And that’s how Seth found himself crawling, shivering and half-soaked, through a rough-hewn stone tunnel barely wide enough to bend his knees in. His mite torch was clamped between his teeth. Its hexis light cast across the ridges and corrugations in the wall and danced on the chin-height water and Seth felt as though he were crawling through the mildewed esophagus of some fossilized, gargantuan white-feather seraph.
A foul-tasting, greasy speck of something dripped onto his tongue and made him dry heave. His jaw had opened the popmite trap at the base of his torch and let a droplet of ichor from the crushed bug out onto his mouth.
He wondered what idiotic part of him was responsible for this. His heart? His brain? His dick? He resolved to blame the Fox, which had been silent for days, save for a muffled snickering now and then, so faint that Seth couldn’t tell whether he was imagining it.
Perhaps that meant he was on the right path, and didn’t need its help? As his shoulders burned from the slow, bent progression of his slithering crawl, he wondered how that could possibly be true.
The water was deepening, now, as the tunnel sloped subtly downward. The current picking up. Seth twisted onto his back, in a symphony of digging stone edges and awkward joints, to keep his face above water. His hair, spiked with wet, hung limp into his eyes; his mouth was too full of flashlight to blow it away. So he dragged himself, half-blind like a brainless bottom-feeding fish, fingers palpating for purchase on the walls. A rough edge scraped a burning line across his shin. He hissed in annoyed pain and kept crawling.
Think of the shower you’ll get to have when this is done. A nice, hot, scalding, blasting shower. Think about clean, warm, fluffy towels. Think about Lisa.
Think about her wrapped in a robe, waiting in bed for you, her damp hair and her soft thighs pressing together and her warm skin and that smile she gets when you look at her body.
Think about how gentle her hands are, whenever she touches you. Gentle but tense with want. Think about those thick black-cherry lips, opening wide, and—
CLONG.
His palm slapped into a grate with a metallic sound he could hear over the rushing water. Idiot. Idiot idiot idiot.
He clicked the light off, then froze and listened over the water and the galloping pulse in his ears. When thirty seconds had passed in complete subterranean dark, and nobody had run over to murder him, he reached up to the grate with hands trembling from the chill and gave an experimental push. The metal wiggled; screws on the ends, he saw, with one missing.
He shimmied another few armspans, to get his feet into position in the narrow chute that the grate capped. He pressed his back into the floor, planted both boots on the metal, and pushed, as hard as he could and as quick as he dared.
The metal wrenched and complained. One screw cracked; another pinged. Saints, the noise. Surely any listener would hear his heart, too, the way it thundered in his ears.
The grille gave way. His foot pushed out into air. He gasped with agonized relief.
A game of inches, then, to ease himself out from the uncovered tunnel. He flopped and wriggled and wondered how he might have done this gracefully, though by the mercy of Silvertongued St. Procas, nobody was here to bear witness.
He lay on his back in the still, stale air of the crypt for a moment (or what had better be the crypt, because Seth was not about to fucking do that again). Then he sat up, slipped the grate back into place as best he could with raw, scratched fingers, and clicked his flashlight on again.
He was in an oblong chamber, its contours determined long ago by pre-Emergence builders according to some logic of geological tide. Three exits he could see, if he didn’t count the choke tunnel, which he refused to. Two tunnels into the dark, one door—a thin sheet of metal, really, with hinges spike-hammered into the much older structure around it. That looked promising, and he was pleased at how quiet the hinges were after the creaking grate.
Geometric shadows shortened and lengthened again as he passed the gridded catacomb slots along the walls. Loculi, these were called. He’d heard the word in the smoke-addled stories of a tomb robber who’d owed Rohan. Alcoves for the dead. He kept expecting to see some moldering ossuary or leering skull. None presented itself. Hannah had told no lies about the extent of the place’s hollowing.
