Asti grabbed him and covered his mouth. He heard something down one of the other hallways, coming from the east. Delmin protested, but Asti dragged him through another doorway on the north side.
“Quiet!” Asti told him. “Someone’s here.”
Delmin nodded. He looked like he got it, and Asti released his mouth.
“Maybe they’re coming to finish the machine,” Delmin whispered.
“Let’s see what’s happening,” Asti said. He peered out of the doorway. A thin, damp man with stringy black hair came into the machine chamber, flanked by a cadre of beasts.
That was the only way to describe them. Almost a dozen, all of them inhuman in their own ways. Skin unnatural colors. Limbs of every size.
“Saints almighty,” Delmin said. “That’s a mage. A potent one.”
“You can sense that?”
“Like I can see you,” Delmin said. He stumbled away and vomited in the corner of the room.
Asti couldn’t blame the kid. He was of half a mind to do that himself. The last thing he wanted to do was tussle with a mage and a squad of horrors.
“Stay quiet,” Asti said. “I’m going to look for another way out.”
“How?”
Asti shook his head. “Best I reckon, we’re under Saint Bridget’s Square. The church should be over there. They’ve got cellars, maybe it connects.”
“I should—”
“Kid, it might be that the only way out is the way we came in,” Asti said. “You say you’re a mage, so ready yourself to get us back up to that tunnel. You hear?”
He nodded.
Asti followed down the hallway—and it was a hallway. The machine chamber and the tunnel from under the mage house, that had been rough-cut stone. This was more like Josie’s passages. Properly built, with real walls and doors. Asti cautiously checked a few of the doors. Empty sleeping cells. Looked like no one was using this place. But dead ends.
Asti checked another door. Empty again.
But not without sound. Crying. Moaning.
Children.
A quick scan of the room showed where that was coming from. A ventilation shaft at the top of the wall. So the kids were somewhere on the other side.
Asti went back to the hallway, seeking the best way to reach to the kids. If he could find them, find a way up to the surface from here, then that would make all this worth the trouble. He went around the next corner, spotting a grand doorway. Drawing out two knives, he pushed the door open. If the kids were here, and he was going to have to fight to save them, so be it.
There were no children. Instead it was far more disturbing. The room held ten glass cases, in a circle. Sarcophagi. Four of them were occupied by sleeping women. Sleeping, pregnant women.
“What in—”
Hands grabbed his head. Liora Rand’s face appeared right in front of him.
“You cannot be here!” she said.
He knew she was a figment of his broken mind, but by Saint Senea, she felt real. He could smell her.
“Get out, get out, you stupid man,” she snarled at him. “You can’t see this.”
She pushed him away, and he swiped at her with his knife.
He swung at open air.
“Asti!” Delmin was lumbering over to him. “Did you find a way out? Are you all right?”
“I—what just happened?” Asti asked. He was standing in the middle of the hallway.
“You were just stabbing . . . nothing.”
“I saw—she . . .” Where had he just been? He had heard something, or . . . seen . . . an image of something troubling was just on the edge of his mind, but he couldn’t reach it. No, he had just been searching the hallway, and found nothing peculiar at all.
“Did you find a way out?”
“No,” Asti said. Dead end sleeping cells. That’s all there was. That was all he had found, he was certain.
Wasn’t he? He looked back down the hallway, as if he expected to see something else. Had there been another door? No, of course not. Nothing, nothing at all, no need to look again.
“Then we need to get out,” Delmin said. “I don’t know what that machine does, but I do know that mage is building up numina to do something, and I don’t want to be here when that happens.”
The examinarians came, the bodies taken, the rooms searched, but no revelations that made everything suddenly make sense. Satrine had hoped these fellows, who chose death over arrest, had some sort of journal or ledger or something she could read through and understand it all. But there was nothing.
Nothing except the trapmaster, who had slipped off into the crowd. She didn’t even really think he was a part of this, or knew anything. She knew he lived near this part of town; he might well have been just another gawker. She might be putting more weight on his presence just because this whole thing spooked her, and she was trying—needing—to find some sense out of the chaos.
But then she remembered how Sister Myriem had pointed her toward him, exactly when Satrine needed to find him. That couldn’t be a coincidence. Unless it was, and she was convincing herself that a random hunch meant . . . what? A greater power helping her? Her prayers were being answered in the form of an angry girl in a cloistress dress?
“There are better prayers you could answer, Saint Marguerine,” she said to herself as she stepped out of the apartment into the dusky twilight of the Keller Cove streets.
“What now?” Kellman asked her.
“Just talking to myself,” she said. “Sorry this was a waste of time.”
“I’d hardly call it that,” Kellman said. “I mean, these were three sick bastards who clearly were going up to terrible business. We’re definitely better off with them gone.”
“No argument on that,” she said. “But we still don’t know what they stole, why they stole it, or who they were with. Because whatever the blazes this was, they were part of something bigger.”
“The Brotherhood,” Kellman said, frowning. “I remember hearing that once before, can’t remember where.”
“Think on that, it might matter,” she said. It was well after sign-out time,
