Van travelled through the Underway as if remembering a lie.
He doubled back without warning, crossed inhabited rooms instead of public passages, and greeted three sentries by names they did not offer Valerie. Once he opened a cupboard in a laundry and climbed through its missing back into a shrine two streets lower. The priest continued speaking to six worshippers while Valerie and Van emerged behind the altar.
No one turned.
"How far?" Valerie asked when they reached another stair.
"Near enough for whispering to become unwise."
"Then stop talking."
"You asked a question."
They had left the busy tunnels behind. Black Feather signs became smaller and more frequent: three cuts in a beam, an oiled feather pushed into mortar, a black handprint beneath a lamp. Twice Van stopped before corners and waited for patrols to pass. The first carried clubs and short swords. The second rolled two barrels uphill while a chained man walked between them with a sack over his head.
Valerie did not move until they disappeared.
"Prisoner?" she whispered.
"Debtor. Prisoners are valuable. Debtors are instructive."
The metallic crash sounded again.
Closer.
Van's head turned. "That has followed us since the tallow market."
"It was caged."
"Many things begin that way."
A scream cut off behind them.
They ran.
The passage narrowed between brick retaining walls. Valerie heard stone break, then feet—or something using feet without agreement about how many—striking the ground in quick uneven groups. The smell of rot thickened.
Van caught her arm and pulled her through a side door.
They entered a butcher's cold room. Hooks hung from ceiling rails. Salt silvered the floor. Van closed the door until only a finger's width remained.
Something moved past outside.
It was taller than the passage and had folded itself to fit. Hairless grey shoulders rolled beneath a hide marked by old burns. Its forelimbs touched the ground on black hooked claws; the rear pair bent forward like a man's knees and backward again beneath them. Skin covered the place where eyes should have been. Its head swung from wall to wall, tasting the air through the vertical split of its mouth.
A broken collar hung from its neck.
Knotted to the collar was a strip of blue cloth.
Valerie knew the colour before she saw the torn line of white stitching. Eastern Watch issue. The winter coat she had left in the Ulkhander house.
Her coat.
The trancero stopped outside the door.
Van looked from the cloth to Valerie.
She drew her sword silently.
The creature lifted its head.
Across its back, someone had burned the outline of an open hand into the hide. One mark at the wrist. Five long marks spreading toward the shoulders.
An Aldin's Finger.
Kavie had not merely guessed she might enter the Underway. He had sent something that could follow her scent where royal soldiers could not.
The trancero struck the door.
Wood split down the centre.
Valerie braced, but Van seized a salted haunch from the nearest hook and threw it through a hatch in the far wall. The creature's head snapped toward the impact. One claw came through the door, opening and closing inches from Valerie's face.
Van pointed at the hatch.
They climbed through as the hinges tore free.
The next room opened onto an elevated pipeline above a flood channel. Valerie landed, turned, and saw the trancero force its shoulders through the hatch. It moved too quickly for its size. Van ran along the pipe. Valerie followed, boots slipping on condensation.
At the far end, Van jumped to a maintenance ledge and cut a suspension rope.
The pipeline shifted.
Valerie jumped as it dropped. Her chest struck the ledge. Van caught her sword arm, his damaged hand locking painfully around her wrist while the other found her shoulder. Beneath them, the pipe crashed into black water.
The trancero leaped.
It landed on the falling metal and vanished into the channel with it.
Water erupted high enough to strike the ledge.
Valerie pulled herself up.
"You could have mentioned the rope," she said.
"You could have mentioned an Aldin monster knows your smell."
Below, the water moved toward a grated spillway.
Then the grate bent outward.
The trancero's claws appeared between the bars.
Van watched the iron begin to tear.
"Our original route is no longer attractive."
Valerie wiped water from Saughtrick's sword. "Can it reach the cistern?"
"Everything reaches the cistern if enough walls are removed."
"The Black Feathers have guards at every entrance."
"Yes."
"And they want me alive."
Van understood first. His expression was not approval. It was the brief respect of one dangerous idea recognising another.
"The beast wants the cloth," he said.
"It wants me."
"That is less reusable."
Valerie looked down at the trancero tearing through the grate. "We give it a shorter scent."
They found the cistern's first false entrance behind a shrine to safe childbirth.
