They moved like ghosts, five of them at the forefront and a shadowed circle of fighters shoved behind like a threat that would come down on anyone who got in their way. The moon had run out into a smudged mist; a wind with a metallic taste buffeted their cloaks and tugged at the ropes across their shoulders. The fortress brooded on the dark ridge in the distance like a crown melted from a king's head towers, crenellations, slow-burning watchfires that burned like red eyes scattered across the night. Lucian's banners streamed in the wind, but no shadow of a watchman showed along the outer walls. That, Julian's feeds had promised, was to be the lie.
Adriana tightened the straps on her pack and raked her hands through a snarl of hair. In spite of the scheme, the ledger, the false trails and Victor's lie, the vacuity of the act seemed pornographic: moving into the teeth of a man who believed he was inviolable.
Damian fell in step alongside her reflexively; it was their gravity. He regarded the ridge with calculated calm, but his hand never departed far from the gun suspended at his waist. "Stay in wall," he whispered. "Eyes open."
Elara proceeded on deadline a slender woman draped in disguise: a loose merchant's cape, a slumping sack of goods in her hands. She'd prepared her face for weeks hungry, exhausted, rehearsed remorse. She'd been given a name this evening: a beggar who took revenge and had come to bargain. In the silence between them, Adriana's fingers touched Elara's elbow for a solitary beat of encouragement. Elara met her eyes and nodded once, close and tight.
Julian knelt in dark gray along the ancient waterworks, his tablet shining with assurance. "I have eyes on three feeds," he whispered into the earpiece. "Loop will be four minutes. At T-minus three, I'll drop a blind. You locate the inner ring prior to the sensors spooling back online."
Four minutes. Enough time for a scalpel.
They moved down toward the southern post a ruined gate that the ledger had recorded as little used. A courier route. A place where supply wagons crammed their bellies up against the earth and left behind nothing but flattened grass. The breach would be small. The escape plan needed precise rhythm: Julian, timers; Elara, decoy; Damian and Adriana, the knife-edge.
They reached the gate. Damian deployed the breacher as if it was the first thing he'd ever done: right, silent, drilled. The charge breathed the wall open in the lightest of whispers. They passed through as if they were things not to be noticed.
Inside, it was as Lucian wanted: iron-scented halls and the light of distant lights fueled by sluggish machinery. The initial lantern they passed was circled in Julian's printout a sensor loop that would flash hollow if the feed had. Julian's voice in Adriana's ear was a thread, guiding. "Thirty seconds. Move."
The inner ring would have been a blur of men on patrol, yet the ledger had lied in the correct direction: fewer soldiers than Lucian's strength would suggest, precisely where the ledger had promised weakness. That was the reward Victor's coin had bought them a fact lost in theft and black markets. For the time being, their path did.
They arrived as breathing: cut, slip, shadow. Two guards fell to Damian's sword with a hasty efficiency of motion; Adriana hung in the wall and swallowed fear like breathing.
Then, at the third corridor, the scheme was foiled. A figure came around the bend early a wide-eyed young soldier. He saw movement. He screamed. The scream was a splintered sound, and the ledger's narrow window of time was shut.
"Now!" Julian screamed. He flung the blind down hard. Cameras stuttered. Doors jammed. The air twisted into momentary disarray.
They heaved and shifted and pounded the minutes into drumbeats. Every step was a victory. Adrian no, Adriana pulled the archive cabinet Julian had drawn up and hurled it open. Drives clinked inside like caged fireflies. She pushed the smallest one into her sleeve and felt the tiny heat of it against her. Names, ledgers, the structure of Lucian's machine it lived curled in the center of her hand like a folded heart.
But the corridor behind them ringing out with yelling and the sound of heavy boots pounding. There was a delay in the loop of the blind; someone had triggered an alarm panel that hadn't been on any schedule. Lucian's men were coming up like a tide; the bones of the stronghold began to creak.
"Out," gasped Damian. He shoved a crate into position as a temporary barricade, a move that cost them seconds. "Elara, the side go!"
Elara didn't hesitate. She produced a small ribbon from her sleeve a signal Damian had taught them: the merchant's call. She flung it down the far corridor, and like a moth to flame, two guards fell after it, curiosity getting the better of duty.
