14
“Hmm. He’s pretty,” said Cassia. “Good job I only hit him on the back of the head.”
Myria said nothing. Good job they’d had a healing charm to hand. She looked down at the unlucky prefect, now shackled to a steel table in their silver lining hideout.
She’d spied Aurelias following her a few minutes out from the Althion.
At once, she’d known she was in trouble; the prefect should’ve dropped the bone a week ago.
If he was still on her tail, that could only mean he suspected her.
Her detours hadn’t lost him, and she’d run out of time to shake the man by gentler means.
Still, she hadn’t meant it to end quite like that. When Cassia set out to concuss a fellow, she didn’t do it by half measures.
“What do we do with him?” Leo asked, checking his pocket watch. “We have ten minutes.”
“Those shackles are old. Are they secure?” said Myria, sizing up the steel bands that clamped Aurelias’s wrists and ankles. The sight scraped unease down her bones. For a moment, she felt the ghosts of cold metal circling her arms.
“Perfectly,” said Leo. “They’re arcanically locked. Plumbed into the workshop’s power supply. He can’t open them without his gauntlets.”
“Provided you’re sure he can’t use his arcana,” said Cassia.
“He can’t. Will you wake him, Leo?”
“Is that not a, ah . . . terrible idea?”
“Please,” she said, gesturing to their prisoner. She offered no explanation, but her friend sighed and clicked his fingers.
Felix’s eyes snapped open. He jerked against the table, momentarily panicked, gaze flashing from side to side. Myria instinctively laid a hand on his wrist. Beneath her fingertips, his pulse was running like a deer.
“Prefect,” she began, “you’re quite safe. We won’t harm you. We only need a few hours’ grace.”
“You,” he said, his eyes half angry and half dazed. “You’re . . . you were one of them. The Elysius Vault crew. The traitor.”
Interesting. He’d gone off down the wrong alley, but he’d found the right street. She’d taken a false measure of the man.
“We’ve no traitors here, Prefect,” she said. “We were the betrayed. Myria Cadessa, at your . . . well, I’d hesitate to say service. Lie still. We’ll be back to set you free.”
He watched her for a moment, blinking hard against the concussion. Then his gaze cut wider, taking in the tables, the tanks and the two silhouettes in the gloom nearby. When he spoke again, his voice had turned level and cold.
“Liberty in death? I didn’t know you were of a philosophical bent, Miss Cadessa.”
“Not when sober,” she replied, a smile tugging at one corner of her mouth. “But don’t fear. It’s not my trade to harm your sort. We’ll trim your memories and release you. Trust me.”
“Trust you?” He choked out a laugh.
“Yes, Prefect,” Myria said quietly. “Trust that I know mercy. Far more mercy than the last soul to lie on this table ever saw. Now . . . must be off. Comrades to save. Devils to destroy.”
“I see. A righteous quest, is it?”
“Of sorts. Ever heard of a man called Vixius?”
He raised an eyebrow, and she smiled without humor.
“I didn’t imagine so. Though I expect you’ve heard of Julius Evander.”
That broke the glassy facade. His head snapped up, and his eyes focused.
“Praetor Evander?” he said.
Myria watched him for a moment. She was almost inclined to tell him. Some irrational part of her didn’t like the thought that he imagined her a villain. Still, she thrust it aside. She was a graysider. It was the closest a girl could come to villainy without governing Carintheum.
“Never mind,” she said, patting his bound hand. “You won’t remember. Sleep.”
She turned a dial at the edge of the slab, and a charm hummed softly through the steel. The prefect’s limbs fell slack at once. He was away in moments, sunk deep beneath the aether.
“There we are, then,” said Myria, flicking out her pocket watch. “Still on schedule. Time to go.”
Haideum Castle had its own inherent menace, but nature lent its aid that dawn. The storm erupted overhead, and churning bruise-black clouds devoured the sunrise. Bolts of lightning split the dark. Rain hurtled down as the lamps fought to illuminate more than ten square feet around them.
Myria felt a similar storm bottling up inside her as she strode along the rain-drenched street—little static flickers darting down her nerves, sparks at her fingertips and the electric tang of anticipation in her blood.
Leo walked beside her, greatcoat snapping in the wind.
Right now, across the city, Cassia would be tracking the night soil run for the last time.
If she didn’t manage to commandeer one of the vehicles .
. . well, their escape was going to turn a lot more interesting.
They passed through the castle gates and into the courtyard.
Myria tensed as dark arcanic wisps cut about her ankles, tasting her for danger.
She steeled herself. The tracking furies would find nothing.
