15
White-hot pain wrenched Felix back to the world. He gasped for breath and jerked half upright before the shackles at his wrists arrested him.
He fell back onto the steel slab, skull pulsing ruthlessly. His heart was running like a racehorse. The world flashed scarlet every time he blinked. His gauntlets were gone, and his wrists and ankles were locked to the table.
Memories whipped past him. The chase, the amber haze, the silvered shadow world, and then an agony that had plunged him into blackness.
He fell still. As he lay there, taking breath by careful breath, the world began to steady. The room inked itself in twilight hues around him. It was something like a bloodshop. Where a bloodshop would’ve had doors and windows, though, this had only walls like wind-stirred fog.
What the devil is this place? he thought. It didn’t feel like anything he knew. The air was smotheringly heavy. Even the light was wrong—a cold, pale gloom that came from nowhere.
Still, the shackles were his first concern. With his powers, he could’ve broken out in a second. He had nothing, though, and she’d known it all along. He could scarcely believe it. Myria Cadessa. She’d played him like a lyre.
Then use your wits, he thought with a whipcrack of anger. You’ve lost your powers, and they’re not coming back, so for once in your life, think your way out of it!
He turned to the shackles. They were humming slightly. Fed by arcana? He spied the power cords and tracked them back to the tanks on the wall. Perhaps, if he could break the connection . . . But they were twenty feet away, plumbed into the tank by a mechanism that would take four hands to operate.
Think. It’s a bloodshop. That means dangerous machinery. Old, too. Probably built before the grid was anywhere near reliable. If you were jamming all that into a confined space, what would you need?
A way to close it down. Quickly. Something to trip the power.
He opened his eyes. There it was, on the far wall—a rusted lever edged in faded yellow paint.
Got you.
Felix jerked against the wheeled steel table, and the motion sent it rolling forward. He tried again and won a few inches more.
After two minutes that passed like hours, he reached the wall. With one last jerk, he put his foot to the lever and shoved.
The sound of dying power had never been sweeter. Felix pulled against the shackles, and they levered open. He scrambled to his feet. His balance betrayed him at once, but the air itself arrested his fall. He felt like a diver in deep water, held up by the pressure of the muffling world around him.
Then, again, he sensed it. Arcanic draining. He’d felt it in Carysium Street, then Cadessa’s chamber. Someone had been siphoning arcanic power out of the world, and he wagered he’d found where it had gone.
Felix found his balance and turned to that hollow space inside. With gentle touches, he reached for his old senses. Confusion poured in on them at once. Trying to feel the fabric of the place felt like trying to read mirrored writing—familiar, but wrong.
Inside out.
An image traced itself in his mind’s eye. It was as though someone had taken the sleeve of the world and pulled it through, and he stood on the wrong side.
Keep thinking, Felix told himself, pacing back and forth. If they created this place by pulling through arcana from the real world, you should be able to reverse it. A sudden outrush of power, giving back what they took . . .
He turned to the arcana tanks on the wall and smiled.
Perfect.
He was no thericist, but that old machinery didn’t need a genius. It usually worked along the lines of pull the lever and duck.
Felix threw himself beneath the shelter of the tables as the power came spilling from the tanks.
The arcanic fabric heated—hissing, trembling, shimmering like a mirage.
His stomach heaved. Pressure built around his skull, and the copper taste of blood cut through his mouth.
It accelerated, intensifying until he couldn’t stand it any longer—
With a crack, the world turned on its head. For a moment, he was lurching through a void. Then, the ground slammed up beneath his back. A limestone arch pitched into view above him. The drum of rain and thunder sounded from far off.
Felix shot to his feet on the spurs of adrenaline and fetched up against a curved brick wall.
He seemed to be in some kind of sewer. Light pooled on the stagnant water at his feet.
The detritus of the bloodshop lay around him—steel tables, empty tanks and an old filing cabinet he hadn’t noticed before.
His interest quickened, and he hauled it from the water. If luck took pity on him, Cadessa might have left some evidence in there. It was the work of a moment to break the rusty hinge.