They edged by, and briefly they were outdoors in a courtyard lined with dark windows. The moon shone a pale, indifferent light over them. In the distance, the inner keep stood as a black tooth growing from darkness. Strings in the ledger assured a path through the granaries, across the catwalk, and into Lucian's private ring.
"Julian?" Damian's voice cut through static.
"Forty seconds," Julian said. His voice sounded far away, like the last voice you'd hear before a storm. "Pull. Pull. Pull."
They moved through the granaries, the air thick with the ghosts of things once barley and now the smell of oil for the foundry. Adriana felt the drive like a stone under her skin a small thing that would start a war. She saw her people in the crypt, battered faces, Damian's tired frown. She saw all of the names in the ledger she had yet to read. She saw Lucian's smile and how it curled her fists.
They reached the catwalk. The way narrowed to a thin ridge of wood suspended above an empty, dark chasm. Damian gripped her tight. "We cross quick. Stay in the middle."
They did.
Halfway down the runway, a scream wailed tinny high, metal, the sound that tore the sky apart. Julian's voice in her ear cut through static and then through a blasphemy: "Loop failed. Two minutes. Two minutes."
Two minutes was not twelve. Two minutes was time to slit a throat straight or for a blade to find a heart.
Down from the dormitory doors, a troop flowed like eels. Lucian's men pushed forward in raw precision. Somebody had labeled them: they were Lucian's favorites. The kind you reserved for the teeth. The ledger had bled them in ink.
"Hold," Damian growled, and slid forward like a loose shadow and collided with them. Steel sang and fists closed and men fell. Adriana fought at his side, blade whispering and blood spiking. For a moment they were geometry: movement colliding with movement, offense meeting defense in whirling turn. They shielded as one. The catwalk creaked. The sky yawned in their ears.
Then a shout: "Western wall! Knife!"
A man caught a flying knife in Damian's shoulder. He stumbled and cursed; the cut was shallow but it made a mouthful of pain. Blood oozed down his arm.
Adriana saw it and her insides turned to glass. Automaton, she sprang and crashed into the man who had thrown the knife. She took him down, hard, and during the movement felt something red and small thud into her side. Pain ripped, hot and deep, a clean white star forming beneath her ribs. She could taste iron. She thought: not yet.
Elara's voice broke, rough and hot alongside them. "Go! I hold!" Her hands embroidered in the forbidden chant Damian had prohibited the same forbidden sound which had burned the ash-beasts to ash. Her mouth moved to perform too ancient and dangerous for a woman so young, and the sound tolled like a bell clashing in a deep well.
An opening was left; three men rushed at Elara, but she replied to them with a blast of white flame, and for one moment of time, they were flung like straw. The forbidden curse broke her throat. Blood was in her mouth. She staggered, eyes becoming glassy with pain, but she held the opening.
"Run!" Damian ordered.
They set off. Feet thudded. Julian's voice urged them to keep going. The catwalk creaked under their weight and the thud of men behind them grew into a pack of wolves.
Beyond, a courtyard lay open like a throat, and in its center a man stood waiting as if he had been expecting them to arrive. Lucian calm, terrible, the black eye at the center. He did not rush. He did not shout. He simply stood there and watched them with a grin that was the smile of a man confident their hand would be last to fall.
Adriana staggered, pain a hammering white beat, and she gritted her teeth and rose. Damian stepped forward, sword raised, but Lucian raised a hand and the courtyard froze as if time had ceased at the toll of a bell. Ten men behind Lucian retreated and formed a ring, no longer assailants but onlookers.
"You arrived," Lucian remarked. His tone was as silky as oil against metal. "So genuine. So rowdy. So appallingly human."
Damian's glare could split rock. "Surrender, Lucian. Tonight is over."
Lucian laughed and the sound didn't ring back it cut them. "Ends? No. This is an opening movement. Look about you, Damian. You've bled. She has bled. And if you think I will fall because you've stolen documents and killed loyal dogs then your hubris is your death."
He stepped ahead, and the men behind him unfolded like drapes. One of them a lieutenant whose face Adriana had glimpsed once in a ledger photo lifted a thin staff and drew it through the air. Above them, the sky pulsed and the moon shifted as if in hearing.
