Noxia Shade's Arc

Chapter 5 of 15

The dark held its shape around her. Noxia stood still and let her eyes adjust. A low light came up slow, the color of old brass, and showed her a narrow room with one shelf and one file laid flat on it. The key in her hand had gone cool. She crossed the floor in three steps and read the name printed on the file's edge. The name belonged to her teacher. The dead one. The one whose loss had cost her everything. Her hand did not shake. She set the warm key down beside the file and waited for the room to tell her what it wanted. The wall behind the shelf woke. Glowing panels lit one by one, and crystal tubes along the seams pulsed with stored light. The file was bait. She knew it before she opened it. She opened it anyway. Inside lay one sheet. Her teacher's death date. A second date beside it, three days later. A signature she had seen once before on a payment slip. The spymaster's. Her teacher had not died in the way she had been told. He had been bought, then buried. Noxia closed the file. She slid it inside her coat. She picked up the key. The fifth gate was no longer a test she wanted to pass. It was a room she wanted to walk into with the truth folded against her ribs. The glowing panels dimmed as she turned. Behind her, a panel slid back and showed a small grove staged inside the wall. Trunks stood half-chopped, axe scars deep in the wood, fresh chips on the floor. Carved into the tallest stump was her teacher's name, scored over and over, as if someone had practiced erasing it. A reminder. A threat. The axeman knew this room, and he had been here before her. Noxia pressed the file tighter to her ribs. She walked to the far door and turned the key. The lock gave. She had come for entry into the spymaster's circle. She would still take it. But she would carry a knife now that the spymaster could not see. In the corner past the door stood a cracked stone figure, draped in vines, soft moss pooling at its feet. She knew the shape. Her teacher had stood her in front of one just like it the first day he taught her to breathe through her soles. She set her palm on the cold stone and let it hold her weight for one slow breath. Then she stepped past it. The door at the end of the hall waited, lit low and even. She walked toward it with the file at her ribs and the spymaster's name pressed against the file, and the gate she had wanted now meant a different thing entirely.