Chapter 61

Chapter 61: Chapter 61

The eastern edge of the third tier ended in a wall of smooth white limestone that dropped hundreds of feet into the dark, freezing water of the central lake.

The roar of the panicked crowds and the crackle of burning merchant stalls faded to a muffled drone as we slipped over the stone balustrade and into the shadows. Kaelen led the way. He went down the slick, algae-covered maintenance ladders as silently as a spider. I followed close behind him, with Nia and Luckas at the rear.

We climbed down into the dark beneath the city, and the air turned cold at once, thick with the smell of damp moss and stagnant water.

Sixty feet above the surface of the lake, Kaelen stopped on a narrow, rusted iron grating. Beside it, set into the limestone foundation of the Academy’s floating island, was a heavy circular iron grate, the outflow pipe for the citadel’s maintenance aqueducts. Water poured through the gaps in the bars and crashed into the lake below.

Kaelen took a set of slender, blackened steel lockpicks from his tunic. His fingers worked quickly in the pitch black, and less than ten seconds later the lock clicked.

"The water pressure is going to be brutal," he whispered over the rush of the current as he pulled the grate open. "And it’s a blind climb. Stay close."

He slipped into the stone pipe, and the rushing water and the darkness swallowed him.

I turned to Luckas and Nia. They were shivering in the wind coming off the lake. Luckas’s teeth chattered, and his jaw was set. As a Swelled Bud he could have pushed the heat of his Ember into his skin and boiled the water around him, but he knew better. A sudden spike in thermal energy would give us away to any competent Republic sentry above us.

"Can you do this?" I asked Nia quietly. She had none of the density or the enhanced muscle of the vanguard. She was an ordinary human girl from the provinces.

"I’m not staying out here," Nia said. Her voice shook with cold, but her dark eyes were fierce. She gripped the edge of the iron pipe. "Push me if I slip."

We entered the aqueduct.

Going from open air into that rushing darkness was suffocating. The water was waist-deep and fast, pouring down the slick, curved limestone floor, and the cold was paralyzing. Total darkness closed around us.

I closed my eyes and focused on the Rune of Antiquity branded into my right arm. I kept the Ember to a trickle so the pale starlight wouldn’t light up the tunnel and give away our position, and fed that thin thread of astral magic straight into my visual cortex.

When I opened my eyes, the pitch-black tunnel had resolved into a crisp, glowing topographic map. The precognition traced the limestone walls, the rushing water and the thermal signatures of my three companions in faint, ghostly lines of silver and blue.

"I have visual," I whispered, and the sound echoed hollowly off the stone. "Step exactly where I step. The moss on the left side is too slick."

We began the climb.

It was a punishing ascent. The aqueduct was a network of steep inclines, vertical shafts and rushing waterfalls, built to flush waste and carry fresh water through the lower levels of the citadel.

For the first hour we fought our own bodies. The freezing water sapped the warmth from our limbs. Luckas slipped on a patch of mossy limestone, his boots losing their grip on a forty-degree incline. I caught him by the collar of his doublet with my left hand and braced my boots against the stone. My Swelled Bud muscle took his full weight against the current, and I hauled him back onto his feet without a word.

Nia was struggling, her breathing ragged in the dark, but she never complained. Whenever her strength faltered, Luckas was there to offer his shoulder, and I was the anchor for the whole group. We worked like a single vanguard unit.

Eventually the rush of the water slowed. The incline leveled out into a series of dry maintenance corridors directly beneath the Academy’s lower cellars.

Kaelen raised a hand, and we halted.

We pressed our backs against the cold, damp stone. Ahead of us, a faint, flickering orange light spilled from a T-junction.

Kaelen slipped forward without a sound, looked around the corner, and came back to my side.

"Republic sentries," he breathed, his voice barely more than a vibration in the air. "Two of them, heavily armored. They’re holding the junction so nobody can flank the cellars through these tunnels. Repeating crossbows, drawn and loaded."

"We can’t fight them," Luckas whispered, shivering hard, his wet velvet clinging to his dense frame. "If we spark our Ember, or if they fire a single bolt, the echo will travel up the maintenance shafts. The main strike team in the cellars will hear it. They’ll detonate the charges early."

"We eliminate them," I said, my voice cold.

I left my runic sword where it was and unclasped the strap on my right thigh, drawing my Veriti combat knife. The dark blade was eight inches long, non-reflective and razor-sharp.

I tapped my fingers on Kaelen’s shoulder in the dark, using basic vanguard tactical signs. Two targets. Simultaneous strike. I take the left. You take the right.

Kaelen nodded and drew two black throwing knives.

I called up the astral mapping of my Rune again. Through the solid stone wall I could see the glowing thermal outlines of the two Republic sentries. They stood back-to-back at the intersection, sweeping the dark tunnels with their repeating crossbows. They were professionals, but they relied on their eyes.

