8 · A Way Out Through Customs

beside him the bread from the shirt they had found in the marsh.

“We don't know who it was for. If your mother sent you food, it could be this.”

He broke off a piece. His hands were so numb that crumbs fell onto his burned shirt.

“My mother didn't cook,” he said. “She sang so she wouldn't be afraid.”

They could not prove the note was hers. Teren decided they would not try there, beneath the earth. He offered water and explained they would bring him before Mara Dels. He would have to testify about the mill attack. He did not promise freedom. Luro seemed to expect a trap until he heard that.

“What if I don't talk?”

“You'll get there anyway.”

“Even though I came to kill you?”

The cleric looked at his torn sleeve. A strip of lifted skin would hurt badly when it dried.

“I'm trying to decide what we do with people who can return from death,” he replied. “I can't begin by killing those

still breathing because they're no use to me.”

Luro kept eating. After a while he asked them to move the lamp away from his face. Later he gave the name of the overseer who handed him the tokens. Neris wrote it down without looking up.

Maera kept her distance from the prisoner. She had entered following a grain shipment stolen from Blackember and had spent two days in the tunnels. Her men waited outside. She did not offer to join anything; she pointed out on the map which roads would close if Ordan's depots mobilised more soldiers.

“We come from the neighbourhoods they call criminal,” she said. “Hunger doesn't change its name when it crosses a border.”

In the Hall of the Pact, they found the first seal.

It was neither a jewel nor a sword. It was a ring of stone surrounded by dry conduits. At its edge were two recesses. Ivara named them under her breath: one held the boundary piece, which set how far the passage could

open; the other, an engraved wedge that decided towards whom it opened. The first was empty. In the second, a new wedge had been fitted, engraved with a name: Ordan.

Teren felt a tug behind his breastbone. For an instant he heard his father calling from a kitchen that no longer existed. Ivara caught him before he brought his hand closer.

“The water remembers your voice,” she whispered. “That doesn't mean it's him.”

They removed the wedge with the workers' tools. As it fell, a very distant thud sounded, as though a door had been closed at the far end of an immense house.

Before withdrawing, Ivara tried to put the false piece back to test which part of the flow it controlled. Teren stopped her hand.

“No.”

The mage looked at him with irritation. They needed to know how the chambers were connected. A mistake later could cost many lives. He lacked the knowledge to challenge the test, and both knew it.

“If I insert it only to the

first mark, it doesn't reach…”

“It heard us with the whole piece in. We don't know what happens with half.”

Ivara pressed her lips together. It was the same reasoning her superiors used to reject uncomfortable observations: do not risk a project over a doubt. But Teren was not running from the doubt. He refused to use those present to answer it, and that distinction cost the mage more than she would have liked to admit.

She wrapped the wedge and put it away without touching the ring again.

Neris had climbed onto a ledge. From there she saw the watermarks and the place where an old conduit had been stopped with fresh lime. She knew nothing of pressure, but she understood a repetition someone was trying to erase: the darkest stains always ended beside the same wall.

Elyen tested the conduit with a rod. The lime gave way, releasing a thin jet. The water smelled of hot metal.

Serik went to find tools. By the time he returned, the

crack had spread. Beneath the new layer was an old relief of Naevyra: not a crowned woman, but two hands letting water pass between their fingers. They had used the body of the image to hold the plug.

Maera asked whether they could leave through the guards' corridor. Luro shook his head. It climbed to a chamber locked from outside. The route was used to enter, never for workers to return on their own.

The paladin looked at the prisoner.

“Did you never ask why?”

Luro shrank as though struck. Serik wanted to withdraw the question. The man answered first.

“I asked once about my mother. They told me that if I already had her, I wouldn't be so ungrateful as to ask about doors as well.”

The water touched Neris's sole. The gnome jumped off the ledge and gathered her papers.

Ivara raised the lamp. She was no longer arguing about the experiment. There was a different question they could answer only with their whole bodies: whether they would

be able to reach the top.

Then the flooding began.

They climbed the way they had descended. Serik carried the prisoner; Maera and Elyen took turns supporting Teren. Neris wore the two halves beneath her shirt. In the channels, the frogs sang so loudly that instructions could not be heard.

They emerged in water up to their necks and returned through the marshes in the rain. When they reached the gardens, a column of foam rose behind them. The sluice had given way.

They entered Bridgebasin through customs at dawn. Mara Dels waited among boatmen, shopkeepers and guards. Her public testimony saved their lives: an order from Dawnrock described them as relic thieves, allies of the Horde and saboteurs of the river defences.

Serik read the accusation aloud.

A shopkeeper asked for them to be taken to the Council house. Another wanted the city gates shut. News of the flooding had arrived before the travellers, and the neighbours had too many sacks on their lower floors to distinguish relief works

from a conspiracy.

Mara had Luro climb onto the customs scales.

“Speak,” she ordered.

The prisoner looked at Maera. The dark elf stepped back out of sight. What the prisoner feared was another threat: he had been told what the enemy would do to his mother if she fell into their hands.

Luro spoke of food first. He had joined the works because they paid on time. Afterwards they offered to bring his mother to the shelter. One afternoon he found her alive. Not a ghost or a voice: a woman who called him by name, hit his arm for having a dirty shirt and burst into tears. She said she had come back with something warm beneath her collarbone, like an ember that did not burn. The overseer let him embrace her before speaking of the duties he assumed.

A boatman shouted that it was a lie. His sister had been missing for a year. If there was a door, he wanted to know where it stood.

“I don't

know why one returns and another doesn't,” Luro replied. “They kept my mother forty days without letting her see me. They told me she needed rest. They told me many things.”

Mara ordered his words recorded without correction. Then she put the two tin halves on a table and called for witnesses who could read the old script. Ivara stepped aside so she would not be the only person able to make sense of what they had brought.

A very old salt seller recognised the forms. His grandfather carved gravestones. He read the sentence, then repeated it with a different pronunciation. No one knew which was correct. For the first time, that mattered less than the fact that both versions said the same thing.

The governor did not declare the travellers victors. She placed them under protection and ordered the riverside conduits inspected. The records would be divided among three storehouses. Luro would remain a prisoner, entitled to name witnesses of his own. She allowed Serik to write to the

commander.

When the crowd dispersed, the boatman who had shouted stayed beside Teren.

“If you find my sister, her name is Ula,” he said. “She's missing a front tooth. Tell her I have her necklaces. I didn't sell them.”

The cleric wrote it down. He could do nothing else, and he would not call the only thing he could do small.

Serik unfolded the arrest order again. At its foot was Commander Ysara Venn's signature.

The paladin took off his Armada insignia, but did not throw it away.

“I still have to ask her for an explanation,” he said.

Neris looked at the crowd. The time had come to choose which version to sing. For the first time in her life, certainty frightened her more than contradictions.