“Silence,” Ilhicamina declaimed, raising his hands, and the crowd obeyed. Tvorh and Senrii slipped into the throng, glancing this way and that as they pushed between the disenfranchised, seeking pale girls with dark curly hair.

Ilhicamina’s voice boomed beyond the looming upper bodies of the crowd. “Dear people of the Chasm! Gens Nxtlu thanks you for your services. Know that we place on your shoulders a great responsibility: silence, stillness, cooperation. Tell me, people of the chasm: are there among you any sisters known as Hrega or Bilr?” There was murmuring, but no response.

“I’m sorry,” Tvorh muttered as he nudged a ragged old woman off her balance. She glared daggers at him, but the voice of Ilhicamina quickly drew her attention back. Tvorh slipped away through the press.

“No? None at all? I find this hard to believe. It is of little consequence, however. If the sisters will not present themselves, we shall find them by other means.” He waved to a guard standing nearest the ledge around which Tvorh and Senrii had climbed in order to enter the chamber. The guard nodded, pulled a man out of the crowd, and began to hustle him to the ledge. The rest of the crowd began to raise an outcry as the soldiers tried to force them to follow. A few shots in the air silenced them, and the crowd began to move.

“We have need of you, Hrega and Bilr,” Ilhicamina said, raising his voice above the cries of outrage as the people began to approach the ledge. “There is no need for your neighbors and companions to suffer a long march into the Labyrinth below. Come forward, and release your people.”

Tvorh couldn’t help but snort as the crowd pushed him along. If Dux Ilhicamina thought his sisters bore any affection for the other beggars, then that proved even blue-bloods could be idiots.

The throng flowed around Tvorh like an almost-blocked sewage pipe with only a small outlet through which the runoff could ultimately escape. The ledge back the way they’d come was wide enough for one, but it would be treacherous ground for some of the less steady men and women here. As he approached the ledge, he peered at each and every face, looking for his angelic little sisters. If Bilr was here, somebody would be carrying her. But while there were plenty of boys his age and old, dirty men and women shuffled by, there was no sign of his sisters.

Red and black Blooddrinkers moved among the crowd, ensuring an orderly flow, and Tvorh ducked back into the stream of people before anybody could notice that he was refusing to move along. He passed back and forth, studying the face of every young child, but to no avail. The rear of the crowd was in sight, but Hrega and Bilr were not apparent anywhere within.

They were safe, then. They were safe! He had to find Senrii, of course, but if they returned quickly and inconspicuously to the hovel, they might be able to escape.

Escape. All of them. If Senrii kept her word, that was. The thought of it caused Tvorh’s stomach to leap and turn a somersault.

A rough hand on his shoulder dragged him from his reverie. A red-and-black masked figure loomed over him, and the warrior’s voice came out muffled and distant. “Where do you think you’re going, child?”

Tvorh glanced behind him and realized that the crowd had moved on without him. He was now standing in a no-man’s land, halfway to the lungboat parked at the edge of the cliff, where the Nxtlu Generosi continued to hold counsel.

Tvorh’s rat was cooked.

The soldier shook him violently by the shoulders. “Well? Are you dumb, or simply stupid?”

He glanced back at the soldier, shut his mouth, and stared silently. If he was lucky, they would take him for mute, simple, or both.

Tvorh’s world turned upside-down as the soldier upended him. “Miserable morons,” the brute muttered under his breath as he slung Tvorh over his shoulder.

If Tvorh didn’t fight, he might yet be shoved back into the crowd. But when the man took his first steps away from the others and toward the cliffside, Tvorh’s heart fell into his gut.

The soldier slammed Tvorh onto the ground near the lungboat, then fell to one knee and placed his fist over his heart. “Erus,” he said.

“What is this?” Ilhicamina turned from his sister Eztli and leaned over, peering at Tvorh and stroking his cheek with a single long fingernail. He glanced up at the soldier. “Why have you brought me this child?”

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“The crowd left him behind. It seemed suspicious.”

Tvorh drew a deep breath and struggled to control his pounding heart. They said some Magi could hear the beats from miles away. If he was going to play dumb, he couldn’t betray his true feelings at all.

“And you did not simply throw him back into the crowd?” the Dux asked.

“My lord, you commanded that we take no chances.”

“So I did. Very well.” Ilhicamina flicked a hand. “You may return to your duties.”

“Thank you, my lord.” The soldier stood, and his footsteps receded.

Ilhicamina squinted and gazed at Tvorh. His pupils were as black as the Chasm. Tvorh fought to remain still. When the appearance of a distant lungboat descending from far above drew Ilhicamina’s attention away, Tvorh risked glancing up.

Two white-faced, dark-haired children, eyes wide with fright, sat in the back of the lungboat, one of them clutching something to her chest. It took all of Tvorh’s willpower not to cry aloud.

