The heat against her ribs bit through wool, smelling of charred sheepskin and iron. Kallia shoved the smoldering book deep into her belt sash, ignoring the blisters forming along her knuckles. "The terrace roof," Vekaris said, his greatsword already clearing its sheath with an oiled hiss. "Move, both of you." Nyros didn't wait. He scurried toward the ceiling hatch, small frame agile as a stray cat, his boots finding purchase on the old cistern pipes. Kallia vaulted after him. Below, the cedar beam holding the sanctuary door groans under an iron ram, wood splinters exploding inward like buckshot. Night air struck them on the sloped terracotta tiles—brine-thick, sharp with the wind whipping off the southern gulf. Below their perch, Krythos tumbled away in terraced tiers down toward the breakers, every alley crammed with torches. Lantern light glinted on bronze helmets. "Crossbows on the grain silo!" Vekaris barked. He caught Kallia by the collar, dragging her flat against the slope just as steel-tipped quarrels gouged rows of broken clay an inch above her scalp. She slapped his hand away. The proximity choked her; the invisible golden cord linking her wrist to his ribcage hummed like an overtuned harp wire, threatening to wrench her off balance whenever he shifted his stance. Even now, the memory of his jaw on the scaffold, the shadow of his descending broadsword, clawed at the back of her throat. Run. Every nerve urged her to dive into the dark. "Don't touch me," she hissed. "Then don't stand in the volley," he countered, calm as marble. "You want that boy alive? Follow my line." They sprinted across the ridge. Tiles shattered beneath their strides. Nyros scrambled ahead, small shoulders hunched against the gale. A second volley struck the masonry beside them, spraying blinding limestone dust. They hit the courtyard edge. Dead end. The sanctuary roof ended abruptly at the shear face of the upper garrison wall, thirty cubits of solid cyclopean bedrock with nowhere left to climb. Behind them, ten archers in Malakos's house livery vaulted onto the roof, ratchets clicking as they re-strung their mechanisms. "Surrender the boy, imposter!" their squad leader shouted through an iron visor. "The Master knows who carries the ink!" Vekaris stepped into the front, leveling his massive blade. "Step back, Tessaris," he said under his breath. "I will break their line." "No!" Nyros shouted. The boy slid to a halt before the blind stone wall, tearing a copper cylinder from his satchel. The relic looked like an overgrown navigational astrolabe, its interlocking rings etched with Hellenic spirals that hissed against the damp mist. "Nyros, get behind him!" Kallia reached for her brother, the line stretching taut, snapping her arm back toward the Lord Commander. "I found it in the culvert drain!" Nyros yelled over the wind. He wedged a brass pin into the cylinder's core, twisting with both hands. "Sister showed me the schema once!" A deafening hum ripped through the air, shaking the mortar between the bricks. A ball of cerulean force discharged from the cylinder's snout, striking the base of the garrison wall with the concussive punch of a battering engine. Masonry fractured into pulverized gravel, throwing up a cloud of chalky smoke and blowing an arched fissure straight through into the ancient high aqueduct beyond. The shockwave blew the crossbowmen off their feet. Shingles slid down the pitch in roaring avalanches. "Move!" Kallia grabbed Nyros by the scruff, shoving him through the jagged hole. Vekaris followed instantly, his shoulder knocking aside loose masonry as he squeezed through the breech. On the other side lay the aqueduct: a single, narrow span of fluted stone stretching across an eighty-foot chasm between the inner cliff and the citadel garrison. Water had not run through its channel for three centuries, leaving only crumbling flags covered in slick moss. Rain began to pelt down, cold and unrelenting. "We cross to the garrison towers," Vekaris yelled, wiping water from his brow. "The garrison guards there answer to the high council, not your uncle." They stepped onto the span. Below, the black void swallowed the roar of the surf. Kallia took the lead, guiding Nyros along the center gutter where the stones remained solid. Her hand stayed clamped to her sash, feeling the scalding corner of the treason record against her hip. This was the document that had her mother's forged signature, the proof that Malakos had bartered state secrets to the seafaring leagues. It was her resurrection. Her pardon. Her retribution. Thunder cracked overhead. A heavy trebuchet ball, launched from the