I raised my left hand and held up three fingers.

Three.

I watched their outlines. The sentry on the left shifted his weight and turned his head to cough.

Two.

One.

I dropped my hand.

Kaelen and I came around the corner together at a dead run.

I crossed the twenty feet of damp stone in a fraction of a second, fast and silent. The sentry on the left had time to see a blur and nothing more. My left hand clamped onto the iron mechanism of his repeating crossbow and forced it up toward the ceiling, and in the same instant my right hand drove the Veriti knife up into the unarmored gap beneath his chin and severed his brain stem.

He died instantly. I caught his armored body before it could hit the floor and lowered it to the stone without a sound.

To my right, Kaelen had been just as clean. He had closed the distance and driven both blades into the base of the second sentry’s neck, then eased the body to the ground without a clatter of armor.

The whole thing took less than two seconds. There were no shouts and no crossbows fired, only silence.

Luckas and Nia came around the corner a moment later, eyes wide as they stepped over the dead commandos. Luckas looked at the blood on my combat knife, then at my cold, clinical face, and I watched him finally understand what a vanguard officer was capable of in the dark.

"The cellars are directly above us," Kaelen whispered, wiping his blades on the dead man’s tunic.

We found a rusted iron ladder bolted to the stone wall, leading up to a large square ventilation grate in the ceiling. The faint, flickering light of alchemical lanterns filtered down through the bars.

I climbed first and tested the weight of the grate. It was unlocked and sat loose in its stone frame. I lifted it an inch, slowly and silently, and looked through the gap into the cellars of the Imperial Academy.

The scale of the Republic’s operation hit me at once.

The lower cellars were vaulted chambers of ancient limestone, long used to store wine and grain. Tonight they had become the core of a bomb.

In the center of the chamber stood the main foundation pillar of the Academy, a colossal column of reinforced black granite eighty feet wide that supported the Spire of Antiquity directly above. Hundreds of oak barrels were stacked tightly around its base. A few wagons could never have carried all of that. The Republic must have been working its way into this cellar for months, bribing guards and doctoring supply manifests. Tons of volatile alchemical black powder were packed against the weak points of the granite.

Thirty heavily armored Republic commandos patrolled the cellar with their repeating crossbows ready, moving with strict discipline.

But my eyes went straight to the man at the base of the central pillar.

In place of armor he wore a coat of hardened leather stained with chemical burns, and a brass respirator with glowing green filters covered his face. He was a Saboteur, a master alchemist.

He was carefully adjusting a mechanism attached to the main cluster of powder barrels. It was an alchemical timer: a large glass cylinder divided into two chambers. A viscous, glowing purple acid dripped slowly from the top chamber into a lower reservoir filled with a volatile white powder.

I ran the numbers in my head. At that drip rate, the acid would reach the powder in six minutes.

When it did, the reaction would ignite the whole cellar. The pillar would shatter, and the Spire of Antiquity would collapse outward and wipe out the dormitories and hundreds of students.

"What do you see?" Luckas whispered from the ladder beneath me.

"Thirty elite commandos," I relayed quietly, my mind running through a dozen lethal algorithms. "One Saboteur. And a bomb big enough to crack the island in half."

"The timer?" Kaelen asked.

"Six minutes," I confirmed.

Nia drew a shaky breath at the bottom of the ladder. "Can we evacuate the dorms in time? Can we pull the fire alarms?"

"No," I said coldly. "If we sound the alarm, the Saboteur will detonate the charges by hand the moment it rings. The Republic came here to watch the Academy fall."

"Then we have to break their perimeter," Luckas said, his voice surprisingly steady, more Knight-Mage now than aristocratic boy. "Thirty against four. Six minutes."

"Thirty against three," I corrected, looking down at Nia. "Nia, you stay in the tunnel. If we fail, or if the timer drops to one minute, you run. Run as fast as you can to the main gates and scream for the Imperial Guard."

"I’m not leaving you," Nia hissed.

"You’re our contingency plan, Valerius," I said, my voice leaving no room for argument. I looked at Luckas and Kaelen.

"We can’t afford a prolonged engagement. We have to bypass the commandos entirely," I said, laying it out fast. "Kaelen, you take the shadows on the perimeter. Slit throats, cut bowstrings, create chaos. Luckas, you’re the distraction. I need you to step out of this grate and make as much noise and fire as you biologically can. Draw their entire line to the right."

"And the Saboteur?" Luckas asked, drawing his silver longsword in the dark.

"I’ll take the Saboteur," I said, resting my hand on the hilt of my runic bastard sword. "I’m going to stop that timer. Then I’m going to kill him."

I looked at the glowing purple acid dripping in the glass cylinder. Five minutes and thirty seconds.

"Brace yourselves," I whispered, setting my shoulders against the iron grate. "We’re going to war."