Chapter 77 The Long Way In

The tunnel mouth sat under a collapsed drainage house on the western edge of the alchemy grounds, behind nine years of blackberry and one rusted grate.

Damien went through it at two in the morning with the venom-coated edge on Verdict, a relay charm clipped to his collar and Blank riding inside his coat.

’Nine years of failed specimens dumped down a hole nobody sealed, yeah, and the house is watching four roads while its own garbage chute stands open.’

The first stretch ran as storm drain, the next four hundred meters considerably older, after which those walls stopped being masonry and turned into something excavated.

Mina’s voice came through the paired charm with a delay of about half a second and a great deal of interference.

"Your readings jump every twelve meters and the compound concentration doubles at each jump, so you are walking up a gradient rather than a tunnel," she said.

"Right, and a gradient climbs toward wherever the poison came from, which is exactly the direction I want," Damien answered.

"The direction you want is also the direction it wants, since something down there is producing that signature continuously," Mina replied.

Blank came out of his coat at the six hundred meter mark to ride his shoulder, edges gone sharp, head turned back the way they had come.

’It is watching behind us and not ahead, shit, whatever it senses is not in front of me, it is following.’

He kept moving anyway, since the alternative was standing still in a corridor full of nine years of somebody else’s mistakes.

The first venom construct came off the ceiling four hundred meters later, no kind of animal, never alive in any ordinary sense.

Marlowe grew them out of failed batches, according to the tax filings Bram had bought, which described the practice as organic waste consolidation.

It had six legs, no eyes, and a body that dripped continuously onto the tunnel floor with a hiss that ate stone.

[Eye of Reckoning: Venom construct, alchemical]

[Level: 480]

[Aspect category: corrosive containment]

’Category reads instead of a level band, yeah, that mastery page just paid for itself in one look.’

Corrosive containment meant it held everything inside its body under pressure, so killing the thing wrong would fill this tunnel with compound.

Damien did not cut it. He caught the thing by one rear leg joint, twisted the whole body over, then drove Verdict through the floor plate beneath its head to pin it face-down.

The construct emptied itself across the stone underneath, screaming into its own puddle, a noise that went nowhere at all.

The second came from the side passage while the first was still dying, carrying a mouth built for making noise.

Flicker put him inside its guard before the jaw opened, and the flat of Verdict went across the base of the skull rather than the throat.

It went down without a sound, which was the entire point, since a shared scream in these tunnels would have reached the alchemy grounds in nine seconds.

[Venom construct defeated: 2]

[Experience: +820,000]

[System Points: +340]

[Level: 700 → 701]

[Experience: 418,000 / 701,000]

"Both of them died inside forty seconds and neither screamed, which I know since my drain microphones are still running," Mina said.

"They scream through a shared channel, so the first one had to drown before the second one arrived," Damien answered.

’The novel spent one line on that detail, in Chapter nine hundred and four, buried under a paragraph about waste disposal, yeah, worst research I ever did, best money I ever spent.’

’Which is a fact I know from a novel and cannot explain to anyone, damn, and someday one of them is going to stop letting that go.’

Above him, on the surface, House Marlowe was doing precisely what the map had predicted it would do.

’Eleven men on a road I have no use for, damn, and every one of them believes he is the reason I have not arrived yet.’

Bram’s ward network had spent the evening producing four sightings of a black-coated Sterling near the eastern service road, paid for in ferry tokens and grocery credit.

Marlowe hunters sealed the eastern approach at one in the morning using eleven men and two beast handlers, who were still standing there by three.

Vivienne watched them from a rooftop nine hundred meters south with her blades wrapped and her Ashe cape left at home, counting rotations for a fight she intended to have later.

The tunnel began climbing near the twelve hundred meter mark, its walls turning into dressed stone that carried the Marlowe crest at eye level every forty paces.

’Under the wall and inside the grounds, yeah, the crest means I am currently trespassing in a place their statute says nobody can trespass into.’

Two hunters stood in a maintenance chamber above the tunnel’s second landing, one of them complaining at length about the eastern road assignment he had not been given.

Damien went past underneath them through a service duct built for water rather than people, with his coat scraping stone the entire way.

’Hold still, hold still, and let the man with a grievance keep talking, yeah, nobody has ever heard anything over the sound of their own complaint.’

He came up in the drying yard behind the alchemy hall, inside the compound’s second ring, forty meters from a wall guarded by eleven men on the far side.

[Marlowe Keep: inner grounds]

[Trespass under family statute: active]

’They sealed the gate I was never going to use and I came up through their laundry, okay, this is the funniest thing that has happened all week.’

The prison tower stood across the drying yard, six floors of pale stone with narrow slits instead of windows, its foundation reaching further down than the building rose.

Mina had the foundation plat, which showed a service tunnel, gated at either end.

"One more gate stands between you and the tower foundation, the only thing on this route carrying an actual lock," she said.

"Then it is also the only one anybody bothered to ward, so tell me what the reader says about it," Damien answered.

"The reader says the gate is clean and the tunnel behind it runs nine times the concentration of anything you have walked through," Mina replied.

’Nine times, shit, so the thing producing that signature lives between me and her cell.’

He went through the gate anyway, since seven days had become six at midnight and there was no version of this where he waited for better information.

The tunnel behind it ran two hundred meters, sloping down, the crest disappearing from those walls while stone aged with every step.

At the far end, a narrow stair climbed into the tower foundation, with somebody breathing badly above.

’That is a person and not a construct, okay, six floors of prison tower and the breathing starts on the lowest one, which is exactly where they put her.’

Blank went rigid against his neck, turned its head all the way around toward the tunnel behind them, then produced the low unhappy sound from the fragment.

Something began moving in the dark back there, no six-legged construct, nothing that sounded remotely small.

Damien took the stair two at a time toward the breathing, while the tunnel behind him filled with the sound of segments dragging over stone.