Jacob POV
The bone in his palm pulsed once, like a second heartbeat.
Sum'gial had carved it himself: a sliver from some dead champion's spine, runes etched so fine they only caught the light if you tilted it just right. He'd set it on the desk beside a cracked black mirror.
"Field key," the lich had said. "Press if you want my toys to listen to you instead of my last orders."
Jacob had tapped the mirror. "And this?"
"If E'nathyr gets ambitious. Your contract covers that. If they try anything funny, I send two death knights and two thousand five hundred skeletal soldiers. You run while they argue theology with the locals."
He'd hoped to never pay for that clause.
The circle's power climbed.
Cold washed over him, sank in, and kept going. It hooked into old scars, lit the Tower brands inside his soul until each mark burned like white metal. His teeth ached. His heart beat against invisible fingers.
Ordination. Strip, weigh, burn.
Glyphs along the walls brightened in slow, heavy rhythm. Mushroom incense and old ash pressed into his throat.
Shor'Ith's voice slid through the hum. "Do not resist. The Queen will strip away what does not belong."
Bael'sha watched him from the dais, staff grounded. Ve'ris' hand clenched around her whip. Veyn'dor stared like he could will this into being someone else's problem.
"Submit," Bael'sha said. "Serve, or break."
Malvek's voice in memory, calm over mycelbrew and ledgers: If they turn on you, you don't fight the city. You crawl to me. Basement level, council wing, third unmarked door—old stone. The tunnel noses toward the west entrance. My people watch those gutters.
Sum'gial's voice over that, dry and amused: If they try to make you a lesson, Jacob, press the key. Delay is worth more than you are.
Jacob's fingers tightened around the bone.
"Intact is overrated," he said, and let his left hand drift inside his coat as if bracing his ribs.
His thumb found the notch on the shard.
"When you're ready to stop pretending you can talk your way out," the lich had said, "press and twist. The dead will listen."
He pressed and twisted.
The runes cracked.
Necromancy surged along unseen lines—orders flung down tunnels and across caverns toward two armored corpses and ranks of waiting bone. In his palm, the shard went from cool to searing.
The ordination circle bucked.
Its pattern slammed into the Tower-brand stamped deep in his soul and hit something that shouted back. Ward-lines under his boots flared, glitched, then clamped down harder.
Pain knifed up his spine. Blood filled his mouth.
Priestesses shoved more power through their staffs, forcing the rite to hold. The circle shrank around him.
Jacob's right hand dropped to another pocket. Clay, smooth and warm. Dark-bloom powder. Malvek's voice: Eats light, chokes phosphor wards, kicks like a mule. Break it on stone, not on your face.
"Jacob of the Tower," Haet'Ra's Matron snapped. "Stand still."
He let the circle yank him forward half a step and hammered his fist—and the capsule—into the floor.
The clay broke.
Darkness erupted.
Light died in a breath. Mushroom-lamps went out with a hiss. Phosphor sigils flared sickly and vanished as the powder swallowed their glow. A muffled boom rolled through the room as spellwork and alchemy bit into each other.
The world went black and gray.
Someone screamed. Staffs cracked against stone. A body hit him and bounced away. Another figure stumbled into the circle, jolting the pattern.
The circle's grip spasmed.
Jacob couldn't see, but he knew the pattern's edge by heart. He drove toward it. Wards clawed at his boots, dragging, burning up his calves.
His heel hit the etched line—hot as wire. One more step and it was gone.
Pressure snapped off his skin as the magic let go and fired behind him, missing its target.
Ordination flared and crashed inward on empty air.
"GUARDS!" a voice bellowed. "Seal—"
The doors blew inward.
Obsidian-banded wood became shrapnel. Fungus-grown bars snapped like twigs. One door scythed through a cluster of lesser priestesses; the other spun off its hinges, hit the wall, and buried two crossbowmen in splinters.
A death knight stepped through the wreckage, tower-shield up. Black armor, scarred and pitted. Green soul-fire behind its visor, steady and flat.
Half-blind crossbowmen fired on reflex. Bolts thudded into the shield, skipped off metal, tore chips from the floor.
The second knight came right behind it, sword out. Haet'Ra's Matron thrust her staff forward and dropped a beam of Queen's light through the dark. It hit the knight square in the chest.
Runes on the breastplate flared, drank most of it, then split with a crack like breaking stone. The undead staggered back a step, smoking.
"Protect the asset," the first knight rasped, Sum'gial's binding echoing in its dead voice.
Jacob moved.
His right leg almost folded; the ordination residue crawled through muscle and bone, half numb, half burning. He forced it to hold, forced his boots to remember the circle's edge even in the dark.
A priestess hurled a low arc of fungus and stone at the floor. Black mycelium thorns burst up across his left side, punching through coat and skin.
The pain tore a shout out of him.
He grabbed a thorn and ripped it free. Skin went with it. Blood spilled hot down his ribs.
The nearest death knight slammed its shield down between him and the next spell. A second beam hit the metal, blackened it, warped it, but didn't punch through.
"Rear guard," Jacob gasped. "Hold this room."
The knight turned back toward the council chamber, shield raised, sword braced.
The other grabbed the back of Jacob's coat and yanked him toward the shattered doorway.
Crossbows snapped again. A bolt sang past his cheek. Another slammed into his thigh. His leg buckled; he lurched, dragging himself upright with the knight's momentum.
