Two dozen knights lined Valor, armed with spears, their helms donned. They wore green silk over their armor, each embroidered with a roaring lion. At night they looked inhuman, unfeeling, in service to their queen and country.
“That is too many guards to bribe,” Dom said dryly from beneath his hood.
“I don’t plan to use a bridge,” Sorasa replied with equal bite.
“Do you intend to swim in that . . . substance?” he said, sneering at the fetid canals.
Before she could spit a retort at the Elder, Corayne did it for her. “Clearly there’s some kind of tunnel,” she said softly. Her eyes darted to the Konrada, then the palace. “There’s more below us. In the Old Cor ruins.”
“Yes,” Sorasa replied stiffly.
She glanced at the girl, looking her over again. In Lemarta, Corayne had seemed unremarkable, another daughter of the Long Sea, with a sun-kissed face and salt-tangled hair. Smart, curious. Restless, maybe, but what girl of seventeen is not? There’d been only a flicker of something in her. It burned now, a candle catching light. And Sorasa could not say what it meant.
“There used to be a stadium here, where the Cors raced their chariots on sand, or staged navy battles on the flooded grounds,” Sorasa explained in a low voice. “Only a sliver remains, at the east end of the palace. But the foundation, below us—below the canals, even—it’s a maze of tunnels, some decades old, some two thousand. Many burned when the Old Palace fell; others have collapsed or flooded since the days of Old Cor. But not all.”
Corayne narrowed her eyes at the Konrada again, looking to its roots rather than its pinnacle. The wall dedicated to Immor faced them head on. The great god of time and memory held the moon and sun in his hands at equal height, with the stars like a halo behind his head. In his chest was a rose window, burning with blue and green light. A doorway arched between his feet, one of twenty, spilling the sound of evening worship.
Sorasa beckoned them both toward the cathedral, a smile on her lips. “The Konrada vaults hold nothing of value anymore, but they do go deep.”
“That will suffice,” Dom said grimly.
Corayne could only nod. Her eyes went wide again, and she seemed once more the girl in Lemarta, not the daughter of a dead prince, with the realm’s fate laid between her hands.
“I think the tunnels smell worse than the streets,” Corayne said, her voice muffled. She drew her shirt up over her nose and mouth, leaving only her black eyes visible. She glared at the walls and the dirt floor, searching for faults. Her eyes seemed to eat the meager light.
Dom’s growl echoed. “I did not realize that was even possible. And yet here we are.”
“Funny, the Elder legends don’t mention how fussy your kind is,” Sorasa snapped, though she had to agree. The tunnel air was somehow both sour and stale. The canal ran above them, and clearly the walls were perpetually wet, covered in moss that gleamed by the weak light of her torch.
The Elder muttered a retort in his own language. It echoed down the tunnel, passing away into the blackness. The Konrada vaults were behind them now, occupied only by a gray priest who would regain consciousness sometime around dawn.
The memories came with each step. Her first contract behind the walls of the New Palace was fifteen years ago, the last only four. Both ended with men dead in their chambers, missing ears and fingers, contracts fulfilled and messages relayed. She took no pride in them nor satisfaction. Duty was done for its own sake—at least, it was then.
Beneath Ascal, in the chilling damp, Sorasa had never felt farther from the Amhara and the citadel. She chewed her cheek, the air cold through her clothing, like a touch of sickness.
After a long while, the tunnel began to slope upward. Dom brushed the back of his hand over the wall, feeling the stone. “We’re out from under the river,” he said, his knuckles coming away dry. “We must be under the palace now.”
“Oh, good,” Corayne said. Her voice held the edge of panic. “Now I can stop worrying about being drowned and focus entirely on being crushed.”
A rare chuckle passed through Sorasa’s teeth. “It’s not so bad,” she replied. “Protect your skull and ribs. You’ll be all right.”
The girl blinked at her. “You’re a very strange person, Sorasa Sarn.”
“It’s a strange world out there,” Sorasa said. Her eyes met Dom’s as he brought up the rear of their trio. He fell into his constant scowl. “And growing stranger by the second.”