lower palace artillery platforms, howled through the mist and smashed squarely into the aqueduct's central pillar fifty paces behind them. The entire structure groaned. The stone beneath Kallia's boots buckled upward, then sagged sickeningly. "Jump!" Vekaris roared. Nyros threw himself across a widening gap, landing on his elbows on the stable half of the garrison landing. He scrambled up, reaching back out. "Kallia!" She leaped, her skirts snapping in the squall, clearing the breach cleanly. But behind her, the ancient stonework gave way completely. A twenty-foot section of the conduit sheared off into the abyss with a sound like tearing parchment. Vekaris leaped, but the stone beneath his boot crumbled at the moment of propulsion. He fell short. His left arm slammed onto the rim of the broken span. His plate-armored fingers gouged into wet moss, slipping down the slime. The sheer heft of his armor dragged him toward the chasm. The golden tether snapped taut between them like an iron chain. The sudden, violent yank wrenched Kallia off her feet, dragging her chest-first toward the ragged precipice. Her knees skidded against the edge. If he fell, the tether would either snap her spine or pull her down into the rocks alongside him. "Release the binding!" Vekaris shouted, his boots kicking against empty air, stone chips showering down into nothingness. "Cut the chord, Tessaris! Use your daggers!" "It doesn't cut!" she yelled. Her knuckles turned white as she dug her free hand into an iron drainage grate on the platform floor. Her shoulder felt as though it were being pried from its socket. Beneath her sash, the bound pages worked free. The small, scorched volume slid out onto the wet stone, teetering on the edge of the collapse. Three inches of open air separated the book from eternity. She looked down. Vekaris's grip was failing. His gauntlet skated across the mossy rim. His gray gaze locked onto hers—not with panic, but with that same maddening, terrible composure he had shown on the executioner's dais when he had lowered his steel toward her neck. He was ready to die. If she used both arms, she could snatch the ledger before it tumbled. She could let the tether rip her into the wall, wedge her boots, and watch the man who murdered her break upon the coastal reef. Her vengeance, neatly delivered without a single drop of poison. The volume slid an inch. The rain plastered her dark curls to her temples. *He wept for you,* her memory snarled. *He hates his own hands because of you.* "Curse you!" Kallia roared. She ignored the pages. She surged forward past the falling book and drove both hands down into the cold iron of Vekaris's gorget. Her sleeves tore against the rough sill. The book slipped past her forearm, turning end over end through the dark, swallowed by the gray foam of the surf below. All her proof. Every signature. Gone. With a ragged, furious scream that tore the lining of her throat, she braced her hips against the drainage rim and hauled. The golden tether pulsed white-hot, feeding her effort, burning through the numbness of her arms. Vekaris found a toehold against a projecting corbel, heaving upward with her pull. He rolled over the broken lip, collapsing onto the stone landing in a clatter of steel and sodden leather, chest heaving. They lay there in the rain, three feet apart, linked by the radiant strand that now hummed a quiet, mournful harmony. Vekaris stared at her, his broad chest rising and falling in violent hitches. His dark hair was plastered to his forehead, his face pale beneath the lantern glare. He saw the empty sash at her waist. He saw the blistered skin on her palms. "You saved me," he rasped, his voice raw with an awe that stripped away every layer of his command. "You threw away the proof... for me. Tessaris." She opened her mouth to spit another lie, to bite back that she only saved her own neck from the tether's snap. But the words died in the back of her mouth, drowned out by the sudden, piercing shriek of a child from the courtyard below. Kallia scrambled to her knees, looking over the low crenellation. Nyros was in the courtyard. Three heavy-armored retainers had him pinned face-down in the mud, their spears crossed over his spine. Behind them stood Malakos, his embroidered mantle stained with ash, a silver horn pressed to his lips. A magical voice boomed from the horn, amplified by the city's ward-stones, rolling like thunder across every district of the citadel: "Citizens of the rock! By decree of the High Council, the traitor's whelp, Nyros of House Tessaris, will face the headsman's block in the center circle at dawn!"

The Choice