The barest dim red had spread into the black iron. He tipped the pry bar forward.
The hoop fell on the gate's far side and hit the water with a sharp hiss. As a cloud of steam erupted on its impact, Chane threw all his force against the pry bar's cloak-wrapped end.
Without a wall to brace his back, his boots slipped on the tunnel's submerged floor, but the one heated bar bent away from its nearest neighbor. He twisted back, levering the other way. The other central bar barely gave, but the heated one bent a little more.
"That's enough," Wynn said. "You've got it."
Chane pulled the pry bar out and splashed water against the gate's heated bar. Once it stopped steaming, he knew it was safe enough to pass through. He tossed the pry bar to the other side and took his packs from Wynn. He held hers as she struggled through the widened space, and then Shade wriggled after her.
Chane passed Wynn's pack and staff through. When she was ready, he shoved his own belongings through the tight space. Getting through himself was more trouble, and he ended up soaked to the shoulder on his left side. The last thing he did was fish out the pry bar and use it to hook the hoop out of the water.
The etchings still glowed. Not as brightly as when he had dropped it, but more than in the first pass of his finger. He had not yet learned how to dispel its heat and would have to carry it on the bar for now. He crouched down a bit.
"Warm yourselves," he said, nodding to the hoop.
Wynn waved Shade closer, though the dog was hesitant. Both took a moment of much-needed heat. Then Chane noticed the water on this side of the gate.
It reached above his ankles.
When he looked up, Wynn was staring up the tunnel. With a nod from her, they resettled their gear and moved on. Shade took the lead, and Wynn stayed close behind on Chane's right, holding the cold lamp crystal as he kept the dimly glowing hoop suspended ahead of him. It was a while before their feet stopped splashing, and they were walking on only damp floor. More than once, Chane glanced back, listening.
"What's wrong?" Wynn asked, watching his face.
"You and Shade are cut off," he answered. "If we reach a dead end, you cannot get back out until the tide recedes. It will be too far to submerge and swim."
Wynn grew very still. Perhaps she finally caught what he heard—the soft shift of the undulating ocean creeping up the tunnel.
"Come on," she breathed.
Chane pressed forward, but it was not long before they both heard Shade's growl, followed by a huff and a snarl. They quickened their pace until the crystal's light illuminated the dog ahead.
Chane nearly groaned.
Just beyond Shade was another gate.
Beyond that, the tunnel stretched into the pitch-dark distance.
They were nowhere near its end or the final gate Shade had seen in the duchess's memory. And the tide was still coming.
Sau'ilahk patiently waited in a dim side passage beyond the turn to the Off-Breach Market. A narrow place, it was little more than rear access to a few shops carved into the mainway.
Wynn had vanished beyond his reach, but he did not care. She and her companions had likely embarked on another pointless foray. He had overestimated the sage's intelligence, but she had served one purpose in the last few nights: Sau'ilahk had found a better link to the texts' whereabouts.
Duchess Reine Faunier, Âreskynna by marriage, would go below tonight. He would follow, finally gaining a way to the underworld.
Come, he whispered with thoughts.
An orange-red glow rose in the passage's side wall.
His stone-spider surfaced, its single glass-lump eye radiating bloodred. It clung there, watching him, as ripples spread in the rock beneath each point of its four legs. Another ripple snaked along the floor. This one rose at his feet.
It broke the floor with more ripples in stone, arching upward like a rope-size worm of rock-plated segments. Its round mouth oscillated, tasting the air that filled its limbless body.
Neither of these two was the one he had sent to track the duchess.
He had left more than one corpse in the seatt's forgotten corners in order to call and keep all of his compound servants active. At halfway to midnight, a curling twist of black smoke rolled in under the lip of the passage's ceiling. It spread along the high stone, clinging to that surface in its progress, until it hung above Sau'ilahk's cowl.
It gathered itself into a mass, and like black steam, it spread over his cowl.
Each of his trio of servitors was endowed for its special purpose, couched within a spark of sentience. The spider of Stone, Fire, and Air could see and hear. The worm made of Stone, Water, and Air could smell and taste. And the smoke, that blending of Air, Fire, and Spirit …
Show me, he commanded.
It curled over his cowl, into its opening. Within the black robe—within Sau'ilahk's incorporeal form—it spread.
The passage vanished from his awareness.
He looked down upon the wide columned tunnel of Breach Mainway from high above, hanging somewhere within the great crag by which it had been named. Below, the duchess and her people turned into the passage toward Off-Breach Market.
Sau'ilahk, submerged in his third servitor's recordings, drifted out of the high crag, curling along the passage's ceiling, and followed. The market was closed, empty and quiet, but the duchess passed all the way across to one rear tunnel. He followed inward, wafting along the new path's side wall.
The duchess walked amid her entourage with slow, sluggish steps.
No one spoke. It was a strange, silent procession.
Sau'ilahk's servitor flowed down the wall and surged forward along the dark passage's floor. It—he—spread around the rear guards' clomping feet and gathered about the duchess's smaller ones. All Sau'ilahk could see in the servitor's recording were the swish of the elf's white robe and the pounding of the captain's boots. But he felt …
Fear clung to Duchess Reine.
More than that, there was the pain of loss. Two emotions matched and joined to Sau'ilahk, as if one led to the other and back again. She feared the loss might repeat, all the worse for it.
Sau'ilahk did not understand and wished someone had spoken during his creation's surveillance. Anything to illuminate this clinging odor of dread and remorse might have proved useful.
The duchess coughed, slowing. Ahead, the elf's footsteps drew to a stop.
Sau'ilahk's smoke servitor slipped away along the floor. As it rolled up the side wall to the ceiling, he saw the duchess turn with her hand over her nose and mouth. The elf sniffed the air twice and wrinkled his long nose as he looked up and down the passage.
"Someone passed this way with an open torch," he said. Before he expressed more, she waved him onward, and the procession continued.
Soon, Sau'ilahk saw a passage wall of cut stones roll inward after five touches from the duchess. He would not need to deal with the passage as she had.
Banish!
The smoke within him thinned to nothing. He no longer needed that one and, unlike the other two, it could not swim through stone to keep pace with him. He now knew where to go and carefully envisioned his destination.
Follow, he commanded, and winked through dormancy.
Sau'ilahk reawakened before the passage wall, its fitted stones returned to their proper place. He waited only long enough for his two remaining servitors to catch up.
Wynn clenched her chattering teeth. Her feet were numb inside her boots as she slogged through knee-deep water. Shade's breath, like her own, echoed in the tunnel in shudders. Wynn tried not to look back too often.