He wasn't running blind. Basement. Third unmarked door. Old stone. Malvek's way out.
Outside, the corridor seethed.
Guards rushed toward the chamber from three directions, some blinking, some running on drilled pattern and shouted orders. Dark-bloom still ate light at the edges, turning men into shadows.
The forward knight didn't slow.
It crashed into the first rank, shield first. The leading guard bounced off metal and slammed into his friends. The knight's sword swept low on the backswing, hacking through calves and thighs. Men went down screaming.
Jacob snatched a hanging banner and ripped it down into a knot of crossbowmen. Bolts fired anyway, tangling in cloth and each other. One went through, grazing his forearm and leaving a hot line.
"Crossroads," he rasped. "Block it."
The knight shoved him past the first intersection and planted itself in the middle of the crossing, shield set, sword back. Another squad pounded around the corner and met steel and black armor at full speed.
The impact rang along the stone.
Jacob didn't look back.
He ran.
It was a limping, dragging run, every step a jolt. His shoulder throbbed. His side felt flayed. The ordination burn crawled along his spine. The bolt in his thigh sent fire up to his hip with each footfall.
Two guards burst from a side passage, blades drawn.
The first swung high. Jacob dropped under it and drove his good shoulder into the man's chest. Cracked ribs screamed, but the guard went down.
The second lunged. Jacob twisted; not enough. The sword slid into the meat of his right hip instead of his belly.
Heat and cold detonated in the joint.
He caught the man's wrist, jammed his palm up under the elbow and snapped it. Bone cracked. The guard screamed and dropped the hilt.
Jacob wrenched the sword free from his own flesh, nearly blacking out, then flung the blade sideways into another guard scrambling up from the floor. The man went down, choking.
The death knight behind him finished both with two short, efficient blows.
"Move," the dead voice grated.
He moved.
They hit the service stairwell. Narrow shaft, slick stone, darkness thickening at the bottom.
Jacob half-stumbled, half-slid down the steps, one hand on the rail, the other pressed to his bleeding hip.
At the top of the shaft, a wizard lurched into view, eyes clearing. He slapped a kinetic glyph onto the wall and triggered it.
Force dropped like a hammer.
It hit the knight square in the back.
Metal bent. Dead bone cracked. The undead slammed forward into Jacob, crushing him between plate and stone. Something in his chest gave with a sharp, wet snap. Air shot out of him in a silent cough.
He buckled, knees clipping three steps, hand skidding along the rail. For a moment his lungs didn't work at all.
Then air ripped back in, ragged and hot. Pain flared along his ribs.
The knight shoved off him, plates grinding. One arm hung loose. The breastplate was a spiderweb of cracks.
"Asset," it rasped.
Jacob swallowed, nodded, forced his legs to move. "Basement," he got out. "Third door. Malvek's door."
They ran.
Above, faint through stone, something heavier than guards was starting to move—distant, rhythmic thunder, the kind made by ranks of bone and rusted steel. Sum'gial was paying in full.
The bottom corridor stank of mold and old paper. Archive doors lined one side, plain ones the other.
"Third from the end," Jacob breathed.
The unmarked door gave when he hit it with his shoulder. New pain spiked. His vision tunneled.
Shelves, crates, dust. At the back, a low gap in the wall, half-choked with fungus and rubble. Different stone beyond it—older, smoother.
Ther'vassi. Malvek had called it "old teeth in the council's gums" and traced the path for him on a wax tablet.
The knight took one look, then turned back to the corridor.
"Hold," Jacob said. His voice sounded thin. "No one comes through clean."
It caught his forearm, shoved him toward the hole, and let go.
He dropped to his knees and shoved himself into the gap.
Stone scraped his burned back. Fungus smeared cold slime into open wounds. His stabbed hip howled with each drag forward.
The storeroom door slammed open behind him.
"HE'S—"
A crunch cut the shout short. Steel bit bone. Something heavy hit the wall.
"FOR THE QUEEN!"
"FOR THE TOWER," the knight answered, and the corridor filled with steel on steel, metal on flesh, boots slipping in blood.
Jacob crawled.
Every movement pulled at burns, punctures, broken ribs. His hands were half-numb from the rite and half-flayed from stone. He couldn't feel fingerprints, but he felt each shard that dug into his palms.
The fight behind him burned hot and fast. Shouts. A scream that broke high. The crack of something heavy hitting armor. A shield slamming the floor.
Then fewer voices. One last roar, cut off mid-curse.
Silence, except for distant alarms.
Jacob didn't stop.
The tunnel widened. He could hunch instead of crawl. Old Ther'vassi faces watched from the walls—eroded features, eyes full of lichen, sigils worn down by time and fungus.
He slumped against the stone for a moment, chest heaving.
His shoulder hung wrong. His hip burned with every heartbeat. Blood soaked one boot and squelched with each small shuffle. His back felt like a single raw sheet where divine light and fungal thorns had both gone to work. Black veins of half-failed ordination still traced faint lines under his skin.
Above, muffled through rock, E'nathyr roared—wards tightening, alarms howling, and somewhere, the cold clatter of skeletal ranks joining the chaos.
Jacob pushed off the wall.
He wasn't done just because he'd crawled out of the circle. Malvek was out there, with wagons and chains and a way past the blockade.
All he had to do was keep moving until he fell in front of the right gutter.
He bared his teeth and limped toward the west.