Chapter 1 - Down Among the Dead

Ten minutes after stealing robes from a wall hook, Felix and I were going down the stairs into the catacombs beneath Ashbourne dressed like two men with a very serious interest in blood sacrifice.

The hooded crimson robes were far too clean for anything associated with a sewer. Mine pinched under the arms. Felix’s fit him perfectly, because the gods had built the entire world around making Felix Skotos look good in stolen clothing.

He moved three steps below me, one hand trailing over the rough stone wall, blonde hair tucked into his hood. The robe pulled across his ass every time he stepped down. I had been watching this happen for at least fifty stairs, and somewhere around the thirtieth my cock had started taking an interest.

It might have been sixty.

“If you fall,” Felix whispered, “I’m leaving you here.”

“I wasn’t going to fall.”

“You’ve missed the same step twice.”

“Bad masonry.”

“My ass isn’t going to change shape while you stare at it.”

“That’s exactly the sort of claim that requires careful observation.”

He glanced over his shoulder. Violet eyes caught the weak light from below, and the corner of his mouth lifted. “How professional of you.”

He reached back without turning around, found the front of my robe, and squeezed my cock once through the wool. He let go and kept walking down, and I missed the next step for real.

The Tome shifted against my spine under the robe.

“PROFESSIONAL?” it said, far too loudly. “The boy spent four minutes deciding which stolen robe made his shoulders look broader. I have witnessed military campaigns planned with less vanity.”

I slapped a hand over the lump on my back. The eye on its cover pressed against the cloth and blinked into my palm.

“Quiet,” I hissed.

“I have been strapped beneath a garment that smells of lavender water and frightened perspiration. I will speak whenever I please.”

“You can speak from the bottom of the river whenever you please.”

“You make that threat as though I haven’t survived three drownings, a shipwreck, and an emperor’s underwater fertility observance. Six days. Forty pearl divers. The oysters never recovered.”

Felix stopped so abruptly I walked into him.

His hand covered mine over the Tome, and he tipped his head toward the bottom of the stairs.

Voices drifted up the stairwell.

We stood pressed together on the narrow steps while two men talked somewhere below us. His other hand found its way back between us and settled on my cock, and it stayed there, patient and warm, for the whole conversation. I was fully hard against his palm inside three breaths, which I blamed on the stairs. I lost half of what the men said, and the rest blurred under the scrape of shoes and a wet sloshing sound. One complained about the smell. The other said the incense merchant had promised sandalwood and delivered cedar again.

The Tome’s eye rolled beneath my hand.

Felix leaned close enough that his lips brushed the shell of my ear. “If the book shouts, smother it.”

“Gladly.”

“I heard that,” the Tome muttered into my palm.

The voices moved away.

Felix waited through ten slow breaths before continuing down. That was how he did things. He waited, listened, counted, and moved when the world gave him permission.

I usually moved and discovered afterward whether permission had been involved.

It had mostly worked out so far.

I decided to lead the next flight, to remind him that Blackthorn’s letter had come to me. I made it four steps. Felix came down right behind me with his robe against mine, and on the fifth step his hand slid in through the side slit of my robe, over my hip, and wrapped around my cock through my trousers.

I stopped dead.

“Keep walking,” he whispered. “You’re leading.”

I kept walking. I led us down two full turns of the stair with Felix stroking me slowly through the cloth in time with my steps, and I couldn’t have told you one thing about the masonry. Somewhere on the second turn I reached back blind and found him every bit as hard under his robe, and I got my fingers around him, and after that neither of us was leading anything. We went down the rest of that flight like two drunks carrying a ladder, breathing through our teeth, and I had absolutely no plan for what happened at the bottom.

The stairs dropped farther than any sensible person would dig under a city full of heavy buildings. Water dripped somewhere ahead. The air tasted of copper and old stone under incense thick enough to chew. Every few yards, someone had painted three interlocking circles on the wall with a color that looked suspiciously close to blood. I wasn’t about to touch it to find out. The older marks had dried nearly black. The fresh ones still gleamed.

