The letter was still unleafing itself. Csorwe lifted the book over her head and dropped it on the packet. There was a crunch, and silence.
She fell back into the chair, winded with delayed terror, and sat there for a moment or two, watching. Just in case. Once she was as certain as she could be that the packet wasn’t going to come back to life, she crept out onto the landing and found Parza.
“I dealt with it,” she said.
“You cannot deal with magic,” he said, glaring at her. Parza often glared at her, but this was a different quality of anger. He was still terrified.
“Suppose I should just have run away like you did,” said Csorwe.
“Yes,” said Parza. “If you had been educated in a civilised country you would know that. Run away and inform the Inquisitorate—not that such a thing exists in this godsforsaken world—”
“Well, I dropped the lexicon on it,” she said, knowing he would shriek about it.
“My lexicon!” said Parza. “How—” He broke off. She followed his gaze to see that something was seeping out from under the door to the apartment. Curls of some dark substance, like liquid smoke, were branching and creeping across the floorboards toward them.
“Mother of Cities,” said Parza. “You dealt with it, did you?”
“I—” The smoke was already a few feet from the door, moving much faster than it should. The stuff was billowing up from the floor, rising in puffs and then narrowing into thready black tendrils. It seemed to be reaching out for her. She wished she hadn’t left her sword inside, useless as it was likely to be.
For a second she was frozen with guilt and terror, staring at the escaping smoke as Parza pushed past her to get away from it.
“Magic is an abomination to the gods,” he said. “May the Nine forgive us for—”
She ought to warn them downstairs. This was the wineshop’s busiest time of day. There would be dozens of people in the taproom, innocent of what was going on up here.
Sethennai had done everything he could to keep a low profile. He never used magic here. But they would have no choice but to leave Grey Hook now. Parza had already seen too much, and if dozens of patrons were thrown out of a wineshop—well. This would be the end of their comfortable life.
She’d known it had to end sooner or later, but the idea of cutting it short through her own thoughtless actions was more than she could bear. Why had she accepted the letter? She had ruined everything because she was frustrated with Parza, of all things.
Parza was still gibbering. She opened the door of the nearby linen cupboard and pushed him inside. She’d figure out how to deal with him later, or Sethennai would.
“Stay here,” she said, ignoring his protests. “I will deal with it.”
She shut the door on him and strode back toward the apartment, squaring her shoulders and snapping her tusks, as if faking bravado might help somehow.
She realised now that she should have destroyed the sigil on the envelope. She didn’t know much about magic, but Sethennai had warned her about this kind of device. If you could break the control sigil, the rest of the working was supposed to come apart like a wagon with a busted axle. If she could get to the desk and tear up the paper … well, she had no idea what would happen, but it was the only plan she had.
She opened the door to the apartment and stepped inside. It was as dark as night. The smoke blotted out any light that filtered through the shutters. The air smelled thickly of grave dirt, and mingled with it—again—the scent of burning lotus. Breathing it in, Csorwe felt a familiar sensation—the numbness of body, the dimming of sight, the taste of rust—and for a moment she thought she would drown in it. The rush of unwelcome memories threatened to close over her head and carry her away: the hall of the House of Silence, the insinuating presence of the Unspoken One, the weight of the bowl of blood in her hand.
She clenched her fists and willed the memory away. If she breathed in any more lotus she was going to fall down and start gibbering before she could do anything about the sigil. She held her breath as she struggled toward the desk. It was like fighting through syrup. It took a terrible, infuriating effort to move her legs, as though these three years of training had abandoned her all at once and left her weaker than before. She was less than halfway to the desk when she tripped over a footstool. Her knees gave out altogether and despite her efforts she gasped, sucking in huge gulps of the poisoned air. Her vision clouded and she felt herself falling again, as though the floor had opened up and revealed an abyss.
The crypts beneath the House of Silence never ended, she saw, as her thoughts scattered in panic. She was never going to be free. They were underneath her wherever she went and now they were claiming her.
No. The boards under her hands and knees were real. She was real. She was still here, in Sethennai’s apartment. She was no longer the girl who had climbed to the Shrine, with no idea that there was any world beyond. That was behind her.
Her body was numb, and moving each muscle was an effort. But she managed to get to her knees, and to drag herself from chair to table and up to the desk, where Parza’s lexicon still sat on top of the crushed letter. The smoke was spiralling out from under the book. The smell in the air was much thicker here, and she felt the crushing, obliterating pressure of the lotus on her sight and reason.
She swatted at the book with hands that felt like empty gloves, but she couldn’t muster the strength to lift it. At last she managed to grip the edge of the packet and drag it out some way from under the book. The clouds of lotus-smoke seethed around her, pulling her down into a vision.
It would be so much easier if she would just let herself go. If she would just drink in the fumes, and sleep and dream and float in the darkness and the deep.
No-no! she thought, as her knees slackened again and she slid back to the floor. She hauled on the paper, furious with her weak body and sluggish mind.
It was too late. The years had made her body strong, but they had sapped her tolerance for the lotus. As she blacked out, she heard the sound of paper tearing, but she was too far gone to wonder what it might mean.
* * *
Someone lifted and carried her, and she struggled feebly.
“Csorwe,” said a voice. “Be calm.” It was Sethennai.
He put her down on what she now realised was the couch in their apartment. The lotus fog was gone. A brief flash of relief gave way to trepidation. Sethennai did not look happy. He was dressed in his Blue Boars uniform. He must have returned from his assignment to find the apartment trashed and Csorwe half dead. He must be furious.
“What happened?” he said, in a flat voice that she had never heard before.
She was both cold and sweaty, as though she had just run through the rain. She unclenched her clammy fingers, revealing a ripped sheet of waxed paper that had been crushed in her fist.
He took it from her and unfolded it, flattening it out against his knee—and revealing half the sigil, roughly torn across. Like a beetle pierced with a pin, it was no longer wriggling.
Sethennai startled, drawing his hands back from the dead sigil as if it might still bite. “This was part of a curse-ward,” he said. “What made you think you could handle this?”
“I didn’t want to ruin your cover,” she said. “I’m sorry.”