Damsel
Every hanging corpse opened its eyes and whispered—dry, rasping threads of sound that coiled through the chamber.
They made no move to escape their bindings. They only watched and whispered, as if he was an actor messing up his lines during their favorite performance.
The guard took advantage of his shock.
She’d lost her sword, but that didn’t make her harmless. A punch or a kick, he might have dodged—but she grabbed his arm and dug her fingers in with such force he half expected to hear bone snap.
Then she crumpled to the ground.
He nudged the body with his foot, but she didn’t react. The armor began shrinking, collapsing inward, as if magic alone had ever held it in the shape of a human.
“Math?” Kai stood in the doorway, lowering her hand.
“What did you do?” He knew they should flee, but he had to know. That had been … effortless.
“I erased the graving keeping her animated.”
“I didn’t see any writing.”
She shrugged. “I am well-acquainted with where Sanistral conceals his gravings.”
“Nice. But you can’t stay. You have to get out of here,” Math said, glancing warily at the swinging corpses. It wasn’t safe. Sanistral might not track his every step, but Kai was another matter.
“We must leave this place,” she corrected. “Naturally, we shall—”
Her voice trailed off as she noticed the corpses on the walls, still awake, still whispering. If anything, they were louder now.
“I know these people,” Kai whispered, her voice hushed with horror.
Math glanced from the guard’s corpse to the mummified ones. “How can you tell?”
“Because I last saw them a few weeks ago—or rather, a few weeks ago, from my perspective.” Her expression twisted with grief.
Rage followed, slower, hotter. “They are my fellow graven wizards. Those who, like myself, entered magical stasis to preserve what remains of humanity. They should not be…” Her eyes widened.
“They should not be here. How can they be—?”
Rage and horror surged through the bond, raw and unfiltered. For a heartbeat, Math couldn’t tell which of them was shaking.
Math reached over and took her hand. The contact dulled the edge—just enough for him to speak. “We need to go. If this is the same pyramid that houses the waystation, maybe we can return the same way.”
He was asking a lot, but the guard at the bottom of the pit was still alive—or aware, at least—and Sanistral would come looking soon enough.
They couldn’t stay.
Math had questions, of course. How had Kai left the palace without Sanistral detecting it?
If not for the fact that he could feel her, he would’ve thought it too good to be true.
He sensed her worry for him wrapped around a core of despair and pain that he hated precisely because he understood its exact cause.
If she hadn’t figured out that Sanistral was an evil gravefucker before, seeing all her friends and colleagues pinned up like butterflies surely drove the point home.
She didn’t protest.
Math focused on getting them out.
They ran. Stealth was pointless—if Sanistral’s people hadn’t noticed their escape by now, they deserved Sanistral’s ire later. As for Sanistral himself …
His absence was a looming avalanche that refused to fall.
More immediate concerns pressed in, so Math focused on retracing their path to the gate. Fortunately, that part was simple: exit the ziggurat, climb to the top.
Suspicion and dread prickled his skin when he saw no guards posted. A flicker of unease ghosted through the bond—Kai’s, not his—and it told him more than words ever could.
Math stepped in front of Kai, barring her path. “This is a trap.”
“No,” Kai corrected. “Or rather, not a trap in the manner you are expecting.” At his raised eyebrow, she added, “He is allowing us to escape.”
“Why?”
Kai raised her hands over the graved floor pattern. “That is the question, is it not? But our options are these: accept this path, or spend months returning to Rokasmaa on foot. Now then—if you will permit me?”
Math glanced back at the pattern. Kai wasn’t wrong. But he was struggling to shake the paranoid—yet rational—fear that this would make Sanistral’s work easier. That they were walking into their own destruction or playing into some terrible mistake that would doom everyone else.
What choice did they have?
Math took a deep breath and stepped aside.
Math felt the difference between Lomar and Rokasmaa immediately. In theory, the two places should have been identical, aside from the map on the wall. And yet …
Something was in the air, scratching at his senses. The air was easier to breathe than it had been mere seconds and thousands of miles ago.
