* * *
Stix held Ryber’s hand and ran toward the center of the Ring. She didn’t know what else to do. The stall was in flames, the scaffolding and towers were in flames, and high-pitched squeaking filled Stix’s ears, lungs, bones.
Safety, she thought with each footfall. Safety, safety. She summoned ice to crack up around her and Ryber, but the heat was too strong. Each crackling shard melted almost as soon as it appeared, then puffed into steam and vanished.
So Stix tried freezing the rats instead, but Hagfishes take her, there were too many. For every ten she got, another hundred came rushing over, close enough that she could feel their footsteps vibrating into her teeth.
She and Ryber reached the center of the Ring, where the mud dipped to its lowest. A floor waited there—one Stix hadn’t noticed the day before with the lake atop it. Now, there was no missing the ancient flagstones, nor the orange tabby sitting at the heart. Red-furred and ragged, she licked her paw, grooming as if nothing of interest happened around her.
Stix had never minded the six-fingered tabby, but in that moment, she hated her. “Help us!” she shrieked. “Isn’t this what you were made for? Here are all the rodents you could ever want to destroy—”
A rat leaped onto Ryber’s leg. She yelped and whirled around, leg flinging out. But it wasn’t the only rat. Three more had reached her and were climbing up with fangs out.
Stix blasted ice onto the beasts, but they thawed almost as quickly as they froze. Kahina’s heat would not be denied. Ryber fell. Stix fell too. Their hands came apart, and Stix thumped back first onto the muddied flagstones. She punched and kicked and wriggled at rats, and she banged against the stone.
Once. Twice. Thrice. On what would have been the fourth bump against the wall—as two more rats leaped toward her face—Stix hit the stones … And then sank through.
Darkness swallowed her. Ryber screamed, and the world of the Ring vanished around them. They plummeted for what felt an eternity, her stomach stretching long and her brain crushing inward.
Then Stix hit more stone, and Ryber crashed down beside her. Rats landed atop them, so Stix kept kicking and punching and wriggling. One landed beneath her fist; she felt its skull crunch. Another went flying off her when she finally grabbed its scruff and threw. And the last, still attached, suddenly screamed and fled when a light flared.
Stix screamed too, more burst of sound than actual scream. She expected guards or Kahina and flames and more rats, but in the several moments it took for her vision to adjust, she found neither. It was simply a Firewitched lantern, ancient in style and strangely familiar, revealing a small stone space around them.
Stix and Ryber lay at one end, and at the other was the orange tabby, looking very pleased by the rat now dangling from her mouth. The other rats were nowhere to be seen, save the two Stix had crushed. They rested, bloodied and dead, several paces away.
Ryber groaned, and Stix rolled to her friend’s side. “Are you hurt?”
“No.” Ryber waved her off, eyes shuttering as she took in the room around them. “What is this place?” Without waiting for an answer, she crawled unsteadily to her feet.
“I don’t know.” Stix rubbed at her eyes. Without her spectacles, Ryber was a vague blur circling the room. “The voices refuse to speak to me anymore.”
A sharp huff from Ryber, though Stix couldn’t gauge if the frustration was aimed at her or at the voices.
“Listen,” she began, “about what just happened. I should never have made that deal with Kahina. You were right, and now the prisoners…” Stix trailed off. Ryber wasn’t listening, and not because she was angry—though she had every right to be—but because she was absorbed in exploring the room. As if none of the chaos from the Ring had just happened. As if she didn’t have a charred shirt or several braids singed at the edges. This was a new realm, new knowledge, and she was a scholar to her core.
“I’ve heard of these places,” Ryber murmured, awe rounding her words. “The Six made them. Secret spots where the Exalted Ones wouldn’t find them … And oh.” She clapped her hands to her mouth. “Come look at this.”
Though Stix really didn’t want to stand—her breaths were sharp and fast, her heart the dominant sound within her ears—she straggled to Ryber’s side, to where a stone relief filled one wall. It looked identical to a relief in the capital of Lovats, in the under-city that had first triggered the wretched voices to rise.
“Lady Baile,” Ryber said. “Noden’s Right Hand. A saint in Nubrevna. A saint in Saldonica. The Paladin of Water.” She swiveled toward Stix. “You.”
Stix ran her fingers over the relief, exactly as she had only a month ago, when the voices had first started speaking and the memories had first started rising. This relief was in better condition than the one beneath Lovats. Water had not weathered this limestone, and no fungus called it home.
“Though we cannot always see,” Stix murmured, “the blessing in the loss, strength is the gift of our Lady Baile, and she will never abandon us.” Those were the words beneath every relief in Lovats, where Baile stood with a trout in one hand and wheat in the other. Her fox-shaped mask speckled with stars, and a moon passed over her.
They were not the words here. “Three rules has she,” Ryber read. “Our Lady of the Seas. No whistling when a storm’s in sight, six-fingered cats will ward off mice, and always, always stay the night for…”
She paused. For here the words were different than what was written elsewhere. “For Baile’s slaughtering,” she finished.
“Slaughtering,” Stix repeated. “Slaughter Ring.” She frowned at the relief, but Ryber had read it accurately. It said slaughtering instead of Slaughter Ring.” What does it mean?” She glanced at the tabby, who of course did not reply, and Ryber merely shrugged, a helpless movement. “Still no voices?”
“Of course not.” Although Stix wasn’t sure she needed them. She could sense, all on her own, that something critical was here—the missing shard to finally give her the full picture.
She’d whistled and summoned a sea fox. Not because she’d known that was what her whistle would do, but because she’d had a hunch guided by Kahina, the woman who kept flame hawks as pets. The Paladin of Fire.
And now, though the cat hadn’t exactly warded off mice, that six-fingered tabby had helped her escape the rats. Which left only one line in the poem that perhaps was not a poem at all.
“Always, always stay the night for Baile’s slaughtering,” Stix repeated. “Slaughter Ring. Slaughtering.” Her eyes lit on the moon shining above Baile’s head. Another difference between this relief and the one in Lovats. “Midnight?”
The tabby nuzzled against Stix’s calf with a purr.
“What happens at midnight?” Ryber asked, but Stix only shook her head. The answer was so close. Within reach. She just needed the proper angle. Just needed the proper words. Damn the voices for always going silent …
Baile would never forget the tide comes at midnight.
“Oh,” Stix breathed to the relief. “Oh.” Kahina had already given her the answer—and really, it had been there all along. The tidal river beneath the Ring. The condensation that lived on the stones. The humidity that breathed in the very air of Saldonica. Lady Baile had built her palace here for a reason; Stix had simply been unwilling to see.