Sabine's good hand remained on the wheel. The fingers were clean except where blood from her crushed arm had dried in the creases. She did not look at Mara.
"You entered it," Mara said. "Not Pell. You."
"I had the key."
"You had no key."
"I had the household right to enter any locked room beneath Veylan House."
Above them, boots struck the kitchen floor. A man shouted for the lower passage. Dust sifted from the joints in the ceiling. The Office wheel gave another slow breath of smoke through the split lock, sweet as bruised pear and twice as dangerous.
Teren turned his head toward the noise. His left sleeve was black with blood from shoulder to cuff. He had tied a strip of his shirt around the wound, but the knot had loosened and was beginning to shine.
"How many?" Ivo asked.
"Enough," Teren said.
"That is not a number."
"It is the number we have."
Ivo drew his knife. The blade was short, plain, and newly sharpened. He held it low beside his thigh.
Sabine's mouth tightened. "The service stair is blocked."
"By the men you invited?" Mara asked.
"By the gate."
"You built a lock that crushes its own house."
"It was built before I was born."
"You fed it my work."
Sabine looked at the brass housing. The maker's stamp sat beneath Mara's thumb, darkened by soot and damp. "I fed it what the Office required."
The kitchen door above splintered again. This time the sound came with a cry, cut short. Ivo smiled without amusement.
"One less," he said.
Teren reached for Sabine. She jerked away before his hand touched her.
"Do not make a ceremony of it," she said. "We have perhaps three minutes before they find the secondary stair."
"You are coming with us," Teren said.
"No."
He took her by the back of the coat and pulled her upright. Her injured arm hung wrong, the sleeve pinned beneath the elbow by the pressure of the stone. The movement drew a white line through her face, but she made no sound.
Mara watched Teren release her at once. He did not apologize. He only shifted his grip to her waist and took the weight she had been refusing to give him.
"You can walk," he said.
"I can direct you."
"That was not the question."
Sabine's good hand closed over his wrist. "The lower passage leads to the old cistern. The cistern leads nowhere now."
"Then we will be nowhere with remarkable speed."
Mara slipped the brass lock from the housing. It came free with a wet click. Smoke crawled from its broken seam and curled around her glove.
"Take that off," Teren said.
"Why?"
"Because you are breathing it."
"I am breathing all of it."
He seized the front of her coat and pulled her back from the lock. Not hard enough to bruise. Hard enough that her shoulder struck his chest. His blood had soaked through the shirt beneath his coat, and the smell of iron rose warm between them.
"Your eyes are narrowing," he said. "The color has gone from your lips."
"An excellent observation for a cavalry officer."
He took off his scarf, folded it twice, and pressed it over her nose and mouth. The wool smelled of horse, rain, and the resin smoke from the camp.
"Breathe through that."
Mara caught the scarf with one hand. His fingers stayed at the back of her neck for the space of a breath, holding it in place. He had no reason to know the concentration. No formula. He had seen her go still and done the useful thing.
She hated that she noticed.
"If I collapse," she said through the wool, "drag me by the ankles. Less distance between the poison and the floor."
"I will carry you."
"You will worsen your bleeding."
"Then do not collapse."
Ivo moved toward the stairwell. A pistol cracked above. The ball struck the stone arch and flattened with a bright spit of metal.
"They have guns," he said. "The Office men."
"Pell does not bring guns into a house he intends to claim," Sabine said.
"Those were not claim papers."
"No. They were instructions."
Mara pulled the brass lock into the pocket of her skirt. It was warm despite the cold stone. The maker's stamp pressed against her thigh through the cloth.
"This way," Sabine said.
She pointed with her chin toward a narrow opening behind the Office wheel. Teren kept one arm around her waist. Ivo went first, crouched beneath the low lintel. Mara followed, carrying the lamp and keeping the scarf over her face. The passage smelled of wet limestone, mouse droppings, and the sharp mineral tang of old blasting salt.
They had gone six paces when Sabine stopped.
"The left wall," she said. "There is a lever beneath the third brick."
Mara counted the bricks. The third was not a brick but a thin stone tile set among them, its edge dark with handling. She wedged a fingernail under it and pulled. A lever came down with a groan.
The passage floor dropped by a hand's breadth. Somewhere behind them, metal screamed.
"That was the gate," Teren said.
"The Office wheel has released it."
"You said it was opening."
"It is possible for a thing to open and continue breaking."
Water rushed beneath the stones. The sound grew from a mutter to a hard, rolling push. At the end of the passage a row of iron teeth withdrew into the wall, revealing a black channel barely wide enough for a man.
Ivo glanced back. "We go in there?"
"Unless you prefer the kitchen," Mara said.
A second pistol fired above. This time a man screamed. The voice was not one of the intruders.
Ivo looked at Teren. "Your people?"
"No."
"That was my question."
Teren's jaw shifted. "No."
He pushed Sabine into the channel first. The current caught her boots at once. She reached for the wall with her good hand, missed, and struck her hip against the stone. Teren caught the back of her coat and hauled her against him.
"I can manage," she said.
"You have been saying that since the house began falling down."
"It has not fallen."
"The distinction is administrative."
Mara entered after them. The water came to her knees, then her thighs. It was black with silt and cold enough to seize the muscles. Her lamp guttered. She raised it above her head and felt the current pull at her skirts.
