The city dressed the Grand Arcade like a stage. Banners ran the length of the glass spine overhead; chalk lines bit clean arcs into the stone. Priests swung censers at the rope barriers and smiled with teeth that never met their eyes. The crowd watched with the concentration of people about to be told where to applaud.
Rem stood with the other porters in the supply lane. His pack rode high, straps tight, weight arranged so it felt like part of him. His cheek still wore yesterday's bruise like an old argument. When the quartermaster ran a finger down the slate to his name, he barely glanced up.
"Porter Three. Academy wedge. Keep pace. Keep quiet."
"Copy," Rem said.
The Academy team formed under the arch like a sketch that had learned how to be a wall. At the point stood Evelyn Verran, seventeen, Rank B, posture straight enough to make strangers fix their collars. She didn't glow. She didn't need to. Her focus drew the world into lines.
"Discipline," the officiant called, voice sweet with certainty. "Clarity. No heroics."
The first bell chimed. On the third, they crossed.
Cold breathed from the rift and settled on skin and lungs. Inside, the dungeon gave them old stone, right angles, torches that hummed a steady light. The air held a dry mineral smell that reminded Rem of flint and old mortar. It felt predictable in the way of a staircase you could walk by touch.
"Formation," Evelyn said. The wedge became a crescent. She didn't raise her voice; it landed where it needed to.
The first pack of creatures came low and fast. Pale, too many joints, a wet click to their movement. Evelyn lifted her hand and drew a line through the air. Aether Lance cracked the lead thing open, light hissing as it met meat. She didn't watch it fall. "Bind." Glyphs snapped like a net around the next two, and the front shield slammed one into the wall while a blade took the other at the knee.
Rem let the team's rhythm settle in his bones: step, breathe, hand off a bandage without looking, anchor a rope, feed a fresh blade to a grip already reaching. A hiss gathered above them. He caught the shadow in the bracket of a torch, stepped in, and flicked a tight, upward cut that ate a syllable out of the air. Null Cut. A black spit died on the thing's tongue and fell back into its mouth. Rem returned to his mark before anyone could tell him to.
Evelyn didn't look at him. "Stay behind the line."
"I am the line," he said.
If she heard the edge under the sentence, she didn't show it. "Forward."
They moved into a grid of halls carved with old symbols: stars with flared points, circles so faint they were almost rumors. The floor was honest about where feet had been. Rem brushed a fingertip along the edge of a tile and felt where traffic had rounded one corner and left the opposite sharp. He filed it where he kept the way bridges creaked and rope stretched.
A veteran at the rear cracked a quiet joke about how the Academy kids kept their boots shiny even underground. Someone snorted. Even Evelyn's shoulders loosened by a finger's width.
They cleared a second chamber with the calm of people doing what they trained to do. Evelyn's Warding Psalm spread a pale veil over a push, the front line set and advanced under it, and the back line took down stragglers with practiced economy. A pair of novices breathed too fast and corrected it without being told. Rem swapped a spent flare for a fresh one, caught a slipping strap one-handed, and eased a stumbling caster back on his feet with a grip that didn't ask permission.
"Demonstration," the officiant had promised. For a while, it was exactly that.
Then the sound changed.
It wasn't much. A note wrong in a song you've heard too many times. Somewhere down a side hall, a draft Rem couldn't feel moved a torch a fraction without touching the flame. The old stone made a noise like a jaw thinking about a yawn.
"Hold," Evelyn said, soft as a breath.
The ceiling cracked. Not a sharp break; a long, tired failure. Dust bucked out of the seam with a muffled cough. A slab the size of a door fell between Rem and the rest of the wedge, slamming the torch to darkness and coughing the corridor full of grit.
"Positions!" Evelyn's voice cut clean through powder. On her side, boots found stone. On Rem's, reflex did the same.
"Are you intact?" she called, eyes on the line of hairline fractures that now stitched the slab.
"Intact," Rem answered. He set his palm against the fallen stone and pushed. It didn't budge. Not without a lever and time they didn't have.
The captain on the far side didn't waste the pause. "Circle. Meet at the heart. Go."
Evelyn hesitated for the space of one breath at the cost of recalculating a map she'd been writing in her head and then pivoted into the side corridor that remained. Rem turned the other way and found her already there, five paces ahead, as if both of them had decided the same thing without the inconvenience of asking.
"Two paces spacing," she said. "Minimal noise."
"I'm not a bell," he said.
"You are large."
"Useful."
She didn't argue. They moved.
