Chapter 10
I dove under again, eyes burning against the silt.
My fingers raked the depths, blindly brushing iron rings, floating debris, until my knuckles jammed against heavy boiled leather. I grabbed a fistful of his harness, bracing my boots against a sunken stone weir, and hauled with every ounce of sinew left in my shoulders.
His bulk broke the surface. He was completely limp, water streaming from the jagged hollows of his scarred jaw.
"Breathe, you bastard," I wheezed, locking my arm under his chin, swimming against the brutal undertow toward a low, crumbling landing where the masonry had collapsed into a shale bank. "Don't you dare die in the dark. Breathe!"
I dragged him up onto the shelf of crushed stone. My knees buckled beneath his weight, both of us collapsing onto the grit.
He didn't move. Blood leaked from the torn seam of his left shoulder, dark and sluggish in the gloom, washing into the black water lapping at our boots.
I rolled him onto his back. With trembling, numb fingers, I jammed two fingers into the hollow beneath his jaw.
His pulse was a fluttering thread, stuttering under skin that was ice-cold and slick with river silt.
"Silas. Look at me."
Nothing. His eyes were half-lidded, rolled back, lashes glued with grit.
I struck his chest with an open palm, once, twice, right over the sternum, directly beside the jagged tear where a quarrel had glanced off bone. "Wake up!"
A violent, rattling gasp tore from his throat.
Water and scarlet foam erupted over his lips. His massive frame convulsed, heels digging into the shale as he fought for air. His left hand—calloused, blunt-fingered, scarred across every knuckle—lashed out with terrifying speed, seizing my throat in a crushing reflex.
"Stand down," I choked out, not fighting the grip, keeping my eyes locked on his wild, unfocused gaze. "It's me. Silas. It's me."
The manic, hunted terror in his eyes cleared slowly. His pupils, blown wide in the dark, contracted. His grip loosened from my throat, his calloused palm sliding down my collar to rest, flat and trembling, over my racing heart.
"Lucian," he rasped. The word was barely a breath, rough as broken slate.
"I'm here," I said, my voice shaking in a way an Inquisitorial hound’s voice never should. "You took two quarrels. We're in the deep drains beneath the lower ward. We need to move before Vane floods the grates."
He tried to push himself up, but an agonizing groan tore through his clenched teeth. His head fell back against the stones, muscles in his thick neck cords of strained iron.
"Leave... the armor," he grunted, eyes squeezing shut against the pain. "Can't climb in plate."
"I'm not leaving you to bleed out on a sewer bank."
I drew my hunting knife. With rapid, practiced cuts, I severed the swollen leather straps holding the scarred pauldrons and backplate to his frame. The iron came away heavy and wet, clattering against the rock. Beneath it, his homespun wool tunic was saturated with blackish-red fluid.
Above us, far down the echoing stone tunnel, a dull, reverberating crack shook dust from the ceiling arches.
*Breaching powder.*
Vane’s hounds were blowing the secondary lockouts. We had minutes, maybe less, before the scent-trackers were loosed into the drainage veins.
"Can you stand?" I asked, sheathing the knife and slipping my shoulder beneath his uninjured arm.
Silas ground his teeth, nodding once. "Try me."
With a ragged heave, I hauled him upright. He towered over me, a fortress of scarred bone and torn muscle, his dead weight driving my boots into the mud. He stifled a scream as his mangled shoulder bore his balance, his fingers knotting into the fabric of my cloak, clutching me close to keep from falling.
For a heartbeat, his face was buried in the hollow of my neck. I felt the feverish heat radiating from his skin despite the freezing water, felt the desperate, rhythmic shudder of his breath against my pulse point.
Ten years of hatred, ten years of hunting a faceless monster, melted into an unbearable, terrifying ache.
"Walk," I commanded softly, the roughness in my throat betraying me. "Keep your feet under you."
We stumbled into the dark.
***
The corridor rose sharply away from the roaring flume, narrowing into an ancient passage cut from the living bedrock. The masonry changed here—no longer Imperial brick, but the chisel-marked granite of the old faith. A subterranean sanctuary, abandoned two centuries ago during the First Cleansing.
We crossed a shattered threshold marked by headless statues of weeping saints into an octagonal rotunda. A dry stone dais sat in the center, shielded from the drafts by the fallen remnants of an oak choir stall.
Silas’s legs finally gave out. He collapsed against the dais, his back sliding down the carved reliefs of forgotten martyrs. His breath came in shallow, wet hitches that made my own ribs ache in sympathy.
I turned back to the entryway. A heavy iron portcullis hung half-dropped in its tracks, jammed with calcified rock. I jammed a fallen stone pillar into the mechanism, jamming the counterweight, then stacked cracked masonry against the narrow iron door until it was wedged solid from the inside.
It wouldn't hold a battering ram, but it would slow them down. It would buy us time.
I made my way back to him through the dark. From my belt pouch, I pulled a flint, a strip of dry tinder kept in an oiled tin, and a stump of tallow candle. When the small flame caught, the yellow light bloomed across the rotunda, throwing jagged shadows against the fluted pillars.
The light fell on Silas.
My breath hitched.
He had torn his soaked tunic open to the waist. The flesh across his torso was a catastrophic tapestry of violence. Old lash-marks crisscrossed his ribs, pale and thick as rope. Jagged entry wounds from old blades pocked his sides. But the fresh wounds were terrifying: a crossbow quarrel was lodged deep in the meat above his left collarbone, the black iron shaft snapped off an inch above the skin, weeping dark venous blood with every ragged pulse. Another quarrel had gouged a furrow along his third rib, leaving flesh torn open like red cloth.
"Sit still," I said, kneeling between his spread knees.
My voice sounded small in the vast, hollow chamber. The smell of copper, wet limestone, and his skin—hot, musk-heavy, laced with the metallic tang of trauma—filled the narrow space between us.
"You shouldn't waste the tallow," he murmured. His head was tilted back against the stone, eyes watching me through the tangled, sodden dark hair falling over his face. "Keep it for the dark."
"Shut your mouth," I snapped, setting the candle on the flat altar beside him. I reached for the broken bolt shaft. "This iron has barbed flanges. If I pull it straight, it’ll tear the subclavian vein. I have to push it through."
His lips curved into the faintest, most infuriating shadow of a smile. "Then push, Little Scribe."
The name hit me like a blow to the ribs.
My hands froze on his collar. *Little Scribe.*
"Where did you hear that name?" My voice dropped, taut with a sudden, dangerous fury. "Who told you that name?"