Marcus Blackthorn’s letter had called all of this probably nothing.

The letter had arrived at breakfast eight days earlier, folded around a list of missing objects from the lower districts: seventy-two black candles, nine sacks of chalk, three silver bowls, two ceremonial knives, and one goat.

The goat had been underlined.

I had read the first two lines aloud at the Crooked Nail. Felix invited himself before I reached the word catacombs. Kaniz started packing food before either of us stood up. The Tome called the candle count amateurish and spent the rest of breakfast describing an emperor who had illuminated an entire palace with candles made from traitors.

Maple took my plate away when it reached the part about rendered fat.

For a week, Felix and I followed chalk symbols through sewer junctions and alleys where even the rats traveled in pairs. We found blood under a tannery drain and a collapsed archway with a hidden trigger stone carved to look like a fat cherub’s nipple.

Felix found the stone.

I found the robes.

That made us even, regardless of what he said.

The steps ended at a narrow landing. Three passages opened ahead, each black beyond the reach of a single smoking lamp. Felix crouched, brushed two fingers over the floor, and looked hard at the dust.

I crouched beside him and pretended the scuffs meant something to me. Crouching stretched the wool over his thighs, and I looked at those instead, since I could read footprints any time I liked and Felix’s thighs in tight wool were a rarer opportunity. I put my hand on the nearest one for balance. He let it stay, and I left it there while he read the dust, and I slid it higher every time he didn’t object.

“Left,” he said.

“Obviously.”

“Why?”

“The blood cult has a natural preference for left turns.”

“Footprints.”

“Those too.”

Felix rose, and we took the left passage.

The catacombs had started as burial tunnels. You could tell from the little stone shelves cut into the walls and the bones stacked on them. Skulls watched us pass with empty, deeply judgmental eyes. Somebody had dressed one in a crimson scarf and placed a candle on its head. Wax covered half its face.

“See?” I whispered. “Standards.”

“It’s a skull wearing a scarf.”

“A coordinated scarf.”

The cult had expanded the old tunnels with enthusiasm and very little skill. New arches leaned slightly to one side. Chisel marks scarred the stone. One support post had been reinforced with what looked like a dining table shoved upright beneath the ceiling.

Malkor had built corpse-machines into his walls. He had fed girls to pits and strapped me naked to a board beneath an ancient grimoire while a slave girl cut my hand open. Malkor had been horrible, and thoroughly committed to the work.

This place had signs.

The first one read CEREMONIAL CHAMBER in careful gold lettering with an arrow pointing deeper underground.

“That’s considerate,” I said.

“Don’t touch it.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Your hand is already out.”

I lowered it.

Beyond the sign, the walls changed. Murals covered the stone from knee height to the curved ceiling. The painter had used a lot of red paint and even more black. Robed figures knelt before a mouth full of stars. Bodies poured into it in long crimson ribbons. Something huge waited behind the mouth, painted as a pile of claws and teeth that never joined up into one body.

The artist had talent. The subject needed hobbies.

One painted figure had been given a cock roughly the size of Bertha’s front leg.

“Tome,” I whispered. “Does the Devourer have a giant cock?”

“The Devourer has no fixed anatomy.”

“So maybe.”

“If that is the detail you take from this mural, I may throw myself into the river.”

“You said rivers don’t work.”

“I would find a deeper one.”

Felix stopped me by the cock. He didn’t even look back. He held on, and I stopped so fast the Tome thumped against my spine.

The floor ahead looked ordinary, plain fitted stone with a few dark stains and a discarded candle stub. Felix pointed to a line across the passage so thin I only saw it when I lowered my head. A black thread stretched ankle-high from one wall to the other. I had spent the last twenty yards watching his hips move under that robe, and my next step would have gone straight through it. He showed me the rest of the trap one-handed, and his other hand never let go of me.

Past it, six floorstones stood a fraction higher than the rest.

Tiny holes dotted both walls.

