Forty-four steps passed, with Cam counting softly the entire way, before Merik and the girl reached a brick wall with a jagged crack slicing down. The rift looked accidental.
It also looked recent, the edges sharp. The rubble fresh.
But clearly this was what Merik and Cam had come for, so they slipped through the crack. Merik went first, only to end up behind a shelf of damp cedar. A shuffle sideways and he found himself in a cellar.
The royal storerooms. They looked exactly as Merik remembered: uneven shelves filled with boxes and sacks and blankets and bottles—any supply that might be needed for running the palace.
For several long breaths, Merik waited, listening. Feeling for breaths in the stale air, squinting for figures in the weak light that flickered from magicked lamps.
Merik heard no one; Merik saw no one. The only sound was water dripping into a puddle nearby. Condensation off the weeping granite walls, and perhaps a leak in the foundation too.
“We’re on the lowest level of the royal storerooms,” Merik murmured to Cam at last.
Her breath kicked out with surprise. “Well, that was easy to get in.”
Merik agreed, and he couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps the X on the map hadn’t indicated a meeting at all—but rather a hole in the Cisterns that needed repair.
Here they were, though, and Merik intended to look around. Particularly since this was the first time he had ever seen supplies on the lowest level. The upper two floors were usually well stocked, but the lower four were always empty. Always.
Merik had entered these storerooms two months before. He’d descended to level two, seen nothing but mice, and gone straight to his father to request a trade envoy be sent to Veñaza City before the Truce Summit.
Serafin had agreed.
Then Serafin had appointed Merik to that task—and not just the task of reopening trade but also of representing Nubrevna as Admiral of the Royal Navy at the Truce Summit.
The holiest always have the farthest to fall.
“Come.” Merik cocked his chin, beckoning Cam onward. The storeroom’s shelves crisscrossed toward a central intersection where a stone staircase circled upward six levels.
Row after row they passed, each shelf crammed full of supplies.
“What’s that say?” Cam whispered, pointing to a fat sack. They were halfway to the room’s center, and supplies were thinning out. “It doesn’t look like Nubrevnan letters.”
“Because it’s not,” Merik answered. He toyed with his filthy sleeves. “Those are Dalmotti words. That one says wheat. The other says barley.” He motioned to a crate with red paint on the side. “That crate has dried dates in it from Marstok. That one of over there says walnuts in Cartorran.”
Cam’s lips pinched sideways. “But, sir … what are foreign foods doing here? I thought no one would trade with us.”
Merik was wondering the same, though he could make a guess. One that conjured Marstoki weapons, miniature ships, and violence at sea.
Heat spindled down Merik’s arms.
The amount of stores here was far more than two weeks of piracy could provide though. Vivia must have started the Foxes months ago—long before she’d betrayed Merik at sea and left him to die.
Merik’s certainty of that grew, as did his rage, the closer he and Cam came to the cellar’s heart, where the stairwell waited. Here, all shelves were empty, as if whoever had stocked this space wanted the wares to be hidden.
“Up,” Merik ordered. He had to check the fifth level. He had to see if there was more of the same.
There was, and Merik’s lungs fanned hotter. The fifth floor was even more crowded with supplies than the sixth, none labeled in Nubrevnan.
And all of it here, where it could do no one any good.
This food should be feeding Pin’s Keep or the homeless in the Cisterns—or, hell-waters, the people of Nihar would take it. Instead, though, it sat here and served no one. Except, perhaps, Vivia.
Enough—Merik had seen enough, and it was time to leave the way they’d come. There was no meeting here. Only a hole in the Cisterns wall that needed fixing.
Merik and Cam were halfway back to the stairwell, though, when a groan drifted toward them. “Help.”
Merik froze midstride; Cam halted beside him. The groan repeated, “Help,” and Cam clutched at her stomach.
“We need to go check, sir.”
A snap of Merik’s head. No.
“Someone’s hurt, sir.”
Another snap, harder this time. Something icy was rising in Merik’s veins. Something powerful and dark, made of Hagfishes and shadows. Leave while you still can, Merik’s instincts screamed. This place is not safe for you!
The shadow man was here.
Merik grabbed Cam’s cloak, still damp and filthy, and towed her toward the stairs. They made it three steps before they reached the source of the groans.
A man stretched across the flagstones with a sword in his belly and intestines glittering on the floor. Pain shook in his eyes, while lines as dark as the sea’s blackest depths webbed across his face.
It looked so much like a different death. A different murder—one that Merik had committed. Leave while you still can, leave while you still can.
Cam yanked herself free from Merik’s grip and dropped beside the man. “I’m here,” she crooned in an attempt to comfort. “I’m here now.”
The man’s eyes swiveled to Cam, and something almost like recognition flashed there. He tried to speak, but blood burbled from his mouth. From the hole in his stomach too.