I am not leaving.
But I need to understand the ritual. I need to know if there's a way to sever the pact that doesn't kill him. And I need to do all of this without him knowing what I'm doing, because if he finds out I've been in the lower archive he'll either shut me out entirely or try to manage what I know, and I cannot afford either.
I move to the archive. I bring a blanket this time, and a second lamp, and Oren's most recent notes on the theological texts he's been quietly sourcing from the black market on my instruction.
I read until the first hour past midnight. When I come to bed Sevareth is still awake, working at his desk, and he looks up when I come in
and I think: I know what you are. All of it. And I'm still here.
"Late," he says.
"Couldn't sleep," I say.
He nods and goes back to his papers and I get into bed and lie in the dark and think about entity pacts and forbidden rituals and the particular terror of caring about someone whose destruction is already in progress.
The terror is familiar. It's the same thing I felt every time I sent a family through the harbor channels. The same thing I felt every time Oren didn't come back on schedule.
I know what to do with it. I've always known.
You do the work anyway.
16
SEVARETH
The two men Draevik brings me are Vel'eth's. Their hands have the specific calluses of trained fighters who've spent years carrying blades they aren't supposed to have, and they are entirely unsurprised to find themselves in a Vhol'ir interrogation room, which tells me they expected capture as a possible outcome and were prepared for it.
Prepared. Not afraid.
I spend the first twenty minutes establishing that they should be afraid, which works as it always works, and at the end, I have the name of the Vel'eth intermediary who contracted them, the timeline of two planned follow-on actions, and the location of a safe house in the harbor district being used to stage additional operatives.
Standard. Clean. The kind of interrogation that requires precision rather than force — knowing exactly which question to ask, in exactly which order, at exactly which moment of maximum psychological exposure.
I have done this hundreds of times. I am good at it.
What I am not good at, tonight, is the part that comes after.
The second operative — younger, more frightened beneath the preparation, with the look of someone doing this for money rather than loyalty — gives me the safe house location and then says, with the particular desperation of someone trying to buy themselves something: "There's more. About the human woman. About what Lady Vel'eth has planned for her specifically."
Something shifts.
"Tell me," I say, and my voice is level, and the shadows in the corner of the room are not.
He tells me. It is not creative — targeted exposure, a manufactured scandal, a document campaign designed to strip Mireya of any legal standing before Vel'eth moves to have her removed from the capital entirely. Efficient. Patient. The way Nyzara Vel'eth does everything.
By the time he finishes, the shadows along the east wall have migrated to the center of the room and are moving in ways that have nothing to do with the single candle on the table, and the operative has stopped speaking and started pressing himself into the back of his chair.
"My lord," Draevik says, from the doorway. His voice is very controlled.
I know what he's telling me. I can feel the Maw pressing at the edges of my awareness — not the whisper it usually is, something louder, something that tastes like the anger I'm not letting myself feel and wants very much for me to let myself feel it. Wants me to let it help. It is always offering to help.
"Out," I say to Draevik, meaning the operatives.
"My lord?—"
"Get them out of this room."
He moves fast. Good man. The door closes and I am alone and the shadows are three feet from me now, drawn close like something that has been waiting for permission, and the angerunderneath the control is so much larger than I usually let it get that I don't trust what I'll do with it if I don't?—
