On the balcony, the city lay quiet under her own breath. Lanterns pooled in the yards. The dome roofs of the granaries made soft humps in the dark. Somewhere a patrol turned on a heel and the heel made that hollow sound stone makes when it is pretending to be part of a city and is actually a mouth over a cistern.
Another thread. Not home.
Ashara, a wraith said. A bright place with knife-music. Under their public baths, the water gets colder where it should get hotter. The voice was all bones and apology. I cannot go further without touching something I do not understand.
Two lairs. One here. One in a place where enemies are taught to bring their nakedness to light and call it cleanliness. Of course. If you were going to hide in a city you intended to wound, you would hide where the city believed itself clean.
The Twilight thread tugged again. Noctis did not make it tug a third time.
He stepped onto the balcony's edge and spoke aloud because sometimes the world behaves better when you give it a word to obey. "Armor."
Blood answered. It didn't pour. It drew itself out of him with the neatness of practice: a collar first, sealing the throat; plates next, laid like dragon scale but cleaner; gauntlets that knew the angle of his wrists better than any glove; greaves that took his calves like a second pair of bones. The cuirass seated last. He felt its weight and recognized the math of it: defense sufficient to invite charge, not enough to slow it. The plates darkened, not black but a red so deep it pretended it was a hole.
His wings opened.
Four, the way a lesson is sometimes learned by halves and then by halves again. Not feathery. Not leather. Not any bird or beast's. They were structures of command, the geometry of a sovereign's intent made into something that moved air. When they unfurled, the balcony's torches bent away at their tips and the smoke went sideways like a flag that had been waiting for permission to do exactly that.
He didn't look back into the room. To look back at night is to confuse memory for duty. He let the wings take him and stepped into the drop.
The Twilight kingdom rose up to meet him like a city that had waited a long time to be seen from above by someone honest. He didn't cut the air; the air made a corridor for him because he had taught it its own behavior once and it remembered. He went down and then curled and then leveled and then knifed north, not to the walls, not to the granaries, not to the ridges where he had been testing. He flew for the old prison.
The dungeon wasn't what he called it anymore in his head, not since he had torn out the worst of its habits and turned it into a place where you could teach wraiths a trick without having to apologize to the trick. But words stain stone, and Twilight had called that place a dungeon for three hundred years; the word still bled out of the mortar.
Gates recognized him. They moved. Guards didn't stop him because he didn't come the way men come when they can be turned around. He came like law. The inner yard opened, the stair down opened, the second door down opened because stones move when a sovereign tells them not to embarrass themselves. The smell came up to meet him three levels down: old chain, old damp, something iron that was not fresh blood and so was worse.
He dropped through a shaft that had been used to move bodies when the dungeon had been used to make more bodies. He didn't like using it. He used it because sometimes a path that is honest about its stain is better than a clean path that lies.
The bottom of the shaft had a lip. He folded his wings and stepped onto it. The corridor beyond was where he had taught wraiths to obey. Noctis had left marks here on purpose — scratched symbols, small anchors so the air would behave the same way every time a command had to be repeated in an emergency. Those marks were still there. Something else was, too.
At first, it looked like water had dried wrong. The stone shone in long, slick arcs as if something had come up out of it and then thought better of it and slid back in. When he knelt and touched the curve, the cold that came through his gauntlet wasn't wet-cold. It was bone-cold, the kind stone holds when it's been taught to rehearse being a grave.
He let his hand rest there. The Grid rose in him without being called. His vision did the thing it does when you've been doing something for so long it does you — the walls went thin, the floor went thinner; the lines of the corridors spread out like veins finding a diagram; the marks he'd left glowed in gold.
There — under his old training hall the lines bent in a way that lines don't bend unless they want to hide the bend. A seam where there hadn't been one. A seam you don't see with eyes because eyes are trained to be polite to seams. The wraith thread pulsed again.
Here. The whisper had the sound of a body holding its breath for too long.
He cut a square out of the stone with two fingers' worth of will. The square was air before the stone knew it had been argued with. He slid through.
The new corridor was wrong in the way people learn to call right when they have been taught to be afraid. It was clean. It was very clean. The kind of clean that is oil and salt and repeated prayer drawn with a blade tip instead of a pen. The walls were marked with shallow cuts that looked like someone had written a litany in a language that was not language. The floor had been brushed with something that had made the dust lie down flat and agree not to rise even when a wing beat through it.
He moved without letting his armor bite the air. Some places need sound to respect you. This was a place where sound would tell the wrong thing the right thing about you.
At the end of the corridor the clean broke. The clean had been a lie to bring you here. The lie ended where the lair began.