Lucian's eyes came to rest on Adriana and remained there, interested. "You think you can kill my machine with an accounting book? You think you can best me with names?" He cocked his head, smiling. "You're children pretending to be emperors.".
Adriana's lips were dry, her ribs burning in pain. She recalled Damian's almost-confession in the chapel, the crypt, Elara's corpse cast aside and the way the chant had flowed through her like white fire through her breast. She was a coin spinning in mid-air and had to decide how to land: on war, on love, on blood.
She raised her chin. "We're not children," she said. Her voice was smaller than she felt but clean. "We are tired of your tyranny."
Lucian's smile widened. "Then let us begin properly." He gestured, and without warning, the men in the ring moved not to full attack, but to surround and hem them in. Advisors always prefer their prey to remain alive long enough to suffer.
Damian snapped, shattering the ring and thrusting Lucian's men out into the open. The remainder of the team poured in Julian on the flank, unleashing a technical wrath as he battled. The fighting was animal and raw. Blades grated against blades, armor crashed against armor, and through it all a figure glided with special beauty: Victor. He had been far back in the front for most of the push, but now he went through the melee spinning a sword with a grin. He struck this way and struck that way, and left men dying and living alike.
Adriana was beside Lucian, not because she had wanted to but because the world had pushed her there. Lucian moved like a slow greasy machine; however, he was alive. He arrived with a strike that Damian deflected, and for an instant they were a blur of motion, a deadly dance. Adriana's side hurt and she bit back on a cry; she could hear Julian's bellow behind her an instruction, a warning.
There was a cry. Fire danced from torches along the battlements. Pages of the book had sent them capering like words in a moth-filled air. Lucian applied the pressure point he'd been waiting for: Damian's eyes flashed once in Adriana's direction an unspoken warning glance and in that flash of attention a knife found the mortar of Damian's defense. He took it in the shoulder, crashing down to the ground on one knee with a sound that held something of a break.
Adriana's breath escaped. Time was condensed to a point. She sprang. If Damian went down, everything that she had built would come closer to destruction. She placed herself between the lieutenants and him and let the world become a blade.
A hand closed around her throat from behind. Iron, unyielding, not Lucian's but that of one of his lieutenants. She kicked, she scratched with her nails, and where she could, she hit. Vision constricted. She heard Elara's laugh as something torn asunder and then a sound a gunshot and the man at her throat fell.
She looked up.
Victor stood there, his hair full of smoke and his knife-like smile. He had fired the shot, something that was not unusual to him but unusual enough that his word could not be purchased on the basis of a single life saved.
Adriana's knees hurt to buckle. Damian bled, but stood living. Elara stayed where she was by the courtyard edge, the price of the forbidden chant written on her throat in ash and drool.
Lucian watched it all with a calm that made her skin crawl. "You fight with bravery," he said softly. "You fight with foolish bravery. But bravery does not make what I am otherwise.".
He turned on his heel as if the others were only a tasty interlude. "Take what you have," he instructed his men, amusement like a coin tossed. Let them run. Let them lament to their gods. They will never sleep."
They sprinted. The way back to the catwalk was a broken vow of pictures. Julian cursed, his face streaming with blood but triumphant in a small bitter manner. They burst through the cistern-way, the dark narrow tunnel, and when they vomited up on the distant alleyway, the ridge blazed fire behind them. The ledger was tightly wrapped in Damian's backpack, wrapped in oilcloth like a ritual.
They carried blood. They carried names. They carried a wound to present Lucian had touched them and Lucian had touched them in return.
On the outskirts of the city, once the hammering finally ceased and the woman who had been Elara struggled weakly and opened her eyes, Damian cradled her head as if it were a strange thing he loved. Adriana sat beside them, the ledger like a charred talisman between them.
Victor watched in the shade with a smile that was nothing and everything. Lucian had not been defeated. But the ledger had teeth; they had sunk into the heart of his business. They had ventured into the lair, pilfered a map of the monster, and left with a wound that they would bear.
And somewhere in the darkness above that ridge, Lucian's silhouette shifted like a promise slow, patient, the hunter who knew the form of his prey. He had measured out Damian and Adriana, and he would go about preparing his answer.
They existed now on borrowed time; every breath was dear, every alliance precarious. But far down under the ash and the blood, something hot and abiding smoldered: they had begun the war.
They would no longer keep it quiet.