Chapter 9
NINE
ZORIC
The sea gate holds only for so long.
Aviora has disappeared toward the Eastern Wall.
I count the time by heartbeats and blade strokes, by the rhythm of combat that’s become as natural as breathing.
The drowned pour against the iron chains in waves—pale bodies climbing over pale bodies, their luminous hands finding purchase on metal that should be too slick to grip.
My blade takes heads, severs limbs, sends them tumbling back into the churning water. But they keep coming. They keep coming.
“Hold the line!” My voice carries over the chaos, rough with exertion. “Don’t let them breach!”
Thorne fights at my left, her blade moving with the precision of twenty years’ experience.
On my right, two younger guards whose names I should remember but can’t—not now, not in the middle of this.
Their faces blur into masks of fear and determination, lit blue by the ward fires blazing along the harbor walls.
A wraith lunges through the gap between defenders. I catch it with a backhand slash, feel my blade bite through rotting flesh and spine, and the thing drops. Another takes its place immediately—a woman this time, or what used to be a woman, her face preserved in an expression of endless want.
I don’t let myself think about who she was. Can’t afford to. Every corpse in Oreth’s army was a person once. A sailor, a merchant, a passenger on a ship that trusted the wrong waters. Thinking about that would paralyze me, and paralysis means death.
So I fight. Cut. Kill. Move to the next.
The chains groan.
I feel it before I hear it—a vibration running through the stone platform beneath my feet, a wrongness in the metal that’s held for centuries.
The drowned aren’t just climbing the chains anymore.
They’re pulling. Dozens of frigid hands working in concert, their unnatural strength focused on the weakest link.
“Fall back!” I grab Thorne’s arm, yank her toward the passage leading up to the keep. “The chains are going!”
We run. Behind us, the screech of failing metal drowns out everything else. I don’t look back—can’t look back—but I hear it: the crash of iron hitting water, the surge of bodies pouring through the gap, the triumphant shrieking of things that haven’t known victory in years of probing attacks.
The sea gate has fallen. Dreadhaven’s harbor belongs to the dead.
We retreat in stages, just as we planned. The corridors narrow as we climb, funneling the enemy into kill zones where three defenders can hold against thirty. Ward fires blaze at every choke point—blue flames that make the drowned scream and recoil, buying us precious seconds to fall back farther.
But seconds aren’t enough. The dead don’t tire. Don’t hesitate. Don’t feel the wounds that would drop a living fighter. They push through the pain of ward-fire, sacrificing their front ranks so the ones behind can advance.
“Captain!” A guard stumbles past me, blood streaming from a wound on his scalp. “The east tower! They’re coming up through the caves!”
My blood goes cold.
The sea caves. I sealed those passages years ago—collapsed the main entrances, blocked the secondary routes with rubble and ward-carved stone. But Oreth was there when we mapped them. He knows every tunnel, every passage, every way into Dreadhaven’s foundations.
Years are plenty of time to find another way in.
“Fall back to the Great Hall!” I shout the order even as I’m running toward the east tower. “Everyone, now! Seal the lower passages!”
The corridor splits ahead. Most of the guards take the right fork, heading for the hall as ordered. Thorne and I take the left, toward the breach, because I need to see it. Need to understand what we’re facing before I can figure out how to survive it.
The east tower stairs are slick with water. Not spray—actual water, pooling on the steps, streaming down from somewhere above. The smell hits me next: brine and rot, the distinctive reek of the deep Wrecktide. Whatever’s happening, it’s not just an attack.
It’s an invasion.
I round the final corner and stop.
The tower’s lower chamber is gone—flooded to the ceiling, black water pressing against the door that barely holds it back. Through the cracks, I can see movement. Pale shapes. Cold light. The drowned have filled the caves beneath us, and now they’re filling Dreadhaven itself.
“How long?”
“Before we drown?” Thorne shrugs, the gesture heavy with resignation. “An hour. Maybe two. The keep’s built on solid rock, but rock has cracks. Water finds cracks.”
I stare at the flooded chamber. At the shapes moving behind the door. At the steady stream of water pouring through gaps in the ancient stone.
Oreth isn’t trying to breach our defenses anymore. He’s making Dreadhaven uninhabitable. Flooding us out, forcing us into the water where his army waits.
“The Great Hall,” I say. “We consolidate there. It’s the highest point in the keep.”
“And then what?”
I don’t have an answer. Every plan I made assumed we’d have walls to defend, ground to hold. Without that—
“Then we figure out what comes next.” I push past her, back toward the stairs. “Move. Get everyone to the hall. Now.”
The Great Hall is chaos when I arrive.
Guards pour in from every entrance, some wounded, some carrying wounded. The braziers burn green-bright, casting everything in submarine hues. Rain lashes through the shattered windows—the storm that’s been building all night finally breaking, as if the sky itself wants to drown us.
I count heads as I push through the crowd. Forty defenders when the night started. Now—
Twenty-three. We’ve lost almost half our strength, and the real assault hasn’t even begun.
“Zoric!”
Aviora appears from the chaos, blood on her blades and a gash across her cheekbone that she doesn’t seem to notice.
Her hair has come loose from its knot, dark strands plastered to her face.
She moves toward me with that sharp-edged grace I’ve come to recognize, checking threats even as she closes the distance.
“The lower halls are flooded.” She stops in front of me, close enough that I can see the pulse jumping in her throat. “Water’s rising through the drainage channels, pouring up from the caves. I’ve never seen anything—”
“The curse.” I cut her off. “Oreth’s pulling the sea into the foundations. Filling every space he can reach.”
Her expression shifts. Processing. Calculating. “Then the lower levels are already gone. The armory, the stores, the—” She stops. “The coins. I threw them into the water near the Eastern Collapse. If the tide’s risen—”
“They’re part of the hoard now. The curse will have claimed them.”
“Claimed, or—” She grips my arm, her fingers digging in with surprising strength. “The plan. We needed the coins I had to throw into the harbor. Without them—”
“Without them, we find another way.” The words come out steadier than I feel. “We still have the coins in Dreadhaven’s vault. Forty-seven pieces. And we still have you.”
“Me.”
“The curse wants you. Thalira said you’re attuned to it, more than anyone else alive.” I meet her gaze, hold it. “That hasn’t changed.”
“No.” Her jaw tightens. “It hasn’t.”