Van ignored it and led Valerie to a chimney descending beside the old bellworks. Far below, voices echoed through stone. Valerie removed the borrowed shawl, cut a long strip from its hem, and tied it around the blue cloth after Van sliced the cloth free from the trancero's collar with a weighted knife.
Getting close enough had cost them one lamp, half Van's coat, and a section of wall that belonged to an innocent brewer.
The trancero now followed the cloth in Van's hand with religious concentration.
They moved above the cistern through a maintenance gallery while the creature tracked them in the tunnel below. Every few breaths Van dragged the cloth against a gap in the stone, renewing the trail. Valerie could hear Black Feather sentries arguing beneath them.
"—thing came through West Drain."
"Then close West Drain."
"It ate the wheel."
"Wheels are not meat."
"Tell it."
Van stopped above a square opening and pointed down.
The royal cistern had once supplied the palace during sieges. Its central reservoir was dry now, divided by timber walls into storehouses, gambling rooms, barracks, and cells. Walkways crossed the open depth at three levels. Black Feather lamps made constellations along the old waterline.
At least forty people were visible.
Valerie counted exits, weapons, ladders, choke points, and distances. Her despair at the garrison tried to return. Too many bodies. Too little time. Another fortress beneath another part of the city.
Van pointed toward a stone room built into the lowest wall.
Two guards stood outside it. A third sat on the connecting bridge. Beside the door waited a narrow table holding a black iron case the length of a hand.
Van's case.
K would be inside or already dead.
Valerie refused the second possibility before evidence offered it.
"Your route?" she whispered.
Van indicated the vertical drop, two occupied walkways, and the guarded bridge. "Unfavourable."
"Flood gates?"
"Sealed."
"Other exits?"
"Seven. Six false, one currently full of trancero."
Below them, a bell rang once.
The ransom interval.
A Black Feather emerged from the stone room carrying a parcel wrapped in white cloth.
Valerie saw blood soaking through it.
The man placed the parcel in a message tube and began tightening the cap.
Something inside knocked faintly against metal.
K, one identifiable piece at every bell.
Valerie moved toward the opening.
Van caught her.
She turned Saughtrick's sword beneath his chin.
Valerie turned the sword beneath Van's chin. "Release me."
Van did not loosen his grip. "There are forty-three."
Her eyes stayed on the message runner below. "Forty-two after the bridge."
"Your arithmetic is becoming emotional." Van held on until she looked at him rather than the bloodstained parcel.
The message runner lifted the tube.
Valerie heard K in Drierie: Do the terrible plan. Just do it at the correct time.
She lowered the blade.
"Now," she said.
Van dropped the scented cloth through the opening.
It landed on the bridge beside the runner.
He stared at it.
From the western tunnel came a sound like a horse screaming through a broken door.
Every Black Feather in the cistern turned.
The trancero struck the first barricade hard enough to carry it across the chamber. Men scattered. One fired a crossbow; the bolt vanished into grey muscle. The creature caught him without slowing and threw him into a card table. Lamps overturned. Someone shouted to close the inner gate. Someone else shouted that the gate had been removed for repairs.
The Underway punished optimism quickly.
Valerie dropped from the gallery.
She landed on the upper walkway, rolled, and came up inside the reach of a swordsman still watching the monster. The pommel of Saughtrick's weapon struck his temple. Van landed behind her without noise and put two knives into two wooden supports.
"What does that do?" Valerie asked.
The walkway sagged.
"That."
They ran downward as the cistern divided between fighting the beast and escaping it. Valerie cut a cage latch on the second level. Three debtors stumbled out and immediately began releasing others. Van kicked an oil jar from the railing. It broke across the lower steps, sending pursuing Feathers into one another.
The trancero reached the scented cloth and found no Valerie attached.
Its head rose.
It smelled her in the chamber.
"Faster," Van said.
They crossed the lowest walkway. The guard beside the black case saw Van and drew a curved sword.
"Urkov. Orion said you would come."
"I dislike that sentence."
The guard attacked.
Van met him with the damaged hand forward. The guard watched the weakness. Van let him. A knife appeared in the good hand low by his hip, turned once, and struck the sword guard. Metal spun away. Van drove his forehead into the man's nose and caught the iron case before it fell from the table.
