The Submerged District

"We have to burn the notes and bury the chest in quicklime," Dymnos said, his hands shaking as he reached for my notebook. "Evoia, listen to me. Kyranthos is the Night Blade of House Vane. He survived a fifty-foot drop into the North Chute; an Erethes enforcer of his blood doesn't die from cold water and broken pine. Right now, he is having his ear canals cauterized and his ribs set by the house surgeons. By third bell, he will have thirty wardens scouring every cellar within half a mile of that canal."

"Let him scour," I said, pulling the notebook out of his reach and slipping it back into my leather coat. "He doesn't know where this cellar is. He only knows I ran toward the Under-Arches."

"He doesn't need to know where the cellar is! He knows the frequency of your tuning forks! He knows how you work!" Dymnos slammed both palms onto the workbench, rattling the jars of acoustic resin. "If you try to hold this over House Vane, Pelagia will not negotiate with you. She will not pay you hush money. She will scrape this entire district down to the subsoil and feed our bones to the harbor crabs!"

"I'm not asking for hush money," I said.

"Then what in the name of the seven founding architects do you think you're doing?"

"I'm buying our lives." I looked straight into Dymnos's bloodshot eyes. "Look at this city, Dymnos. The Long Night lasts eighteen hours out of every twenty-four now. Ten years ago, it was twelve. Five years from now, the sun won't touch the lower tiers at all. The Erethes aren't just ruling us; they are feeding on the resonance of that slaughter to widen the dark. If we bury this shard, Kyranthos will find us eventually, take the stone back, and drop us into the Sump in chains. Our only leverage is the master anchor."

"Leverage?" Dymnos scoffed, though the anger in his voice was cracking under the weight of his own exhaustion. "A mortal translator with a cracked rib and a bag of brass tools has no leverage against a founding bloodline."

"I have leverage if I can reach the master anchor and threaten to detonate its harmonic seal," I said. "A single fracture in the master anchor will send a psychic shockwave through every stone foundation in Vrythos. Every Erethes palace on the Upper Terrace will ring like an iron anvil under a sledgehammer. Their heightened senses will tear their minds apart."

Dymnos stared at me as if I had sprouted horns.

"You're completely out of your mind," he whispered.

"Probably," I said. "Which means Kyranthos won't expect me to go south into the water. He'll expect me to run east toward the mortal border gates."

Dymnos let out a long, ragged sigh that ended in a rattling cough. He reached into his pocket, pulled out an old tin snuffbox filled with dried mint leaves, and chewed on a pinch to clear the turnip stench from his mouth. He looked at the sand-covered lead chest, then at the map of the lower city pinned to the wall behind his lathe.

"You won't survive ten minutes in the Kalyx Sump with standard translator gear," he said flatly.

"Then give me what's in the iron locker under your bed."

Dymnos froze, the mint leaf caught between his yellowed teeth. "How do you know about that?"

"You've had three padlocks on that locker since the day I became your apprentice seven years ago," I said with a thin smile. "And every time the humidity rises before a storm, I can hear the brass leafing inside it ringing in sympathy with the deep tides."

The old man cursed under his breath, muttering several inventive profanities involving my mother's lineage and my complete lack of survival instincts. But he turned away from the workbench, walked into the cramped alcove behind his wool curtain, and emerged a minute later carrying a heavy wooden crate bound with tarnished copper wire.

He dropped the crate onto the flagstones with a dull thud.

With a small iron key from his neck chain, he tripped the three tumblers and threw back the lid.

Inside lay a piece of equipment I had only ever seen in old guild schematics: a master translator's diving mantle.

It was crafted from thick, oil-cured seal leather, reinforced across the chest, spine, and shoulders with overlapping scales of acoustically dead bronze. At the collar sat a heavy, hemispherical cowl made of spun brass, fitted with internal lead baffles and a twin-channel listening horn that could be opened or shut using thumb-valves at the neck.

"My old master wore this when we surveyed the lower sluices during the Great Sinking," Dymnos said softly, his rough fingers brushing the cold bronze scales. "The lead baffles protect the auditory cortex from deep-water psychic back-blast. If an anchor stone starts screaming underwater, this mantle keeps your brains from boiling out of your nose."

"Does the seal hold?" I asked, kneeling to inspect the leather seams.

"I oiled it every spring," he muttered. "Because I was a fool who thought that one day I might be brave enough to go back down there and finish what we started."

He reached into the crate and pulled out a heavy belt fitted with six lead weights and a specialized pneumatic chisel driven by a compressed-air bladder.

"The master anchor won't be sitting on a pedestal waiting for your little silver tuning fork," Dymnos warned, thrusting the pneumatic chisel into my hands. "It will be embedded in the primary keel-stone of the Old Sump Gate, submerged under forty feet of black brine. The Erethes have automated night-wardens patrolling the intake channels—blind, mechanical clockwork horrors tuned to strike at any heartbeat that isn't masked by dead bronze."

"Then it's a good thing I'm wearing dead bronze," I said.

I picked up the heavy brass mantle. The cold metal bit into my palms, the lead plates inside giving the garment a brutal, grounding weight.

"There is a maintenance breach behind the third pump station in the Leatherworks," Dymnos said, pointing toward the southern corner of his map. "It drops straight into the old drainage tunnel that feeds the Kalyx Sump. The tide is turning. In an hour, the water in the upper sluice will be at its lowest point. If you go, you go now."

I looked at the old man. Despite the turnip salve smeared across his ears and the cynical scowl carved into his brow, his hands were steady as he helped me hoist the heavy bronze scales over my bruised shoulders.

The weight pressed down on my cracked ribs, a sharp, grounding ache that cleared the remaining fog from my thoughts. I buckled the thick leather straps across my chest, cinched the waist belt tight, and tested the thumb-valves on the brass cowl.

The mechanism clicked into place with a dry, satisfying snap.

"If you die down there, Evoia," Dymnos growled, handing me my tool satchel and a pair of dark lanterns sealed with pitch, "I'm telling the Guild Council you stole my best copper kettle."

"If I die down there," I replied, fastening the chin-strap of the cowl, "you won't have to worry about the Guild Council. You'll have Kyranthos at your door by sunrise."

"A comforting thought. Get out of my cellar."

"Keep three inches of obsidian sand over that seam," I said, adjusting the weight of the bronze cowl across my shoulders. "If the box starts ringing before the third bell, don't try to dampen it again. Take your kettle and run."

Dymnos reached for his jar of turnip salve with a weary snort. "I'm keeping the kettle, Evoia. Just bring me back a piece of the city that doesn't scream."