There was, the young assassin thought, such a thing as being too well informed. Ivor had given her a map of the hidden passages which she had received gratefully, but he had gifted her also with far more palace legend than she wished to know, old deaths and disappearances; at this moment, she feared her fate would be to add to their number.

Lost in the darkness of the Cold King's private tunnels, her racing heartbeat and her panicked breath were the only sense that the world moved on, that time had not locked up about her, sealing her in the dark and dust. If only she hadn't lost her lamp. Sweat trickled into her eye, stinging, and she rubbed it away, transferring streaks of drying blood from her red-washed hands to her cheeks.

She fumbled her way to the wall. Her fingernails scrabbled at the tightly joined stones, collecting dust and dirt and old, dried mold as she fought to regain her composure, to find the way out. She felt one step from animal terror and that had to be avoided at all cost, or she'd run, mindlessly panicked through the tunnels until she either brained herself on a protruding stone, or ruined Ivor's careful plan.

It had been a simple enough task Ivor had given her: Use the palace's oldest defenses to kill its newest king. Simple instruction, simple plan, but the execution had been difficult from the start. Her aim had been off--she rubbed at the straps of her eye patch resentfully--and she'd needed the sword. And all of Ivor's training failed to prepare her adequately for the awkward weight of a man's body slumping over a blade embedded in his guts, tearing the blade from her grasp.

She had had to wrest it free, Aris groaning pitiably, his hands feebly grasping at her thighs, turning what should have been a neat job into a slaughter. Bad enough that she had to slice his throat to make him die when the bullet hadn't done it, when the gut wound hadn't done it. Worse was the sudden cold realization that he hadn't been alone. When his voice, his breath was finally, finally silenced, she heard gasping sobs beyond her own.

She'd whirled, slipping on the spew of blood and intestines beneath her feet, and gotten a quick glimpse of gilt hair, a face going to shadow in openmouthed terror, and then the Countess of Last vanished, seemingly dragged into shadow.

The blade had trembled in her hand, but she moved forward, hunting that pale hair. The chapel shook under the weight of a sudden distortion, as if the very stones had released a long-held breath. The hair on her nape raised; every muscle in her body shuddered, and she turned and fled.

As a girl living in the Explorations, she had attempted to steal away Miranda's husband, unaware that Miranda had once been Maledicte, Black-Winged Ani's chosen courtier.

The assassin lost her eye to Miranda's blade, lost everything else in the lingering shadow Ani's wings cast: her village burned, her parents died, and she had been harried from one false refuge to the next, until she learned the only way to shed Ani's attention was to shed herself.

She'd forfeited her wants, her past, and her name, ever aware that Ani listened for it still. A single recitation of her name and Ani's wings would close over her once more.
To be hunted by a second god--the thought was more than she could bear.

A glance back and a shifting shadow set her moving forward again in blind panic, her blade scraping lichen into a fall of dust that trickled into her boots, and left a pale mark on the stone, a clear signpost to her direction. The rasp echoed oddly, bounced back at her, rippled along the walls, and settled like fog, hopefully as confounding to any pursuer as herself.

Challacombe, the spymaster, hadn't been in her plans either.

She'd fled the god's approach, blundering back into the tunnels, and found the spymaster awaiting her, teeth clamped on his cigarillo, eyes furious, a pistol to hand. "Assassin," he breathed. "Who sent you?"

Filled by terror, she hadn't even paused, bulling into him, heedless of the pistol, the explosion held tight between them, and then she was past him, tripping over the lamp, spilling its oil into the thirsty dust, disappearing into the Cold King's tunnels gone stranger still in the darkness.

It had taken her three turnings with her breath coming fast, a ruinous stitch in her side, to realize that she had been shot. Not fatal, not even close to it, but it burned and hurt until she tightened the waistcoat brutally close over the wound.
The spymaster hadn't been so fortunate. She had left him behind, his blood slowly felting the dust beneath his corpse.

The god's presence filled the tunnels like the strange stillness before an earthquake, changing her path, tangling her in a spiderweb run of blind turns and false exits. Her fingers, replacing her vision, fumbled desperately along the stones, hunting for the little carvings that mapped the tunnels, but found none. Her skin crawled.

Legend had it that the Cold King built the tunnels not to escape his enemies but in a vain attempt to protect his loved ones from himself. The Cold King, the first of the Redoubts, had taken the throne by force and by the will of a god. But alliances with gods were treacherous, and Thomas Redoubt. . . changed, found Haith's likeness settling into his skin, raising horns from his skull, raising scales along his skin, and leaving death and illness in his wake.

Superstition, Ivor scoffed, a grain of truth distorted for better telling, and she knew that was true. But the assassin also knew how tenuous the line was between legend and actuality.

The god's presence found her again, swept about her like a whirlwind, raising grit and dust, but causing no more harm than stung skin and burning eyes. She cowered nonetheless, waiting. . . .

But after a long moment where all she listened to the frantic thud of her heart, she realized the god was waiting also, waking slowly, studying the world.

A ringing bell shook the walls, the chapel bell tolling, its vibration turning the tunnels into pipes, and the god's attention faded. She crouched and covered her ears until the echoes had stopped.

She gasped, glad for the first time to hear the rasp of her voice, the angry thumping of her heart. She crept forward on hands and knees, and her shoulder brushed some imperfection in the stone. Her coat seam tore, and she reached out, nearly laughing. There it was, one of the directional markers, a sinuous stone lizard, feeling oddly alive beneath her trembling fingertips.

She followed its cue, making her way through the dark until a faint bleed-through of light and the sounds of uneasy horses led her into the oldest stall in the palace. She waited for their curiosity to override their sense of duty, and crept out into the palace mews. The horses nearest her raised their heads and whinnied at the scent of blood.

In the torchlight, she found herself gore smeared, nearly head to foot. A quick casting about found a stable boy's cheap woolen coat laid over a bale of hay. She dragged it on, rinsed her face in a horse trough, scrubbing off the worst of the blood, before heading into the night and the waiting docks.

She'd have to find a message boy to take a carefully worded missive to Ivor. Ivor's plans were thorough, his temperament nerveless; still, things had changed. It wasn't simply Janus he was challenging, and the court; there was a god returned to the city and what gods wanted all too often boded ill for mortal ways.