Page 153 of Zenith Court

Jonah waited at every change in depth. Kieran’s injured hand drifted lower whenever he forgot to hold it up. Delphine’s fingers left occasional dark marks on the wall despite the bandage. Caspian caught my belt once when the current shoved me sideways, released it when I recovered, and kept walking.

The last corridor widened until the lamp no longer reached both walls. The ceiling rose out of sight. Water stood above my knees, warmer than it had been on the stair and clouded with pale mineral threads that caught the light when we moved.

Pressure filled the cavern. It pushed against my ears and tightened every line at my wrists. I could taste metal, apple, leather, and burnt sugar. With each surge, the tastes blurred together.

Beneath the roar ran a slower rhythm. A woman’s voice spoke too low for words, pausing at measured intervals. The sound traveled through the water more clearly than through the air. The lines at my wrist lifted toward it before I chose to reach.

The lamp finally found a door set directly into the rock. It had no visible hinges and no handle, only iron blackened by constant damp. Water streamed beneath it toward us.

I stopped one step away with the others breathing behind me. Then I put my palm against the iron. The current on the other side pressed back.

43

Astra

The iron door opened inward beneath my hand. Water rushed around its lower edge and pulled at my knees as we crossed into a chamber the Court’s maps had omitted.

No mason had squared this room. Water had cut the walls into long curves and worn spiral gutters through the floor. Later stonework showed only around the doorway and in four narrow walkways raised above the channels. Everything else belonged to the cavern beneath the Court.

The walkways met in a ring around the basin. Between them, channels dropped too deep for the lamp to find bottom, their surfaces disturbed by water rising from below rather than running across the room. A faint vibration traveled through the ring and into the soles of my boots.

The founding basin stood at the center, black stone polished silver along the rim by generations of hands. Its water rose in a narrow braid no wider than my wrist, twisting upward without spilling. The First Chair stood over it with both arms submerged to the elbows.

The braid climbed her sleeves and thinned as it passed over her shoulders. Light moved beneath her skin in slow pulses, each one followed by a tremor through the floor. She was feeding her reserve into the basin. The rite had already taken enough that the tendons in her neck stood out when she breathed.

Every pulse lifted the water in the channels by a finger’s width, held it, then let it fall. Her hands shook once beneath the surface and steadied.

Metal flooded the back of my tongue. My three lines tightened in answer: marble, apple, leather, each distinct despite the pressure in the room. The current beneath the floor pulled toward the basin from every channel we had followed down.

The First Chair did not look up when five sets of boots crossed the threshold. Her attention stayed on the rising water.

Caspian moved left, putting himself between the basin and a black opening where two rite-guards had appeared. “Two,” he said to Kieran. “The nearer one favors his left knee.”

Kieran went right and set his back to Delphine’s. His burned wrist stayed close to his chest; he held the recovered short blade in his other hand. When the first guard rushed, Kieran shifted toward the weak side and drove him shoulder-first into the wall.

The impact jarred Kieran’s injured arm loose. He caught it against his ribs with a sharp breath and used his boot to keep the guard down. Delphine covered the opening at his back, her captured blade low because the bandage made a high guard impossible.

Jonah stopped just inside the threshold and watched the gutters rather than the guards already moving. “Three more past the second channel.”

The hidden guards had used the water to mask their approach. Jonah tracked the breaks in the surface until the first head rose behind the walkway, then shifted two steps left and blocked the nearest place they could climb out. One guard came up on hands and knees. Jonah met the shoulder, rolled the body sideways, and sent the man back into the shallow edge of the channel without following him down.

Caspian met the second visible guard at the edge of the walkway and forced him to fight with running water at his heels. Behind him, the remaining two hidden guards reached the channel ledge.

Delphine laid her uninjured palm against the near wall. Her bandaged arm remained tucked against her ribs. She opened her eyes. “Nothing else behind the First Chair.”

Jonah nodded. The four of them turned outward around the basin and left the inner ring open for me.

I stepped onto the inner walkway. The First Chair lifted her head.

“Not yet,” she told the rite-guards.

Heat left my wrists. Marble, apple, and leather disappeared between one breath and the next, so completely that I staggered before I understood she had folded the suppression around me alone.

Behind me, steel struck stone. Kieran shouted something I could not make out. I reached for the chord by instinct and found nothing—not distance, not pain, not even the sense of a door shut between us.

The loss was physical. My balance shifted as if a handrail had vanished beneath my palm. I knew the others were less than twenty feet away because I had just seen them, but my body insisted the room ended at my own skin. Even Caspian’s burnt-sugar trace was gone beneath the metal flooding my mouth.

I finished the walk to the basin without it. My legs shook once when the floor pulsed beneath me. I kept moving.