Chapter 23-The Response

Chapter 23: 23-The Response

High above the stink of the tannery, past the three hundred feet of weeping bedrock and the iron grates of the outer rings, the air in the Vane Estate smelled of crushed winter-mint and ozone.

There was no mud here. The courtyard of the third-ring manor was paved with unbroken slabs of white marble that caught the pale, dead light of the Silver Eye hanging overhead.

In the center of the subterranean hall, a room four times the size of Voss’s cistern, supported by pillars of living, frost-rimed silver-wood sat a single wooden box.

Inside the box were a dozen jagged, melting lumps of blue ice, floating in a shallow puddle of clear water.

Lord Cassian Vane stood over the box. He was a tall, spare man who looked to be in his late thirties, though he had lived for over seventy years.

His hair was the color of spun aluminum, pulled back neatly from a sharp, bloodless face, and the robes he wore didn’t have a single crease. He didn’t carry a weapon.

He didn’t need one; the air three feet around his body constantly snowed microscopic flakes of frozen mana, the hallmark of a cultivator who had stood firmly in the Second Level, the Silver Blood realm, for two decades.

Kneeling on the marble floor in front of the box was the commander of the Sector Four strike team, his forehead pressed flat against the stone, trembling so hard his silver-plated pauldrons clicked together.

"Tell me again," Cassian said. His voice wasn’t loud, like Voss’s, or flat, like Kael’s. It was smooth, quiet, and carried the terrifying weight of a glacier sliding down a mountain.

"Because my ears must be failing me. You are telling me that Voss, a half-mutated gutter pig who has been eating our table scraps in Purgatory for six years suddenly developed the refinement to freeze a Late-Stage core from the inside out without spilling a single drop of blood?"

"No, My Lord," the commander choked out into the marble.

"Voss... Voss was seen at the front gates by six different Enforcers during the breach. He never entered the main building. He fought in the mud with the hogs and retreated when our carriages arrived."

Cassian reached into the wooden box with two bare, pale fingers. He picked up a chunk of the rapidly melting ice that had once been Captain Kael’s left ribs.

As the Level 2 noble held the ice, his brow furrowed slightly.

"There is no lunar taint in this frost," Cassian murmured to himself, holding the dripping shard up to the pale light of the chandelier. "When we pull mist from the Moon, even with the finest inner-city filters, there is always a trace of sediment. A fraction of beast-rot. This... this is completely clear. Absolute zero. It didn’t freeze his flesh; it stopped the movement of his very essence before the Moon could even claim his corpse."

He dropped the ice back into the box with a wet plop and wiped his fingers on a silk handkerchief.

"Only one bloodline in this city ever produced ice that clean," Cassian said softly. "And I watched their manor burn to the foundation stone ten years ago."

A second figure stepped out from behind one of the massive silver-wood pillars.

She was younger than Cassian, barely twenty-two—dressed in a tight, high-collared hunting coat of dark leather and silver scales, her body sexy, around 1.60m tall with a fat ass. Two long, needle-thin rapiers hung from her hips, and her eyes were a strange, milky silver, the pupils vertically slit like a cat’s.

"The ward," the young woman said, leaning a shoulder against the pillar and crossing her arms. "The little Fyrn girl that went missing that day. What was her name? Valera?I thought her body burned long ago with no ashes left. I hated her for taking the spotlight inside the academy"

" An overseer, Anvil, was found three days later with his collar cooked black and his head split open," Lyra replied, a slow, sharp smile spreading across her pale lips. "And two days after that, young Julian, who was so very proud of his Symmetric Mind was found in a storm drain with a hole burned straight through his chestplate."

She pushed off the pillar, her boots making no sound at all on the marble as she walked up beside the wooden box.

She looked down at the melting water, then sniffed the air lightly, her slit pupils dilating.

"There’s ash in the water, Uncle," Lyra whispered, her voice practically purring with sudden excitement. "Look at the bottom of the box. Soot. Kael didn’t just get frozen. Someone burned him first. Someone with a core hot enough to melt third-ring steel before the girl turned him into glass."

Cassian turned his cold eyes toward her. "A solar anomaly? I have not heard of those in the last fourty years, those defects burn themselves to cinders within a week of waking up. Their veins can’t hold the heat."

"Unless they have a Fyrn sitting in their lap to cool them down," Lyra pointed out, tapping a silver-nailed finger against her chin. "Fire and pure ice, feeding off each other. And now they have eighteen of our unregistered tithe crystals, and Voss is running around Purgatory telling every gang leader with ears that two stray dogs just robbed the House of Vane."

Cassian’s jaw set. The temperature in the hall dropped ten degrees, a thin layer of white hoarfrost instantly spider-webbing across the marble floor and locking the kneeling commander’s knees to the stone.

"If the Inquisition hears that eighteen pure tithe crystals were stolen from an unregistered vault in Sector Four, they will audit our Harvest Houses," Cassian said, each word dropping like an iron weight. "And if the other High Lords hear that we let the Fyrn girl survive the Somnium and awaken the Pure Moon... we won’t have a seat on the Council by winter."

"Then don’t call the Inquisition," Lyra said, resting her hands on the hilts of her twin rapiers. "And don’t send these clumsy idiots in plated armor clanking down into the sewers."

"You want to go down into the mud, Lyra?" Cassian looked at his niece. "You are at the Peak of Level 1, three weeks away from your Silver Blood baptism. The slums are beneath you."

"Hunting is never beneath me, Uncle," Lyra smiled, showing teeth that were just a fraction too sharp. "Give me three of the Pale Hounds from the kennel and seal the sector grates so the rats can’t swim across the river. Voss thinks he’s clever, hiding behind two children. I’ll skin Voss first, hang him from the Purgatory bridge, and when the little Fyrn witch and her pet furnace come out to breathe..."

She drew one of her rapiers an inch from its scabbard, the steel ringing with a high, hungry note before clicking back into place..

"I’ll bring you her core in a jar, and we can use the boy’s skin to line the kennels."

Cassian stared at her for a moment, then gave a single, slight nod.

"Take four hounds," the Lord of Vane ordered, turning his back on the melting box of ice. "And burn everything between the slaughter-line and the river until you find them. I want the crystals back, Lyra. Leave nothing else."