They wore no disguises, carried no curses, and bore no arcanic imprints on the register of felons.
A hundred yards in, they reached the watchhouse that led to the keep. Perhaps it was mere fancy, but Myria thought she could feel the chill of the eternity cells through the walls. They lay tantalizingly close. Only the medics’ bay, the guardroom and four feet of unbreachable curses in the way.
“Declare yourselves,” said the warden at the desk. Leo and Myria shook off their rain-beaded cloaks to reveal smart lawyers’ garb. The man eyed them up, then shrugged.
“You’re very early.”
“For our sins,” Leo said with a yawn, tossing himself into a chair. “Which must’ve been many.”
“Let the damned cheer you by comparison,” Myria replied, then nodded to the warden. “Don’t mind us till opening hour. The prosecutor beat us to the accused last time, and I’ll be dashed if I let it happen again.”
He seemed to accept that for an explanation, and turned back to his paperwork.
The minutes ticked down in Myria’s head.
The air was hot and prickling with curses.
Even she could feel them, flat and lifeless—the work of machines instead of men.
That dawn, though, they were built on sinking sand.
Soon, it would be time to feed the inmates, and the polluted stimulants would send the virus flooding into the system.
Below, the infected bloodshop arcana bubbled in its tanks, waiting for the switch to wake it up.
Tick. Tick. Not long now. Tick. They’re relying on you. Tick, tick. Not ready . . .
Beside her, Leo flipped the Empire’s Herald from the table and started filling in the crossword. She leaned over, half amazed that he could set his mind to it, before she saw him scrawling nonsense in the boxes. Despite herself, she grinned.
Then the lights went out.
She felt the curses fall. The air went dry and black as death. She came to her feet in feigned alarm. The warden’s chair shrieked across the wood.
Five, four, three, two . . .
Something gave a loud click, and the lights returned. There was a great surging rumble from beneath the floor, the whir of machinery, the gurgle of liquid . . .
A crack rent the air. The globes blew out and scattered hot arcana to the ground. Myria yelped and ducked beneath her briefcase.
“Pantheon above! What’s happening?” she cried. A sheet of lightning threw bright white across the room, cutting a stark image of the warden stumbling for the door to the medics’ bay. She marked it in her mind’s eye before darkness swallowed them again.
“Stay there!” he shouted, then barged through the door.
Myria and Leo moved in a blink. Leo reached the door and forced his boot into the gap a second before it closed. They slipped inside the medics’ bay and froze against the wall.
She sized up the room in a heartbeat. Three doors—the watchhouse behind them, a service corridor to the right and the guardroom ahead. Beyond that last chamber lay the prison.
Cassia had done her job well; the lights had no third rising. In moments, chaos broke across the jail. Shouts rang from all directions, and their echoes answered back in a cacophony. Doors whooshed and slammed. A rush of bodies burst into the darkness.
“Disconnect them!”
“We haven’t enough—”
“—into the medics’ bay—”
“Someone check the locks on the Infernum!”
“Where are those damned arcani?”
“—the grid! There’s something wrong—”
The door to the guardroom clanged open, and the stench of vomit washed through. Leo choked and pressed a sleeve across his nose.
And there, the promised effluvia. Galvius had warned her that the virus wouldn’t leave a pretty scene behind.
Moments later, someone threw open the door between the guardroom and the prison. Kaleidoscopic light flashed across the chamber. Men came shoving their way in, wheeling devices like glass coffins into the cramped guardroom.
The eternity cells. They rocked on their wheels as the prisoners inside convulsed, retching and pawing at the glass. The arcana flooded out of them through glass veins, bright as comets in the night. Her focus narrowed in. Lysander’s turquoise light was somewhere in that thicket.
Time. She and Leo threw off their dark overcoats and tore white laboratory garb from their briefcases. The workers hauled more cells into the room by the moment.
Then, amid the chaos, she saw it—a set of pipes that blazed as turquoise as the tropical sea. Lysander’s arcana. The sight was distinct as a voice.
Hold fast, old boy. Here we come.
Together, they dashed into the guardroom.
The place was a pandemonium of guards and medics, close-crammed cells and vomiting arcani. No one paid any mind to another two white-coated figures in the chaos.
“Medics!” Leo shouted. “Let us through. You, start moving these cells to the bay. We need space!”
Myria fought her way to the turquoise-lit cell and seized the frame, eyes seeking her friend’s face. There. Lysander lay beyond the clouded glass, his skin a yellowed white, his eyes closed.
Leo darted to her side. They took the cell together and pulled, hauling it through the door to the medics’ bay.