A thin-faced girl—Hansch, but a servant—ran through a wooden colonnade to her right, and Sammish ran after her, shouting. The girl stopped and turned back. Her eyes were wide with panic.
“Lady Andomaka,” Sammish said.
“What?”
“Andomaka. The pale one who’s in charge of everything. Have you seen her?”
“What?”
“Have you seen her?”
The girl flinched like Sammish had struck her, and shook her head. When she ran again, Sammish didn’t try to stop her. The hallways looked different than when she’d snuck in before. Either they weren’t the same places as the map in her mind, or she wasn’t the same girl who’d seen them. Both seemed possible. The private temple would be to the west. She was sure of that. She put the morning sun behind her and went as fast as she could.
People were everywhere. Some were carrying armloads of cloth or embroidered chairs. Some were weeping. A few were carrying buckets of water and sloshing so much out as they went that there’d be nothing left by the time they found a fire. Sammish scanned the pandemonium. There was only one thing she needed to find.
She stumbled into a hall that she was sure she knew. Yes, there was the path leading to the window she’d jumped through. The private temple was ahead.
And, brief as lightning, a pale face and hair that passed through a doorway at the end of the corridor. Sammish caught her breath. Her body was rushing like a river at flood, even standing still. She walked down toward where Andomaka had been, telling herself that she was only looking for her cousin at the same time she pictured what she knew of the maze of wooden passages that led to the stone altar at its heart. If she was right, if her memory held, that was the direction Andomaka was going.
She held the little cutter’s blade in her hand. It seemed inadequate now, but it was sharp as a razor. She pictured herself pushing it between the pale woman’s ribs. Or drawing it across her throat. She was almost certain she could do it. She reached the passage where Andomaka had been, turned down it.
Andomaka was no more than a dozen feet ahead, her back to Sammish. A guard in the uniform of the brotherhood was talking with her. Sammish didn’t wait to hear what they were saying. She turned back around the corner and pressed herself to the wall. It was a struggle to hear anything over her heartbeat, but the sound came. Footsteps. Someone was moving. She risked a glance around the corner in time to see Andomaka vanish. She followed, but the guard was in her way, grabbing her by the shoulder.
“You have to go,” he said. “Get out now.”
“I will. I just have to get something.”
“You don’t understand. They’re giving up the house. We can’t save it. The sand-and-water crew is just trying to keep it from spreading. We have to get everyone out.”
“All right,” she said, and the guard turned and left her, believing that she’d go. It was going to work. She’d only meant to put a little fear into the captain, but this was best. If the house was coming down, they had to save the knife.
But she wasn’t moving forward. She wasn’t chasing her prey, and she didn’t know why she wasn’t. All she could see was Alys. Alys, in the barred room. Alys, saying I trust you.
“There’s enough time,” Sammish said aloud, as if hearing her own voice would convince her. “You can do both. But you have to move.”
Caught between impulses she could not master, Sammish didn’t move.
The private temple was empty when the thing that called itself Kithamar entered it for the last time. The tapestries hung as they always had, still and solemn against the walls. The stone altar squatted, the game board on it unplayed. The lanterns marked their sacred geometry. It was all fated for the fire. There was no stopping that now. But it didn’t matter. Everything would be fine in the end.
As it strode to the altar, it pushed away the memory of being Ausai in this same place. Of reaching for the sacred blade and finding the locked safe cache empty. Whatever this was, it wasn’t that. The blade would be there this time. The dangers of the present weren’t the dangers of the past. At the altar, it pushed the game board away. The carved wood crashed to the ground. Glass beads hissed and skittered. It knelt and undid the lock with trembling hands. The thief girl had been here once before. Been at this same altar when it had worn the Bronze Coast boy. But it had been careful since. Karsen, the friend of its enemy, had come and left the knife untaken. Had he only been getting the lay of the land? Was he behind this? No one could have snuck in and taken the knife.
Except that someone had before.
The mechanism turned, revealing the sacred cavity beneath the altar. With trembling hands, it reached in and clutched at the darkness. It felt the leather sheath and pulled it out. The knife was there, but the thing that called itself Kithamar drew it. It had to see the marks on the blade itself to be sure. It had to feel the subtle hum of its power. And when all was as it should have been, it let out a soft cry in relief and bowed its head.
Everything else could be redone. The altar would have to be retrieved, but no fire could break it. Even if the brotherhood burned to the ground, the stone would wait beneath. Once it took its rightful place as prince, there would be laborers and mules and ropes enough to dig down to the bones of the world if it needed to.
It rose, collecting itself. The panic it had felt only moments before seemed shameful now. It fastened the blade to its belt, tying it in place with leather thongs and knots that would not slip.
It had faced a hundred moments of crisis before. Sometimes, it had died in them. As long as there was an initiate who knew how to call it back and the tools to accomplish the rite, it feared nothing. Its mind grew more focused and clear. The way forward was the palace. Even if Byrn a Sal and Halev Karsen had lit this fire, Tregarro would still be there. It had drawn itself up from nothing before, and it had much more than nothing now.
Something roared in the distance and a wave of human voices cried out in alarm. A wall collapsing, perhaps. The air in the private temple had grown murky with smoke. It was time to leave.
It strode toward the corridors, the courtyard beyond them, and then the city.
Slowly, over the long and terrible minutes, Alys came to understand exactly how much trouble she was in.
At first, she paced in the dim light from the window, her throat thick with excitement and fear. She imagined all the things that might be happening with Sammish and Andomaka—Sammish captured, Andomaka killed, the fire put out too soon and guards returning to open the barred door and demand to know how Alys’s prisoner had escaped.
The sounds from outside grew louder. Voices raised in alarm. For a time, she took comfort in them. As long as there were calls of alarm, the attention of the compound would be on that and not her. The wind pushed the scent of smoke in, and the shadows of ankles and carts and heavy buckets flickered above her.
A sound came. A steady rumble, like wooden wheels on cobblestone, only constant. Alys listened to it growing under the voices, not sure what could be making it. A carriage, maybe, but a carriage that didn’t fade with distance. The wind, maybe, catching some niche in the architecture and playing the house like blowing across a bottle. Only, when the wind shifted, the rumble didn’t shift with it.
Fewer shadows came. Fewer buckets of water. And the rumble grew louder. It was almost a roar when she understood. It was the voice of the fire, and then all other thoughts were blown from her mind.