The street lamps of the lower city were going out one by one when Sumit finally stopped walking.
They had searched every place two people could search in a single night. The barracks. The training grounds. The Bear's Cave, where the badger-man behind the counter had shaken his head at Ishita for the third time. Four pubs Jack owed money to, three he had been banned from, and one that had pretended not to know him at all. The wolf had simply vanished.
"Nothing," Ishita said. She leaned against the wall of an alley with her arms crossed, and her tail hung limp behind her. "Nobody has seen him since the afternoon of your match."
Sumit nodded. His legs ached, but the wound across his chest had closed hours ago. He had poured nearly all of his aura into healing it, and what little was left sat curled up deep in his bones like a stone he could not lift, silent ever since the King had pressed down on him in the hallway. Whenever he reached for it, only a thread answered.
"We start again in the morning," Ishita said at last. "We are both out of the tournament. We have all day, and nobody expects us anywhere." Her mouth twisted. "Everyone else will be too busy at the finals to notice two losers wandering around the city."
"Morning," Sumit agreed.
She hesitated at the mouth of the alley. "If he is drunk in a ditch somewhere, I am going to kill him." A small pause. "And if he is not—"
She did not finish. Sumit did not ask her to.
...
By morning, the whole capital was moving in one direction.
Shops were shuttered. Bakers had closed their ovens, farmers had driven their carts in from the outer villages, and soldiers had traded their spears for cushions and folding stools. Grandmothers carried baskets of food. Fathers carried children on their shoulders. Every street ran toward the arena like a river toward the sea, and every window hung with red and gold cloth.
Sumit met Ishita at the corner by the bakery where they had agreed to meet, and they pushed against the current together.
"What if Jack went to the arena?" he asked. "He has been at every match. He wouldn't miss the finals."
"Then we will find out soon enough." Ishita did not slow down. "We are going to see someone who knows everything that happens around here."
Sumit thought about it. "…The King?"
She laughed. It was short and surprised, the first real laugh he had heard from her in two days. "No. The opposite. The beggar."
"The beggar," Sumit repeated.
"Don't make that face."
"I'm not making a face. I'm just wondering why we are going to a beggar's house. A beggar isn't going to know anything important."
"Because begging is the front." She ducked under a line of washing. "Everyone thinks he is a broken old man with a bowl. He sits at every gate in the capital, and nobody notices him, and every night he sells what he heard to whoever pays the most. Guards. Merchants. Even an Elder, once or twice. If something happens in this city, he knows about it."
...
The slum began where the roads stopped being straight.
The houses leaned against each other like tired men. Laundry hung between the rooftops, and the alleys were so narrow that Sumit had to turn his shoulders to get through them. The noise of the capital faded behind them, and in its place there was only dripping water and the distant, muffled roar of a crowd.
Ishita stopped in front of a small house with no roof.
It was not abandoned. The walls stood solid, the door was patched with careful hands, and a pot of something sat cooling on a stone in the middle of the floor. There was just nothing above it but sky and rafters, and a few ragged strips of cloth that might once have been a ceiling.
"He says the stars are free," Ishita said, and pushed the door open.
A rat-man was kneeling in the middle of the room, stuffing coins and scraps of paper into a sack. He was small and gray-furred, wrapped in so many layers of rags that it was hard to tell where the clothing ended and the fur began, and he was working with the frantic speed of someone who did not expect to have much time.
He looked up. His whiskers froze.
"Ishita?"
"Hello, Musak."
"No." The rat-man dropped the sack and scrambled backward, nearly tipping the pot. "No, no, no. Not today. You have to leave. Please. I'm leaving the capital. I have to leave soon, and I haven't got time for—"
"Musak." Ishita stepped inside and shut the door behind her. "Why are you in such a hurry?"
"Because my life is in danger!" His voice cracked. "My life is worth more than any coins you could pay me, Ishita. More than anything. So if you don't mind—"
Ishita raised an eyebrow. Sumit, standing awkwardly behind her, felt very much like a stranger at somebody else's family dinner.
"Isn't this just an ordinary day for you?" Ishita said. "You sell something to the wrong person, the guards come to protect you, and in return you give them a little more information. I even heard you made a deal with one of the Elders recently. So who are you so afraid of?"
"The guards!" Musak said.
There was a silence.
"The guards are the ones after me," the rat-man whispered. His whiskers trembled. "I don't understand it. I told them everything I knew. Suspicious people. A secret tunnel. Stone statues. And they didn't go after the Temple. They went after me." He wrung his hands. "I admit I only gave half to the Elder and half to Chief Dhruv. I always sell in pieces, that's how I stay alive. But that isn't a reason to attack me!"
Ishita's tail stopped moving.
"Musak," she said, very quietly. "Slow down. Start from the beginning. Tell us everything."
The rat-man took a deep, shaky breath. He sat down on an overturned crate and looked at his hands for a moment.
"Some time ago," he said, "Elder Gaja himself sent for me. He wanted to know about a cult in black robes. People had seen them near some black trees in the east. He paid well. So I asked around, and…" He swallowed. "I found out where they were coming from. Inside the Temple."
Sumit's stomach tightened.