It wasn't large, because hidden things rarely are until they are done being hidden. Three rooms, one with a pit that had been wet recently; one with a rack that didn't bind bodies but held instruments the way you hold a promise very close to a fist; one that had a wall that wasn't a wall. The not-wall was a membrane of stone that had been taught to behave like fat — you could push a hand into it if the hand promised not to be a hand.
Noctis didn't push a hand into it. He doesn't put his hands into things he isn't going to keep. He stood and watched the wall breathe. It did. It moved on a slow count that made his ribs want to follow and then made them decide not to.
The wraith's thread tugged again, not urgent, more like a child not wanting to say what the next sentence is going to be. He opened the tether, just a slit.
They came through the cisterns, it said. They learned when we used the lower halls, and then they learned where we did not. They built this when you were in the mountains. The voice was not apology. Wraiths do not apologize. It was data that knows it has arrived late.
He let the slit widen and slid his sight forward along the edges of the not-wall the way a knife slides between skin and fruit when you want to look at structures without cutting anything that might bleed into a lesson. Beyond the membrane, a chamber breathed.
He saw what had made the pit wet. He saw the lattice of hooks that wasn't a lattice of hooks so much as a way to hold something up that didn't weigh anything and still needed to be held as if it did. He saw three figures kneeling in the kind of patience you learn when you have time, and none of it is yours.
They weren't demons he would have bothered naming before tonight. Their bodies were too thin, their limbs too long, the joints wrong in that deliberate way which says a thing is behaving like a version of you designed by something that does not think you are the project you think you are. Each had a mask tied to their face with a cord that went around the head twice, not because the first cord would fail but because a second cord tells you that a face is a place to hold a lie on. Their hands held knives that were not metal. The knives were made from whatever the opposite of bone is — something that is patient enough to become hard without being asked to.
They were not praying. They were counting. Their lips moved and the sounds came out the way a list of tasks comes out when someone who likes lists wants to be sure not to forget anything. A fourth figure stood with its back to the membrane, hands pressed into it up to the wrist, as if pushing your hands into the wall was how you convinced a wall to be a door.
Noctis watched the count. The numbers were not like his. You could make them like his if you held them in your mind too long and that made him respect them the way you respect poisons you can draw into a medicine if your hand doesn't shake. On every seventh count one of the kneeling figures' shoulders pinched in a way that looked too much like prayer for him to forgive. They were timing their breaches to the city's bells. They had noticed his pattern. They had buried themselves under it.
A small thing happened. The fourth figure's wrists vanished into the wall up to the scar line where wrists become hands. The membrane went flat. The room breathed differently. The three kneeling things stopped counting. One lifted its head. Its mask was carved to look like nothing because if you make a face that looks like nothing sometimes people will put everything they are afraid of into it, and you get to use that for free.
Noctis spoke once in the kind of voice that tells a room it is now a hall and the hall is now a court. "This is mine."
His armor didn't flare. It didn't need to. He wasn't telling the demons that the room was his. He was telling the stone. Stone behaves differently when it has heard a sentence it believes. The membrane shuddered as if deciding that it had not been paid enough to continue pretending.
The three thin things stood. One touched its mask with two fingers and the mask didn't change shape but the air around it did. The fourth drew its hands out of the wall and they were slick with the lie the wall had been telling. They looked at him in the way you look at someone who has just made you change a plan that you were very proud of having kept quiet.
The wraith tugged, not fear, not warning, just a thread that said you are not alone in the city you thought you were alone in.
He didn't step in. Not yet. A sovereign who has already decided to kill should also decide what to learn before the kill makes learning irrelevant.
He tipped his head a fraction to the right and shifted his sight the way you shift a spearhead in a rack one column over to see if the weight distribution is honest. The lair was not one direction. It was several. There were three more membranes inside this one, thinner, tuned to different frequencies of pressure. There were channels cut behind them that would bring water in if someone who wasn't a sovereign shouted and asked the city to panic. There was a small bell wired to a thread that would ring numbly if someone pulled it, the sound designed to travel through stone the way stories do when they are told by people who are tired and a little in love with their own voice.
He breathed once. He took that breath the way you take the first steady breath before a blade goes in, because you do not want the blade to show mindless joy or grief. He took the breath because breath is schedule and schedule is weapon.
He closed his hand around the edge of the air and the air knew what that meant.
Movement. Not his. Behind him, past the corridor's bend, a whisper — not of voice, of weight. Something had learned how many times a wing beat makes dust lift and had come up with a new count to make the dust sit down again even when important things were happening.
He did not turn quickly. Quick is the first word too many people learn when they are children and they never learn the rest of the sentence. He turned the way a city turns when it has decided which way its river will go and every field will now have to live with that decision.
