29. Corrine
CORRINE
The stair goes down in pieces it did not have an hour ago. A step is missing where there had been one. The fire Varek set beneath the foundations has eaten into something it should not have reached, and Leoric's weight shifts on my shoulder every time his right foot lands.
He doesn't pretend the bleeding isn't bad.
He doesn't ask me to slow. He moves like he does through everything—pain handled as a door he chooses to walk through, on purpose, narrow—and I match him because dropping back would force him to wait, and waiting in this corridor is how Varek gets his back shaft.
"The prison chambers open south," I say, smoke pressing voices small. "He'll take them. The service shaft is in the back wall."
"He won't reach it."
"He thinks he will."
"That's how we have him."
The corridor below is warmer than the one above.
The cells we passed coming up have started to take heat at the floor.
Somewhere behind us I left a whittled bird the size of my thumb wedged in a seam.
I didn't pick it up because it was a decision I wasn't ready to make. I leave it again now by walking past.
At the second turn, the floor sounds off. Hollow under the boot. I shift our weight to the wall side and Leoric makes a small sound I pretend I didn't hear.
Drogan's original plan showed a low arch under the cell row, one that comes out behind the administrative store. I slow at the lintel.
"Tell me what you see," Leoric says, when I slow at the arch.
"Pitch on the lintel. They set it here for a reason. He doesn't plan to come back through."
"Then we don't either."
I duck us under. He has to bend further than I do, and pain shows at his mouth when the bad side pulls.
He steadies against me. He's been doing it since the stair—whatever weight he can spend on me instead of stone, he's spending.
I don't know how to hold that without putting it into words, and putting it into words would slow us, so I hold it where it is.
We come up behind the administrative store.
The door stands open. The lamp is lit. Varek has not been quiet about this room.
He's in the prison chambers beyond. I hear him before I see him—the case hitting the table, then his voice low and quick to whoever.
One guard. The other will be at the service shaft, holding it for him.
Leoric eases off my shoulder onto the lintel and motions me forward.
He would go first if he could. He can't. We've both already decided this.
I step through. It's the room with the drain.
Of course it is. He has the lid off a brazier set in the floor and is feeding tablets of pitch into it, and the heat coming off it is the only honest thing in the chamber.
The black case lies open on the table at his elbow.
Two of the original execution orders are already in his hand, half-tipped toward the flame. He sees me before the guard does.
"Corrine." He says my name. "I had hoped not to have you in this room with me."
"You hoped wrong."
"You can't broadcast from down here. The relay above is gone."
"There's an administrative relay in this chamber. Bolted to the south wall. You had it sealed when the cells were active. You forgot you didn't pull it."
His eyes don't move to the wall. He knows where it is. He simply hadn't expected me to.
"It won't change anything." The page is still tipped toward the brazier.
"The story is already in their mouths. Put twenty pages through every crystal in Protheka and they'll call it forgery.
Peace between your kind and mine is the lie, Corrine.
I am the corrective. The world only offers slow death or fast."
"Drop the page."
"No."
Leoric steps through behind me. The guard moves toward him, and Leoric puts him on the floor with one short stroke. He keeps his palm against the wall afterward. He won't be standing in a minute. I cross the chamber.
Varek tilts the page lower toward the brazier, watching me. I don't run. Running tips the page into the flame. I walk to him. Varek lowers it another inch. The corner browns. Curls. The first thread of smoke lifts from it.
My body moves before fear can finish speaking.
I close my hand around the burning edge and wrench it up.
Pain opens white and clean across my palm.
Varek does not let go. Men like him never release anything unless they can sell the release as mercy.
He twists the page, trying to tear it. I catch his wrist with my other hand and drive it sideways into the iron lip of the brazier.
It goes through him. Through me. Sparks spit up between us and bite my sleeve.
"Careful," he says, almost smiling. "You'll burn it yourself."
I hold still. Harder than pulling. Harder than striking.
The page smokes between us, the heat chewing at my skin while every instinct screams to snatch, tear, win.
I fold the burning corner against my palm and smother it with flesh.