Kai kneeled beside the pattern and began working another spell.
“What are you doing?” Math stepped outside the pattern’s boundary. He had no desire to find out what happened to someone still inside when another portal opened.
“Something that breaks my heart,” Kai murmured as she worked, “but I cannot have that man so easily following us.”
“You just said he let us go.”
“He did.”
“Then why would he—?”
“One moment, if you would be so kind.” Without waiting to see if he would cooperate, Kaiataris raised her hand. The engraved sigils and motifs on the ground softened, like a wooden stamp used so often its edges wore down. Gradually, the worn spots spread until much of the graving was sanded away.
When she finished, Kai turned back to him. “We are safe enough for the moment. You may now proceed with your interrogation.”
A flicker of bitterness passed through the bond—cool, controlled, unmistakable.
For a moment, he wondered if the word had changed over the centuries—grown sharper, crueler. Then he remembered the bond. He had heard “interrogation” because she had meant “interrogation.”
“It’s not an interrogation.” Math crossed his arms—then realized he was doing his best impersonation of Iduan not getting her way and uncrossed them again.
“You wonder if you can trust me,” Kai said, bitter and resigned. “If he let us go because I had already agreed to help him.”
“More like I want to know if you believed his lies.”
“Not a single one.” Kai closed her dark eyes. For a heartbeat, Math felt the clash of emotions through the bond—despair, rage, sorrow, all churning in silence. “He was my father in all but name. His betrayal would not pierce me so otherwise.”
He wanted to comfort her—to pull her into his arms and shield her from all of it.
Math did not.
“How did you know he was lying?” Math asked. “I only figured it out because he told me—after I refused to cooperate.” He hesitated. “They were pretty good lies. I believed him, for a while.”
She pressed her lips together, gaze lifting to the ceiling—avoiding him, or lost in memory, he couldn’t tell.
“I might have, as well,” she admitted at last. “But he made a mistake during dinner. Do you remember when he quoted the phrase carved into the stone of my bower? ‘In silence, wisdom is knowing the difference between the library and the tomb.’”
“I remember.”
“To me, that phrase has only existed in written form for a week, whereas I suspect he has studied it for so long he forgot the context.”
The context being that no one who visited the maze antechamber ever saw the full sentence—only fragments: first, “In silence, wisdom,” and later, “—wisdom.”
In fact, knowing the full sentence would have made the maze harder. It would mislead a researcher, steer them toward libraries, knowledge, books—all guaranteed dead ends.
“You weren’t quoting anyone. Not yourself, not some old proverb. Even if someone knew the beginning, they’d have no idea how it ended.”
“I did not mean it as a test. But still—I carved the rest of that sentence myself, just before completing the graving for my slumber.” She gazed up at him with those dark, dark eyes.
“Math, the only way he could have been so familiar with that saying while forgetting that it had never passed my lips would be if he lingered inside my vault while I slumbered.”
Math exhaled slowly. That was … deeply creepy. Revulsion surged through the bond, hot and bitter. Not hers—his.
“Wait,” Math said. “He can’t have been there. That’s impossible.”
“I assure you, there is no other explanation—”
“You said the bond was supposed to trigger with the first person who entered. That was me.”
“Consider: I would require no bond if awakened by one of my death knights. And I would desire no bond if awakened by enemies.”
“Fine, but how does that—” Math stopped himself.
Oh.
There was a simple way to guarantee that outcome, wasn’t there? All her enemies were inhuman or dead.
She raised an eyebrow and waited, nothing of her inner turmoil showing on the surface.
“The first living human to enter,” he said, the word catching on his tongue. “And he’s a grim lord, which means he isn’t alive.”
She swallowed. “I’m such a fool. I was so desperate for one of my own kind to have survived that I refused to consider how improbable such a survival would be. Clearly, he must have founded his kingdom centuries ago, and graven wizards are not immortal, so the simplest explanation is—” She choked.