Seth came to another t-junction and again picked the side with a door and was rewarded with a cylindrical room, the floor of which was etched with a familiar circle. The place had been swept not long ago—piles of dust and pebbles at the edges—but one stone still sat in the circle’s center.
Seth picked it up and rubbed his thumb across the Fox on its underside.
“I don’t know if you’re listening,” he whispered. “But I’m in. Found the stone. There has to be an exit. I’ll find that, too, and let you in.” His fingers tightened. “Please be listening.”
He crept from the circle chamber and across the junction to the road not taken, and then a left, and then another, searching for more of those doors and doing his best to commit his passage to memory.
The next door he found not by sight but by smell. The kind of miasmatic odor that old physikers believed carried diseases right through the nostrils. How twisted-around had Seth’s life become at the hands of the Verdugo, that now he moved toward that smell, rather than away?
It led him to a larger chamber than any he’d seen on his way, built around a thick central column that was studded with upright sconces where, once upon a time, the dead must have slept standing. Concave scoops in the stone suggested skulls burrowing out from their seatings. What must it have sounded like, Seth wondered; that thought’s grotesqueness was quickly dwarfed by the sodden canvas bags that lay in the outer wall’s loculi. And the stench. It was eye-watering in here. The kind of smell a rotting head makes, with any luck. He resolved to be about his business and then go on his way.
On the other side of the column sat a cluster of barrels, deposited against the wall like a massive insect’s clutch of eggs. Seth opened one, and was struck first by the smell, which he could not identify but which screamed wrong!!! in his mind with such force that he knew, instinctually, it was something dead that had been dead for a long time. The barrel was half-full of something. Some foul coagulation laying over a chunky, half liquid layer of…
Entrails, Seth realized. And blood. Organs and effluvia shedding gallons of monochrome grotesquerie. Those lumpen black-stained sacks stuffed into the stone shelves.
Those were unlit corpses. He had stumbled into an abattoir.
He threw up, then, but only a little, and he dragged the barrel on top of the stain to cover it, so that was fine. He steadied himself, forced the dancing spotlight in his shivering hand to stillness, and continued to cast it across the chamber. He ignored the screaming questions in the back of his brain. All this unlit blood. In the sewers. In the water system. What was this? What plot had he stumbled into?
It wasn’t all body bags in this storage room. On the far wall there was a shelf of stockpiled miscellany. Stacked bricks and trowels, a rack of rifles, a dented popmite spawning tank. And there, in a cleared-out spot as if given prized position:
A slack-jawed, gray-skinned, yellow-haired head.
Seth’s mouth went dry. He drew a deep breath through his nose, and the queasy tinge the rank air sent through him was overpowered by triumph.
He raised the stone to his lips. “I fucking found it.” The excitement bumped his whisper into a near-voice. His lips were turned up of their own accord. “Shitting saints. I’ve got your head.”
He tucked the head under his arm. The uneven bumps of its dead face pressed into his side, but this was such a minor horror compared to the rest of the room that he barely registered it. “I’m coming back,” he whispered. “Can’t take that tunnel again, especially with this thing, but I—”
He froze. Around the corner there was a green, pulsing glow.
“Not alone,” he breathed. “Someone’s turned on the wall lamps. I—”
You’ll handle it.
“I’ll handle it,” he whispered, and slipped the stone into his pocket. He tied the head to his belt loop by its stringy hair. Inch by hissing inch he slid his cutlass from its sheath.
He crept toward the light, keeping to the wavering shadows, and beheld a man in the same loose, grimy uniform Hannah had worn. In lieu of a bell, this man had brought a hatchet, which he held across his crouching legs as he examined the grate Seth had crawled from. The broken screws. The shining puddle around it. The wet tracks.
“What the fuck,” the man murmured to himself.
He turned, then, back the way he had come, perhaps at some sound or to call out to a colleague. Whatever it was, Seth had to move now.
