For a moment, there was only cold and dark and the weight of black water pressing on his chest.
Then his head broke the surface, and he could breathe.
Aren stood up slowly.
The water came to his knees now, not his chest.
It was still freezing, but the light had changed.
He was standing in a huge hall of grey stone, much bigger than the dye house he had stepped out of, so big that he could not see the far walls.
A pale, sickly light came from nowhere and everywhere, the same flat light he remembered from the Training Rift.
All around him stood vats.
They were enormous, round stone tanks as wide as a house and as tall as two men, rising out of the flooded floor in long rows.
Their rims were thick enough to walk on.
Old iron pipes ran between them, rusted orange, some broken and dripping.
Each vat was full to the brim with water, and the water in each was a different color.
Deep red.
Dark blue.
A poisonous yellow-green.
The colors glowed faintly in the dead light, and their reflections moved slowly across the stone ceiling far above.
It was very quiet.
The only sound was dripping.
A dye house, Aren thought.
The Rift copied the place it opened in.
Or the place copied the Rift.
He did not know which, and he did not like either answer.
He waded toward the nearest vat, slowly, his sword held above the water.
He had gone perhaps ten steps when something touched his leg.
It was soft and cold, and it wrapped around his ankle and squeezed.
He did not think.
He threw himself sideways at the vat and caught the thick stone rim with both hands and pulled himself up out of the water in one desperate heave.
Something came up out of the water with him, still holding his leg.
It was grey and slick and as long as his arm, a fat tube of muscle with no eyes and a round mouth at one end full of tiny, circling teeth.
The mouth was already pressing against his boot.
[Dye Leech.
Rank F: Level 5.]
He brought his heel down on the stone rim with the leech under it, hard, twice.
It let go.
It fell back into the water with a soft splash, and he saw, now that he was looking, that the water around the vat was moving.
Small ripples everywhere.
Dozens of them.
Maybe hundreds.
He sat on the rim of the vat with his heart hammering and looked at the flooded floor of the hall, and finally understood why nothing had come out of this Rift.
The monsters here lived in the water.
They did not leave it.
They did not need to.
Anything that came into their water would come to them.
The city guard had looked at a quiet Rift in a flooded cellar and decided it was harmless.
They had been right, as long as nobody was stupid enough to walk into it.
He did not go back into the water after that.
He moved along the tops of the vats instead, the way he had moved along the roofs of Salt Lane.
The rims were wide and slippery, and the gaps between the vats were sometimes a long jump, sometimes a balance along a rusted pipe with the black water waiting underneath.
The Moonlit Step helped.
It made his landings silent and his balance perfect, and he understood it a little better with every jump.
He was crossing a pipe between a red vat and a blue one when he met the first Vat Crawler.
It came up over the rim of the blue vat in front of him, slowly, pulling itself out of the colored water.
It was the size of a large dog and shaped like a crab, with a flat, wide shell of grey stone and six thick legs and two heavy claws.
Blue dye dripped off it in long strings.
It did not have eyes either.
It had two thin feelers that waved slowly in the air, tasting it.
[Vat Crawler.
Rank E: Level 3.]
The feelers found him.
The Crawler raised both claws and came at him along the rim.
He had fought the Quarry Brute with a plan and rocks and luck.
He did not have any of those now.
He had a narrow pipe under his feet and a black pool full of leeches underneath it.
But he had something new.
He looked at the Crawler, really looked, the way the instinct he had taken from Rook let him look at things now.
He saw its weight.
He saw how it moved its front legs first and its back legs after, so that for half a heartbeat with every step, the front of its body lifted.
He saw, under the edge of its shell, right where the front legs joined the body, a thin line of something paler and softer than stone.
It swung a claw at him.
He leaned back and let it pass in front of his face.
It stepped forward, and the front of its body lifted, and he put the point of his sword into the pale line and pushed.
The Crawler shuddered and went still.
Its legs folded.
It slid off the rim of the vat and into the blue water with a heavy splash, and the water began to boil with leeches.
Aren stood on the pipe, breathing hard, and watched the blue water churn.
All right, he thought.
All right.
I can do this.
He did it six more times over the next two hours.
Not all of them were clean.
The fourth Crawler came at him from behind, over the rim of a vat he thought was empty, and caught his left leg in one claw before he could turn.
It squeezed.
He heard something in his calf make a sound that bones should not make.
He killed it anyway, but when he pulled his leg out of the claw, there was blood running into his boot, and every step after that was a little slower.
The sixth one nearly knocked him into the water.
He hung from the rim of a yellow vat by his fingertips for one long, terrible second, with the black pool rippling right under his feet and the small circling mouths rising toward him, before he got a knee onto the stone and dragged himself up.
He cut out every core he could reach.
Some of the Crawlers fell into the water before he could get to them, and those were lost.
By the time he had worked his way to the far end of the great hall, he had seven cores in his pocket, each the size of an egg, glowing a cold sea-green.
He absorbed two of them, sitting on the rim of a red vat with his torn leg stretched out in front of him.
[Experience gained: 38% of current level.]
The other five he kept.
Each one was worth most of a gold crown at Old Mag’s, and he owed Rook money at twenty percent interest.
He had done the math on that every night since Wednesday.
At the end of the hall, there was a doorway, and through it, a round chamber full of black water.
In the middle of the chamber, rising out of the water like an island, was a low platform of stone.
On the platform, something enormous was sleeping.
[Vat Mother.
Rank E: Level 8.]
It was a Crawler, but grown to a size that made Aren’s stomach turn.
It was as big as a wagon, its shell crusted with layers of old dye, red and blue and green, like a painting left out in the rain for a hundred years.
