Chapter 8
I slammed the heavy door shut, dropped the iron bar, and wedge-locked the release lever with a broken iron crowbar I found on the floor.
It wouldn't hold forever. If Vane brought the sappers' charges, they’d blow the hinges in twenty minutes. But it would keep the dogs out.
I dropped to my knees beside the fugitive.
He was shivering violently now, his skin grey and clammy, his breath coming in shallow, fluttering wheezes. The cold of the catacombs had set into his bones, and the blood loss was draining whatever life he had left.
"Wake up," I commanded, pulling off my soaked gloves and pressing my bare palms against his cheeks. His skin felt like cracked parchment baked over an oven. "Silas. Look at me."
His eyelashes trembled, but he didn't wake.
I pulled my field kit from my belt, my hands shaking as I laid out the instruments: needle, catgut thread, a vial of raw carbolic spirit, and a strip of clean linen.
I reached for the buttons of his tattered tunic.
The cloth was stiff with dried crust and grime. I sliced it down the center with my parrying knife, peeling the fabric back from his chest and torso.
What lay beneath made the air freeze in my throat.
There was almost no unscarred skin on his upper body. Across his chest were the pale, raised tracks of old lash-marks—hundreds of them, laid down with the methodical precision of an inquisitorial torturer. Beneath those were the circular indentations of brand-marks, the three-pronged solar cross of the White Sun burned into both of his shoulders, then violently scored out with a hot chisel, as if someone had tried to obliterate the marks of allegiance.
And along his collarbone, running in a jagged, violent line from the base of his neck to the edge of his jaw, was a seam of knotted, purplish skin.
The mark of a flesh-weaver's scalpel.
I had seen those scars once before, in the forbidden codices of the Black Registry. The illegal arcanists of the borderlands used that technique to peel the skin from a man’s skull and graft another’s over the bone, altering features at the cost of unimaginable, unrelenting agony.
A shudder ran through me from the base of my spine to the roots of my hair.
*I took your face so they wouldn't hang you.*
The words he had choked out in the drowned chapel returned to me, echoing with an unbearable, horrific resonance.
"No," I whispered into the cold dark. "No, that's impossible."
I poured the carbolic spirit over the open puncture wound in his flank.
The fugitive bucked instantly, a strangled scream tearing through his clenched teeth. His eyes snapped open, wild with agony, his hands flailing out and catching the lapels of my inquisitorial tunic with crushing force.
"Hold still!" I commanded, pinning his shoulders against the stone floor with my forearms. "Hold still or you'll bleed out!"
"Lucian..." he gasped, his fingers twisting into the heavy wool of my coat, pulling me down until our faces were inches apart. His breath was hot, smelling of bile and iron. "The... the archive cipher. On the south wall."
I froze. "What?"
"The siphon hatch," he groaned, his forehead pressing against my cheek, his whole body trembling with the effort to speak. "Behind the gear housing... there's an emergency bypass. It uses... the Third Index cipher. The one we made up. For the restricted room."
My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird.
Ten years ago, the Repository of the White Sun had contained thousands of volumes on forbidden arcana and ancestral lineages. As junior clerks, we weren't allowed into the inner vault. But the lock had been a mechanical tumbler system, keyed to a twenty-four-letter alphabetic wheel.
Silas and I had spent two months studying the mechanism during the night shifts. We had worked out the bypass combination, encoding it using a cipher we invented—substituting the Latin names of local songbirds for the tumbler numbers.
*Lark. Sparrow. Kestrel. Owl.*
Nobody in the entire world knew that sequence except Silas and me. Silas had come up with the birds because his father had kept cages of them on their roof.
I let go of his shoulders, turned to the rusted siphon housing, and cleared away the thick web of moss and grease.
There, half-hidden behind the bronze gears, was an iron tumbler wheel.
My fingers touched the cold metal. My pulse roared in my ears.
I turned the dial. *Lark.* Twelve clicks clockwise.
*Sparrow.* Seven clicks counter-clockwise.
*Kestrel.* Nineteen clicks clockwise.
*Owl.* Four clicks counter-clockwise.
*Clack.*
With a deep, resonant shudder, a hidden counterweight dropped within the wall. A narrow stone slab beside the siphon groaned and slid back three inches, revealing a pitch-black escape shaft descending into the subterranean aqueducts below the city’s foundations.
I stood there, staring at the open door, my hands trembling violently.
The silence in the chamber was broken only by the shallow, wet rattle of the man lying on the floor.
I walked back to him. I fell to my knees beside him, my composure completely shredded, the ten years of iron discipline that the Inquisition had forged inside me shattering into useless, jagged splinters.
"Silas?" My voice was barely a whimper.
The man looked up at me through hooded, fever-bright eyes. A faint, broken smile touched his lips.
"You remembered the birds," he whispered.
***
"Why?" I asked, my voice cracking as I threaded the needle with catgut. "Why do you look like this? If you're Silas... why did you run? Why didn't you come to me?"
"Because you were already dead," he murmured, his voice fading in and out of consciousness as I pressed the needle through the torn flesh of his flank.
He didn't scream this time; he only arched his back, his fingers digging into my knee, clutching the fabric of my trousers as if it were the only anchor keeping him tethered to the earth.
"I wasn't dead," I choked out, pulling the stitch taut, tying the knot with shaking fingers. "I was arrested. I was thrown into the Iron Wells. Vane dragged me out of the cells, put an inquisitorial ring on my finger, and told me that Silas—my friend, my brother—had sold our names to the Purge Council, butchered my father, and fled with the treasury scrolls!"
Silas let out a dry, rattling laugh that turned into a cough. "Vane lied to you, Lucian. Like he lied to everyone."
"Then tell me the truth!" I leaned over him, grabbing his jaw, forcing his head up so his eyes met mine. The touch was desperate, furious, and terrifyingly tender all at once. "Tell me what happened the night the Repository burned! Why was my handwriting on the treason manifests?!"
Silas looked at me, his slate-grey eyes pooling with an ancient, bottomless sorrow. He reached up, his rough, blood-encrusted hand cupping the side of my face.
His skin was burning hot, but the touch was gentler than anything I had felt in ten years. My breath caught in my throat. I should have shoved him away. I was an Inquisitor of the High Tribunal; he was an escaped fugitive. But I leaned into his palm, unable to stop the shudder that racked my frame.