"But I do not make enemies of temples," Musak said quickly. "No sensible rat does. So I told Gaja only that the Temple was behaving strangely. That was enough for him. He gave me my reward, and I thought that was the end."
"Then?" Ishita said.
"Then Leo came."
Ishita's eyes narrowed. "Leo?"
"He wanted to know where Jack had gone. He was worried. I could tell." Musak's voice dropped. "So I took the job. One of my boys had seen Jack walk into the Temple that afternoon, and he never saw him come out."
Ishita made a very small sound, like a breath that had been punched out of her.
"I went in myself. Rats are good at small spaces." Musak's hands were shaking now. "There's a door behind the big mural in the east wing, with a sign on it. Renovation. There is a tunnel behind it, with a staircase that goes down and down and down, and it runs straight under the arena. At the end there was a room with stone statues in it. Dozens of them. And one…"
He looked at Ishita, and he did not finish.
"Jack," she said.
The rat-man nodded miserably.
"I ran," he said. "I went straight to find Leo. But he was gone. He's always somewhere in the arena, and I couldn't find him, so I… I told Chief Dhruv. He's Leo's superior, I thought, he's the head of security, I thought he would know what to do." His whiskers drooped. "He listened to everything. He thanked me. And then he ordered his guards to attack me."
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
"Dhruv," Ishita said at last. Her voice had gone flat and cold. "Leo trusts that man like a brother. He told me last week that Dhruv was the only one in the arena who had never once doubted him."
"Ishita—" Sumit began.
"I know." She was already moving. "Leo is at the arena. Dhruv is probably standing right behind him." She turned to Sumit, and her yellow eyes were bright and sharp. "I am the fastest one here. I'll go to Leo and warn him. You go to the tunnel."
"Ishita, Jack is—"
"I know where Jack is." Her voice cracked, then steadied. "I know. And I can't do both. Leo is going to walk into that arena with a knife at his back, and nobody will tell him." She grabbed Sumit's shoulder hard. "Bring him out. And when you do, tell him I'm going to kill him."
"I will."
She let go and was out the door before he had finished speaking, a gold-and-black blur between the rooftops.
Sumit turned back to the rat-man, who had gone very pale.
"The east wing," Sumit said. "The mural. How do I get through the door?"
Musak stared at him for a moment. Then, with trembling fingers, he dug through the sack at his feet and pulled out a bent iron key.
"I made it myself," he said. "Don't ask." He pressed it into Sumit's palm. His hands were ice cold. "And boy— That room. It didn't feel like a room. It felt… hungry."
Sumit closed his fingers around the key.
"Thank you," he said, and ran.
...
The Temple of Life was almost empty.
Every priest who could be spared had gone to the arena, and the white halls echoed with Sumit's footsteps. Far away, through thick walls, he could hear the roar of the crowd, faint as the sea.
He found the mural of Creation in the east wing, a great painted seed splitting into a tree. Beside it, a wooden board hung from an iron door: UNDER RENOVATION. The floor in front of it had been swept clean in a neat arc by many boots.
The key turned on the second try.
Behind the door, a staircase dropped away into the dark. Sumit pulled the door shut behind him and started down. He counted the steps for a while, lost count somewhere past two hundred, and kept going. The air turned cold and damp, and smelled of earth and something sharp underneath, like old iron.
Then, at the foot of the stairs, he felt it.
It began as a tickle. A faint tug on the inside of his skin, as if a very small hand were pulling at a loose thread. He stopped. The tug grew stronger. It was a slow, patient pull, like the tide dragging at the ankles of a swimmer, and he knew it, though he had not felt it in a long time.
The dark tree. What little was left of his aura was trying to leave him, drawn toward something deeper in the tunnel.
Don't.
He thought of the Cat-man's lessons. Legs, arms, shoulders, back: aura moving through the body, never leaving it. He thought of a fighter in the arena whom he had watched circulating his energy in a tight, perfect loop, wasting not a drop. He took a long breath and held it, and he drew the last thread of his aura inward, packed it tight, and kept it moving inside his bones.
The tug faltered.
There was almost nothing there to take. It slid off him like water off a stone, puzzled, as if the thing in the dark had reached for a meal and found only an empty bowl. Then it faded.
Sumit stood very still, his heart loud in his ears. For once, having almost no aura was a gift.
Keep it inside, he told himself. Don't let any of it out.
He moved on down the tunnel with his shoulder against the cold wall. Halfway along, light flickered at a bend, and a figure in a black robe stood there with a lantern, hood up, a piece of pale shell hanging at his chest. He was reading the dark the way aura users read it, with a slow, searching turn of the head.
Sumit froze.
The hood turned toward him. For a long moment, the cultist looked straight at the spot where he stood, and Sumit held his breath and waited to be seen.
Nothing. The hood slid away, bored, toward the other side of the tunnel. There was nothing for him to sense: no aura, no pressure, no glow. In the dark, to someone who was looking for strength, Sumit was just another stone.
For the first time in my life, he thought, being nothing worked.
He slipped past, one careful step at a time, and kept walking.
Ahead, far down the tunnel, a faint blue-black light was pulsing in time with a low, steady hum.