37. Aven
Aven
Ellis remembers the tower in pieces. The first memory gives me the north gate and the scrape of a ruined family crest. The second gives me old brick under newer stone, silver buried where roots should have grown, and a service road that drops below the first ward line before the building can notice a body moving toward it.
The third makes Ellis flicker so hard the air around him snaps cold, and I have to press one hand flat to the floorboards until Vera’s library stops tilting under me.
Cain is still in the bond, but not the way he should be. What reaches me now is his terror smoothed until it almost knows how to impersonate peace. I hold on to the difference because the difference is Cain.
I repeat what Ellis gives me, as Ira turns it into marks on the map.
"He says the first gate faces north," I tell Ira, keeping my voice steady because if I let it shake, the spirits near the shelves lean closer.
"Black iron. Family crest on the center, but scraped down.
Damaged enough that the shape looks wrong unless you know what it was. "
Ira marks the gate. His sleeves are shoved to his elbows, and there are iron filings caught in the dark hair on his forearm.
He hasn't stopped moving since Cain was taken.
When he isn't drawing, he checks a weapon.
When he isn't checking a weapon, he rewrites a route.
When he isn't doing either, his eyes cut to me, to Soren, to the windows, to the door.
Soren moves behind him with an armful of books and a face so composed it makes my skin crawl.
He should be snapping at the books. He should be insulting Vera's shelving system or threatening the table for daring to have corners.
He should be vibrating with exhaustion and spite, because that's the Soren-shape grief usually takes before it finds somewhere to land.
Instead, he moves too neatly. Book to bag.
Wire to table. Chalk to cloth pouch. He checks items off a list in handwriting that looks sharper than normal, each mark quick and severe.
His sweater hangs off one shoulder, and there's a folded edge of paper tucked too deep into his inner pocket, the corner visible only when he bends.
I see it but I don't have room to understand it because Cain's absence burns too hot.
Ellis looks toward the window as if the city outside is only a curtain.
His face has gone thin around the mouth, more like Cain's than it should be when he says, "There's a service road behind the third mill.
The family used it when they didn't want the Church delegates seen at the front gate.
It curves near the old water tower, then drops.
The road is lower than the street. That matters. "
I repeat it, and Ira draws the road with one hard stroke. "Why does it matter?"
Ellis's gaze flickers to me. He does that when he knows the answer will hurt in a way he can't soften. I hate that I already know his tells. I hate that I know any dead man this well.
"The wards are buried in the slope," I say, because Ellis is speaking too fast and the images are coming with the words now: wet earth, old brick, something silver threaded under roots that never survived long enough to become trees.
"Anyone coming from above trips the outer line early.
The service road runs under it for the first stretch. Less visible."
"Less visible is not the same as safe," Ira says.
"No one here thought it was."
The sentence comes out colder than I mean it to, but Ira doesn't react.
He only marks the road, then circles the place Ellis indicates beneath the tower.
Soren comes to the table and sets down a silver-bound ledger with more care than he's given anything else in the room.
The book gives off a low, hungry hum when it touches the wood.
"Siphon infrastructure," Soren says. His voice is too smooth. "Lower level. Older than the visible foundation. The blood-tether network feeds through there, and if we don't interrupt it before we reach Cain, Adaro can make him a weapon against us."
Cain sitting on silk sheets with someone else's calm pressed into his bones.
Cain's hands resting on his thighs because the leash told them where to be.
Cain's mind screaming somewhere behind a face trained to look composed.
I press my palm harder to the floorboards, and the authority under my skin stirs in answer.
The spirits feel it.
They've been gathered around the edges of the library since the bond screamed.
I told them to stand, and they stood, which solved one problem and opened another.
They wait near shelves, corners, windows, and the doorway, human shapes and almost-human shapes and things that have never worn bodies at all.
Some are from the shop. Some came when Cain was taken and haven't left.
Some are drawn by Ellis. Some are drawn by me, and that's the part I don't like naming.
Ellis moves along the map, and Ira follows.
I keep relaying: upper room, narrow window, inner stair, guard rotation at the east corridor, old chapel beneath the foundation, Adaro's operating level, reservoir chambers where the impure magic knots thick enough that even Ellis struggles to describe it without breaking into static.
Each detail feels less like information and more like a bruise pressed into the table.
Ellis remembers the tower as a victim. Cain knows it as a cage.
Ira reads it as a battlefield. Soren sees it as a system to break.
I feel all of those things at once and still have to make my mouth work.
Soren passes behind me, close enough that his magic brushes the back of my neck. Like a lamp turned up too high behind frosted glass. I catch his sleeve before he can move away. He looks down at my hand, then at my face. "Cain first," he says quietly.
I hadn't asked the question out loud. "I know," I say.
His smile is small. "Good. Keep knowing that."
Then he slips away, and the spirits nearest him go silent in a different way than before. I file that away beside the folded paper in his pocket and the way Ira tracks him every time he crosses the room. Later, I tell myself.
Ira sets the pencil down. "The map is enough to start. We need eyes inside before we move."
The dead answer before I do.
I feel them in the floor, in the shelves, in the cold places between the walls.
The ones already here and the ones beyond the shop, waiting under pavement and church stone, caught in old foundations, tucked into alleys where people prayed and were not answered.
When Cain's terror tore through me, the light inside me rose and the dead knelt.
I've been trying not to think about how easy it was.
How good it felt for half a breath before horror caught up.
The Church would use that feeling as proof.
The thought makes my stomach turn.
"I can call them," I say.
Ira looks up slowly. "By call, you mean ask."
"Yes."
Soren's hand pauses over the containment tin.
Ira's eyes remain on mine, and there's no accusation in his face, which somehow makes the question heavier.
He's spent his life around people who command in the name of protection.
He knows exactly how little distance there can be between necessity and control.
"I mean ask," I say again, because the dead are listening too. "No binding. No pulling. No orders dressed up as holy purpose."
Ellis's expression hardens. "Some of them won't understand an invitation."
"Then I'll explain it until they do."
"And if they refuse?"
"Then they refuse."
The words are simple. They don't feel simple.
Cain is in a cage. Cain is being forced calm.
Cain, who's held me through my worst nights, who taught me what silence could feel like when it wasn't punishment, who let me put my bloody hands in his and didn't let go.
There's a part of me willing to use every tool in the world to get him back.
That part looks at the spirits and sees reach, numbers, access, invisible hands inside a tower built to ignore the living.
The Church has done worse with prettier words.
I push myself to my feet, and the room goes still around the movement. My knees object. My chest aches where Cain should be. Soren starts toward me with the water glass, then stops when Ira touches his wrist.
"I need space," I say.
Ira moves first. He clears the center of the library without argument, shifting the smaller table back, rolling up the edge of the rug, and pushing a stack of Vera's journals out of reach.
Soren sets the water on the main table, then adds a salt dish, a piece of chalk, and a strip of silver wire, because even when he's lying through his teeth about something, he can't stop preparing for disaster.
"You don't have to make this clean," Soren says, too quietly for the whole room. "Just make it yours."
That almost breaks me.
I sit on the floor in the space Ira cleared, legs folded beneath me because cross-legged makes my hip ache.
Ellis stands in front of me. Ira takes position behind my right shoulder.
Soren stays near the table, one hand on the map, the other resting lightly over the pocket where that folded paper hides.
The bond presses beneath my ribs, carrying the shape of Cain’s body being made quiet while his fear keeps trying to rise.
I answer it with my own breath.
I won't pray to a system that taught men how to turn souls into fuel. I let the celestial magic rise, but I don't sharpen it. I don't make it a hook. I open it like a window.