“They will notice,” Dreven points out, rather unnecessarily. “They will come for you.”
“Will they?” I ask seriously. “Because I’ve always been able to beat them, even with diluted slayer power.”
“Have you?” Dastian asks in the same tone I used. “Or did they just let you think that?”
His words give me pause. Great, big, annoying pause.
Fucker.
I swallow the urge to smack Dastian and look back at Tabitha. “Fine. We do it now.”
“Good girl,” she says, like she’s praising a dog that didn’t bite the postman. “The Chamber is warded six ways to Sunday. I can get you through. Then you will need order,notchaos.” She shoots Dastian a fierce stare. “Let’s move.”
We cut across the green, the rain turning sideways. I don’t bother hooding up. If I’m in between and the village can’t see me, the weather can get stuffed. Tabitha walks like a woman who owns every step. Dastian keeps pace with me, crackling quietly, and Voren ghosts behind us, the temperature dropping to church-not-warmed-since-1962.
My skin crawls as we push through the doors of the shop. The Oath Chamber sits under the public room, under the sanctified circle where they pressed oil to my forehead and told me I was chosen.
Yeah, chosen to be syphoned. Arseholes.
We descend the stairs, and I suddenly wonder why we are trusting her. What if she is walking us straight into a trap?
Tabitha stops at an antechamber door that I’ve never seen before, and plucks a bobby pin out of her hair. She flicks it once. It becomes a thin, precise key. She slots it into the lock. The wards on the wood hiccup. The door opens with a sigh that sounds personally offended.
“Neat trick,” Dastian says.
“Basic order magic,” she says, already moving. “You take a thing and tell it what it’s for.”
“Why did I never see that door before?” I ask.
“Creatures on the mortal realm cannot.”
Makes sense. As much as any of this does.
We descend. The air thickens. The walls sweat old vows. The circular room at the bottom is empty.
Tabitha skirts the edge of the visible circle and toes a specific tile. “Here.” The slab looks like all the others. It isn’t. The grout around it is too perfect.
“Step back,” I say.
She does. I draw my blade and slide the point into the seam. The stone resists, then yields with a little cough. Dreven’s shadows slip under and lift. The floor comes away in one clean plate.
Below, the engine purrs.
It isn’t cogs and levers. It’s a net. A lattice of fine, silver lines strung over a dark well, anchored to iron pegs hammered into the bones of the room. Jars sit in niches—smoke trapped under wax, old breaths, old names. Every line hums in a frequency I recognise because it is inside me. My light answers like a dog that hears its name called by the wrong mouth.
Voren’s voice goes very quiet. “They built a syphoning net on a grave.”
“Of course they did,” I say, rage narrowing my world until the edges go clean. “How do I break it?”
“Not with chaos,” Tabitha says, eyeing Dastian, who lifts his hands in innocent outrage. “It’ll backlash into the village.”
“Not with brute shadow,” Dreven adds, crouching down and reading the pattern. “It will chew and reweave. You need to pull the master line.”
I kneel next to him and stare into the web. “How do we know which it is? They all look the same?”
“They don’t,” Tabitha corrects, crouching beside me with a knee crack that sounds far too mortal for an immortal witch. “Look with your power, not your eyes. Order hides in plain sight, but it always has an anchor.”
I narrow my gaze. I stop trying to see the silver threads and start trying tofeelthem. Most of them buzz like angry wasps—stolen power, agitated and trapped. But one doesn’t buzz. It sings. A low, miserable note that vibrates right down to my boots. It’s the only line that isn’t shaking, holding the entire lattice taut with a grim sort of determination.
