Csorwe stepped back very slowly. Shock caught up with her as she realised how close she had come to blithely walking past the thing, and her heart began to race.
“It’s a curse-ward,” said a voice out of the darkness above her. Csorwe had her knife out before her brain could make sense of the words.
It was Talasseres Charossa. “So it’s true,” he said, blandly, as if people drew knives on him for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. “You really aren’t a waitress.”
Csorwe lowered her weapon. If Talasseres had wanted to attack her, he wouldn’t have announced his presence. Probably, he would have just shoved her down the stairs.
“Why are you here?” she said.
“The same reason as you,” he said, and gestured down past Csorwe to the darkness below. “Looking for another way out.”
“What does it do?” said Csorwe, indicating the curse-ward. It was clearly different from the ward Oranna had sent in her letter to Sethennai. She wasn’t sure whether the sign stamped into the wax was the control sigil, or whether there were more signs buried underneath. Either way, touching it would be a mistake.
Talasseres reached into his bag and pulled out the gnawed bone of an old chicken leg, holding it with some disdain. Shreds of gristle adhered in places. He threw it overhand into the stairwell, and just as it was about to pass the bottom step, the curse-ward flared, and the bone was gone, leaving—perhaps—a smear of black smoke. There was a greasy smell in the air, like burning fat.
“It’s my uncle’s work. He wouldn’t know a light touch if it grabbed his balls. Air and rocks pass through fine,” said Talasseres. “Anything that’s alive, or used to be alive, goes up like that.” He snapped his fingers. “But if your next question is going to be How do I disarm it?, you’re shit out of luck.”
“How many times have you been down here since we talked?” said Csorwe.
Talasseres shrugged, which she took to mean every night.
“You think there’s a way through,” said Csorwe. She wondered whether he had come past Atharaisse, or if there were other ways through the labyrinth of passages.
“If it was easy to get ’round, Olthaaros wouldn’t still be Chancellor, would he?” said Talasseres.
Csorwe watched him. She was sure there was a catch coming. Talasseres seemed so blindly grateful for someone to talk to that she didn’t have to push him even a little bit to keep going.
“You can’t disarm it,” he said. “But there’s an amulet, a protective charm—” He looked at Csorwe doubtfully.
“I know what an amulet is,” said Csorwe, unable to stop herself.
“Oh, do you? Well, bully for you, you’re going to love this next part, because the fucking amulet belongs to General Psamag and he wears it ’round his neck, day and night.”
“The jet pendant,” she said. She had seen it that night in the dining hall. It had seemed then like an odd choice of jewellery for an old soldier.
“You’re observant, aren’t you, Soru?” He sounded less caustic, more interested, and she realised she ought to have kept her mouth shut.
She shrugged. “Just curious.”
“Well,” said Talasseres, his interest glazing over as he looked back at the curse-ward. “It’d be a quick way to go, anyway.”
* * *
General Psamag’s private quarters were in the very highest lofts of the fortress. The walls were hung with fine tapestries, oil paintings, ceremonial weapons, the rarest treasures of a dozen worlds. Here, in the deepest watches of the night, Csorwe crept from room to room, scarcely disturbing the air.
It had been a week since she had spoken to Talasseres in the cave. She had known since then what she needed to do, but knowing and doing were very different things.
You frightened of spiders, Csorwe? one of her teachers had asked her. He was a retired cat burglar, one of Sethennai’s many shady old friends. You frightened of ghosts? Whatever it is you’re scared of in the dark, that’s what you become.
I’m not scared of anything, she had said, and he had laughed at her. She was scared now, but she did as Sethennai had taught her: turned the fear into fuel, burnt it to propel herself onward.
She made it past the outer guards. Two of Psamag’s revenants were patrolling in the next corridor, staring ahead with milky eyes, but revenants weren’t any more observant than living men, and she passed by them easily. There were two more in each successive room, and neither of them turned from the furrows they were polishing in the floorboards.
In the antechamber to Psamag’s bedroom she paused to check the dagger strapped to her belt. Within the sheath, the blade was freshly sharpened, and Atharaisse’s venom glistened on the steel. Just in case. This wasn’t going to be an assassination unless it had to be.
The door to Psamag’s bedchamber was ajar, and darkness lay beyond. Inside, someone was sleeping. She heard nothing else. No other footsteps, no breathing. The hinges made no sound as she crept inside.
A soft haze of moonlight came in at the windows, and by this weak illumination she determined the shape of a bed, and someone lying on it. She managed a single step toward it before a cold hand closed over her mouth and nose, and something like an iron bar tightened around her waist, crushing the air from her lungs. There was no use trying to cry out. She bit down, but the revenant’s skin was tough as cured hide, and it made no reaction, simply holding her as she wriggled like a worm pinched from a bait-pot.
“Don’t smother her, Dead Hand,” said a voice, calm but perfectly alert. “We’re going to have a conversation.”
There was the hiss of someone striking a light—a flare of brightness in the dark—and then a lantern was lit. She saw the bed, rich with hangings, and the shape of someone asleep, deep in shadow. Dead Hand’s grip clamped around her face was beginning to darken her vision. Sitting on a chest at the end of the bed, naked from the waist up, was General Psamag.
Somehow he had known. She had slipped.
“You two, disarm and restrain her,” he said, rising and stretching. “No gag. Like I said, we’re going to talk.”
Another revenant came out of the shadows. There was nothing Csorwe could do as they hoisted her to a beam and bound her raised arms to it. They found her dagger easily enough and took it away.
This was the end, then. She calculated, as though from very far away, how soon the pain would become unbearable, stretched in this position. She had not been schooled in interrogation—Not yet, Sethennai had said—but she had heard her tutors talk sometimes, about how breaking people’s fingers was all very well but how much easier to let their own weight do the work for you.
For such a huge man, Psamag moved with graceful economy, and when he spoke his voice was quiet and unemphatic.
“Someone sent you here to me,” he said. He leant on one hand, running his thumb over the knifelike point of one tusk.
She shook her head. She would not betray Sethennai.
“Yes,” he said. “Someone sent you to kill me.”
Belthandros Sethennai had stolen her from the very mouth of death. She had no fear of anything, and no one could compel her. She would say nothing. Let them hurt her. Let them do what they wanted. She would not speak, even if they wrenched the life from her.