title. The witch-accusation came after.”

“My brother—”

“He’s the church’s puppet now. We’ll talk on the road.” She wrapped a strip of cloth tight above the wound. “Where’s the God’s Locket of Retaliation?”

Spear touched her neck. “They started with chains on my legs, then switched to this.”

Nightingale’s stomach sank when she saw it: a collar of metal as thick as her thumb, magic stones packed into the tube and sealed with specialized technique. You couldn’t pry it open. You needed the unlocking mechanism—and you needed it now, before the Judgement Army’s armor started clanking down the stairs.

“The locking device—where?”

“Near the dungeon entrance. Where they first processed me.”

The Saint had clearly understood what Spear was. Only this kind of collar could neutralize a witch of significant ability; an ordinary chain was theater.

“We go to the first cell. Stay close.”

They moved through the corridor, stepping over the bodies. Nightingale took the guards’ keys and opened the door. The unlocking device stood against the wall inside: two iron clamps on a mechanical frame, like a torture instrument that had been repurposed for something only marginally less terrible. Spear pressed her neck into the clamps. Nightingale locked the frame around the collar and cranked the handle, letting the pulleys do the work, the clamps pulling in opposite directions until the metal ring developed a crack and then a gap.

The tower bell began to ring.

The alarm bounced off the mountain stone, doubling itself, filling the corridors.

“Church alarm,” Spear said.

“I know.” Nightingale straightened. “It helps us. Everyone’s moving to the entrance—they’ll cluster at the choke point.”

She was right. In the black-and-white world of the Mist, the dark dots of God’s Stones converged on the dungeon entrance like beads drawn to a magnet—a column of Judgement Warriors, maybe eight of them, coming down the narrow passage in armor. She could see their stones; they couldn’t see her. She stepped into them and fired twice, working through the column before the first man finished falling. Two rounds, most of the guards down. The ones remaining broke formation and backed up, trying to find a target in empty air.

She reloaded and put them down.

A lower-rank church contingent—believers and minor functionaries, not trained fighters. Time was the problem. The actual Judgement Army was somewhere above and moving toward the sound of gunfire.

“Hurry.” She grabbed Spear’s arm, pulled her into the Mist, and pushed upward.

Through the floorboards, through the joists, up through the first floor and then the second, the walls parting around them like water—

At the tower’s base, outside, real air. Cold and damp and absolutely perfect.

Behind them, inside, voices and running. She could hear them not quite believing what they’d found in the basement.

Nightingale reached into her bag and produced a bamboo tube. She pulled the cord at the end.

A red flare climbed out of the tube into the grey sky and burst apart in a shower of sparks—bright enough to be visible from the air even through fog, bright enough to cut the murk. Roland had spent the better part of an afternoon explaining how the signal worked when he’d given it to her. One flare, and a thousand soldiers will come to your aid. She didn’t need a thousand soldiers. She needed Maggie.

The shadow arrived before the sparks finished falling. Maggie came down hard and fast, her wingspan scattering the fog in every direction, her body crushing the wall beside the tower and her roar vibrating in Nightingale’s chest.

“What is that—” Spear had gone entirely still.

“My friend.” Nightingale pushed her forward. Lightning, already on Maggie’s back, took the Marquess’s arm and helped her up, lashing her in place with cord. Nightingale used the last of what she had to pull herself up and patted Maggie’s side. “Go. Now.”

“Aooooo—”

The great wings snapped open. The Judgement Warriors who had reached the tower entrance stopped dead at the sight, which bought the two seconds needed. Maggie rose, drove the fog down into spirals beneath her, and vanished into the dark sky above the ridge with the three of them aboard.

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