Chapter 78 Visiting Hours

The lower cell had a stone floor, a drain, one bench and a barred face-plate at ankle height where the foundation stair came up under the wall.

Damien arrived at that face-plate on his stomach with Verdict flat beside him and the sound of segments dragging closer up the tunnel behind.

"There is a rat under my floor and it is wearing an extremely expensive coat," Isolde said, without getting up from the bench.

’She heard me on the stair and waited, damn, four days in a hole and her timing is still better than mine.’

She looked terrible in the specific way people do when nobody has let them wash, carrying it like an accessory she had chosen.

Her wrists carried the restraint band, the gloves were gone, and every ring had been stripped except one plain circle on her left hand.

"They stripped eleven rings off you and left the empty one sitting there," Damien said, getting his shoulder against the plate.

"They took eleven rings holding poisons and left the one holding nothing, since a house that fears my hands has never once understood them," Isolde answered.

The plate came out of the wall on the fourth pull with a noise like a dropped kettle, and neither of them said anything for two seconds afterward.

"Nah, nobody is coming, the corridor guard walks the quarter hour, and you have roughly nine minutes," she said.

’Nine minutes, counted by a woman with no clock and no sleep, yeah, and I would bet the estate she is accurate to thirty seconds.’

"Then I will use six of them and leave you three to be difficult in," Damien replied, putting his back against the wall beneath the opening.

She came down off the bench and sat on the floor beside the gap, close enough that they could speak below the level of the door.

"Say your terms before you say your plan, since I would rather know the price while I can still refuse it," Isolde said.

"There are no terms and no price at all, so if you try handing me one I plan to be extremely rude about it," Damien answered.

’And she is going to hate that answer, yeah, since a woman who prices everything cannot audit a thing with no invoice attached.’

She went quiet for exactly one breath, then spoke again with her voice changed in shape.

"You misunderstand me. I will not owe you anything dressed as affection, I will not have this rescue turned into a debt with a bow on it," she said.

"Agreed on every word, no argument here, nobody reopening this three months from now," Damien replied.

’That came out too fast, shit, and now she is offended, which is somehow the correct outcome here.’

Isolde stared through the gap, green eyes gone very still, something moving in her jaw that had nothing to do with amusement.

"You agreed to all of that inside one second, without a single condition," she said.

"You asked for a clean arrangement and I gave you one, so tell me which part of that requires negotiation," Damien answered.

"The part where a man refuses payment is the part where he decides what he is owed later, you did not even take the opening," she replied.

"You have built an entire theory of men out of the four worst ones in your family," Damien said.

"Six," Isolde answered, "and one of them is currently arranging my execution, so my sample is small but the data is excellent."

’She is flirting with a stone floor between us while a venom construct comes up the tunnel, yeah, she is doing it to stay in control of the room.’

She leaned closer, took the edge of his coat between two fingers, her whole posture turning professional and predatory at once.

’Here it comes, the fan-and-contract routine, in a cell, four days unwashed, damn, the woman is unbelievable.’

Then she stopped, her face went flat, the cloth came toward her nose instead.

"That is Keeper’s Coil, from the deep vault, and there is enough of it on your sleeve to kill this floor of the tower," she said.

"I came up a tunnel that ran nine times the concentration of the drains, so tell me what that means to somebody who is not an alchemist," Damien answered.

"It means my brother already woke the rite beast, and waking takes four days, so the arena is set for five days from now rather than seven," Isolde replied.

’Five instead of seven, decided by a man with a feeding rod, shit, the schedule was never a schedule, it was a courtesy.’

The system corrected itself before Damien could finish the arithmetic, which it did whenever the world moved faster than his plan.

[Script Quest: The Villainess Clause]

[Deadline: 7 days → 5 days]

’Five days, damn, they moved it while I was standing in an evidentiary session being polite.’

Isolde did not waste the next thirty seconds on outrage, which was the moment Damien decided she was the most useful person he had ever met.

"Celene signed the acquisition record, Evander sealed the signature, the only place either fact exists on paper is her private laboratory," she said.

"Your house law office told me the custodian signature was privileged," Damien answered.

"It is privileged in the family record, so the working copy sits where the work was done, in a room under the eastern glasshouse with no door on the plans," Isolde replied.

She gave him the route in eleven sentences, from the drying yard to the glasshouse to a cold-store stair that appeared only on irrigation drawings.

’Eleven sentences without one pause for thought, yeah, she has been building this route in her head since the day they took her rings.’

"Take the artificer with you and do not take the swordswoman, since Vivienne cannot walk through Marlowe grounds without starting a house war," she said.

"Vivienne is on the eastern rooftops counting hunter rotations and she volunteered before I asked," Damien answered.

Isolde smiled at that, briefly and honestly, with nothing whatsoever in it that belonged to a negotiation.

’That one was real, huh, she is going to be furious with herself about it in roughly four seconds.’

Behind him, in the tunnel below the foundation stair, the dragging sound stopped, the silence that replaced it was substantially worse.

Blank came off his shoulder onto the stone and made the low unhappy noise directly into the gap, which put Isolde’s hand on the bars.

[Eye of Reckoning: Ancestral construct, venom lineage]

[Level: 910]

[Aspect category: containment, hereditary]

’Nine hundred and ten, shit, that is two hundred above me and it is the small one they keep as a gate guard.’

"Whatever is down there reads as an ancestral line and not a specimen, so your family keeps more than one of these," Damien said.

"They keep three, the rite beast being eldest, which leaves you standing between me and the youngest," Isolde replied.

"Then the youngest is going to learn what a Sterling ledger does at three in the morning," Damien answered, getting his feet under himself.

"Never fight it in a stairwell where the venom pools, or let it break the floor above that drain," she said, fast and precise.

"That is the most romantic thing anybody has said to me this year," Damien replied, and took Verdict off the stone.

The gate at the bottom of the tunnel came apart with a sound like a struck bell, and whatever stepped through filled the entire corridor.

Damien went down the stair toward it rather than up, since the one thing this tower could not survive was a fight on Isolde’s floor.