FIVE
IVALYS
Gravebind at ground level is worse than the view from Inkwright’s Rest.
We move fast through streets that narrow and twist without logic. His axes are back on his belt, but his hands stay near them, fingers flexing. I keep pace two steps behind, my brother’s groceries abandoned on his stripped-bare landing, my marked palm throbbing with every heartbeat.
The city swallows us.
Alleys branch from alleys. Overhead, laundry lines and jury-rigged bridges connect buildings that lean toward each other like conspirators sharing secrets. Gas lamps flicker at intervals too far apart to be useful, their light swallowed by shadows that seem to push back with intent.
Every instinct I have sayswrong direction.We should be going to the authorities, to someone who can help, to anyone who might know where my brother is. But Gravebind doesn’t have authorities—not ones that aren’t already owned by the Ledger Master. The city runs on debt, and debt runs on fear, and fear runs on the massive orc ahead of me whose scarred back I’m trusting for reasons I can’t articulate.
“Faster.” His voice comes back to me, low, pitched to carry no farther than my ears. “The Ledger Master will have felt the contract shift.”
“I’m going as fast as?—”
“Faster.” Not a request.
I dig deep and find speed I didn’t know I had. My lungs burn. My calves ache. The cobblestones are slick with something I don’t examine, and twice I nearly go down before catching myself on walls that leave my palms gritty with old mortar.
Rathok doesn’t slow. Doesn’t look back. But I notice how he chooses his route—through buildings that shouldn’t connect, down passages I’d have walked past a thousand times without seeing. He pushes through a door that looks like a wall, cuts through someone’s storeroom, exits into a courtyard I’ve never seen, despite living three districts away for years.
He’s done this before. Not the running—the hiding.
The thought is both reassuring and unsettling.
We cross into the Ashmark district—I recognize the black-stained brick, the permanent residue of the tannery fires that burned here a generation ago. The buildings are tighter, meaner, pressed together like teeth in a rotting jaw. The air tastes of old smoke and chemicals that never quite washed away.
Rathok stops.
So suddenly that I nearly crash into his back. He holds up one fist—wait—and I freeze, barely breathing, while he reads the darkness ahead with senses I can’t match.
Three seconds. Five. Ten.
“Clear.” He moves again, but slower now. Deliberate. He ducks beneath a collapsed archway, through a gap between two buildings so narrow, his shoulders scrape both walls, and into a dead-end alley that stinks of rust and something sour beneath.
Not a dead end. The back wall has a gap—a drainage pipe three feet across, the iron grate pulled aside and leaned againstthe brick. Rathok folds himself through it with a grace that shouldn’t be possible for someone his size.
I follow. The pipe opens into darkness that resolves, as my eyes adjust, into a crawlspace beneath a building. Packed earth floor. Low ceiling thick with cobwebs. The smell of damp and old stone and something faintly chemical—the tang of ink, of contract magic, seeping up from somewhere far below.
“We can stop here. Briefly.” Rathok moves to the far wall, checks something I can’t see—running his fingers along the stone, feeling for cracks or sigils or threats. “The wards above us are thick enough to muddy his sight. He won’t pinpoint us, but he’ll know the general area.”
“How long?”
“Long enough to give you a small break.”
I sink to the packed earth. My legs give out the moment I stop demanding they work, trembling so hard the vibration travels up through my spine. I wrap my arms around my knees and try to breathe through the fear that’s been chasing me since I opened my brother’s door and found it empty.
Rathok stays standing. Or as close to standing as the low ceiling allows—he’s bent at the waist, head ducked, his massive frame compressed into a space meant for drainage, not orcs.
“You said you’d explain the rest.” I keep my voice even. Controlled. The way my mother taught me before I understood why control mattered. “About my brother. About what the Ledger Master actually wants.”
He doesn’t deflect. Doesn’t soften.
“Your brother didn’t stumble into that contract. He was steered toward it—a scribe who worked for the Ledger Master, terms designed to fail, a debt that was never meant to be repaid.” His voice comes low, careful, each word placed like a stone in a wall. “The contract was bait. Gror was bait. The Ledger Masterhas been hunting your mother’s children since she died, waiting for one of you to manifest what she passed down.”
Manifest.The word settles over me like cold water. “He wanted me to find the contract,” I say. “He wanted me to touch it.”
