Cleaning Up

She wore newly commissioned robes, the color of vermillion, so the blood stains didn’t look too out of place. Voah Sahnsuur, swung a clean slice through the neck of an accomplice of the creed.

Voah didn’t know if she was trying to prove to herself or the Duke that she hadn’t lost her edge and this was the third person in as many weeks that she put to the chopping block.

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The first of them was from the list of names she was given after the raid. He was a man on the run for aiding and abetting a cultist, now determined to stick it out in the woods, probably until the city was in the throws of chaos from the expected new wave of colonists.

She easily tracked him down with the help of her new Incus, Hunter. They waited for the man to return to his woodland abode before branding him and bringing him in alive for a public execution wearing the shackles she recovered from the Alossi ship. Soon she would try to find a witch to test out those runes.

The second, the wife of a dead cultist, the Arbiter had located through rumors about her and her husband behaving suspiciously at strange hours. Using her ‘methods’, Voah extracted information from the woman who had knowledge of the creed and hid his involvement. It turned out that the man was deeply concerned about an oncoming second winter. Their first year in the new world had been hard, taking their two children from them. They were both terrified at the prospect of ever having to survive such a harsh winter again. The wife confessed that her husband had done some awful things, though she didn’t know what those were. She just knew that he had claimed to have found a god that would save them. The woman begged for mercy as she was with child and sweetened the plea with the name of another cultist who fled the city to the mountain called Fang. The woman was spared at the chopping block, but would forever bear the mark of Vastad carved upon her forehead for aiding a cultist and refusing to turn him in willingly. Voah secretly made it a habit of donating small contributions to her home in the form of food or drink on several occasions.

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As an Inquisitor, Voah was always a target. The third person, the woman whose exposed neck had just splattered blood on her nice new robes, was a brazen (or stupid) assassin who attempted to take the Arbiter’s life as she was passing through the streets toward the rectory. This time Hunter wasn’t around and the woman had nearly made her mark but Voah was trained for such mindfulness and now that her headaches had all but disappeared, she swiftly disarmed the woman and brought her to the ground before her dagger could make contact with Voah’s back. She was immediately dragged to the square.

Voah had seen the woman before working in the Keep. Whether she was a cultist or a hired hand, she didn’t know. Voah prayed Zin take the assassin and she left the body there in the square. She bade an acolyte to leave a note that said, “For the Keep: You are welcome.”

When she returned to the rectory that evening, she punched and blocked her training rack until her knuckles bled.