He detached from the wall in the hustling, long-striding crouch his “uncle” had called the Footpad Sprint. His blade tightened in his grip. One motion. One quick death across the jugular. You kill people now, Seth. You’re surprisingly decent at it. Go on.
The stories had told him that the cutting of a throat was a silent, stealthy thing. For all Seth knew, the stories were right, and he was just a fuck-up. This man did not die silently. He wrenched Seth’s arm as the blade bit into his neck and let out the start of an anguished “STOP—” that froze Seth’s blood, even as he spilled his mark’s all over the sconced wall before them.
The o in stop turned into a gurgling groan and the man’s grip slackened and he slumped forward, head cracking hard against the wall, and then he was on the ground twitching, and was he alive? No, his eyes were wide and unseeing. Just a last firing farewell of nerve and muscle forever relieved of their duties.
Seth had one heartbeat to savor his hobbled victory—then his victim’s friend darted into the chamber. A young man, gangly and freckled, and already pulling at the chipped Legion-surplus olive handle of his saber.
“Someone’s here,” Freckles cried, and his sword was out and pointed at Seth’s chest, and they shared a moment, then, or so it seemed to Seth, of confused hesitation. The tucking-away of common sense. Are we really doing this? Are we really about to kill a stranger, or die to one?
Yes.
Here it was. Two men, staring across two spans of leveled steel, and Seth would have to move first, he realized with a seasick lurch. First and fast, or he was fucked. This fellow had been drawn here by the strangled deathcry, and that meant more of them were coming, and his enemy with teeth gritted and eyes darting was in no hurry to take that broomstick step to close the distance.
And so Seth lunged forward, cutlass questing in a chopping overhand that felt as slow as if he’d swung it in a nightmare—which had to be some trick of his agitated brain, because when it connected with the thin man’s sword, it out a hellacious clang and sent a vicious vibration up Seth’s arm.
The swords bound briefly, and then Seth’s slid forward and turned off the man’s crossguard. Clockwise went the cultist’s edge, wrenching Seth’s blade downward and flickering itself horizontal in a clattering counterthrust that Seth whirled into a side-lunging crouch to avoid. Practice cut through panic and halted the turn of his cutlass. His grip hardened; his blade shoved the riposte awry, past his ear. I’m in a swordfight, he realized, with the sickening shock of the victim to a practical joke. An antic, disbelieving huff of laughter passed his lips. No hiding-place to flee to or strike from, no Tiago to blow the guy’s brains out, no Annalise to run him through. I’m in a fucking one-on-one swordfight.
A pulse of furious spite seized him, and he sprung upward from the knee this mean bastard had forced him onto. He’d really expected this to last longer, to have a few flashing exchanges, so he was almost as surprised as the man he impaled when his sword shoved through his stomach to the hilt.
“What,” Freckles mumbled, with a queer, flat affect. Seth tugged the sword out from his belly with a sucking splorch and hacked him across the chest, and for a moment you could believe all he’d cut was cloth and then a bright angry red stripe bloomed onto the man’s shirt, and he went to his knees, and then onto his slackening face.
Footsteps and calling voices echoed off the slab walls. A shadow carved from the hallway mitelamp’s light rose through the corner as the first foe drew near.
Seth’s new hexentat. He hadn’t practiced it, fool that he was. But now it leapt to the forefront of his mind. The freckled man—what had he sounded like?
“He’s got a gun,” Seth cried, in a dead ringer for the deader man’s voice, and then—this will make you feel so stupid if it doesn’t work—he did his best imitation of a gun going off, entirely expecting to go “pshoo,” and perhaps stall his attackers with some kind of laughing fit.
What emerged from his mouth was a hellacious munition-mite BANG that roared its echo off the walls and put a horrendous ringing in his ears. He let out another—best they think it was a wheelgun—and the shadow thinned itself as the individual casting it flattened themself to a wall.