When he looked inside, his intrigue fled. The papers were a decade old if they were a day. Still, he slipped them into his coat. Best to examine them somewhere he was less likely to be murdered. He turned for the ladder and hurried up into the daylight.
The moment he reached the street, Felix turned for Patrium Hall. Then, something snagged at his mind, and he paused. Vixius, she’d said. The name meant nothing; if his schoolroom knowledge served, it was ancient Carinth for fifth. Praetor Evander, though . . . that certainly meant something.
All of a sudden, Cadessa’s impulse to join the praetor’s rally took on a different complexion. She’d spoken of a wicked man—a man she meant to ruin. A certain centurion would be intrigued to hear it . . . and perhaps she ought to, before the prefecture did.
In moments, he was cutting through the storm-swept streets at a run.
His pace sped, and his heartbeat rose to match.
Despite the soaking rain, despite the pain that pulsed in the back of his head, exhilaration seized him.
At last, something had happened. He’d heard the footsteps of danger like an old friend returning home, and it was time he went to greet it.
Felix reached the barracks soaked and bloodied, with the ash of industry still dark on his boots. The sentries didn’t waste time demanding he explain himself. At a flash of his phoenix sigil, they marched him straight to the centurion’s door.
He could feel her the moment he knocked. Power. Sheer power. The air hummed with it, pure as silver, arrow-sharp and rich as wine.
The door opened, and Gloriana looked him up and down.
“Aurelias,” she said, face hardening at once. “You’ve been attacked.”
“No, ma’am, it’s . . . Well, I have, but that’s not the matter,” he said, looking past the door. A woman of about Gloriana’s age sat at the table, craning around to watch. The centurion’s eyes flicked between them.
“Prefecta Marina, could we finish this tomorrow?” she asked. The woman rose with a crack of joints, light glancing from the sigil of a breaking wave at her shoulder. Felix bowed her past, and the centurion swept him in, not wasting a breath on farewells or introductions.
“Business with an old comrade from the Fifth Company,” Gloriana said, then shut the door, eyes raking over him. “You’re injured. What happened?”
“I’m here with intelligence, ma’am,” he answered, nerves alight. “What do you know about a man named Vixius?”
“Remarkable,” said the centurion, pacing squares around her desk. “And she mentioned Evander in connection with him?”
“Yes, ma’am. Does it mean something to you?”
“Less than I’d like,” she said. “Summer, about fifteen years ago, the corps was called in to help the prefecture. Something was happening on the grayside. We kept finding bodies, all across the city, with a V carved into them. Knifed down to the bone. Not petty criminals, either. Proper grayside arcani. Men we’d been hunting for years, killed by the blade. ”
“A civil war? A power struggle?”
“Perhaps,” she said. “We never found out. That was the strangest part of it. One day, it simply . . . stopped. V, though. Fifth. Vixius. If he’s their leader, and he’s in league with Evander, you know what that means.”
“Evander’s vying for the Magister-General’s office. Do you suppose he’s been working with the man to stir up the grayside? Trying to disgrace your brother? And if he wins the seat . . .”
Gloriana gave a short nod. There was no need to speak the thought. “If this Vixius is leader of the grayside, Cadessa may be one of his. He could’ve been behind the theft on the Elysius Vault. He might even have the treasures.”
“And if she’s turned against him—”
“He betrayed them.”
“Precisely.”
“You know, I think we could make use of her,” the centurion said, shooting him a smile. Adrenaline struck a flame inside him. After that morning, turning the tables would be quite the satisfying riposte.
“I can lead you to the sewer,” he replied. “They had me in some kind of . . . I’m not sure. An arcanic prison? It’s collapsed, but they don’t know that. She said they’d return to strip my memories.”
“We’ll find them,” said Gloriana. “I trust she didn’t say where they were headed?”
“No, ma’am.”
But then, copper light flared in the corner of his eye. Felix spun to the window. A great arcanic wall was blazing out into a square to the east. There was no mistaking a prefecture cordon—nor the building at the center.
“Haideum Castle,” he murmured. “On reflection, ma’am . . . I think I know exactly where she went.”