The labyrinth was fixed. It didn't shift underfoot or slide walls like a trick. It didn't need to. The sameness did the work. Halls ran long and turned sharp; dead ends taught them to step one tile left and discover a way forward that had been invisible from any other point of view. Rem marked low with chalk at the foot of corners. Evelyn glanced once at the marks, then at the symbols, and adjusted the route without explaining why.
"Star," she murmured at one branch, toe tapping a faded carve. "Then void."
"Left foot wears the corner less," Rem said.
"That, too."
They passed a niche where someone had left a little pile of stones like an apology. The air cooled by a degree that shouldn't have existed without wind. Rem tasted iron the way you do when you've cut your lip without realizing. The torchlight began to behave like it had opinions.
"Quiet," Evelyn said, unnecessary and still right. Her hand hovered at her side, fingers flexed as if testing a note she didn't plan to strike.
The corridor opened to a long run. At the far end, darkness swelled not empty, not full, something that pressed against the light and made it thin. Even if you had never seen a core chamber, you would have known one lived there; the world went expectant.
Shapes moved in that expectant dark. Veterans, sure on their feet, shields forward, voices low. Their lantern made a hard pool against the floor.
Something else moved behind them.
It arrived like cold arriving in a house that should be warm. Not a roar. Not a rattle. A presence. Rem's skin prickled as if a storm had decided to be only on the inside of him. The air went heavy, and with it his breath. He watched the veterans first, not the thing, because soldiers told the truth with their wrists when their mouths lied.
Wrists that had been steady shook a fraction. One man's knee bent and locked again like it had failed to remember which direction bone was meant to go. The lantern's light trembled, not because of the candle, but because the hand holding it had learned fear at a speed bones shouldn't.
The Effigy of Death came into view one piece at a time, like a bad thought forcing the mind to accept it. Hooves first, black at the edges with rot, each step biting stone with a sound that wasn't quite a clack. Legs jointed backward, muscles like cables under hide that had forgotten why it was meant to hold anything in. A torso like a man's if you kept all the worst choices, ribs open where something had pried them and never put them back. And above, a stag's skull, antlers split and jagged, bone stained the dark of old oil. No eyes. It didn't need them. It had attention.
The veterans felt it. One took a half step back because his body loved him more than doctrine did. The captain hissed and lifted his shield.
The Effigy moved.
What Rem had expected to be heavy was fast. A blur with weight behind it. The captain braced for a clean impact; there was no clean when something took the center of you with speed enough to ask your spine to make new shapes. The shield buckled. The man went down under his own equipment. The second veteran lunged to fill the gap and got a hand at his gorget that lifted him as if he weighed nothing. The Effigy threw him into stone. The sound it made was a wrong word.
"Back," Evelyn whispered, and the word had edges.
Rem couldn't tell if his legs wanted to go or didn't know how. His hands knew: one found the rock at his back; the other loosened on instinct, ready to reach for a strap, a rope, a person.
The lantern went out. Not because the flame died. Because someone dropped it and booted it accidentally and the glass shattered with a delicate sound that broke over the ugliness like frost.
Rem's mouth filled with copper. His heart punched his ribs and then remembered itself. The weight in the air thickened and grazed the edges of his mind like a hand pushing his head under water. He watched the last veteran plant his feet and set his spear for a low drive. He watched the Effigy ignore the spear and take the man down with the sort of contempt that belonged at altars when someone prayed the wrong prayer too loudly.
Panic has a taste. It tastes like coins. It rose in the back of Rem's mouth and met an older thing that did not have a word, only practice. Move when there's a place to move. Stop when stopping saves lives. Count.
The Effigy stood over what it had made and went very still. Stillness at that size shouldn't exist. The air around it warped tight with the pressure of a presence that did not consider permission. Rem saw a novice who had made it that far reach for the charm at his throat with fingers that wouldn't listen. He tried to say something and only a dry rasp came out.
"Back," Evelyn said again, and this time she was talking to her own feet.
She took a step to run.
Rem didn't. He stepped into her instead, grabbed her around the waist, and pulled her behind the jut of stone to their right so fast her body didn't have time to argue. He pressed her back into the rock, covered her mouth with his palm, and put his shoulder between her and the corridor's open line.
Her hands came up on reflex, strong, trained. One found his wrist. One shoved at his chest. He felt the decision she was about to make rank, anger, the principle of not being moved like equipment flare up in her spine.
He bent his head to her ear. What came out was air with a shape.
"Shut up," Rem whispered. "Or we're dead."