“Darts?” I asked.

Felix took a copper coin from his pocket and flicked it onto the first raised stone.

Something clunked behind the wall.

Twenty metal spikes punched out from both sides at chest and groin height. They met in the middle with a sound that made my balls attempt to climb into my stomach.

One spike held a scrap of old crimson cloth. Another had a dark, leathery piece of something stuck to the point.

I leaned closer.

It had a fingernail.

“Their own trap killed one of them,” Felix said.

“Maybe he ducked badly.”

“The spikes cover four feet.”

“A catastrophic crouch.”

He gave me the look. I had missed the look while I was away at Blackrock. Felix could put more disappointment into one raised eyebrow than anyone alive.

“Can you disarm it?” I asked.

“Yes.”

He stepped back.

“Are you going to?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“There’s a side passage six yards behind us.”

I looked back. It was obvious once he pointed it out. “I knew that.”

“Of course.”

We retraced our steps and squeezed into the narrower route. It curved around the trap chamber with barely enough room for one person. Bones showed through the wall where the cult’s digging had broken into older graves. A hand stuck out of the wall at shoulder height, yellow fingers curled as though the dead man wanted his corridor back.

I shook it as I passed. “Sorry about the wall.”

Felix stared at me.

“Manners cost nothing.”

“Your sanity may have a price.”

“Blackthorn isn’t paying enough for that.”

The passage ahead sank into complete darkness. Felix looked into it, then back at me. His eyes traveled over my crimson robe and the bulge of the Tome strapped beneath the cloth.

He smirked.

“What?”

“You wore less the last time we did this together.”

The last time had involved Ashara throwing me naked into a winter alley until I learned how to stop thinking and let the shadows take me. Felix had appeared afterward, stripped without being asked, taken my hand, and pulled me across the rooftops like two freezing ghosts with questionable priorities. I remembered his bare ass on those rooftops far more clearly than I remembered the technique, and I got half hard remembering it now.

At the time, I had assumed nudity was essential to the technique.

Blackrock had established that clothes worked perfectly well. Boots made it harder, but a coat kept important parts from freezing off. Ashara had known all of this and neglected to mention it.

I remained completely certain she had done so for educational reasons.

“The robe is tactical,” I said.

“Is it?”

“And warmer.”

He grinned. “Disappointing, but practical.”

He stepped into the darkness and disappeared.

I let my thoughts loosen. The tunnel and the cult slid away easily. Felix’s mouth took three tries, because my brain kept going back to it, and by the time I got rid of it he had a long lead on me. I was still the best student Ashara had ever thrown naked into an alley, so I let go of the extremely complicated household waiting for me at the Crooked Nail in one breath, and after that all I was thinking about was my feet.

The shadows took me.

Felix flowed ahead of me, a patch of shadow darker than the rest. I followed, feet finding the narrow floor without scraping stone. The stolen robe dragged at my shoulders and fluttered around my boots, but the technique covered it fine. The technique felt heavier dressed. It also felt considerably less likely to end with my cock retreating into my body from cold.

The Tome shifted against my back.

“If you speak,” I whispered, “I will hand you over to the quietest monks I can find.”

Its pages tightened into an offended shudder.

The Shadow Dance hid movement. It did absolutely nothing for an ancient book with no sense of self-preservation.

We kept moving because stopping broke the technique. The side passage narrowed and brightened ahead. Torchlight from somewhere ahead striped the floor in uneven orange bands.

Felix came out of the shadows first, right beside the wall. I stepped out behind him with all my limbs, clothes, and dignity still attached.

He glanced down at my robe again.

“Don’t,” I warned.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Your eyebrow did.”

Another painted mouth gaped on the wall beside us. Black candles had been arranged beneath it in descending order of height, with a skull at either end and a little brass bowl centered between them. Six feet farther on, the cult had repeated the exact arrangement, and six feet past that they had done it again: mouth, candles, skulls, bowl. Apparently somebody had purchased a complete blood-cult decorating set and followed the instructions without deviation.