Hesitation. Seth took advantage. He bolted from the chamber down its perpendicular path, sprinting down twisting, silent halls. He lunged left, prayed this was some kind of circuit, that he’d loop round his pursuers, or that there was another exit, or, failing that, he prayed that the Turning Wheel was as gentle as the songs said, and death wouldn’t be such an awful thing as it appeared.
Another BANG behind him, this one not caused by any hexentat. A chunk of limestone burst, scattering him with dust and stinging shards.
“LISA,” he screamed, hoping a fool’s hope that she’d heard that, or heard him, through the Fox stone or through the sewer wall.
A door. A door, a door, thank every fucking Saint who’d ever swung a stick. An old sheet of rust with a wire window but it might have been the long-awaited Saint Portal opening to redeem the world, the way it surged Seth’s soul. He tried the knob and pulled it open and nearly laughed in panicky despair as it revealed a brick fucking wall.
Kick it.
He gave it a frenzied kick, mostly to register his displeasure at his evil fate, before he realized that one: the Fox had just spoken, and two: his kick had shoved a patch of bricks a few inches in.
BANG again. A bullet pinged off the swung-open door. Seth charged his shoulder into the bricks and they cascaded, a chest-sized opening of them, letting in a humid hosanna of rushing undercroft air.
And fucking Saints, she was there. Lisa al Ydris, his gorgeous, deadly, long-overdue miracle. Looking as shocked as he was, her blade bare and streaked with blood, and he’d never forget the look on her face, the expression of surprise and fear and grateful delight and love.
Love. He was sure of it. As surely as he loved her back.
A cried-out curse from behind him. Another bullet flew wide. Lisa threw her sword down. Her arms rocketed forward, hands linked, fingers spread.
Seth could see behind her now, where Tiago was stabbing an armed and coveralled man in the stomach as Ofelia bent his head back. Before he could process what was happening, Lisa said:
“Duck, darling.”
He ducked. Behind him, a warning was screamed too late.
Bright, scouring fire turned the night-haunted halls to day.
Masked hermandati rolled barrels full of sloshing horror out from the breach in the wall, past the lined-up dead. Two fallen to Seth’s cutlass, two more killed by the incoming al Ydrises, and the jumbled, bleached remains of four—at best guess—fireball victims.
Tiago took another slug from Hermandat Anora’s flask and passed it to Seth. “Two bodies,” he said. “I allow myself the pride of a successful instructor.”
“Uh huh.” Seth adjusted the blanket around his shoulders. “Two to your one.”
“You smell like grilled shit, by the way.”
“This was how they did it.” Lisa shows a pair of green-sashed investigators to the stack of bricks and the discarded trowels. “A group to go in, another to brick them shut and wait outside. The twins and I followed the bangs and the yelling to the entrance and found the outside party.”
“And who’s this one, then?” Anora gestured to Seth, who raised her flask in greeting.
“That would be Seth,” Lisa said. “Our infiltrator.”
Anora’s thumb flicked the catch on her pistol’s mitehorn back and forth. “Seth..?”
“Just Seth,” he said. “I’m one of those mononymic types. Like a musician or a monarch, y’know.”
“I have a report to write, your majesty.”
“He’s given Fontana more than enough.” Lisa crossed to Seth and held out her hand. “He’ll hold onto his surname.”
Seth took the proffered palm, and Lisa tugged him to his feet. He began to pull back; her fingers tightened. She kept his hand in hers.
Her fingers laced into the gaps between his and bound their palms tightly together. She said nothing. Just stared down at him, and smiled.
“I got your head,” he said.
She nodded. Her other hand settled between his shoulder blades and slowly pressed him into her embrace. The public setting reddened his face; he turned his head to avoid burying it in the warm, snug place on her chest perfectly sized for it. The shining sweat over her heart cooled his burning cheek.
Tiago and Ofelia were in conversation over the pile of loot the Hermandati had extracted, and the cloth-wrapped bundle perched atop it. They glanced Seth and Lisa’s way, and though Tiago averted his look quickly, there was no scoff of discontent this time.