I nearly make a sound. Varek's smile thins.
Leoric says my name once, low and lethal.
"No," I tell him, though my eyes stay on Varek. "Not yet."
Varek pulls again. This time I move with him.
Not against the force. With it. I step in so his elbow jams against his own ribs, and he cannot use the full length of his arm.
Then I hook my fingers into his sleeve seam and drag his wrist down onto the brazier rim.
Bone meets iron. His grip breaks, and I take the page.
He underestimated me. I put the page back into the case. I close the lid with my burned hand shaking against the clasp. Varek still has the rest.
He sees me glance. His fingers tighten around the second handful, and for one, vicious second I understand he may burn them anyway, not because it wins, but because men like him would rather leave ash than evidence.
Leoric moves then. Not far. He can't. But the blade reaches Varek's throat before Varek's hand reaches the brazier again.
"Enough," Leoric says.
Varek looks at him, and the smile he gives is almost pity. "You can barely stand."
"Then do not waste what little patience I have left."
Blood is running through Leoric's fingers at his hip.
The blade doesn't shake. I reach for the second handful.
Varek doesn't release it at once. His eyes stay on Leoric's, testing the distance between wound and will.
Leoric presses the blade in just enough for Varek to feel the answer, and the papers come free.
I take the second handful, then the third. Page by page. Not cleanly. Not easily. The brazier eats nothing. The heat off it stays unfed.
"You think this is the ending," Varek says, quiet.
"No. This is the part of the ending where you stop writing it."
I turn before he can answer. The case is heavy, the page inside it, and the room is already shifting under us. Leoric keeps Varek at blade point while I cross to the south wall, past the fallen chair, past the brazier still breathing heat into the dark.
The relay is where I said it would be: south wall, low, bolted, dust-caked, the seal split with age.
I press my palm to the housing. It coughs, then lights.
Two paired administrative crystals, built into the old command chain.
Garrisons. Border posts. Settlements that never tore the relays out because that was how they knew when soldiers were coming.
I lift my own crystal beside the housing. I pair them by touch. I have done this once before. I look at Varek. He isn't moving. The fight has gone out of him the way it goes out of men who counted on a single throw and made it badly.
"This is Corrine again." My voice goes into the housing.
"I am broadcasting from beneath the Blackwater fortress.
The man beside me is Senator Varek Noctryn.
The case on this table contains the original execution orders for the prisoners murdered in the lower cells of this fortress in the months before the fire.
It contains the perimeter directive that sealed the gates.
It contains correspondence between Senator Noctryn and Gideon Valecrest of the Thornwall rebellion arranging the attack three months in advance. "
I read the names. I read the dates. I read the lots—counted lots—and I keep my voice the way Leoric taught me to hold my hands at the picket line: steady, because steady is the only thing they can't argue with.
I don't read it all. I read enough that no clerk in any garrison can pretend it wasn't said.
When I lower the crystal, the chamber is quieter than it should be.
The brazier still burns. The relay still lights.
I don't tell myself it's enough. It isn't. Tomorrow some captain will call it forgery.
Some senator will call it a human plot. Some settlement won't have heard it at all because their relay died ages ago and no one came back to fix it.
The work of this morning will go on for years, and some of it will fail, and some of the dead will stay slandered no matter what I say into a crystal beneath a fortress.
But it is out. The truth has left this room. It is in rooms I will never enter, in mouths I will never hear, and Varek does not get to take it back. I turn.
"You felt nothing," I say, low against his temple. "Before. You told me once."
"For seven years."
"And now?"
"Now too much. All at once. Since you." His head tips against mine. "I didn't know I was numb until you made it stop."
I close my eyes for one breath. Then I open them, because Varek is still in the room.
"The stairs," I say.
Leoric shifts the blade from Varek's throat to the space beneath his ribs and forces him toward the door.
"Slowly," he says. "You wanted witnesses. You can be one."
I take the case against my chest and follow them out, my burned hand locked around the handle. Not walking. Not running. Carrying the thing they burned a country to bury.