The worst part of the sewers wasn’t just the smell.

  It was the smell and the taste.

  I’d made the fatal mistake of breathing in too deeply, and something acrid and wet-and-rotting crept into my mouth, clinging to the back of my tongue like regret. I gagged, eyes watering, and immediately changed my mind. Yup.

  The smell was absolutely the worst.

  My every step squelching on damp stone, the air was humid enough to make my hair cling to my face in limp blue strands. At least it wasn’t mud, but that was a bar under the floor. Somewhere in the distance, I could hear the slow, thick rush of the sewer river, if you could call that vile sludge a river, accompanied by the soft, muffled chatter of other slaves trudging through their miserable shifts.

  I confidently strode toward my favorite guard in the entire sewer system.

  Hey, I only knew two, and I’d met him once. He was automatically my favorite; low bar.

  My heels, my nice Queen Charlie heels, splashed through a shallow puddle of god-knows-what as I rounded the last corner, my speech already perfectly queued up. “Good morning, so—” And then I stopped dead; the guard wasn’t my favorite. The guard was… different.

  A dwarven woman, and not a slave.

  She stood there, rigid as the bars she was meant to guard, with a longsword that looked about as old and tired as she did. My mood soured instantly; time for some Irwen persona.

  “Where’s Akash?” I demanded, my voice slicing through the dripping silence.

  She just blinked at me some more.

  I narrowed my eyes, irritation sparking like static along my skin. Then I took one step toward her, loud on purpose, and let a delicate frost bloom across the stone beneath my heel with a sharp, crystalline crack.

  “Where. Is. Akash?”

  Her hands started trembling. “Who is Akash?” she stammered, but before I could give her the kind of glare that melts faces, she panicked and blurted, “I’m sorry! I’m new! Is… is he a former guard?”

  The anger drained out of me so fast I almost laughed at myself. All my perfectly sharpened fury, gone. I sighed and let my shoulders sag, suddenly too tired for this. “You’re new?” I said flatly.

  “Yes, esteemed mage.” She dipped into a bow so low I half-expected her to faceplant in the muck. “I apologize for… not knowing who Akash is. I was sent here… today.”

  “I healed him…” I muttered, more to myself than her.

  Her face brightened as if she’d just been handed an extra ration of bread. “Oh! You must mean Neel! He got his freedom thanks to you. That’s why… I…” Her breath hitched, and for a split second, her expression softened with something that might have been gratitude or awe.

  Was Akash the other guard then? Or did I just completely invent that name? Whatever. I rolled my eyes, shaking the whole mess out of my head. Irritation was already creeping back in, like an itch I couldn’t scratch, and I wasn’t in the mood to fight it. “Let me guess,” I said, voice low and dry, “you need healing. You’re hoping to get it for free from me.”

  Her shoulders folded inward, and she averted her gaze as if my words had slapped her. “I’m sorry, esteemed healer! It was… I hoped—”

  Of course, she did.

  I felt my jaw tighten as my anger redirected itself, not at her but at the damn grandmasters who’d built this festering nightmare of a city. They had magic. They had power. And yet the slaves didn’t even get basic healthcare.

  The healers I’d seen out in Rimelion were never scarce; they just refused to allow enough of them to heal. They must have a license or some other nonsense.

  “Do I need to heal everyone in this damn city now?” I tried to keep my voice calm, but it came out sharp anyway.

  Her voice cracked as she fell to her knees, filthy water soaking into her tattered clothes. “I’m sorry… Please… I will die if—if my heart—”

  I held up a hand, cutting her off before she could start sobbing. “I’ll heal you, of course,” I said, “under a few conditions.”

  I raised my index finger, holding it in front of her face. “You tell nobody I healed you.”

  The dwarven woman’s head bobbed as if she were attached to invisible strings. “Yes, esteemed healer!”

  Middle finger. Two. “And I need access to that room.” I jabbed my hand toward the barred door.

  “I’m sorry,” she stammered, twisting her hands nervously around the hilt of her rusty sword. “After the healing incident, they don’t give us the key anymore! The grandmaster said it was an unnecessary risk and… and awarded Neel his freedom for bringing that flaw to him.”

  A flaw. Great.

  I squinted at the bars as if glaring at them long enough might make them reveal their secrets. They were thick, blackened iron, sweat?slick with the damp, with faint etchings carved into the frame, runes maybe?

  “So they put a non?slave here?” I asked.

  “No, esteemed healer,” she said quickly, voice dropping lower, more ashamed. “I volunteered. It was either that or…” She trailed off, biting her lip hard enough I thought she’d draw blood.

  “Okay,” I inhaled big through my nose. Big mistake. The air here was like licking the underside of an abandoned fish market.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Yuck, nope, shallow breaths, Charlie. Shallow.

  “That works for me. Maybe…”

  I reached up and let my little princess tiara finally appear on my head, adjusting it until it sat perfectly, like slipping into a persona. If titles worked as when I was going around the imperial capital as a tester, they’d sure as hell work here.

  “I’m a Queen,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  The word hit the air with more weight than I’d expected. It felt… inevitable. Like I wasn’t just saying it, I was it.

  “Queen?!” Her dwarven voice cracked an octave, deep and high at the same time. “E?e?esteemed Queen, my name is Dhriti!”

  I nodded slowly, savoring her awe. “Listen, Dhriti. Revealing myself to you is a huge risk. You could run to your grandmasters right now and spill everything, right?”

  She blinked at me. Just… blank. As if the idea of scheming or betrayal hadn’t even been installed in her brain yet.

  Nevermind, political mode: OFF.

  “The point,” I said, softening my tone, “is I’m working with some of the grandmasters. Trying to change things here. For the better.” A bitter laugh crawled up my throat, but I shoved it down. “At least, I hope so. But to do that? I need access in there.” I gestured at the barred door again, feeling the cold air wafting from beyond.

