The silence in the command chamber was a physical weight. Lyssara's declaration hung in the air, a fusion of threat and invitation. Take back the city. The three most insane words Ravi had ever heard.
"Are you out of your mind?" he finally managed, his voice a choked whisper. "We're two people hiding in a basement! You want me to go up there and fight an entire city watch? An army?"
"No," Lyssara said, her gaze fixed on the glowing map. "I don't want you to fight them. Fighting is what they expect. It's what they're good at." She looked up, and the look in her eyes was sharp enough to cut glass. "I want you to make them believe they are fighting a ghost. A curse. The very embodiment of their own bad luck."
She was looking at him, but seeing a weapon. A unique, psychological tool whose true power wasn't in what it did, but in what people thought it did.
He shook his head, retreating into the familiar comfort of his own inadequacy. "I can't. I'm not a symbol. I'm not a curse. I'm just… me. I run, I trip, I flinch. That's all I know how to do."
"Exactly," Lyssara said, a slow, predatory smile returning to her face. "And that's precisely what makes you so perfect."
She leaned over the scrying table, her finger tracing a glowing line. "Look. This is the Collector's Guild, just south of the Grand Market. Every day at sundown, a tribute wagon leaves from the Warden's district office, right here, and delivers the day's 'taxes'—extorted goods, seized valuables, confiscated relics. The route is the same. The guards are the same. Arrogant, lazy, and overconfident."
She tapped a point on the map where the wagon's route passed through a narrow, winding alley. "Right here. The alley is barely wide enough for the wagon. It has to slow to a crawl."
"You want to ambush them?" Ravi asked, incredulous. "With what? Harsh language?"
"We aren't going to ambush them," Lyssara corrected him, her voice alive with the thrill of her own lethal logic. "You are. But they will never even know you were there."
An hour later, Ravi was crouched behind a pile of rotting crates in the designated alley, dressed in a hooded cloak taken from the vault's armory. The garment felt strange against his skin, too heavy, too purposeful. It was the costume of a character he didn't know how to play. His heart hammered a frantic rhythm against his ribs, each beat a tiny scream of protest. This was a mistake. This was suicide.
"'Walk, don't run,'" Lyssara's voice echoed in his head, a memory of her calm, terrifying instructions from the safety of the vault. "'Let them see you. Look pathetic. Look scared. Let them think you're a random vagrant who took a wrong turn.'"
He heard the telltale rumble of the iron-banded wagon wheels on the cobblestones before he saw it. The sound grew louder, closer. He peeked through a crack between two crates. The tribute wagon, a heavy, boxy cart pulled by two plodding draft horses, was turning into the alley. It was escorted by four guards, two in the front, two in the back. Just as Lyssara had predicted.
This was his cue.
"'Just before they reach your position, step out,'" she had instructed, her finger tracing his path on the glowing map. "'Look surprised. Then look terrified. Let them see your panic. Then, turn and run directly in front of the wagon.'"
His body screamed no. Every cell in his being wanted to stay hidden, to let the wagon pass, to crawl back to the safety of the vault. But the image of Lyssara's cold, calculating eyes was burned into his mind. She knew what he was. Refusing her felt more dangerous than confronting the guards.
With a surge of pure, self-loathing adrenaline, he stepped out from behind the crates.
The lead guard saw him immediately. "Hey! Out of the way, scum!" he barked, his hand instinctively going to the hilt of his sword.
Ravi jumped, putting on a perfect show of a startled rabbit. He looked at the guard, his eyes wide with fear, then at the massive, lumbering wagon, and then back at the guard. He let a pathetic whimper escape his lips, turned, and bolted down the alley.
Just as planned.
"After him!" the guard yelled, breaking into a jog. "Don't let him get away!"
Ravi ran. He poured every ounce of his genuine terror into his pumping legs, his flailing arms, his panicked, gasping breaths. He could hear the heavy thud of the guards' boots on the stone behind him, gaining on him. The wagon lumbered along, its heavy bulk filling the narrow alley.
"'The drain grate,'" Lyssara's voice coached him. "'Just past the butcher's awning. It's old, it's iron, and its crossbars are half-rotted. Don't leap over it. Don't avoid it. Stumble on it. Make it look convincing.'"
He saw it. A dark, rusted square in the middle of the alley. It was his stage. This was his performance.
He didn't need to fake the clumsiness. With the guards breathing down his neck, his legs felt like they were made of string. His right foot came down hard on the edge of the grate. He let his ankle "turn," let out a theatrical cry of pain, and pitched forward.
He didn't fall completely. He caught himself, one hand slapping against the grimy brick wall of the alley, a picture of desperate, failing agility. He glanced back, his face a mask of pure terror.
The lead guard was right behind him, a cruel smirk on his face. He lunged, his hand reaching out to grab Ravi's shoulder. "Got you, you little—"
His boot stomped down on the center of the drain grate.
The sound was not of snapping iron, but of annihilating force. The rusted grate didn't just break; it imploded. It collapsed into a shower of metallic splinters and rust flakes, a silent, violent failure of physics. The guard's leg plunged into the hole, his forward momentum driving his entire body downward.
There was a series of wet, snapping sounds. The guard shrieked, a high, piercing sound of agony as his leg broke in multiple places, twisted into an unnatural shape by the sudden, catastrophic trap. He went down hard, taking out the guard directly behind him in a tangle of limbs and screams.
The horses pulling the wagon, spooked by the sudden screaming and commotion directly in front of them, reared up in panic. They whinnied, their eyes wide with animal terror, and bolted.
The wagon lurched violently forward, its driver shouting and wrestling with the reins. One of the massive iron wheels slammed into the tangled bodies of the first two guards, eliciting fresh screams of pain. The other wheel scraped against the alley wall, sending up a shower of sparks. The axle, a thick beam of solid oak, couldn't handle the shearing, twisting force.
With a sound like a giant's bone snapping, the axle broke.
The entire wagon tipped, crashing onto its side with a deafening splintering of wood and a cascade of its illicit cargo. Crates of confiscated spices, bolts of fine silk, and small, leather-bound strongboxes spilled across the cobblestones, bursting open in a chaotic, valuable mess.
The two rear guards, who had been charging forward, stopped dead in their tracks, their faces white with shock. In the space of five seconds, a routine tribute run had turned into a scene of absolute carnage. One guard was screaming with a mangled leg, another was groaning under his partner's weight, the driver was fighting to control his terrified horses, and the Warden's tribute was scattered across a filthy alley.
And Ravi? He was already gone.
He had scrambled away in the confusion, slipping into a side passage that Lyssara had pointed out on the map, a shadow disappearing into other shadows.
No one had touched him. No one had even accused him. To the guards, it would be a story of impossible, catastrophic bad luck. A freak accident. A rotten grate, spooked horses, a broken axle. A chain of unfortunate events.
But a chain has links. And Lyssara knew exactly who was forging them.
As he ran through the dark, silent tunnels that led back to the vault, a new feeling began to bloom in Ravi's chest, right alongside the familiar, bitter taste of fear. It was a cold, sharp, and deeply unsettling emotion.
It felt like control.