Chapter 5
"Silas," I coughed, pushing myself up on trembling arms.
He didn't move. His eyes were half-closed, staring up at the headless saint with a glassy, distant unfocus.
"Hey," I said, my voice harsher than I intended, panicking as I crawled over to him. "Hey! Don't you dare die on me. Wake up!"
I grabbed the lapels of his sodden coat, shaking him. His head lolled back against the stone.
"Too cold," he murmured, his voice slurred, barely audible over the dripping water. "The water... it’s always so cold in the north..."
"Stop talking about the north," I ordered, ripping his coat open.
The wool was heavy, soaked through, and freezing. Beneath it, his linen shirt was shredded. When I tore the fabric away from his torso to examine the wound, my breath caught in my throat, freezing the air in my chest.
It wasn't just the cut from my blade.
His entire chest and abdomen were a horrifying tapestry of old, brutal mutilation. Deep, puckered puncture marks from iron screws ran along his collarbones; long, raised welts from wire scourges crisscrossed his ribs in tight, overlapping grids; and directly over his heart, burned so deep into the flesh that the scar tissue had pulled the surrounding skin into a puckered star, was the brand of the High Inquisitor’s personal dungeons—the triple cross of the Iron Spire.
My hands froze over his skin.
The triple cross was only used on prisoners condemned to the Deep Vaults. The men who were erased. The men who were never meant to see the sun, whose names were scrubbed from church ledgers with pumice stone and ink-destroying acid.
"What did they do to you?" I whispered, my fingers hovering over the brutal brand.
Silas didn't answer. A violent tremor racked his frame, his teeth chattering uncontrollably as the cold took hold of his blood-drained body. His skin was turning a dangerous, translucent blue.
If I didn't stop the bleeding, he would be dead in ten minutes. If I didn't get him warm, the mountain runoff would finish what the Inquisition started.
"Damn you," I muttered, ripping the hem of my dry inner tunic into strips with my teeth. "Damn you, Silas."
I pressed the linen hard against his torn ribs, using the weight of my hand to stem the dark flow. Silas let out a sharp, choked gasp of agony, his back arching off the stone, his hands flying up to grip my wrists.
His fingers clamped down on my skin with terrifying desperation.
"Lucian..." he gasped, his amber eyes fluttering open, wide and wild with delirium. "The paper... don't let them find the paper..."
"What paper?" I asked, leaning down, pressing the bandage tighter. "Silas, what paper?"
"The seal..." he choked out, his vision unfocused, looking right through me toward the vaulted ceiling. "The warrant... you didn't know... you were only a boy... they made you sign it..."
A sharp chill, entirely unrelated to the freezing water, crept up my spine.
"What warrant, Silas?" I demanded, leaning closer until my forehead nearly touched his feverish brow. "What did I sign?"
His grip on my wrists tightened until the bones ground together. His chest heaved against my palms, his breath coming in shallow, frantic gasps that rattled with fluid.
"I took it," he whispered, a tear cutting a clean, pale track through the soot and dried blood on his scarred cheek. "I took your face... so they wouldn't hang you... but they found the ink, Lucian... they knew you wrote it..."
He stiffened violently, a cough tearing through his throat, bringing up a fleck of dark blood that dotted his pale lips. Then, his grip went slack.
His hands slid off my wrists, hitting the cold marble flagstones with a dull, hollow slap.
"Silas?" I shook him. "Silas!"
His head rolled to the side, his breathing dropping into a faint, shallow rhythm, barely lifting his ruined chest. He was unconscious, slipping rapidly into the deep, irreversible stupor of hemorrhagic shock.
"No," I growled, panic rising like bile in my throat. "No, you don't get to say that and die. Wake up!"
I stripped off my soaked leather brigandine, throwing it aside, and pulled off my heavy woolen cloak—the only piece of clothing that had remained relatively dry inside my oiled field pack. I wrapped it tightly around his shivering shoulders, then dragged his limp body across the terrace, wedging him between the black basalt altar and the stone wall to shield him from the draft.
I knelt beside him, my hands covered in his blood, my own forearm throbbing with a dull, rhythmic burn where I had cut it.
The silence of the drowned chapel closed in around us, thick, suffocating, and absolute.
*I took your face so they wouldn't hang you.*
The words echoed in the dark vaults of my mind, monstrous and incomprehensible. What face? What was he talking about? The man was raving, lost in blood-fever and ten years of subterranean rot. Silas had always been reckless, always arrogant, but he wasn't a martyr. He was the monster who destroyed House Vance.
He had to be.
If he wasn't... if the blood on his hands wasn't my family's...
My gaze fell on the heavy silver signet ring hanging from a leather thong around his neck—partially exposed where his shirt was torn away.
I reached out, my fingers trembling so hard I could barely grasp the cord.
I pulled the ring into the dim gray light.
It was not the crest of House Vance. It was not the falcon or the twin spears.
It was a signet of cheap, crude brass, stamped with the mark of an apprentice scribe—a stylized quill crossed with a balance scale. And scratched into the inner band, in jagged, uneven letters carved with a dull needle, were four words in my own handwriting, etched with the clumsy, flourishing stroke I had used when I was nineteen years old:
*To Silas. My shield.*
A roaring sound filled my ears, louder than the subterranean river, louder than the bells of St. Jude.
I fell back onto my heels, the brass ring slipping from my numb fingers, bouncing against the stone with a soft, hollow *ting*.
Above us, far in the distance, high above the stone vaults and the riverbed, the cathedral bells began to toll again—not the slow, rhythmic cadence of the hours, but the frantic, clanging alarm of a city-wide manhunt.
*Seven tolls.*
The signal for high treason.
Commander Vane had discovered the empty tunnel. The hounds had lost the scent. And my name was no longer on the roster of hunters.
I looked down at my bloodstained hands, then at the scarred, dying man lying against the altar, breathing in shallow, broken gasps.
I had spent ten years hunting the butcher who stole my life.
And I had just brought him into the dark to save his.
The brass ring lay heavy in my palm, freezing cold despite the fever burning through the man propped against the altar.
I stared down at the jagged lettering I had scratched into that band ten winters ago. *To Silas. My shield.*
My throat closed around a knot of barbed wire. I had given that ring to Silas on the night of our twentieth year, sitting upon the high balustrade of the Imperial Archives while the wind off the grey river whipped our cloaks. Silas had laughed, his broad, sun-darkened face splitting into that easy, reckless grin that used to make the dread in my chest evaporate. He’d looped it on his thong, tapped his knuckles against my ribs, and told me that as long as he carried it, no Inquisitor’s blade would ever touch my skin.