“That’s Alice over there?” Seth asked, as Lisa finally released him from the hug.
“It’s Sister Niama al Tars. There’s a bit more preparation in order before she’s Alice.” Lisa lifted a lock of limp yellow protruding from the bundle and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. “This hair will be the prettiest silver, I think.” She let it drop. “But that’s for later.”
“What’s for now?” Ofelia asked.
“For now, we let the investigators do their job here, and return to the manor for a bit of a debriefing with the Corregidor.”
“And some choice words with Marston, I think,” Tiago said.
“Then we’ll find ourselves something delicious,” Lisa continued. “if Seth gets the appetite back.”
Seth rubbed his slim arm, felt the sweat and the sewer water. “Let’s get some fresh air and I’ll let you know.”
“And then…” Lisa lifted her long, pale arm and gave herself a sniff. “Well, I could certainly use a shower. And you might legally require one, Seth.”
“A shower.” Ofelia sighed. “Oh, yes. Please.”
“So we’ll get a few rooms at the Porthau,” Lisa said. “And they can burn a few more beds in our wake.”
Tiago cast a loaded look Seth’s way. “What’s a few rooms?”
“Well, you and your sister have earned four walls each, after all this carriage living. But we mustn’t impose too much.” Lisa clicked her tongue. “Let’s call it three.”
Seth hung his head into the shower’s cleansing flow and let the warm steam and steady pressure wash away the memory of that tunnel, and the awful things that lay beyond it.
Panic and revulsion and violent death. For all the comfort and camaraderie his new life offered, it offered plenty of that, too. He’d lock his future into days like today, if he got what he wanted.
But the things he’d done today—a month ago he’d never have dreamed himself brave enough to attempt them or capable enough to do them. There was a lightness to him, something given buoyancy now that the grime was washing itself away.
You are proud of yourself, he realized. Proud of what you did, not just how well you did it. Which wasn’t entirely well, face it. But you, Seth…
The joy and relief on her face when she’d seen him. The way she’d looked at him after. Her hand in his.
Maybe you’re a hero.
He chuckled at himself and scrubbed the much from behind his ears. Hero, that was a stretch. But for the first time, he allowed himself to believe that perhaps he was worth something.
He was clean, now, skin ruddy and hair silky. But he tarried, still, as the steam thickened, and his throat thickened, and his chest tingled.
Lisa hadn’t said much beyond the debriefing and the clerical work and working out the minutiae of the investigation with the Chief Hermandat and the Corregidor. When they’d eaten, Tiago and Ofelia had nattered about theories and the future and what they wanted to see or do in the week of downtime that awaited them after tomorrow’s executions. But Lisa hadn’t joined in. Hadn’t said much at all. Just looked across the table at Seth, her marshfire pupils bright and inscrutable.
She was having second thoughts, maybe, the same way he was. Those same introspections. Seth began to believe he’d come out of the shower and she’d be Annalise, and they’d share nervous laughter about this whole thing, this bogus deal, and she’d thank him and call him marvelous, and that would be lovely. And then he’d try to forget again for a while.
He stepped from the shower, and bound a towel around his waist, and resolved himself, as he grasped the steam-humid doorknob, not to be disappointed if he opened the door and the woman beyond wasn’t Lisa, draped across the bed in a fluffy robe.
And he was right. She wasn’t.
Because Lisa was wearing The Dress. The one she’d worn to their first dinner in Fontana, and danced with him in.
She sat, legs crossed, on the far bed, and passed a pearl-handled brush through the black-and-silver waterfall of her hair. The shining crimson of her dress was impossibly vivid where its straps caged the ample swell of her milk-white breast.
“You cleared your debt to me today, Seth il Gutierre,” she said.
“I, uh.” His feet felt stuck in place. “I guess I did, huh.”
“Come get comfortable.” She patted the edge of the bed. “And I'll show you just how grateful you’ve made me.”