The ponderous hydraulic door closed behind them with a finality that reminded Aralt of the internment vaults in the marathis caves north of his boyhood home. If the resounding thud echoing down winding brick and mortar corridors unnerved Alira, she did not show it, and he had to quicken his pace to catch her up. The rest of his company, their ranks bolstered by warriors and members of the local militia outraged at Penafull’s treatment of both Alira and Lian, fell in behind with silent resolve. Though he had given each—volunteer and career soldier alike—the opportunity to stay behind, not a one did. He had expected as much and refused to let it trouble him that he did not know what he was leading them into. Lian’s presence buoyed spirits, but of all of those now following him, he was the one Aralt had most wanted to leave on the other side of the door.

“You would rest better here,” he had told him as they gathered to make their exit. And I would rest better knowing you are here.

“I’m sure I’ll be fine,” Lian had chirped, eyes twinkling beneath a fringe of mussed hair. He looked over his shoulder at Penafull. “I’m not wanted here.”

“Don’t waste your time on fools like him. I saw you with the people here—with the children. You have a rare gift, Lian Kynsei, and one I’d like to see preserved. The hour’s late, lad. We’ll be moving quickly. There could be fighting. I can’t carry you the whole way,” he said. But he would have. He would have without hesitation. “You would be safer here.”

“Mayhap,” Lian told him, but it was the unspoken words that troubled Aralt the most as they set off to take what Alira humorously described as the scenic route. I might be safer, but you might not be.

If time had been against them before, it was doubly so now. No one mentioned that by the time they reached the junction it would be well past the time Tycho should have diverted the water. No one mentioned that the tunnel they were in was still dry. No one mentioned the obvious when they reached the junction and found that the pressure gauges still indicated that water was flowing precisely where they needed to be.

He crisscrossed the vault, taking stock of the other tunnels. Listening. For some time, he had been bothered by the sounds of movement behind them, only to realize they were not coming from behind, but from above. Still at a distance, but converging. Alira told him it was unlikely, that no one could fit through those conduits. Not unless they were running on all fours.

“Jeraviks?” Scanlin asked.

“I suppose. There are always jeraviks to contend with in the old lines, and they’ll be on the move if there are fires. They’re likely to run to the river.”

“Show me.” Aralt followed her around the vault as she pointed at tunnels, portals, and hatches. He cocked his head at the sound of scuttling and scratching, directionless, filling the passageways.

“You’re thinking about taking the tunnel to the river, aren’t you?”

“I’m looking for options.” If Tycho failed to bypass the system, they were going to be up to their chins in every sort of wastewater the city had to offer. He went back to the assortment of valves and gauges. “If we opened it now…”

“I don’t think we could if we wanted to. The pressure’s still too high. The water has to be diverted before we crank that wheel open, and then we need to close it up behind us because as soon as it opens, these tunnels are going to start flooding from four other directions.” She pointed to each in turn. “If we aren’t going to wait, then we need to go that way. Toward the river. At least there’s a way out at the end once we open the water gate.”

“Keep an eye on it,” he told her, trusting her assessment. “It isn’t quite dawn. We’ll give him a few more minutes.”

Scanlin followed as he walked away, eyes turned upward. The conduit. The walls. The floor.

“What is it, Wolf?”

He rubbed his hands together. “Nothing, I hope.”

Scanlin cocked an eyebrow. “Do I look so much a fool that ye needs be lyin’ to me? Ye’ve kenned something. What is it?”

“It’s probably nothing. Water rats in the pipes.”

“Water rats? Sweet Creator, Wolf, ’twill do nae good not to warn us if a knowin’s come upon ye. Trust your gift.”

“Consider yourself warned,” he said, slowly drawing Kynlan’s sword, turning in circles, listening. Every soldier around him did the same. Those with shields raised them. He shifted the sword in his grip, quieting that part of himself that perceived it was not his. “Someone’s coming, and I don’t think it’s reinforcements from Veryl.”

“Syr Tremayne? Should we be on our way toward the river?” Kolarin asked. The circles Aralt had noticed under his eyes earlier looked even darker in the lamplight. He might be on the mend, but he wasn’t at his best. “Jeraviks can be a pack of trouble.”

“Toothy trouble,” Telta agreed. “Worse than manti.”

“There’s something worse than manti?” Lian asked.

“There are a lot of things worse than manti,” she told him.

“It isn’t jeraviks.” And it was far too late to run. He felt their approach, a razor against his senses, the sound of their footfalls pattering from every direction, closing fast. The Naharasii were upon them.