  Her shoulders folded in as if she were trying to disappear. “Esteemed Queen, I don’t have the key!”

  I pulled the key from my pocket, letting the metal catch the faint sewer?torchlight. Then I lowered it until it hovered under her nose; she’d bowed so low she was practically kissing the wet stone.

  “The… key?” she breathed.

  “That’s right.” I smiled, all teeth, all bluff. “I told you, I work with some of the grandmasters. Not all. But some. I have the key. The real question is, can you keep a secret? Because they…” I tilted my head. “They cut loose ends, don’t they?”

  Her eyes widened, pupils trembling.

  “I’m sorry!” she yelped, dropping fully to her knees. Water splashed up, dark stains blooming across her threadbare trousers.

  “Let me finish; you’re fine!” I crouched down, reaching to lift her back up by the shoulder. Her skin was clammy, trembling beneath my hand. “What I mean is: you don’t know who’s safe to trust. But I’ll heal you. In exchange, I want you to stay here on guard for the next few weeks.”

  She blinked up at me. “That’s it?”

  Haha. Meet Charlie, a genius.

  “That’s it,” I said with a smirk. “I go in there, you don’t ask questions, everyone stays happy. Nobody gets hurt. And trust me, the grandmaster I work with doesn’t tolerate people stepping out of line.”

  Not… a total lie. I was intending to make Green?Whatever?Master work for me, eventually. So… I just told her before I did that? Like exploiting a quest by doing it in a different order?

  She nodded quickly. “I was told keyholders may come and to get out of their way. I can do that. I can just… do my job.”

  Wait.

  I blinked. I could’ve just walked in pretending to be a keyholder and not turned this into a recruitment speech for my rebellion?

  Genius or idiot. Really hard to tell sometimes.

  With barely any effort, I traced the familiar rune into the stale air; the healing rune formed in front of the now-crying Dhriti. The magic hummed faintly before sinking into her with a subtle shimmer that vanished as quickly as it came.

  I couldn’t tell if it actually did anything—no notification—but apparently it did, because she immediately broke into louder sobs.

  Great.

  So I hit her with another healing spell, the rune sparking and dissolving like frost melting on glass.

  “Thank you,” she choked out between shaky breaths, voice wobbling. “Thank you…”

  I hesitated, the words sticking somewhere between my teeth and my throat. Comforting crying people wasn’t exactly my high-score activity. So I did the next best thing, kept my Irwen persona and kept healing her. Which, judging by her lack of complaints, was apparently the correct answer.

  “Okay,” I finally said, my patience wearing thin. “I healed you like ten times. Better?”

  “Yes,” she just said.

  “I’ll go check the room, okay?”

  She nodded quickly, then added, “And yes… but be careful. I was told keyholders come with a lot of people and leave with less than they went in.”

  “Oh, that’s reassuring.” I rose, brushing imaginary dust off my beautiful bodice, because as Luminaria showed me, appearances mattered even in a sewer, and gave her a dry little chuckle. “Great pep talk, thanks.”

  Unlocking the mechanism was easy; the lever worked, and the door opened easily. Everything was easy. Too easy. I glanced back at the dwarf woman, but she was busy grinning.

  With a heavy sigh, I entered the room.

  The air changed immediately as if walking into a tomb that still remembered its dead.

  The chamber sprawled out at the very base of the obelisk, its walls carved from that same rosy marble. Still hate that. As above, it was inscribed with runes, each one glowing with a steady, blood?red light that pulsed in rhythm. The glow cast long, dancing shadows across the chamber, washing everything in a faint, menacing hue.

  The moment I stepped inside the chamber, the door closed behind me and—

  My eyes landed on a spectral figure floating in the middle of the chamber.

  It was vaguely humanoid. Well, it had two arms, two legs, but everything in between was wrong. Its body was a semi?translucent mash of shifting, viscous goo that refused to hold a proper shape, like it was trying to remember what being solid felt like. No head, no face, nothing to ground it as anything remotely alive.

  “Amazing.”

  Smaller versions of the same… thing, only hand?sized, scuttled around the room like grotesque insects made of living ectoplasm. They darted between the marble runes and the obelisk’s base, their gelatinous little forms leaving faint, wet smears of light as they moved.

  So, the big one was [Warden of Oaths]; the tiny nightmares must’ve been [Oathsworn Sentinels]. Great. Just great. Not only were actual people being worked to the bone here, but these things were also keeping watch like it was their hobby.

  “Hey, Warden! Can I touch the stone?” I yelled, because why not?

  It turned toward me, though without a head or a face. The movement was just a grotesque twist of its formless upper body, and somehow it still managed to look at me. Then it spoke. No mouth, no voice box, just the words vibrating through the air. Weirdly, that wasn’t even the weirdest part of my week.

  “We need an offering.”

  “You have to be kidding me!” I snapped. And then it clicked. They didn’t have fewer people left because guards kept dying. I glanced at the scuttling little critters, stomach sinking.

  They have fewer people… because one needed to offer a few souls to touch the stone. The binding stone was powered by souls, and those little monstrosities were the engine, right? “Damn, and here I thought I’ll have fun fighting. I wanna wear that ridiculous hat as is Lucy wearing and fight baddies.”

  The thing didn’t care about my revelation. It didn’t even react. It just repeated, mechanical as an answering machine: “We need an offering.”

  “Don’t tell me…” I bit my lip. “I need to work here. I need to use the binding stone. Everything hinges on that, no binding stone, no taking over the city. No kaboom. Don’t tell me… I need to sacrifice people?”

  “We need an offering.”

  “Yeah, lol, no.” I turned on my heel, pushed the door open, and stepped back out into the far less horrifying sewers.