House of Blood

Seventy minutes before dawn, two men in proctor’s coats crept through the lowest gallery of the Sector Two ruins.

Neither of them spoke. One carried a lantern hooded down to a slit. The other carried a file and a coil of waxed rope, and both had a smear of black ash under the left eye.

They stopped at the third arch from the central chamber, where a slab of ancient ceiling stone sat on two iron brackets as thick as a man’s thigh.

”The Representative’s people already tied a rope up there,” the one with the lantern whispered. ”Sandbag. Something for the trial.”

”Amateur work.” The other ran his thumb along the left bracket. ”Leave it. Let her play.”

He set the file to the iron and began to work.

It took eleven minutes. When he finished, the bracket looked whole. It would hold a man. It would not hold a slab.

”Now?” the lantern man asked.

”At the first loud noise.” The other tucked the file away. ”The Doctor says one of them has to be under it.”

---

The ruins beneath Sector Two had a gate the size of a barn door, and Cell One stood in front of it at dawn like people waiting for a funeral.

”Three hours,” the proctor called from the top step. ”Find the heart-stone in the central chamber, haul it back out before the horn, and don’t kill anybody. Escorts observe. Escorts do not help.”

Mirain stood beside him with a marshal’s armband on her sleeve and her rapier sheathed. She looked rested, which I didn’t believe.

”I’m not here to fight your battles,” she told Cell One. ”If you screw up, I write it down.”

”Wonderful,” Casper said. ”A chaperone with a sword.”

”Try not to give me material.”

Up on the top tier of the entrance gallery, Gareth Vance leaned on the rail and watched us like a man waiting for a stew to burn.

”Don’t let him get to you,” Solene said under her breath.

”He’s not getting to anyone,” Casper said. ”He’s a rock with opinions.”

Castor snorted. Even Pollux, standing at the back with his shield on his arm, cracked half a smile.

*She’s very good at this,* Aurelix said, curling warm in my chest. *Look at her not looking at you.*

”She’s looking at my feet.”

*Precisely. Isn’t it delicious?*

The staff was back to being a surveyor’s rod. I leaned on it like a man who needed to. Solene took the lead, Castor the point, Pollux the rear, and we went down into the dark with lanterns and a map that didn’t match anything.

The first hour was boring in the way that makes me nervous. Wet stone, old pillars, cracked murals of men with their faces scraped off. I’d walked ruins like this in my first life, with a sword in my hand and a body count waiting at the end. This time I had a measuring stick and a girl behind me who wanted me to slip.

”The survey says this corridor runs straight,” Lyra said, frowning at the paper. ”It doesn’t.”

”The survey’s eight hundred years old,” I said. ”And somebody’s been digging.”

”How do you know?”

”The walls are too clean. Old stone’s got moss. This was scraped last week.”

Nobody said anything. Casper muttered, ”I hate when he’s right.”

We went down three flights. The air got colder, then drier, then smelled faintly like a butcher’s yard. I noticed the smell. I noticed the new rope in the third arch too, a thick coil of waxed cord running up into the dark where a slab sat on two brackets.

*That’s not the Representative’s work,* Aurelix said softly. *The rope, yes. The bracket, no.*

”I know.”

The rope was neat, fresh, and tied by someone who wanted it to be found. A sandbag, probably, rigged to fall near somebody and scare them. A test.

Mirain’s test.

The left bracket, though, had a thin bright line along its inner edge. File marks. Somebody had been careful, and somebody had been patient.

Two traps on one arch. One soft, one real. One of them was amateur work and one wasn’t.

Mirain stood at the edge of the lantern light with her arms folded. She was watching me watch the ceiling.

I didn’t need to look at the slab. I needed to look at Lyra.

She was walking right under it.

”Lyra,” I said. ”Come here a sec.”

”Why?”

”I want to ask you something about the map.”

I’d already started toward her, easy, like a clerk on his way to ask about a map. I was three steps off when the rope above us snapped.

It was Mirain’s rope. I heard it go, a clean crack, and a heartbeat later the sandbag dropped, loud enough to make everyone flinch. And with the noise, on the left, a thin dry sound I knew too well: iron giving up.

