The world folded up mid-swing of the ballista crank and dropped me somewhere else entirely, and my hands closed on nothing but smoke.
I coughed twice before my eyes adjusted enough to tell me where “somewhere else” actually was.
Stone corridor, high vaulted ceiling, tapestries on both walls doing their best impression of kindling.
Vhaldrèche.
The royal wing, judging by the gold trim on everything that wasn’t currently on fire.
My shoulder throbbed right where the infirmary splint had promised it would if I did anything stupid with it, which meant someone had apparently spent the last hour or so doing something stupid with it before I inherited the bill.
Mavra was already moving toward me, crouched low under the worst of the smoke layer, a strip of wet cloth tied over the bottom half of her face.
“You’re late,” she said, which was generous phrasing for a swap I had no control over whatsoever.
“I was busy pinning a dragon to the ground. Catch me up.”
“Three archives, three fires.” She held up fingers as she counted, not out of theatrics but because the smoke made talking a chore and she wanted to conserve breath.
“The king’s sentries figured out we were coming for the record halls, so they’re burning their own wing to smuggle the ledgers out under cover. If the books leave the building, we lose the chance to torch them ourselves, and every soul still bonded to this castle stays chained to him.”
“And someone was covering this exit.”
“Was. Past tense.” She didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t ask, because the sound of boots on stone somewhere down the corridor told me the guards hadn’t stopped moving just because the previous body holding this position had been swapped out from under them.
“Two strike teams are already inside the east and west halls. We’re the third. If we don’t get eyes on this room in the next few minutes, the sync doesn’t happen, and nothing burns.”
“Sync?”
“All three archives light at once, or not at all. One relay survives, the king rebuilds his link through it. That’s the whole reason we’re doing this the hard way instead of just torching the nearest one and calling it a night.”
I filed that away and looked past her at the actual problem, which was a set of double doors reinforced with iron bands and flanked by two guards who did not look like men currently having a good day.
Behind them, deeper in, I could hear the specific scraping shuffle of men carrying something heavy and trying not to drop it.
Ledgers, probably.
Books don’t usually need two people per volume unless the volumes are bound in something considerably heavier than paper.
“Front door’s a bad idea,” I said.
“It’s the only door.”
“It’s the only door you know about.” I dug into the lining of my coat, past the ration wrapper I still hadn’t gotten around to throwing out, and found the thin brass disk I’d lifted off a maintenance rack back in Odrance during a job that felt like it belonged to a different competition entirely.
The arena didn’t care where equipment came from, only that you were holding it when the swap happened, and I’d been holding this token through three sectors now on the theory that a universal maintenance token had to be good for something eventually.
Mavra eyed it.
“What is that?”
“Contractor’s access token. City infrastructure crews use them to get into service tunnels without tripping alarms meant for actual intruders. The palace registry back in the first archive we cleared listed a maintenance corridor running behind this wing, servicing the old boiler stacks. If it’s still wired the same way—”
“You want to bet our timing window on a filing cabinet you read three days ago?”
“I want to bet it on a door that isn’t guarded by two men with halberds. Yes.”
She didn’t argue further, which from Mavra counted as enthusiastic endorsement.
We backtracked twenty feet to a stretch of wall that looked, to any untrained eye, exactly like every other stretch of wall in this corridor, decorated with the same dour oil portrait of some dead relative of the king’s who’d probably also had people burned alive for him at some point.
I pressed the token against the seam beneath the frame, the way the registry diagram had shown, and felt more than heard the click of something old and well-oiled giving way behind stone that had been dressed to conceal it.
It ran parallel to the archive room for maybe thirty feet before opening onto a landing that looked straight down into the chamber we needed, past a curtain of hanging tapestry that separated us from a wall of active flame on the far side.
“That’s the fire they’re using to cover the evacuation,” Mavra said, nodding at it.
“We need to be on the other side of that to reach the brazier and the guards moving the ledgers.”
“Through the fire.”
“Through the fire.”
I didn’t love the plan, but she was already unwinding something from her belt, a coil of cord she’d been using since the tapestry incident back at the first archive, the one where she’d learned exactly what her power was good for and exactly what it cost her to use it.
She reached out and laid her palm flat against the nearest hanging tapestry, the one closest to the flame front, and I watched the fabric under her hand go from scorched and curling at the edges to somehow duller, deader, like the fire itself had lost interest in it.
“Combustibility,” she said through gritted teeth, the strain showing in the tightness around her eyes.
“I can pull it out of something. Doesn’t vanish. Goes somewhere.”
“Where?”
“Wherever I’m standing when I do it.”
I looked at her jacket sleeve and understood the problem about two seconds before she did anything about it, which was long enough to see the fabric change color at the cuff, darken, take on a faint sheen like oil on cloth.
“Mavra.”
“I know.” She was already stripping the jacket off, fast, throwing it clear of both of us before it did whatever it was about to do.
It hit the stone floor and didn’t so much catch fire as detonate into flame, a burst of intense heat that made me flinch even from six feet away.
“Good thing I’m not overly attached to that coat.”
“You could’ve mentioned that risk before doing it next to me.”
“I could’ve. Didn’t have time.” She was down to a thin undershirt now, arms bare.
She didn’t look thrilled about it, but the tapestry ahead of us had gone from an active wall of fire to something closer to smoldering, dead cloth that we could push through without either of us coming out the other side missing skin.
