expected. Given the details of the apartment itself, the door should have opened up into a storeroom, and from there, into a basement, a subbasement, and tunnels. Those tunnels had been unmade shortly after Jewel’s arrival at the Terafin manse—but the apartment had been ransacked as well, drawers overturned, the contents of the chest spread across the room, books torn from their shelves. Her last sight of Rath’s home had been entirely unlike this one: everything was in its place, even the clothing habitually strewn—with some care—over the backs of chairs and chests.
There were stairs, but they were not stairs that Jewel had ever seen in this apartment; they were of carved stone, and although they were narrow where the door met the landing, they widened considerably as they disappeared into the darkness below. “Not the back halls,” she said.
The Chosen entered before her, and Carver pulled up the rear. The grandeur that had been entirely lacking in the apartment itself was in evidence in the stairs. They were rough, the way hewn stone can be, but it was a deliberate roughness, a texture. At the left and right edges of the steps, there were small engravings; they looked like letters, to Jewel’s eye—although they didn’t look like Weston, Torra, or even the Old Weston that she had sometimes seen in the undercity.
“How far down do they go?” Carver asked softly. He whispered the magelight to its full brightness.
“They end just ahead,” Torvan replied. His voice was oddly muted; the stone deadened it. The Chosen could now fan out across the stairs; they drew swords as they continued their descent.
Jewel turned to Carver. He carried the magelight in one hand, and in the other—a dagger. She reached out and offered him her upturned palm, and he placed the light into it. She had no daggers to draw. Carver then descended, walking beneath the light. Jewel started to follow him.
Her legs locked. Her knees. The light dimmed as both hands became involuntary fists.
“Captain,” she said, as Torvan cleared the last step.
He turned.
“That’s enough. I know where this leads now.”
Carver gestured.
“Yes,” she said softly. “It leads to the undercity—but not the one we knew.” She was cold, felt cold; the hair on the back of her neck must have been standing on end.
“You think—you think this is what the entrances used to look like?”
“I think they weren’t always underground,” she replied. “But yes. I think this is what they must have looked like. These stairs. That arch—and beyond it, cloisters. The streets might even be the same length, the same general shape—but we won’t be walking over rubble.”
Carver started down the stairs again and she caught his arm with her left hand. “No,” she said, no hand free for signing. “We’ve lost enough to that city.”
“Jay, the apartment’s not real. The undercity here—it’s probably like your library.”
But she shook her head. “Not yet, Carver. If we come here—at all—we bring the cats, Celleriant, Meralonne.”
“Why?”
She said nothing for a long moment.
And Carver, because he was Carver, acquiesced. The Chosen returned to her in silence. As a group, they retreated up the stairs, to the perfect replica of Rath’s apartment.
Did I build this? she thought, as she glanced through the now open door of his room.
Avandar was standing in the frame of the apartment’s entrance. Jewel. He glanced down the hall, his brows furrowing. “This is not the usual workmanship one expects of House Terafin.”
She laughed. It was too wild; she brought it under control as she saw his expression shift. “No,” she told him. “This is, however, the architecture commonly seen in the thirty-fifth holding.”
“It was not, if I am not mistaken, part of these rooms.”
She nodded.
“Why is it here, Jewel?” His voice was softer, but it was a deceptive softness; his eyes were bright.
“I . . . don’t know. Does it matter?”
“Yes, Terafin, it does. You are at the heart of your domain, in this place.” The ceilings were so low here he appeared to have gained a foot’s worth of height. “If you are not careful, if you are not deliberate, no ground where you stand, sleep, or dream will be solid.” He frowned. “You said the thirty-fifth holding?”
She nodded.
“Your previous domicile was in the twenty-fifth holding, if I recall your history correctly.”
“It was.”
“And this?”
“It was my first home without my family.” She opened the door to her bedroom. “This was my room. I shared it, in the end, with Teller, Finch, and Duster. Before Duster came, Lefty would sleep here