I snorted.

“What’s so funny?” Felix asked.

“No sense of design,” I whispered loudly back.

“You’re critiquing the decorations now?”

The passage widened near the far end. Voices were coming our way.

Felix caught my robe, turned, and shoved me into a shallow burial alcove.

The Tome on my back hit cold stone. His body covered mine a heartbeat later. One thigh pressed between my legs, his chest tight to mine, his breath warm across my mouth. I was hard against his thigh before I’d worked out we were hiding. He pulled both our hoods low and dragged a strip of rotting burial cloth across the opening.

The alcove had been built for one corpse.

It now held two rogues and an extremely irritated book.

“This is undignified,” the Tome muttered beneath my robe.

Felix pressed harder. “Quiet.”

The cultists rounded the corner.

I saw them through holes in the cloth. Two men in crimson robes carried a silver basin between them. The first had soft pink fingers loaded with jeweled rings. He wore polished black boots with little silver buckles, boots bought by a man who had never stepped in anything worse than spilled wine. The second had a carefully trimmed beard and a gold chain across his chest. Sweat shone on his forehead.

The basin sloshed.

A pale hand floated against its rim.

Three fingers remained attached. The wrist ended in red meat and a white nub of bone. My stomach turned over.

“I told Henslow the goat’s blood wasn’t sufficient,” the bearded man whispered. “He refuses to respect the measurements.”

“Henslow owns six warehouses. He isn’t accustomed to being corrected.”

“Blood volume remains blood volume regardless of his property holdings.”

“You tell him.”

“I absolutely will not.”

They carried the basin past.

The smell hit after them. It was fresh blood under a lot of perfume, and the sour stink of men trying hard not to vomit.

Felix stayed against me, listening.

His face was inches from mine and getting closer. The tip of his nose touched my cheek when he turned his head. His thigh shifted, and my brain quit on the spot. I told myself that was a perfectly reasonable response to a severed hand floating past in a basin.

Danger always got me hard, and Felix got me harder.

“They’ve gone,” I whispered.

“Then why are you still whispering?”

He didn’t move.

“We should probably...”

“Be responsible?”

His mouth touched mine.

The kiss began as one quick press, the sort of thing two disciplined rogues might do after nearly being discovered beside a severed hand. It stopped being quick when his fingers slid under my hood and into my hair. Mine found his waist. His mouth opened, his tongue brushed mine, and the catacombs, cult, sacrifice, and entire underground arrangement became much less important.

I pulled him closer and ground against his thigh, which was stupid and the best idea I’d had all week.

He made a quiet sound into my mouth. That sound had ruined several good intentions in the past and was rapidly working on this one.

His hand dragged down my chest over the robe. It slid in through the side slit and hooked my belt buckle.

“Here?” I breathed.

Felix smiled against my mouth. “Fear makes you horny.”

“Everything makes me horny.”

“Then I’d better check.”

“Very thoroughly?”

His fingers pulled the buckle loose. Somewhere around the time his tongue got into my mouth, I had stopped listening to the corridor, which I would have mocked anyone else for.

Footsteps sounded outside.

We froze.

Four more cultists passed the alcove. One was complaining that his physician had forbidden stairs. A woman with an accent from the upper terraces demanded to know whether the sacrificial wine had been allowed to breathe.

“It’s ceremonial wine,” someone whispered.

“Ceremony is no excuse for vinegar.”

Their footsteps faded.

Felix’s hand remained inside my robe, resting over my open belt.

“You owe me,” he whispered.

“For what?”

His fingers tightened.

“Right. Yes. Clearly a debt.”

He fastened my belt with an efficient tug, kissed me once more, and backed out of the alcove. He already looked like a professional again, apart from his swollen lips.

Mine probably looked worse.

“Finish the job first,” he said.

“That sounded like a term.”

“Only to you.”

I followed him into the corridor with a hard-on tenting my robe and a renewed commitment to public safety.