“Move. We don’t have long before it reignites from the ambient heat.”
We went through fast, low, and the heat still found every part of me it could reach, but it was survivable heat, the kind that leaves you sweating and cursing instead of screaming.
On the other side, the archive room opened up into exactly what Mavra had described: two guards wrestling a chained cart of ledgers toward a side exit, a third guard standing sentry over a stone brazier already loaded with kindling, and behind them, shelves and shelves of bound record books, most already marked with the wax seals that meant they’d been tagged for destruction by the earlier reconnaissance passes.
I didn’t wait for a signal.
Neither did Mavra.
She hit the sentry guard low, taking his legs out before he’d even registered we’d come through the fire instead of the door, and I closed the distance to the cart guards while my shoulder screamed its objections at every step.
One of them swung a halberd wide and slow—the kind of swing a man makes when he’s more worried about his cargo than his fight—and I ducked under it, putting him on the floor with an elbow to the throat that wasn’t going to win style points but got the job done.
The second guard dropped the cart handle entirely and ran for the exit, and Mavra let him go, because chasing him wasn’t the mission and every second spent chasing him was a second the sync window kept bleeding away.
“Ledgers,” she said, already hauling the cart toward the brazier.
“All of them, marked or not. If we’re wrong about which ones matter, we don’t get a second pass.”
I grabbed armfuls, felt the paper bite into the raw skin of my palm where the infirmary dressing had already started to loosen, and didn’t stop.
We piled them onto the kindling until the brazier looked less like a fireplace and more like a burial mound made of bound leather and vellum, royal seals stamped in wax across half the covers, each one a name, a bloodline, a link back to King Orsane, who’d apparently spent generations writing down exactly who he owned.
A soft chime came through the ambient noise floor of the arena feed, the kind of notification tone that meant Vassago had something to say whether we wanted to hear it or not.
“Tune in, tune in!” Her voice arrived cheerful and untouched by smoke inhalation, because she didn’t have lungs to inhale anything with. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
“We’ve got a live poll running for our viewers at home: Burn the Books, or Burn the Readers? Vote now for a chance to influence absolutely nothing, since the mission parameters were locked the moment the archives went live! But hey, engagement’s engagement.”
Mavra didn’t look up from the ledgers.
“She does that.”
“She does that,” I agreed, and put it out of my head, because the countdown that actually mattered had just appeared on the inside of my vision, stark red digits ticking down from forty seconds, tagged with a status line I hadn’t seen before: SYNC WINDOW—EAST HALL READY.
WEST HALL READY.
AWAITING THIRD CONFIRMATION.
“Forty seconds to confirm we’re set,” I said.
“The other two teams are already there.”
“Then confirm it.” Mavra was tying off the last of the loose ledgers with cord to keep them from sliding off the pile, sweat cutting clean lines through the soot on her face.
“Ready doesn’t mean lit. It means we’re standing here with fire in hand when the signal comes.”
I found a torch sconce still burning on the wall behind us, the one the guards had presumably meant to use to finish burning their own escape route, and pulled it free.
Thirty seconds left on the counter.
I stood over the brazier with the flame six inches from the driest ledger in the pile and waited, because burning early meant burning alone, and burning alone meant the king kept two working relays out of three, and two working relays meant this entire exercise had been for nothing.
The counter dropped through the teens.
Mavra crouched beside the fallen sentry guard, keeping a boot on his chest in case he had opinions about waking up early, and watched the same digits I did.
At zero, the status line flipped to a single word across all three archives at once: SYNCHRONIZED.
I lowered the torch.
The pile caught fast, faster than any normal stack of paper had any right to, and I understood a beat later that whatever they’d treated the vellum with to preserve it for however many decades had also turned it into pure fuel.
The heat pushed us both back a step.
Somewhere across the room, one of the fallen guards let out a sound that wasn’t pain exactly, more like the sound a man makes watching something he’d built his whole life around collapse in front of him.
Behind me, near the archive’s outer doorway, I caught the sentry guard staring down at his own forearm, at a brand mark burned into the skin there in the shape of a crest I’d seen stamped on every wax seal in that fire.
As the smoke thickened around us, the mark faded—not scarring over, just fading—like ink lifted off a page by something that had never really been there in the first place.
He looked up at nothing in particular, mouth open, and I didn’t have a good answer for the expression on his face, because I didn’t fully understand what he was feeling either.
“That’s it,” Mavra said, quiet, watching the same thing I was.
“Every subject bonded through this archive’s relay. Whatever the king was drawing on to sacrifice them from a distance, it’s gone.”
“From a distance,” I repeated, because something about her phrasing nagged at me, and I was already crouching by the fallen cart to check what had spilled out of it before the fire took the rest.
One ledger had slid clear of the pile entirely, half open, a page of notation in a tighter, more recent hand than the rest of the archive.
I read it twice to make sure I wasn’t misreading it through the smoke stinging my eyes.
“Mavra.” I held it up.
“The relays let him brand and sacrifice people without being in the room. That’s what we just killed.”
“Right.”
“This says he can still do it without any relay at all, as long as he’s standing in front of the person and using his own seal. In person, this still works.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment.
The brazier kept burning behind us, throwing shadows across a room full of empty shelves and men whose skin no longer carried the mark that had bound them to a monarch who apparently hadn’t lost nearly as much tonight as we’d hoped.