He weighed it.
Something shifted inside.
Relief crossed his face too quickly to become readable.
Valerie reached the cell door.
Locked.
She struck once near the hinges. Old wood broke; royal iron did not.
"Keys!"
The second guard charged her with a spear. Valerie moved beside the point, trapped the shaft beneath her arm, and pulled him into the door. His face struck iron. She found a ring at his belt, tried the largest key, then the smallest.
Behind her, the trancero entered the lower level.
The third key turned.
Valerie opened the door.
K sat chained to a stone chair beneath a lamp turned deliberately bright.
His coat was gone. Blood marked his shirt at the shoulder and one side. His left eye had swollen almost shut, and two fingers on his right hand were wrapped in cloth already darkening at the ends. A shallow tray beside him held knives, needles, and a carpenter's measuring rule.
He looked at Valerie.
Then at Van holding the black case.
Then at the trancero killing furniture outside.
"Good," K said. His voice was rough but recognisably offended by events. "You found the quiet entrance."
Valerie crossed the room and tested the chains. "Can you stand?"
"With emotional support."
"Van."
Van closed the door behind them. "I already retrieved my emotional support."
"Keys," Valerie said.
"The large one. Black tooth."
K watched Van unlock his wrists. "I assume we are all pretending the case is not more important than I am."
"There is no need to pretend," Van said.
The first cuff opened.
K's arm dropped. He caught it against his chest and breathed through whatever the movement did to his shoulder.
Valerie knelt in front of him. "How badly are you hurt?"
K tested one leg and reconsidered it. "The answer changes depending on whether you intend to carry me."
"I do not."
He gathered the remains of his dignity. "Then surprisingly little."
The second cuff opened. K leaned forward but did not rise.
Valerie saw the cup on the floor and the pale residue around its rim. "Drugged."
"Repeatedly. Orion has the hospitality instincts of a siege physician."
"Can you move?"
K looked past her toward the fighting. "I had the situation under control."
A body struck the outside of the door.
"Of course," Valerie said.
"I was learning useful things."
"Learn while walking."
Van returned the key ring to the unconscious guard's belt through the broken panel.
Valerie stared at him.
"Professional courtesy," he said.
K forced himself upright. His legs failed on the first attempt. Valerie caught him beneath the uninjured arm and took most of his weight before he could object.
"Your father?" he asked.
"Alive. Condemned. Fifty-one hours."
"Garrison?"
"Impossible alone."
K looked toward the fighting outside the cell, already converting escape into a later route. "Very few buildings remain impossible after introduction to their drains."
Even half-conscious, he approached the problem as an argument.
Relief came through Valerie so sharply it resembled pain.
"We leave first," she said.
Van had gone still beside the door.
The noise outside was changing.
Not ending. Organising.
Men stopped shouting separate orders. The trancero roared once, then screamed. A line of orange light passed beneath the cell door. Heat followed it, dry and immediate. The wood around the lock began to smoke.
K's weight shifted away from Valerie as instinct tried to make him stand alone.
"That," he said, "will be Orion."
The door opened.
The Black Feathers on the walkway had lowered their weapons.
Some were injured. One burned. Two held the trancero in hooked chains while the creature thrashed against a stone column, smoke rising from a wound across its chest. Yet every person still capable of kneeling had done so.
Not toward the monster.
Toward the man crossing the bridge.
Orion La Tuis was taller than Gorven and built without Gorven's cultivated weight. Tribal scars crossed his bare forearms in parallel lines. His hair had been braided tightly against his skull, threaded not with feathers but with small black bones. He wore no coat of office. He did not need one. Silence moved ahead of him and closed behind.
Across one shoulder rested a two-handed claymore.
A red crystal had been fixed above its guard. At its centre burned one needlepoint of green.
Fire moved inside it.
Not reflected fire. Living fire, turning slowly beneath the crystal surface as if searching for air.
Orion stopped outside the cell and looked at the broken door, the freed prisoner, the case beneath Van's arm, and Valerie holding Saughtrick's sword.
His gaze settled on K.
"Calvin," he said.
K sighed.
"Everyone is having a very rude day."
Orion lowered the claymore from his shoulder.
The kneeling Black Feathers bowed their heads.
The crystal ignited.