The Tome squirmed on my back.

“I have notes.”

“Keep them.”

“His hand position showed promise. Your breathing remains catastrophically obvious.”

“Monastery.”

The book went silent for almost twelve seconds.

We continued deeper.

More occupied burial shelves appeared, though the cult had rearranged the occupants. Skulls had been stacked into pyramids under black candles. Femurs had been tied into symbols with red cord. One alcove held the missing goat.

We had found most of it, anyway.

Its head rested upright on a silver platter. Its body hung from hooks behind it, split open from throat to groin. The skin had been peeled down in wet folds. Steam rose from the cavity. Under it, three porcelain pitchers collected blood from copper funnels. I swallowed hard and kept my eyes off the steam.

A handwritten card leaned against the platter.

VESSEL PREPARATION, SECOND ATTEMPT.

“Found the goat,” I said.

Felix looked at the hooks. “Second attempt.”

“I’d rather not meet the first.”

Something dripped behind us.

I turned.

A body had been pushed upright into the corner and dressed in a cult robe. He was a man, judging by the beard, with an expensive haircut and expensive teeth. His throat had been opened from ear to ear, and whoever did it had needed several tries. Blood soaked his chest, robe, hands, and the wall behind him. His eyes remained open. His mouth had been packed with black candles.

One candle still burned.

Felix pinched it out.

“First attempt,” he said.

I stopped finding any of it funny.

I looked at the man’s rings. Three of them, each heavy enough to feed a family for a month. One bore a merchant-house crest I recognized from the upper market. He had probably come down here willingly, worn the robe and complained about the wine like the rest of them, right up until somebody decided the ritual required a volunteer or got carried away.

I remembered the two women in the back of Malkor’s cell. One had died reaching for the other. I had covered them with the same blanket because separating them felt worse, then walked seventeen living women out past their bodies.

I had arrived too late for those two.

I checked my daggers.

Felix saw me do it. He nodded once.

We moved on.

The tunnels became cleaner as we descended. Lamps appeared at regular intervals. Fresh rushes covered the floor, probably to keep rich men’s boots out of the mud. Brass plaques marked robing rooms and a PRIVATE MEDITATION CHAMBER that contained two empty brandy bottles and a pair of silk underthings hanging from a wall sconce.

We found another row of robes hanging outside a wide corridor. These were heavier than ours, embroidered around the sleeves with little black mouths, so we swapped ours for two of them. Felix took one look at the cultists drifting past, stepped in close, and fixed my hood with both hands, which took a great deal longer than a hood needed. His mouth was at my ear the whole time.

“Heads down,” he murmured. His hand slid down inside the front of my robe and gave me one slow stroke from root to tip. “Walk like you belong.”

“I always walk like I belong.”

“You walk like you’re hoping everyone looks at you.”

“And yet—”

Felix put one finger against my lips. I nearly sucked it into my mouth in front of half the cult.

“Don’t.”

That was fair, so I shut up.

We joined the cultists heading down the corridor.

The cultists let us walk right in. One man nodded to Felix and nearly tripped over the hem of his robe. A gray-haired woman clutched a prayer card in one hand and mouthed the words as she walked. Another cultist smelled strongly of expensive soap and onions. They spoke in nervous whispers about seating order and whether the leader planned to call on individual members during the invocation.

“I didn’t prepare remarks,” one man said.

“He won’t call on you.”

“He called on the tanner last month.”

“The tanner donated the altar.”

“I donated the candlesticks.”

“One of them leans.”

The corridor opened into an antechamber where an attendant collected personal weapons in exchange for numbered brass tokens.

Felix and I slowed.

The attendant was a narrow young man with ink stains on his fingers. A ledger lay open before him. Behind him, swords, daggers, canes, and one small jeweled crossbow filled a wooden rack. I wanted that little crossbow the second I saw it.

“Blades must remain outside the congregation,” he recited. “Ceremonial implements will be provided as required.”

The cultist ahead of us surrendered a gold-hilted rapier and received token forty-three.

