Chapter 25- Lyra Vane(1)

Chapter 25: 25- Lyra Vane(1)

The corridor outside sub-level six was a long, straight brick tube, six feet wide and eight feet high, ankle-deep in scummy water that ran down toward the chemical waste.

Sol and Valera stepped out into the water, pulling the iron door shut behind them so their hiding spot wouldn’t immediately give away how long they’d been camping there.

"Which way?" Valera whispered, her boots barely making a ripple as she moved behind his left shoulder.

Sol looked left, down toward the deep sinkholes, and then right, up the gradual incline toward Purgatory’s main cistern.

To the right, about eighty meters up the curving brick tunnel, the walls were glowing with a faint, eerie violet mist in his thermal sight.

And stretched across the tunnel, about thirty meters ahead of them, was something that made the hair on the back of Sol’s neck stand straight up.

To a man with working human eyes, the dark tunnel would have looked completely empty.

To Sol’s Mid-Stage thermal vision, there were six lines of absolute, freezing purple strung from the mortar of the left wall to the mortar of the right wall, at ankle height, knee height, groin height, chest height, and throat height. They were thinner than a spider’s silk, completely stationary, and so cold they didn’t even disturb the air around them.

If they had sprinted up the tunnel in the dark, they would have been neatly diced into six pieces before they heard a sound.

"Stop," Sol breathed, throwing his left hand back to touch Valera’s chest.

"What is it?"

"Wires," Sol murmured, pointing two fingers at the empty air thirty yards ahead. "Made of frost. Strung right across the brick. We can’t go up. The place is filled up."

"Silver Thread," Valera’s voice dropped so low it was practically a lip-read, her fingers tightening on the shaft of her Night-iron spear. "That’s... that’s Lyra Vane. Cassian’s niece. She was two years ahead of me before my family was killed. She’s a Peak Level 1, Sol. And she’s completely insane."

"Good to know," Sol whispered back. "What’s her flaw?"

"I don’t know what the Somnium did to her," Valera said quickly, backing up a step as they turned toward the lower sinkhole route. "The Vanes keep their family curses a secret. All I know is she uses twin rapiers."

Before they could take three steps down the left-hand tunnel toward the sinkholes, a wet, heavy splash echoed from the dark ahead of them.

Sol whipped his head around.

Rounding the brick corner at the bottom of the incline were two things that looked like skinless greyhounds the size of calves.

In Sol’s thermal sight, the Pale Hounds were horrifying. They had no eyes, just smooth plates of bone covering their skulls and their chests were hollowed-out cages of ribs surrounding pulsing, mutated low-stage lunar cores.

Long, whip-like tails of frozen cartilage dragged behind them in the water.

The moment the two hounds rounded the corner, the bone plates on their skulls tilted directly toward Sol’s burning chest.

They didn’t bark to warn their master. They just dropped their bellies low to the water and lunged up the incline like twin bolts from a crossbow.

"Don’t let them howl!" Valera hissed.

She didn’t wait for Sol. As the lead hound cleared twenty feet in a single bound, jaws wide to lock onto Sol’s arm, Valera stepped forward and drove the point of her newly aquired weapon straight down into the ankle-deep water between them.

She didn’t use a basic freeze. Channeled through the black metal of her new gauntlets and spear, a concentrated spike of Pure Moon frost erupted upward from the sewer water at a forty-five-degree angle.

SHUNK.

A three-foot pillar of jagged, diamond-hard ice impaled the airborne hound straight through its open mouth and out the back of its skull, pinning the twitching beast to the brick ceiling like an insect on a needle.

The second hound didn’t even slow down as its packmate died.

It kicked off the side of the ice pillar, twisting in mid-air to tear out Valera’s throat while her spear was stuck in the ice.

Sol was already there.

He didn’t waste energy heating the whole sword. As he pivoted between Valera and the beast, he packed a tight, fist-sized knot of Mid-Stage fire into the last four inches of his silver blade and swung in a short, compact uppercut.

Sssss-wip.

The white-hot tip sheared effortlessly through the hound’s neck bone and slammed four inches deep into the brick wall behind it, cauterizing the windpipe before a single whine could leave its throat.

The headless body hit the water with a dull splash, already dissolving into gray mist.

Sol wrenched his sword out of the brick. "Move. The sinkhole!"

Ting.

The sound came from thirty yards behind them, up the incline.

As the headless hound’s carcass had splashed into the water, a single, tiny ripple had traveled up the tunnel and brushed against the lowest ankle-wire of Lyra Vane’s frost web.

In the dead silence of the sewer, a woman’s voice drifted down the brick tube from the darkness above the wires.

"Oh," Lyra sighed, her voice trembling with a strange, breathy shiver, like someone who had just stepped into a hot bath after freezing in the snow. "Oh, there it is. Do you have any idea how quiet it is down here? Just mud and dead water and rats that barely twitch when they die... my skin was going completely numb."

Sol and Valera spun around, backing against each other so they covered both ends of the tunnel.

Up at the top of the incline, stepping slowly out of an intersecting pipe behind the web of six wires, was a slender thermal signature.

In Sol’s eyes, she was a terrifyingly bright, hyper-compressed star of silver-blue, a Level 1 at the absolute peak, ninety-nine percent of the way to the silver blood realm. Her core was twice the size of Captain Kael’s. And running from the tips of the two long rapiers she held lightly in her hands were dozens of hairline purple threads, trailing off her blades and anchoring into the brickwork all around her like a spider sitting in the center of a funnel.

"Two hounds dead in three seconds," Lyra murmured, tilting her head as she walked down the incline toward the back of her wire trap.

Even through thermal sight, Sol could see her chest heaving, her heart rate racing at an unnatural, manic clip as her fingers plucked lightly at one of the frost strings. "One impaled with ice. One decapitated and burnt. You didn’t even let them squeal for me."

She stopped right behind the chest-high wire, smiling into the dark with her slit-pupil eyes locked onto the glow of Sol’s face.

"Hello, little cousin Valera," Lyra purred, raising her right rapier and dragging her tongue lightly across the flat of the guard. "Voss told me everything before I took his other eye out. He said you found a dog who eats rocks. Let me hear him bark."