Chapter 308: Entry
Nothing happened without Liam.
That was the conclusion Mezos disliked most.
For six days, they repeated the palace survey under different conditions. New drones crossed the guarded perimeter. Power sources changed. Relays were replaced with isolated units that had never touched the imperial network. They varied frequencies, shielding, sensor loads, and even the amount of ether carried by the machines themselves.
Felix’s palace remained irritatingly cooperative.
The entrance opened.
Interior systems activated.
The drones returned intact.
No signal followed them back.
Mezos stood over the operations console, one hand braced against its edge as he reviewed the latest run. His brace was gone now, though his fingers still stiffened after prolonged use. He wore dark field trousers and a fitted black jacket, already equipped with the local recorders Severin had approved.
"Same route," he said. "Thirty-eight minutes inside. Nothing."
Severin watched the frozen corridor on the central display.
"Because Canmore isn’t connected."
"Liam."
Severin glanced at him.
Mezos continued scrolling through the data. "Felix Canmore is the traitor hiding somewhere on the other side of the Gate. Liam is the man Arik will kill us over if we start confusing the two."
"I am aware of the distinction."
"You stabbed Felix. I thought the reminder might help."
Severin’s expression remained perfectly flat.
Mezos smiled.
That incident had answered several questions long before Liam ever arrived in Nuria.
Felix had returned through the Gate decades after Goliath disappeared and walked into Deira, pretending to be the sovereign himself. His imitation had been sophisticated enough to carry something resembling sovereign ether. Enough to pass outer systems. Enough to convince people who wanted desperately to believe their emperor had returned.
Severin had not believed him.
The throne room’s deeper wards had not either.
Felix had escaped back through the Gate, leaving Nuria isolated and his palace under permanent guard as the residence of a traitor.
They already knew Felix could imitate recognition.
What they did not know was what he had built here before leaving.
Mezos closed the latest sensor report.
"We go in."
Severin looked at him for only a moment before nodding.
"No relay."
"Physical storage only."
"If anything reacts, we leave."
Mezos picked up the equipment case beside the console. "Unlike Liam, I possess a functional instinct for retreat."
"He believes he does too."
"That is because nobody has explained the definition to him correctly."
Two hours later, they passed through the security perimeter surrounding Felix’s estate.
The guards knew them and still checked every authorization twice.
The palace had remained watched since Felix was declared a traitor. No household staff returned. No curious official wandered through old rooms looking for relics. Patrol formations covered the walls, and the soldiers at the exterior post recorded every movement near the gates.
Beyond them, the estate looked almost peaceful.
Pale stone rose above overgrown gardens, its long balconies and carved screens belonging to the imperial architecture of Goliath’s reign. Felix had lived here when he was still one of the emperor’s highest-ranking consorts, decades before the poisoning happened.
That was what bothered Mezos.
Not that Felix had eventually betrayed Goliath.
That he had possessed legitimate access before anyone knew there was a betrayal to look for.
Severin stopped beneath the portico.
Mezos followed his gaze toward the old formations surrounding the doors.
"You came here after he returned."
"Yes."
"When he was pretending to be Goliath."
Severin’s watery jade eyes hardened faintly. "I remember."
Mezos already knew the rest.
Felix’s sovereign imitation had opened the first imperial ward.
The second had rejected him violently enough to damage the ether grafts in his arm.
Severin had recognized him before that confirmation anyway.
"He had already spent years draining Wrohan by then," Mezos said, checking the sealed recorder across his chest. "Building an imitation from stolen ether. Then he targeted Agaron’s imperial Core because Wrohan couldn’t give him what he actually needed."
"A stable sovereign source."
"Arik."
Severin nodded once.
That theory was no longer new.
Felix had not been trying to return to Nuria as the dead Goliath.
He had been trying to build something that could eventually replace the living Arik.
And Liam, whether through blood, bond, or whatever Felix had placed in his channels, had somehow become part of that plan.
The doors opened.
Neither man had touched them.
Mezos looked down at the spectrum meter.
"Normal activation."
"For this building," Severin corrected.
They crossed the threshold.
Lights awakened gradually along the walls, illuminating pale stone floors and old decorative metalwork. Dust softened the edges of furniture left behind when the palace was sealed, but the building had never truly been abandoned. Maintenance systems still functioned at minimum levels beneath the security lockdown.
Their boots were the only sound.
Mezos checked his monitor again.
"Nothing."
"Good."
"No. Liam entered the system remotely, and it reached for him. We are physically standing inside, and it does not care."
"That tells us something."
"That we are irrelevant."
Severin continued toward the private wing. "I have survived worse insults."
They followed the route mapped by the drones, past reception rooms that once would have been crowded with officials seeking a powerful consort’s favor. Old household crests remained embedded above several doors. Ether conduits disappeared beneath ornamental panels, newer than the original palace construction but old enough to predate Goliath’s poisoning.
Mezos stopped beside one.
"That is what I want."
Severin turned.
"The timeline." Mezos indicated the hidden conduit without touching it. "Felix did not build all this after deciding to flee Nuria. Some of these modifications were installed while he still had Goliath’s trust."
They continued.
At the end of the corridor, Mezos compared the physical architecture with the original palace plans stored on his isolated tablet.
Then stopped.
The plan showed the corridor turning twelve meters ahead.
The actual corridor continued much farther.
Severin noticed immediately.
"Spatial formation?"
"Nothing registered."
Yet the passage existed.
Mezos looked down its dim length.
Whatever Felix had been preparing here, he had started as a trusted consort with access to the imperial household, long before he poisoned Goliath and long before he returned through the Gate wearing a stolen approximation of sovereign ether.
And now the palace ignored two armed men walking through its private corridors.
Mezos’s mouth tightened.
"It isn’t waiting for intruders."
Severin looked toward the impossible passage.
"No."
Mezos thought of Liam’s hand going numb against a dead console.
"It is waiting for the right person."