The lungboat landed next to its twin, settling heavily onto the ground and breathing an enormously loud sigh of relief, as Ilhicamina went to it. All but one of the Blooddrinkers followed him; the last remained with Tvorh, staring impassively at the boy. The Stigmatized warrior was enormous. Bone armor plating bulged beneath his skin, and when the man smiled hungrily at him, rows and rows of serrated teeth glimmered in his mouth.

As one of the soldiers tried to wrestle her down from the boat, Hrega screamed, the Blooddrinker looked up, and Tvorh grabbed opportunity, whipping out his knife and jamming it between the plates of bone beneath the flesh of the man’s legs. Then he was up and running for the lungboat.

Time slowed around Tvorh as he charged the Nxtlu Generosi and their warriors. There was shouting around him, he knew, but he barely took notice of it. Weapons were training on him, but every second brought him closer to the Dux, and behind him Bilr kicked and screamed aboard the lungboat, her deformed foot flailing and lashing out helplessly as the soldiers dragging her down to the ground were distracted by the chaos behind Tvorh.

A mighty blow from the side felled Tvorh. A strong grip took him by the hair and lifted him up. He gritted his teeth as pain washed over him and willed tears away. When he dared to open his eyes, Ilhicamina stood before him. The Dux said nothing; he merely looked the boy over, then glanced back at the lungboat, where all motion, even Bilr’s, had paused as the men waited for the result.

Tvorh snarled and shoved the knife into Ilhicamina’s side.

The Dux grunted in pain and dropped Tvorh, who crawled backward straight into unyielding arms. They pulled him upright as the Dux gritted his teeth and shook his head. The handle of the knife fell from the wound; where the blade should have been, there remained only sublimating smoke.

Ilhicamina’s blood had eaten forgebone.

Ilhicamina smiled grimly and tilted his head to one side, then the other. His skin darkened and sank inward, and the flesh beneath his armpits began to tremble and extend, pressing outward until two skeletally thin arms had formed. Fingers flexing, the Magus’s four hands went to his belt, drawing away four wicked clubs studded with forgebone razors.

“I only need one of you,” Ilhicamina whispered, and then the macuahuitls came down.

White flashed in front of Tvorh’s eyes, and a loud clanging reverberated through the chasm. The arms holding Tvorh went limp, and he regained his feet. “Go, Tvorh!” he heard Senrii cry as he stumbled backward.

A thick, oppressive cloud, gray and purple, drifted up immediately around Ilhicamina and Senrii, who stood before him with her own sword out. With the speed of a whirlwind, the cloud blasted outward through the entire cavern. The men and women of the crowd screamed; the soldiers and even the Blooddrinkers began to retch and heave.

Tvorh noticed little of that, because the lungburner gas had set his chest on fire, too.

Every breath he drew in was torment; with every exhalation, he expected to burst into flame. He rose to his feet, stumbling through the mist toward the screams emanating from the lungboat.

And stopped.

He didn’t care at all whether the soldiers were in pain; they were threatening his family. But he couldn’t abide the screams of his sisters as the gas tore their lungs apart.

And yet—

Yet behind him, he could hear the sounds of harder and harder blows as Senrii stumbled again and again under the force of Ilhicamina’s four arms. He could hear the creaking and cracking of her white forgebone shield — when had she gotten that? — as she gave way before the Dux’s vicious onslaught. There was a shattering sound, and she screamed hoarsely.

She’d come to help his sisters. She had saved him, and she was in danger. What would father say?

Tvorh turned and plunged into the thickness of the mist. He stumbled and retched as he bolted toward the dark figures in the cloud, but he maintained his feet and fought the pain in order to keep his eyes open.

Many limbs loomed before him. He loosed a yell that charred his throat to cinders and leapt.

There was air, and then there were grunts and clangs and quivering thumps as body impacted bodies. He fell to the ground and rolled to the side, utterly spent. “Go,” he whispered, to nobody in particular.

Hands lifted him roughly, and he hadn’t the strength to fight them, but then he realized that they were urging him toward the lungboat. Somewhere in the distance, Senrii’s voice came through in a hoarse whisper: “Go, go, go! Go!”

They stumbled toward the boat, coughing as they picked their ways over soldiers rolling on the ground. A hand grabbed Tvorh’s foot; he glanced down. The Nxtlu Generosa, Eztli, stared up at him, mucous covering her lips.

He blinked, coughed, and pulled away, following Senrii into the lungboat.

The soldiers were useless against Senrii; the gas was affecting them worse than her. She shoved one soldier after another over the side of the boat into the Chasm below as Tvorh sat in the back, retching next to his sisters. The bird shifted beneath them; heavy breathing commenced.

The lungboat rose, coughed in burnt-lunged agony, faltered and heaved, and then plummeted over the side of the cliff.