Thankfully, the guards hadn’t let the congregation into the back hallways, where what remained of the Presque Mort did business. The staircase she’d climbed so many times before was empty, the nubby carpet warm from the light in the windows.
The statues were still there, one on every landing. Apollius Avenging, the moon-stone and sun-stone held in His hands. She stopped a moment, considering them, the obvious conclusion clicking into place in her head. Two of the pieces of the Fount. That was what they looked like.
And maybe…
Casting a surreptitious look behind her, Alie grabbed the stone held in Apollius’s outstretched hand, the one with the sun. She pulled. It didn’t come loose.
It wasn’t the right one, anyway. She knew that as soon as she touched it. The power in her didn’t leap, didn’t recognize anything. This was just a rock.
“Worth a try,” she muttered, and continued up the stairs.
Down the dark hall, to the familiar door. Alie pressed her eyes closed, just for a minute. Prayer had been a hard habit to break after a lifetime of being told she was blessed by birthright. That all she ever needed was to ask Apollius for what she wanted, and due to her station, He would be inclined to listen. It’d worked, sometimes. But now Alie knew the god had nothing to do with it. Answered prayers were just chance.
Still.
“Let them be all right,” she muttered, thinking of Gabe and Malcolm in Caldien, Lore in the Isles.
She opened the door.
Alexis sat on the edge of the desk, nervously bouncing their knee. They stood when Alie entered. “You got my note. I wasn’t sure it’d made it through the crowd.”
But Alie wasn’t listening. Alie was looking at the person seated at the desk behind them. “Lilia?”
“Excellent.” Alexis ran a hand through their pale hair. “You’ve already met.”
Lore’s mother looked exhausted. The skin beneath her hazel eyes was bruised, and her white-gold hair frizzed around hertemples. “We’ve met,” she said shortly. “Alienor knows what we’re looking for. She helped me get into the storeroom.”
“Right,” Alexis said. “Good. It’s far less conspicuous for you to go with her than with me.” They seemed extremely relieved not to have to explain everything. “Well then, we can—”
“Wait.” Alie held up a hand, then waved it between the two of them. “How doyouknow each other?”
“We’re colleagues, technically,” Lilia said drily. “Alexis and I met when Gabe was drawing up the resolutions to reinstate the Buried Watch.”
A resolution that had never made it all the way into law. It almost made Alie want to laugh, thinking about the mundanity of filled-out forms, how they’d once lived in a world where something so simple actually fixed anything.
“I got in contact with Lilia after all the Mortem disappeared from the catacombs,” Alexis added.
“Under Gabe’s orders?”
“Not exactly.”
All of them conspiring without Bastian, the Presque Mort conspiring without Gabe. It made sense, she supposed. No one in the Citadel was an upstanding sort. “So I assume, if you two are working together, that you’re no longer loyal to Apollius.”
Blasphemy still felt strange on her tongue, and it still made Alexis flinch. “No,” they said. “I’m not. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.”
They’d all been taught that whatever Apollius wanted was the way things were supposed to be, the morality of the world dictated by one god’s desires. But they were far beyond that now.
Lilia had no patience for religious dithering. She sat forward in Gabe’s chair and steepled her hands on the table. “Has Bastian managed to get a location for the Fount piece yet?”
“If he has, he hasn’t had a chance to tell me.” Alie snorted. “What with Apollius suddenly deciding that He wants to blow His own cover.”
And kill Olivier to do it. Cecelia had shown up in court the next day, miraculously healed. At least Olivier had gotten his sister’s health back through his bargain, though she couldn’t forget the look on his face as Apollius raised him into the air, pumped his heart until his veins burst. He hadn’t known he was going to die.
“I was afraid of that,” Lilia murmured. “We need to move fast. Our contact in Caldien—”
“Your contact inCaldien?” Alie looked incredulously at Alexis. “Exactly how involved is this?”
They sighed, sitting once again on the corner of the desk. “Soon after the dock explosion, when I took the debris to Farramark, I met… someone.” They didn’t say who, and that annoyed Alie to no end, but she didn’t press. “Someone who has been in and out of Auverraine, and has become a close companion to the Prime Minister. They’re invested in making sure Caldien stays free of the Empire. And since Apollius has possessed our King and is using the Empire to make the Holy Kingdom…”
