The bracelet closed over his wrist, the sound echoing across the chamber in the sudden stillness. The energy around them seemed to shift for a second.
The band shrank, tightening around the scholar’s wrist until it seemed to meld with his flesh. It shimmered with what Linn might have believed was the ancient magic or sorcery that her elders had spoken of. It looked as though an entire ocean had come alive in that band.
The scholar had collapsed against the wall. He’d covered his face with his hands, and his shoulders shook with sobs.
Sorsha knelt by him. In a motion that could almost be described as tender, she lifted her blade to his throat and murmured words in his ear. Linn could only hear the man’s sobs ofnen, nen, nen—the Bregonian word forno,she had learned—pounding a desperate fear into her chest.
Sorsha grasped his wrist and turned to the girl. With the casualness of slitting an envelope, she drew a gash across the girl’s neck. The girl gave a muffled moan as blood pooled and began to seep crimson.
Sorsha pressed the scholar’s searock band to the girl’s blood.
The effect was instant. The girl jerked as though every nerve in her body had been drawn taut. Her eyes widened and veins bulged from her forehead as she opened her mouth in a scream.
The scholar tilted his head back, lips parted in what resembled equal parts ecstasy and equal parts pain. The girl’s blood, Linn noticed with horror, had stopped dripping; instead, it seemed to be flowingintothe searock band. The veins in the scholar’s wrist began to turn black, spreading up his arms and to his neck, bleeding into the whites of his eyes like ink to parchment.
It was over in a moment. The gold-haired girl sprawled on the ground, her skin pale like wax paper. It was her eyes, though, that would come back to haunt Linn: utterly empty, as though her soul had gone.
Monsters,King Darias had said.There are monsters beneath my floors.
The scholar was slumped against the wall, trembling violently. And as he did so, the glass bottles and containers on the shelves began to shake, too, filling the entire chamber with an ominous thrumming that grew louder and louder.
Sorsha’s face cracked into a smile. She crooned something into the scholar’s ear. In response, he covered his face with a hand and raised the other.
Glassware exploded all around them, splintering into thousands of fragments that arced through the air. For a moment, everything seemed frozen in time: the glittering shards, Sorsha’s mouth parted in wonder, the scholar’s face slack with terror.
And then it all came crashing down.
Amid the shower of glass, Sorsha took the scholar’s hand, gently stroking the searock band.
And then she slit his throat.
The scholar’s arm dropped to the floor, the searock band clanging as it fell off and rolled to a stop. Slivers of darkness writhed across its surface.
Sorsha picked up the band. Even her movements were tempered, as careful as though she were holding a newborn infant. “The siphon is ready,” she said. She spoke in Cyrilian now.
It was then that Linn saw something stir in the very back of the chambers, outside the glow of the lamps. She’d thought there was no one else in here with them, but the overwhelming amounts of blackstone here had blocked her connection to the air currents in this room.
A figure stepped forward, and Linn felt her knees grow weak.
“Godhallem, then.” Kaïs’s voice was colder than ice.
Sorsha cackled. Carefully, she looped the searock band—the siphon, as she’d just called it—onto her belt. “Oh, Kaïs, you forget, we have adearfriend to find first. A certain little Blood Bitch.”
Kaïs’s face was emotionless. “Very well.”
“What a good soldier you make,” Sorsha crooned. She slunk past him, stroking a finger along his chin in an insolent gesture that Linn had never thought he would tolerate.Do not do this,she thought, pleading silently for him to move, to lash out.Fight back.“Even dogs know to be obedient once they’ve tasted pain.”
Kaïs remained standing, still as a statue carved of stone.
Sorsha slid her bloodied dagger into its sheath and turned. “Come, then,” she said as she moved toward the doors, her steps clipping sharply. “We have afeastto attend at eight bells.”
Linn shrank back as Sorsha swept past the spot where she was hiding. Her heart was pounding so fast in her chest, she thought it would burst. Under any normal circumstances, a yaeger would easily have sniffed her out, and she would have been discovered. But Kaïs must not have sensed her Affinity because of the blackstone in this place. It must have blocked his power as much as it did hers.
For a moment, Kaïs paused right before the doors, his muscles tensed in a way that she’d grown to read. He began to turn his head, as though to turn toward her, but then gave himself a small shake, stepped forward, and disappeared through the doors.
Linn didn’t lower her dagger until long after the echoes of their steps faded.
Ana felt as though her entire world had shifted. “The artifactstealsAffinities,” she breathed, the words sounding surreal even as she spoke them aloud.
