3. Ziva #3
Fresh blood, still wet enough to catch my torchlight in a sheen rather than a matte, filling the inscription channels at the sigil’s outer ring in a thin, even distribution that does not look old, does not look like seepage or residue or anything else I could talk myself into.
I look at it for three seconds.
The blood is still moving. A slow, capillary progression through the outermost channel—not pooled, not dried, not old. It is following the carving’s direction the way water follows a cut in stone, and the direction it’s following has been set by whoever put it there.
I look at the corridor entrance behind me.
I look back at the blood.
Not mine. Not Drazhul’s. Not anyone who came down with me tonight, because no one came down with me tonight.
This is fresh. Someone has been in this chamber—someone who knows exactly what this carving is and how to feed it—and the volume of it is not incidental. They came down here with intent. They prepared. They knew what they were doing.
Or they were here while I was reading it.
That’s the thought I walk out of the Foundation Crypt with, moving fast enough that I’m near-running by the time I hit the upper catacombs, fast enough that I don’t stop to think about whether anything is following me—because that thought would slow me down, and slowing down is what you do when you’ve established you’re alone in a place, and I have not established that.
I have established the opposite.
The upper catacombs pass in a blur of torchbrackets and cold stone and my own breathing, louder than it should be, and I make myself slow my breathing by the time I reach the junction because a curse-eater who can’t control her own pulse in a crisis is a curse-eater who makes mistakes, and I don’t make mistakes.
Not the kind that get people killed. Not the kind that get me killed.
Slow down. Count the steps. You know this corridor. Nothing here is faster than you.
I don’t fully believe that last part. I walk like I believe it anyway, because the alternative is running, and running announces things about a person that I’m not willing to announce in a fortress where I already don’t know who’s listening.
My hands haven’t stopped moving since the crypt—not shaking, not exactly, but the fine motor precision I usually take for granted has a tremor under it that I recognize as adrenaline doing its job a little too well.
I flex my fingers as I walk. Count the tension out of my shoulders one muscle group at a time, the way I was taught before I was taught anything else, because a curse-eater who can’t regulate her own body in the aftermath of a scare is a curse-eater who’s going to misread the next threat as this one.
Someone was in that chamber. Recently enough that the blood hadn’t finished moving.
They may have been in that chamber while I was in it.
I think, unbidden, of Drazhul Xorn standing in the middle of his Great Hall with a crack spreading under his boots, looking at it the way a man looks at a wound he’s had for so long he’s forgotten it’s supposed to hurt.
I think about telling him what I found. Not the professional version—I’ll give him that in the morning, clean and complete, exactly the information he needs and nothing he doesn’t.
I mean the other version. The one where I have to watch his face while I tell him someone has been standing in the center of the mechanism that’s been killing his bloodline, close enough to touch it, close enough that I might have shared the room with them tonight and not known.
He’s going to want to go down there himself. He’s going to want to do something about it that I can’t let him do yet, because we don’t know enough, and impulsive is how people die around active Blood Law work.
I hit the main corridor at a pace that earns a sharp look from the night watch guard on the eastern circuit, who I was supposed to have missed entirely. I meet his eyes and keep walking and don’t explain myself.
In my chambers I light every available candle from the hearth and sit at my desk and write down everything I found, in order, with the calm of someone who has been working in the vicinity of things that want to kill her since she was seventeen.
When I’m done I look at what I’ve written.
Active maintenance. Recent blood in the channels. A practitioner inside Blackscar Hold with substantial Blood Law knowledge and no apparent issue walking in and out of a secured Foundation Crypt in the middle of the night without being stopped.
Someone is maintaining this sigil from inside these walls.
And they know I’m here now.
I put my pen down and look at the window, at the dark beyond it, at the mountain this hold is carved into.
In the morning I’m going to have to tell Drazhul that the person maintaining the curse that has been eating his bloodline for three hundred years is somewhere inside his fortress right now.
I’m not looking forward to that conversation.
But first I’m going to try to get three hours of sleep, because being exhausted when you’re dealing with a practitioner of this caliber is the kind of problem I can actually control.
I blow out half the candles.
Leave the other half burning.