Four tons of ceiling came down.

I shoved Lyra with my shoulder. She went sprawling across the stones, and the slab hit the place she’d been standing, and the whole corridor shook.

The slab didn’t land.

It stopped a hand’s width above my head, shuddering, caught in a net of crimson thread that had burst from the floor and walls in the same instant. Mirain was on one knee at the edge of the light, her rapier driven into the stone, her teeth bared, her blood soul on her shoulder fully formed for the first time: a red-gold hawk with wings the size of a door, screaming in her voice.

The net held for two seconds.

That was exactly what I needed.

In the dust, where nobody could see, I let the rod swell into a strut of iron and wedged it under the slab’s corner. Half a heartbeat. Just enough to turn ”a crushing” into ”a close call.”

*You cheated,* Aurelix said, purring.

”I braced.”

I straightened the rod behind my back before anyone could notice it had grown a kink.

The slab crashed down a body-length away. Dust rolled down the corridor like a wave.

When it cleared, Lyra was coughing on the floor with her staff still in her hand, Casper was dragging her up, and Mirain was breathing hard with her rapier in the stone and her hawk folding back into light.

”Mirain!” Casper said. ”You saved us! That net, that’s *incredible*!”

”That’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” Lyra wheezed.

Mirain didn’t hear them. She was looking at me.

Behind us, the proctor drone hanging in the corridor sputtered, tilted, and dropped to the floor with a dull clunk. Its little glass eye went dark. Nobody upstairs was watching us anymore.

*How convenient,* Aurelix said.

I was standing exactly where I’d been standing. My left hand was dusty. My feet were exactly where they’d been three steps from Lyra when the rope snapped.

Three steps. Before the rope.

She’d come into that arch with a plan to watch my feet when someone was in danger. What she’d learned was that I’d moved *before* the danger. Before the rope. Before the bracket. Before any of it.

For once everyone was saying she’d been first, and she knew exactly who’d been first before her.

”That wasn’t my sandbag,” she said quietly.

”No.”

”My sandbag was ten pounds.”

”Yeah.”

”Who filed that bracket?”

”Somebody patient,” I said.

She stared at me for a long moment. Then she looked down at the white crack across the floor where the real slab had landed, and her face went very still.

Her hawk turned its head.

It didn’t look at me. It looked at the wall behind the slab, where the stone had shifted in the crash and split open along a seam that had no business being there.

Behind the seam, a narrow stair went down.

It wasn’t on the map. The steps were crusted with salt. A breath of cold air rose out of it, and with it that butcher’s-yard smell, stronger now.

I knew it. I’d smelled it two nights ago in a dry cistern, over ten barrels of salt.

”That smell,” I said, before I could stop myself.

”What about it?” Pollux asked.

”Nothing. Bad drains.”

*Liar,* Aurelix said, and there was no tease left in her at all. *It’s the same cart. Whatever ate that meat lives down there. Valerian, that isn’t a ruin. That’s a mouth.*

”That’s not on the survey,” Mirain said.

”Nope,” Casper said. ”Great. Love that for us.”

”The horn goes in forty minutes,” Solene said. ”If we go down there, we forfeit the round.”

”I vote forfeit,” Casper said.

”Seconded,” said Pollux.

”We need an order, Representative,” Lyra said. ”Escort’s call.”

Mirain didn’t answer. She was looking at the stairs, and the hawk on her shoulder was shaking.

”Escorts don’t give orders,” Solene said.

”Today I do.” Mirain’s voice cracked on the second word. She pulled her rapier out of the stone. ”Cell One, behind me. Now.”

”Representative, the horn—”

”*Behind me.*”

Her hawk shrieked and dived down the stair.

She went after it.

I could stay behind and keep playing the clerk, or follow and keep playing the clerk anyway, somewhere I couldn’t afford to. I followed.

Solene looked at me. Then we all went down, one step at a time, into the cold.

The steps were wet. I put my free hand on the wall to steady myself, and it came away dark.

Warm. Not water.