A decade had passed since he had been in such proximity. Just the smell of them triggered repugnant memories he wished he could forget. In the light of day they had been repulsive enough. There, in close quarters, the effect of their hunched and wretched forms was suffocating. They swarmed like vermin, converging on the waterworks junction vault, blocking every escape route.

Aralt swept Alira and Lian to the rear of their company as the rest closed in, swords drawn. When the hatch opened—and by every one of the Seven Sea Lords, it had better open quickly—he wanted to be sure Alira and Shepherd Alinn could spirit Lian away. They would fight to the last to give them a chance to escape. It was difficult to tell in the poor light, but he thought it reasonable to assume that the Naharasii outnumbered them three to one. Someone tossed him a shield, and they closed ranks further. The enemy had yet to organize themselves into any attack formation he recognized, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t advance and once they did, there would be no holding them back. Among them were members of at least five clans, some of which had been rumored to be bitter rivals during the war in Tyrian. With any luck, they still were.

“They’re not much taller than I am,” Telta observed. Having no room to draw her bow, she had armed herself with blades. “I didn’t know they painted their faces.”

“Those aren’t their faces,” Aralt told her.

“But—”

“They wear the faces o’ their enemies,” Scanlin said. “The patterns tell the story o’ their victory.”

“I did not need to know that.”

The wretched warriors, malformed to a man, continued to squabble. Their language retained enough of the local northern dialect to be recognizable but was so heavily accented as to be almost unintelligible when so many spoke at once. Aralt had made it his business to learn what he could as a junior Sword. Like Lian, he had a gift for languages. Unlike Lian, he had only mastered a few. Naharasii carried complexity in intonation and glottal stops that always made his throat raw. He had hoped never to speak it again.

Two words stood out amid livid babble. Soul-touched. He looked down to where Lian had appeared between him and Scanlin. Shepherd Alinn pushed through the ranks to drag Lian back to relative safety. As if any place was safe.

“Please, kavsa, come with me.”

“There’s no hiding me.”

“Let us at least try!”

“What are they doing?” one of the younger warriors asked, his high voice betraying his nervousness. “Comparing recipes?”

“That isn’t true, is it?” Lian asked. “When you say ‘cannibals,’ you don’t really mean cannibals, right? They don’t actually eat people. Those are just stories to frighten children. Aren’t they? Aralt?”

He didn’t answer. He had seen things in his youth he would rather forget. Nightmarish things. Scalps and skins and the gnawed remains of the dead and the dying. Pillaged graves. They took to lighting funeral pyres in the manner of the Shirahnyn rather than risk the defilement of their comrades’ corpses.

“Aralt?” Lian prompted. “What are they wearing on their heads?”

“You should have stayed with Penafull and the others,” was all he could think to say.

One of the Naharasii drew a rattling breath through a nose broken so many times Aralt could only guess as to how his face had originally appeared. The man moved along their perimeter, just beyond the reach of the longest arm, sniffing as if to determine which of them was the freshest, or, he thought belatedly, unlike the others. It did not take him long.

The Naharasii stood well below his shoulder, but his weapon, a barbed spear some six feet long, made up for any lack in stature. By the ornaments hung around his neck and twisted in his hair, he was clearly a tribal leader, and though his hair was shot through with grey, he was far younger than appearances would suggest.

“Wolf eyes,” the warrior said, clicking his teeth as he spoke. “We know you. We remember. You stood as heaven wept and the fires died. You did not bleed.”

The morning of the decisive battle. His first command as Teren Glynn’s Second Sword. The dying fires—bonfires and burning pools of everlight—had burned Port Burverr and scorched acres upon acres of land around it. When it rained and the steam created a choking mist of ash and ember, the horde had panicked, thinking the sea had risen to swallow them.

“I did not bleed,” he said. “But marathis remembers Naharasii blood.” His marathis. His sword. Not his brother’s. He gripped the weapon tighter, infusing the song with his memories, perceiving a tonal change, an added chord. Increasingly the sword resonated with his soul. Beside him, Scanlin seemed to notice it as well. His First Sword drew an almost inaudible breath.

The chief—the Horned Moon tribe if he was not mistaken—snorted and spat, great globs of nasal mucus spraying the unlucky. He continued stalking their perimeter, his colorless, vein-filled eyes peeling away the courage of the youngest members in Aralt’s company.

One of the others stalked forward, conferring with the first man. “That one spoke to heaven.” But it wasn’t Lian he was pointing at. It was Scanlin Ross.

