Zach Brenner's Arc

Chapter 13 of 86

Zach stared through the grate at the drop below. The crawlspace let out high on a wall. Under it stretched the courtyard, torches burning, guards in rows. No rope, no stair, no shadow. If he broke through the grate and climbed down, fifty men would see him before his boots touched dirt. He pulled back from the bars. "We need another way," he said. "That grate is a death trap." Raven turned her head. Her cat ears swept the dark behind them. She was the King's daughter, but here she hunted like something raised in caves. She held up a hand for quiet. Zach and Lyra froze. Raven crawled back the way they had come, slow, listening. She stopped over a patch of floor and pressed her palm flat. "Here," she whispered. "I hear air escaping. Down, not out." She tapped the stone. "This is a hatch. A door in the floor." Zach ran his fingers along the seam she showed him. A thin crack traced a square in the rock. He felt cold air push up through it. Lyra crouched beside him. "A way down," she said. "Below the guards. Below everything." Her voice held hope for the first time since her orb died. The hatch had no handle. Zach drew his sword. The blade fought his grip, heavy as always, until he stopped fighting the weight and let it settle. He worked the tip into the crack and levered up. The stone lifted a finger's width. "Push," he grunted. Raven and Lyra jammed their hands into the gap. Together they heaved. The slab swung up and thudded back on its hinge. Below, a ladder dropped into black. Zach climbed down first. His boots met wet stone. Water ran somewhere close, a steady rush. Old pipes lined the walls, thick with green slime. The air stank of rot and damp. Raven came down after him, then Lyra, who pulled the hatch shut above them. "A sewer," Zach said. His voice bounced off the low ceiling. Lyra lifted a small light to her palm and studied the tunnel. Water flowed in a black channel at their feet, heading somewhere ahead. "Yes," she said. "It runs under the whole fortress. Under the courtyard, under the tower." She pointed downstream. "That current moves toward the tower's base." Zach looked down the dark tunnel. They had lost the courtyard, the fifty guards, the horn on its post. No one up there knew they had vanished into the ground. But the water ran fast, and the tunnel narrowed ahead, and he did not know what fed a river beneath a sorcerer's fortress. "Then we follow the water," Zach said. He stepped into the channel. Cold soaked through his boots. Ahead, the tunnel bent toward the tower, and something in the dark made the current churn.