The thing that had come up behind him was smaller than the things in the room. It held no knife. It had a cord around its face and no mask, because some jobs require your face if your face looks like someone that someone else loves. It was not here to fight. It was here to watch whether he would be the kind of sovereign who killed a witness because the witness dared to be present at his duty.
He looked at it for the length of one heartbeat. The heart he looked at was not his. Then he inclined his head by less than the width of a knuckle, because sometimes teaching a thing that it has been seen is the correct first violence. It flinched and went very still. It learned. He let it.
He turned back to the membrane. He let the room see him decide.
He did not call Crucible. The rooms above were stone and chain and the water the lair had threaded under the city would take his field into places where fields should not go if you intend to call home home tomorrow. He did not call Tempest. Storms inside bones are messy and Twilight's bones were underneath his feet. He did not step with Dominion Step because stepping brings what is attached to you, and there were three women asleep in a bed that had learned to treat warmth as something you should keep rather than a thing you should spend to pay old debts.
He said one word, precise.
"Open."
The membrane obeyed.
The three thin things moved as one. The fourth brought its hands up as if to show him something and maybe the something was going to be clever and maybe he would have admired it if this were a place where admiration belongs, but this wasn't. He moved without the Grid needing to remind him how. Armor and marrow and command agree about a single kind of geometry: straight, short, sufficient.
He did not use a named skill. He put his hand exactly where hands belong when a throat is trying to introduce itself as if its existence were a sentence. He cut. The blade that cut wasn't a blade. It was a lesson about how some edges exist whether metal is present or not when a sovereign decides to remember they do.
One went down without discovering that it had stood. The second lifted its knife-of-not-bone and learned that even when two concepts try to occupy the same space — authority and shape — only one of them gets to be air afterward. The third tried to go sideways into a prayer it had been saving for a day when a thing like him would arrive; it got halfway into its own memory of a safe place and then discovered that you cannot enter a place you invented if someone who did not invent it disbelieves it harder than you believe it. The fourth — hands still slick with the lie of the wall — did something that was almost a good idea: it threw both hands in his face as if the lie would stick to his eyes.
He let it get close. He let it think the night would make him a man who would rather be clean than be correct. Then he took its wrists and taught it about the difference between bones and permissions. The wrists stopped being something hands were attached to. The hands were no longer something the wrists were envied by. It made a sound like a bell that has been struck by accident in the middle of a different ceremony.
He held the room steady in his head and looked beyond it, through the thin membranes, through the channels. He followed one to where it rose under the cistern and saw exactly how far he would have to drain and in what order to keep the city's own water from being taught to not trust itself. He followed another to where it touched the old mortar of a granary buttress that had been poured before anyone alive had been born. He tipped his head the other way and followed the last to where it spoke to the old gallows post set in the courtyard and felt something like satisfaction at the neatness of minds that like to tie old crimes to new ones as if the echo made them smarter.
He went still. He listened. Sometimes there's a sound you only hear after the thing that wanted you dead has learned your name and decided to wait until you leave to tell you that the room was a joke and the joke was that there was another room. He didn't hear that sound.
He stepped back through the membrane. He sealed it behind him with a pressure that told the stones they had not been made a fool of. He looked down the corridor. The small watcher was still there. It was breathing as if something had told it a long time ago that if it took one more breath than it was owed and a sovereign saw, it would be made into an example.
He raised one hand, palm open. Not command. Not promise. The kind of open anyone can read. It didn't move. He didn't repeat himself. He turned and went.
On the shaft lip, he paused. Memory put a picture in front of him: Ashara's baths, water turning colder where it should be hot, a city that loved surfaces more than some cities love debt. He let the picture sit, then file itself. You do not chase two things with perfect speed at the same time. You take the nearest first because it is nearest, and you take the next because you promised yourself you would.
He went up.
The dungeon doors re-learned their obedience. The guard at the top turned his head because his training told him to turn when air changes shape, then kept his eyes straight ahead because his training told him to fear being told to see and failing. Noctis crossed the inner yard and took the stairs two at a time because sometimes moving like a man rather than a machine tells a city you are still a person, and cities behave better when they remember that.
On the balcony, the night had shifted from blue-black to the kind of black that is almost kind and never is. He stepped into it again without looking into the room behind him because he had already decided that memory and duty do not rhyme enough to be recited in the same breath. His armor was still warm from the ribs out. His wings remembered how to speak to air and air remembered how to listen.
He said nothing. He didn't need to. The first destination was the second he had learned and the second was the first he had preferred to leave to morning because there are some tasks that make better stories if you let them begin when there is sun. The lair under his own city had forfeited the courtesy of morning.
He went back toward the dark that had asked to be taught how to behave.
He went to the Twilight demon lair.