Its claws were each as long as he was tall.
Around the edges of the platform, in the black water, the leeches moved in slow circles, like dogs guarding a house.
Behind the creature, under its huge body, something gleamed.
A core, he thought.
The heart of this Rift.
When the guardian died and the core was taken, the Rift would close.
That was how Rifts worked.
He crouched in the doorway and made his list.
It is Level 8.
I am Level 1, almost 2.
It is far stronger than me.
My leg is hurt.
If I fall in the water, I die.
If it catches me in its claws, I die.
But It is asleep.
That was the only line on the list in his favor.
He would get one attack, and he could not miss it.
He found a pipe that ran from the doorway across the chamber, high above the water, to a broken vat on the far side of the platform.
He crawled along it on his stomach, one slow inch at a time, his hurt leg dragging behind him.
The leeches did not notice.
The Vat Mother did not wake.
He came down off the pipe onto the edge of the platform, behind the creature, where its huge body hid him from its feelers.
Up close, he could see the pale line under the edge of its shell.
It was much thicker than on the small ones.
Much harder too.
He could tell just by looking.
A sword thrust would not go through that.
He put his bare hand flat on the cold, crusted shell of the Vat Mother and thought one word.
Zero.
The door opened inside him.
Under his palm, the shell stopped being hard.
He drove his sword into the pale line with all his weight behind it, and it went in to the hilt.
The Vat Mother screamed.
It was a high, grinding shriek that shook the whole chamber, and its body heaved upward, and a claw as long as a man swept around blindly behind it.
In that same second, Aren’s own body was as soft as paper.
The edge of the claw barely touched him.
It opened his side from his ribs to his hip like a knife through wet cloth.
He did not let go of the sword.
He held onto it with both hands while the creature thrashed and his blood ran down onto the stone, and when the second ended and his body came back to him, he pulled the sword out, stepped back, and lifted it.
There was nobody here.
Nobody to see.
The silver crescent came off his blade the size of his forearm, bright as the moon, and went into the open wound in the creature’s side and through its body and out the other side.
The Vat Mother went still.
Its great claws fell onto the stone with a crash that echoed through the chamber.
The leeches in the water stopped circling.
Aren sat down hard on the platform, his hand pressed against his side, and for a while he did nothing at all except breathe.
He absorbed the guardian’s core sitting in his own blood.
[Experience gained: 71% of current level.]
[Rank E: Level 1 → Level 2.]
The heat of it closed the worst of the wound in his side.
Not all of it.
Enough to stand.
He tore strips off his shirt and tied them tight around his waist, and then he limped to the center of the platform, to the gleaming thing he had seen under the creature’s body.
It was not a core.
It was a stake of black iron, as long as his arm, driven deep into the stone of the platform.
Its surface was covered in tiny carved runes, so many and so close together that they looked like scales.
It was humming.
He could feel it in his teeth, a low, steady vibration, like a giant breathing very slowly somewhere far below.
Beside it, half in the water, lay a man.
He had been dead for a day, maybe less.
He wore a long grey robe, soaked and torn, and the Vat Mother’s claws had done terrible things to him.
His face was turned away.
At his belt, there was a thin curved knife with a handle of white bone, and the same tiny runes carved along its blade.
Aren stood over him.
Nothing came out of this Rift, he thought.
Because nothing was meant to.
It wasn’t a Rift that opened by accident.
Someone came down here and drove this thing into the floor.
Someone opened it.
He thought about the seven red lights across the city.
The cathedral, the merchant quarter, the docks, the river gate.
Seven Rifts in one night, after eighteen years of never more than one a month.
Someone opened all of them.
He reached down and closed his hand around the black stake.
It was ice cold, and the humming went up his arm into his chest.
He pulled.
It did not move.
He set his feet and pulled with everything he had, with his torn leg screaming and his side tearing open again under the bandages, and the stake came out of the stone with a sound like a long breath let go.
The whole chamber shook.
The black water around the platform began to churn.
The pale light flickered.
Far away, back in the great hall, he heard the vats cracking one after another, like ice on a pond in spring.
The Rift was closing.
He ran.
He came up out of the black water in the cellar of the old dye house with the stake in one hand and his sword in the other, gasping, half frozen, bleeding through the bandages.
Behind him, the red light shrank to the size of a door, then a window, then a coin, and went out.
The cellar was dark and still.
Grey light was coming through the broken roof above.
It was dawn.
Outside, he heard voices.
Boots on the cobblestones and a woman’s voice, loud and rough, giving orders.
“…nobody’s touched it since last night, the guard said.
We go in two by two, shields first.
Watch the water.”
He did not wait to see who they were.
He climbed the rubble of the collapsed wall at the back of the cellar, hauled himself onto what was left of the roof, and lay flat on the wet slates, breathing as quietly as he could.
Below him, people came into the cellar.
Through a hole in the roof, he saw them: six hunters in mismatched armor, and at their head a big woman with red hair cut short and a heavy hammer on her shoulder.
The same one he had seen at the market last night, holding the line around the merchant quarter’s Rift.
Rank C.
She stood at the edge of the black water and looked at it.
The water was calm.
There was no red light anywhere.
The Rift was gone.
“It’s closed,” one of the hunters said.
“Must’ve closed on its own.”
“Rifts don’t close on their own,” the red-haired woman said.
She crouched down at the edge of the water and touched something on the stone floor.
She lifted her fingers and looked at them.
Blood.
His blood, Aren realized.
It had dripped from the rim of the cellar as he climbed out.
She stood up slowly and looked around the empty cellar, and then, for a long moment, up at the broken roof.
“Someone was here before us,” she said.