I reached the table first. “We’re late,” I said, making it sound like the attendant had personally arranged the delay.

The attendant glanced at the ledger. “Names?”

“Henslow.”

The man straightened up at once. “Master Henslow?”

I let the silence answer. It was one of Felix’s tricks. People filled silence with whatever frightened them most, and this man already looked terrified of a warehouse owner with opinions about goat blood. Behind me, out of the attendant’s sight, Felix’s hand settled on my ass and squeezed, and the silence got a great deal longer, because I couldn’t have spoken if I’d tried.

“Of course. Forgive me.” The attendant pushed two tokens across the table without asking for our weapons. “Your party has already entered.”

“See that this isn’t repeated,” I said.

The attendant went pale.

We walked away with our daggers and two tokens to weapons we had never surrendered.

“Henslow,” Felix murmured once we were clear. “Six warehouses?”

“He sounded important.”

“You were listening.”

“Don’t look so alarmed.”

Felix smiled. It was the pleased version this time, which was much worse for my concentration than the smirk, and it went straight to my groin. I decided he was impressed by my lying, which he should have been.

The chanting reached us through the doors ahead.

Dozens of voices repeated the same phrase with the uncertain rhythm of people reading unfamiliar words from cards. A drum tried to hold them together. The drummer kept speeding up.

The Tome stirred on my back.

“They’re mangling the fourth declension,” it whispered. “This is painful.”

“Can they still summon something?”

“A sufficiently large group of idiots can accomplish astonishing things. Most governments rely on the principle.”

The doors stood open by the width of a hand.

Felix got there first and looked through.

He stopped smiling.

I leaned beside him.

The chamber beyond had once been a burial vault. The cult had knocked down walls until it became a vast underground hall supported by square stone columns. Crimson banners hung between them. Hundreds of candles burned in iron stands, far more than the seventy-two on Blackthorn’s list, and they filled the room with smoke and heat.

Three circles of cultists surrounded a raised dais. I counted thirty before losing track. They were men and women, mostly middle-aged and well fed, in robes tailored around bodies used to desks and dinner tables. Several held prayer cards. One man in the second circle wore spectacles over his hood.

Their chant rose and fell, and they did both badly.

Blood filled channels carved into the floor. It ran from silver basins around the outer circle toward the dais, dark and thick, carrying pale clots that caught in the grooves. Two attendants knelt beside one blockage and poked it with a spoon.

At the center stood a gaunt man in layered robes. His hood lay back, showing gray skin stretched tight over sharp cheekbones. He held a long ceremonial knife above his head with both hands. He was the only thin man in the room, and I liked him least on sight.

The blade was real.

So was the blood running down the arm of the man strapped to the altar.

He was perhaps fifty, round through the middle, hairy across the chest, and wearing an expensive nightshirt bunched around his waist. One foot was bare. The other wore an embroidered blue slipper with a little golden grape sewn across the toe.

Someone had cut symbols into his stomach. The cuts were shallow and bleeding freely. A gag filled his mouth. His eyes rolled toward the raised knife.

I stared.

Malkor had kidnapped whole villages of young women, and his standards were so horribly, meticulously high that he probably inspected his victims for blemishes.

These people had abducted somebody’s wine merchant in his nightclothes.

Standards had completely collapsed.

Felix touched the hilt of his dagger.

I reached back for the Tome.

Its eye had pushed against the back of my robe for the entire descent, rolling, blinking, glaring, and generally making its opinions known through the stolen crimson wool.

The pressure was gone.

Cold dropped through my stomach. The Tome shouted inside saddlebags, sacks, wardrobes, and once through three blankets and a locked door. Silence took effort. Silence meant it had found something that scared it more than I did.

“Say something,” I whispered.

The chanting deepened.

The gaunt leader began the final prayer.

Above the altar, the candle smoke bent toward a single point in empty air.

“Tome.”

For the first time since it had chosen me, the Tome of Wanton Desecration was completely silent.