Chapter 4
"An exit for who?"
He stopped, turning his head to look back at me over his shoulder. The green moss light caught the ruined side of his face, casting deep, grotesque shadows across the scars, but the look in his eyes was blindingly clear.
"For you," he said.
My breath caught in my throat.
"You knew I was the one tracking you," I breathed.
"Of course I knew," he said softly. "I left the trail in the eastern quarter wide enough for a blind mule to follow. I wanted you to catch me, Lucian. I wanted you to have the kill."
"You wanted to die by my hand?"
"I wanted you to have the credit," Silas corrected, his voice dropping into that terrifyingly calm, absolute certainty that had always defined him. "Vane promised you a full pardon if you brought my head. I heard him tell you in the garrison yard three weeks ago. I was on the roof, Lucian. I watched him hand you the silver warrant."
A cold sweat broke out across my ribs beneath my armor.
Three weeks ago. In the high courtyard of the Inquisition's citadel. The most heavily guarded fortress in the province.
Silas had been there. He had been close enough to hear Vane’s whispered promises to me. He could have put an arrow through Vane’s throat; he could have put an arrow through *mine*. Instead, he had walked into the flooded sewers of the lower city, waiting in the dark with empty hands, just so I could cut off his head and trade it for my freedom.
"You're out of your mind," I whispered, horror and awe warring violently in my chest. "You're completely, utterly insane."
"Perhaps," Silas said, wading deeper into the dark pool toward the submerged sarcophagus. "The picks are breaking through the rubble, Lucian. We have about ninety seconds before the first hound clears the pipe. Are you coming, or are you going to stand there until Vane hangs you alongside me?"
He didn't wait for my answer. He reached the heavy stone tomb, braced his scarred shoulder against the carved lid, and shoved.
With a grinding shriek that set my teeth on edge, the ancient stone shifted, revealing a black, churning vortex beneath. The sound of rushing subterranean water roared up from the depths, violent and hungry.
Behind us, in the collapsed tunnel, a loud *crack* echoed as a massive stone gave way. A chorus of savage, wet snarls burst through the gap, followed immediately by the harsh, metallic bellow of Commander Vane:
*"Vance! If you are alive, bring out the corpse! If you have failed, your blood pays the tithe!"*
The dogs had caught our scent. The splashing of four heavy mastiffs hit the shallow water at the tunnel entrance, their claws scrabbling frantically against the limestone.
I looked back at the narrow corridor behind me.
If I turned now, drew my sword, and shouted that the fugitive was pinned, Vane’s men would flood the chamber. They would kill Silas, drag his carcass out into the street, and perhaps—just perhaps—Vane would believe that I had merely been delayed by the skirmish. I would get my silver laurel. I would walk out into the sunlight.
Then I looked at Silas.
He was standing by the roaring chasm, one hand braced against the tomb, his blood trailing into the black water, watching me with that same terrible, unwavering patience. He wasn't running. He was waiting to see if I would follow, ready to dive into the abyss or let the dogs tear him apart, whichever I chose.
"Damn you," I choked out, sheer venom and terror lacing the words. "Damn you to the lowest hell, Silas."
I splashed through the freezing pool, my boots churning the dark water, and reached the tomb just as the first massive, iron-collared hound burst through the smoke into the chamber, its yellow fangs dripping red foam.
I grabbed Silas by the back of his coat.
"If you die before you tell me what happened to my father," I snarled into his ear, "I will drag your soul out of the earth and kill you twice."
Silas didn't flinch. A faint, crooked smile touched his ruined lips, warm and impossibly bright in the subterranean gloom.
"Take a deep breath," he said.
Together, we plunged into the black water.
***
The current took us like a fist.
It was not a swim; it was a violent, suffocating descent through a subterranean throat of polished stone. The pressure hammered against my eardrums, freezing mountain runoff roaring in my ears, tearing the air from my lungs in a stream of silver bubbles.
I couldn't tell up from down. The darkness was absolute, heavy and crushing. The weight of my leather armor dragged at my limbs, pulling me toward the rocky bed of the conduit. My lungs burned, screaming for oxygen, my vision speckling with bright bursts of phantom light.
Then, a hand seized my wrist.
Calloused fingers, missing the tip of the ring finger, locked around my forearm with bone-crushing strength. Silas pulled me upward, kicking violently against the churning undertow, guiding us through a narrow sluice where the current crested over a submerged weir.
We broke the surface violently, gasping for air in the pitch-black void.
I choked on foul, stagnant water, coughing until my ribs throbbed with white-hot pain. My hands scrambled blindly over slick stone, finally finding purchase on an iron mooring ring driven into the masonry.
"I have you," Silas’s voice rasped in the dark beside me. His other arm came around my chest, hauling my upper body out of the freezing current and onto a sloping stone landing. "Breathe, Lucian. Cough it out."
I collapsed onto the cold flagstones, shuddering violently from the shock of the mountain water. My teeth chattered so hard they clicked. Every muscle in my body felt like frayed rope.
Above us, the roar of the water receded into a hollow, echoing murmur.
We were in a cavernous space. The air here was drier, smelling faintly of ancient cedar dust, dried myrrh, and old wax. When I blinked the stinging water from my eyes, I realized we were not in a sewer.
It was a drowned chapel.
Slender, pointed arches rose into the darkness overhead, their carved ribs supporting a ceiling lost in shadow. Rows of stone prayer benches, half-rotted by centuries of damp, stood submerged in the shallow water below our landing. At the far end of the terrace, raised upon three tiers of cracked white marble, stood an altar of black basalt, behind which loomed the headless statue of a weeping saint.
A forgotten reliquary, buried beneath the foundations of the ancient guildhalls when the upper city was rebuilt after the Great Schism.
Silas hauled himself onto the ledge beside me, his breathing ragged and wet. He collapsed onto his back, his head resting against the base of a fallen stone pillar. In the faint, gray luminescence that filtered down from a high, choked drainage vent sixty feet above, his face was the color of curdled milk.
The wound on his ribs had torn wide open in the current. The blood was no longer welling; it was pumping in sluggish, dark ribbons across his torn shirt, pooling in the grooves of the marble flagstones.