They had not, yet, singled out Lian. As one, Aralt and Scanlin shifted until their shoulders were almost touching, eclipsing Lian behind them. The words nonetheless drew a reaction from the crowd. Murmurs traveled like a wave over the horde. Fear. Fear was valuable. He would only have moments in which to exploit it.

“Heaven’s eye will turn away if you return to your mountain.”

“Heaven,” the second man said as he stepped forward, “brought us.”

A lesser chief, but a greater man, a head and a half taller than the first, his back straighter, his teeth…sharper. By day’s end, he would command more than he had upon his arrival.

“You mistake the sky for heaven. The sky is only the air you breathe. Heaven is—is…”

“Blue.”

That single word, spoken by Scanlin in his low, lilting voice, sent the lot of them scampering. Teeth clacked and spears shook, bones and other ornaments clattering. Even the lesser chief put distance between himself and Aralt’s company. The adage, ‘only heaven is blue,’ was as ingrained in Naharasii culture as their own even if their interpretations were different. Aralt remembered how they had used that knowledge to their advantage a decade before. Blue. They had dipped their swords in some noxious concoction Scanlin and Teren had dreamed up so that they might appear blue in the moonlight, blue like the light of heaven, wielded in their hands. Blue, like Scanlin’s eyes.

“His eyes, his eyes…”

“Heaven’s light…”

“Lies,” the lesser chief snarled. He swung around and hissed at them. “Lies…”

“Lies are what brought you here,” Aralt said, his back tight with the tension filling the air around him. “The ones that offered you heaven will only deliver hell. What did they promise you?” What could they possibly want?

The leader of the Horned Moon tribe peeled away the mask of skin on his face and licked narrow, blackened lips. A few of the others laughed, low huffs like one whose lungs were filled with poison. Hunger. And revenge. Everyone knew the stories, that the peoples of the north had driven this ruined race of flesh-eating demons into the desolation from which they came. Had posted watchtowers and warning beacons that stretched for leagues, guarding worrisome cataracts, places where the Naharasii might cross. And cross they did. Wave after wave, year upon year, be it hunger or sport, the Naharasii sought to assert their dominion over the fertile Kraeleen Valley—their hunting grounds. The people therein the hunted. Reclaiming the west side of the fjord was strong enough motivations to drive the tribes together and lonn Tirehl had found a way to convince them, then given them wings.

But Aralt wasn’t about to give in. Words were power, and he intended to wield his with as much might as he could manage. When the Naharasii stopped talking, it wouldn’t matter how sharp their swords were.

“Have you made this Shirahnyn who does not even walk among you your chief?”

“He walked. He talked. He promised.”

“Through another’s lips.” It made them restless, that bit. Not that he could fault them. He thought of Lian’s tormented visage as someone, something, forced itself into him. Using him to see. “Were promises made to all of you? The same to each tribe? To the Sleeping Eye? The Clenched Fist? The moon tribes? Did he promise you all the same? Who will divide it?”

That made them mutter amongst themselves, their clicking and chittering like angry crabs along the shore. Individual tribes pressed closer together, casting disparaging glances at other groups. Doubt and distrust. Powerful weapons, and ones he had no compunction about using.

He spat. He recalled that they respected that. That it demonstrated passion. Resolve. He’d have done so again, but his throat was so dry he could barely speak as it was. “Do you really think he will share? That any of them will share?”

“They have other tastes,” one of them said, and the seeds of distrust seemed to wither under their laughter and the grinding and thrusting of their hips.

“They will never keep their promises,” he told them quickly, shifting his gaze from one to the other. Give them all a good look. Most of them recoiled at the sight of his green eyes. If blue was the color of heaven, he wondered what they thought green was. “Did lonn Tirehl share Askierran with the fleet that burned the city of faith? They were deceived. He led them to the Sea of Bones, and their ships burned in the desert. They fought and they died, and they got nothing—not even honor. Akahan consumes all. He rises from Har-Kazahn. He sets the wind on fire. There won’t be anything—or anyone—left.”

A murmur of disbelief went through the crowd at the mention of the burning mountain situated deep in the Naharasii wilderness. Once more they began to argue. He had touched a nerve. He glanced back at Alira standing near the gauges and valves. Shepherd Alinn and two of the city guards that had abandoned Timerynt Penafull wrestled with the valve wheel. She rolled her hands. Keep going. He raised an eyebrow. Keep going? Keep going how? Not that he had another choice. Either Tycho had failed in his mission, or they were betrayed. He needed more time.