Chapter 790: Four Hours to Dawn (4)
Ash filtered down through fissures in the vaulted ceiling, dusting the broad shoulders of Dravis Granger like gray snow. He ignored it. The tremor rolling under the aqueduct floor mattered more than the debris drifting from above. A deep-set vibration beat its way through stone and sinew, landing in his boots as an arrhythmic metronome—two steady pulses, one softer echo, a pause. He matched his respiration to that cadence, lungs rising on the first thrum, falling on the second, holding on the lull. Stability, here, was a timing problem.
He advanced three silent steps. Red-brown water oozed across the culvert’s edge, licking at the toes of his boots before retreating again like a timid animal. The aqueduct had been pristine once—he could still read the masons’ marks, clean dovetails at every join—but Orvath’s sabotage had warped the stone. Whole cornices sagged. Support arches bulged as though the channel were breathing in its sleep. Dravis’s pale eyes—ice under lamplight—measured each deformity in a single pass and filed it away under collapse risk: moderate.
Above him, the patrol clanked by. Two sentinels in iron frog-skin cuirasses paused to share a flask. Their voices bounced off vaults in loose echoes; to untrained ears the echoes were pointless noise. Dravis haunted those echoes, letting their chatter smear his footfalls into the background. He reached a buttress, pressed flat, and flicked a finger. A fingernail-sized sigil bloomed on the mortar—dull garnet light outlining hairline cracks stenciled across the entire weight-bearing seam. The aqueduct would survive maybe one more quake. Possibly two. Definitely not three.
He nodded once—good enough—and slid onward.
Lantern halos kept bobbing across the upper gallery. The guards’ lights revealed jagged graffiti: spiral symbols scored into the walls like mazes scraped by a furious child. Memory tethers, he noted—Orvath’s handwriting. Any soldier brushing a bare hand over those spirals would lose an hour of recollection for every second of contact. Dravis stepped deliberately around them, mind already drafting an exit path that would herd any pursuers through the traps. He wasted no thought on pity. Pawns should know the board they marched upon.
More ash drifted. Somewhere, high in the city, parts of a roof must have surrendered. He tasted the air: iron filings, burned pitch, the faint ammoniac sting of alchemical accelerants. Good; the diversion teams were doing their work. Fewer eyes meant fewer variables.
At the culvert’s midpoint he halted. The stone wall was glossy here, slick with condensation. He palmed the surface; lines of rune-ink flared beneath his glove in ghost-white, sketching an invisible blueprint—every pressure vein, every weld seam, every fatigue fault spidering through the valve chamber beyond. The right-hand flank glowed brightest: left valve, third seam. Exactly as predicted.
He whispered, "Left valve, third seam." Spoken confirmation triggered the sigil code. Symbols snapped brighter, confirming target integrity.
A tremor spat shards of limestone from overhead. He ducked beneath an arch as debris clattered like thrown dice. A lesser infiltrator might have hesitated, recalculated. Dravis merely shifted his stance half a pace to account for a changed traction coefficient on fresh rubble. His heartbeat never left that steady three-beat loop.