“That he died a long, long time ago.”
“Yes.” Kai’s voice trembled with anguish.
“And to see the undead—writhing, mutilated bodies of my fellow wizards nailed to the walls—it can only be that Sanistral himself betrayed us. That he broke into each vault, one by one, and murdered our fellows in their sleep.” Grief surged through the bond, brittle, bright, unbearably raw.
“But not you.” The words tasted wrong even as Math said them.
Several long, piercing seconds passed in silence. Through the bond, Math felt a hollow, echoing quiet.
“No. Not me.” Her voice was a whisper. “I am like a daughter to him.”
“No,” Math corrected before he could stop himself. “You’re not.”
Kai’s head snapped up. “Excuse me?” Irritation flared through the bond.
Math swore under his breath. She had enough to deal with, but he refused to lie. “He doesn’t think of you as his daughter. I saw how he stared at you. That was not the gaze of a loving parent.”
He gestured at her outfit, sparkling and bandage-tight. “He didn’t dress you like a princess. He dressed you like a…” Math trailed off. Not a queen. More like a consort.
She grimaced, revulsion twisting her features, disgust roiling through their bond. “He is dead. Any physical passions he may have once possessed have long since been quenched.”
“Then it’s not lust,” Math said. “That doesn’t make it better. Greed and obsession work as well. You just told me he’s been sneaking into your vault for … Tri-Mother knows how long.” He met her eyes. “You’re not a person to him, Kai. You’re treasure.”
She opened her mouth, but no words came. Horror poured through the bond—thick, suffocating.
“I’m sorry,” Math said quickly. “I’m an ass. I shouldn’t have—” He shook his head. “I’ll shut up.”
“No,” she said. “I am … it is fine. It is better that I face this now.” Her hands had curled into fists. She stood so rigidly upright she was in danger of pulling a muscle.
“Regardless of his opinion, my feelings toward him are clear. I thought of him as my father. That he saw me as … as…” Her voice faltered.
“His due,” Math said.
Math felt her horror gave way to indignation and then rage. He welcomed it: better anger than paralyzing grief.
“Yes,” she said. “His due, which is abhorrent. I am no one’s reward.” She gave him a hard look, daring him to contradict her.
“Besides being gross, it implies you’re meant to be saved for special occasions.” Math pretended to consider. “Whereas any rational person would want your company every day.” He hesitated. “Every minute. Every second.”
Kai narrowed her eyes, though a faint smile tugged at her mouth. “You need not overreach to impress me. I already think the world of you.”
“Ah yes. Your only flaw.”
“How soon you forget I snore. Or my love of awful puns.” She stepped closer, her voice softening. “Mostly, though, I would not have you speak so ill of my dearest friend.”
Math’s heart stuttered—but not in a good way. What did she mean by “friend”? After everything she’d endured, she was likely—painfully likely—to be wary of anything resembling a romantic overture.
Her voice softened, almost reverent. “Thinking well of you is not a flaw, Mathaiik Kaven.”
“I was just joking.”
“No,” she said. “You were not.”
Kai stepped in, curled a hand around the back of his neck, and drew him into a kiss—too brief, too charged.
When she pulled back, her eyes were steady.
“I would love nothing more than to spend time convincing you of your worthiness. But there is no time.” She sighed and stepped away. “Sanistral will soon follow.”
“He can still use the Kaliri waystation,” Math said.
She grimaced. “You are right. Naturally, he lied about that as well. We must assume it still functions.”
“No need to assume,” Math said. “He told me outright.”
Kai raised an eyebrow. “Did he?” She paused—then giggled. “Did he truly reveal his plans? Brag about everything he intends?”
“Mostly,” Math said. “Could’ve used more detail. Maybe a map or two. But I’m not complaining.”
She brought a hand to her mouth, trying—and mostly failing—to suppress laughter.
“Unfortunately,” Math said, sobering, “that’s the bad news. Lomar didn’t work—so I have to go back to Bashan.”