Behind, Ivo was last through. He reached back and hauled the iron teeth into place. The mechanism clanged shut just as boots pounded into the passage beyond.
The sound carried through the stone. A man struck the sealed gate with the butt of a gun.
"Open in the name of the Royal Office!" he shouted.
Ivo leaned his forehead against the bars. "You heard him. We are saved."
The current took them.
Mara caught a ring set into the wall and held while Teren dragged Sabine forward. The water smelled of peat and old copper. It pulled at her fingers with a patient force, testing each joint. Teren moved awkwardly with his wounded shoulder, but he did not release Sabine. When the channel narrowed, he put his body between her and the wall and let the stone scrape him instead.
Mara saw the skin break along his cheek. He did not turn his head.
There was room to pass him. She could have gone ahead. Instead she hooked one hand into the back of his belt and steadied him while he lifted Sabine over a submerged step.
His glance found hers in the lamp's weak circle.
"Thank you," he said.
The plain words were worse than a compliment.
"You are welcome to the bruise," she said.
"I will treasure it."
"That would be wasteful."
Sabine made a sound behind them, not quite a laugh. The channel widened into a cistern chamber. A stone platform rose above the water on the far side, crowned by a rusted ladder. Teren pushed Sabine toward it.
Mara climbed first and set the lamp on the ledge. The flame steadied. The chamber had once stored household water, but roots had broken through the ceiling and hung in black cords. A round opening showed a slice of night sky, narrow and starless beneath the kitchen foundations.
Ivo emerged from the channel and shook water from his coat.
"There is a grate at the top," he said. "Locked from outside."
Sabine sat against the cistern wall. Her face had gone grey. She worked at the buttons of her coat with one hand, trying to free the crushed sleeve.
Teren knelt before her. "Let me see it."
"No."
"You need the arm bound above the break."
"I know what a broken arm looks like."
"Then you know it will kill you if the bone has entered the artery."
She looked at him for a long moment and gave him the knife from her belt.
He cut the sleeve away. The forearm was swollen beneath the torn cloth, the hand mottled and cold. Mara looked once and then at the water. The color was wrong. Too pale at the wrist, too dark around the fingers.
"Splint it," she said. "Not tightly. Her hand needs circulation."
Teren broke two rungs from the lower ladder and laid them beside Sabine's arm. His hands were steady. The blood at his own shoulder had begun to drip again, bright drops onto the black water.
Mara opened her satchel. The contents were damp but intact: a roll of linen, a tin of salve, three sealed ampoules, and the small copper scale she used for weighing volatile powders. She passed the linen to Teren.
He took it without asking what it cost her to use it.
"The ampoule," he said.
"No."
"You have three."
"And I may need them."
"For what?"
"For a problem more obedient than your family."
His eyes went to the broken arm. "This is the problem in front of us."
Mara held his gaze. The wound at his shoulder had opened through the makeshift bandage. He was bleeding onto the floor, and still he had chosen Sabine's arm before his own.
She gave him the smallest ampoule.
"One measure in water," she said. "It will dull the pain. It will not repair the bone."
"How much water?"
"Enough to keep her breathing."
He uncorked it and poured the clear liquid into the cup at Sabine's hip. The cup had been lying in the cistern grit. He rinsed it twice before mixing the dose. Mara watched the care he took with the sediment, the way he held the cup beneath the lamp to be certain no grit remained.
He noticed her watching.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"That is rarely true when you say it."
"You cleaned the cup."
"It seemed sensible."
"Most people would have poured the medicine into mud and called the result courage."
"I have met most people. They are exhausting."
Sabine drank. Her good hand trembled only after the cup was empty. Teren set it down and began binding the splints.
Above them came a scraping noise. The grate.
Ivo lifted his pistol. "They found the vent."
Mara extinguished the lamp with her fingers over the chimney. Darkness swallowed the chamber. Teren's hand found her wrist. He did not squeeze. He only held her still.
A key turned overhead.
The grate opened. A lantern lowered on a rope, its light cutting the cistern into wet stone and black water. A face appeared above: narrow, pale, and powdered with ash.
"Inspector Pell requests that Lady Sabine Veylan remain where she is," the man called down. "The rest of you may yet be entered as witnesses rather than fugitives."
Ivo raised the pistol.
Mara caught his sleeve. "The lantern oil."
He looked at her.
"Do not fire," she whispered. "Shoot the rope."
His smile returned, sharp as the knife he had sharpened for someone else. He fired.
The rope snapped. The lantern dropped. Teren kicked it into the water before the flame could catch. Above, the man cursed and fired down blindly.
The shot struck Sabine's splint.
Wood burst apart. Sabine's hand opened once, then fell limp.
Teren moved over her. Ivo fired toward the opening, and the face vanished.
Mara grabbed the lamp and shielded it with her body. The chamber filled with the stink of oil and powder smoke.
On the far wall, behind the roots, a line of fresh chalk showed where someone had marked the water level. Beneath it was a date.
Mara brought the lamp close.
The date had been written in the notation used by the Royal Office. It was not old. The chalk was still damp.
And beside it, in a hand she knew from the orders at the gate, someone had written: HOLD FOR PELL.
The water rose another inch around their boots.