The rain fell heavy in the early hours of Orynth, washing the dirt from the stone streets.

  On the second floor of an old tavern, the group was using a filthy room as a shelter. The smell of mold mixed with Brog's heavy breathing. Nasir was sitting on the rotting mattress. In his hands, a piece of charcoal marked the floorboards. He drew in silence, his blue eyes focused on the tactical planning.

  Malik was standing near the window, which was stuffed with old rags. His fingers wouldn't stop touching the hilt of the new knife. A palpable nervousness emanated from the boy; his left leg bounced in a constant tic.

  "We haven't survived so many winters in the sewers by accepting tainted gold from the high nobility," Miren said. The woman's icy voice pierced the gloom. She rubbed an oil-soaked, dirty rag along a blade. "Men like Valerius pay fortunes to tie up loose ends. Then, they discard the shovels in the trash. Swallowing these coins is just digging our own graves."

  Brog kept his eyes on the chipped floor, his jaw tight as he chewed a piece of root. He knew Miren was right. His gaze, however, swept the half-light and stopped on Malik.

  The young man didn't take his eyes off the leather of his own doublet. Until a few days ago, he had worn damp rags and run as blind bait for rotting-hooved monsters underground. Now he was armed and clean of the blood of worms.

  "If we refuse and go back to the dark, what's left?" Malik asked. His voice trembled at first, but quickly gained a strange, sharp firmness. He clenched his fists. "We go back to the beggars. We clean the canals for two holed copper coins from the minor guilds. We become a giant insect's dinner. Valerius paid us to kill a hidden man. Just one man. It's our chance to clean the mud off our boots for good."

  The boy laid a hand on the plated chest of his doublet. Brog stared at Malik for a long time in the dim light. The dwarf didn't reprimand him. Not long ago, the veteran would have crushed the arrogance of a brat wanting to jump into the fire. But this time, he saw something different. He saw the desperate thirst of an older brother wanting to pull his little one out of the trench of rot once and for all.

  Brog stood up. The veteran walked to the broken window and spat hard outside into the rain.

  "If we're going to cut the neck of this rich, polished guillotine before it cuts us, the leadership changes," the dwarf declared with his back to them, drying his thin beard. "Going in there blind against a deserter mage is suicide for us. Fighting arcane prey isn't killing insects. That man's room will be a minefield impossible for normal eyes to see."

  Nasir stopped scraping the charcoal on the floor. His eyes rose to the old mercenaries.

  "The deserter is from the Guild. He's a free-flow mage," Nasir explained in a calm, methodical tone, pointing to the dirty drawing of the room on the floorboards. "He'll fill the hallway with static alarms. Magical tripwires invisible to sweepers, sensitive to a breach at the door or window. His fear will be our ladder."

  The youngest wiped his charcoal-stained fingers on the thigh of his pants.

  "I hear the friction of his magic. I can see exactly how an armored door burns in invisibility. Malik, with his thick gloves and no conductive metal, is going to disarm the joints exactly where I point, bypassing the alarm sensor. Brog and Miren only enter the room once the lock opens silently, closing the distance before he conjures something nasty in a panic. Don't use potions before breaching; the glass gives away the smell of reagents in vigils."

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  For the first time in his years roaming the deadly sewers of the capital, Brog just nodded. He and Miren didn't argue. They were placing their own brutal lives in the hands of a boy with a sealed chest and his bait brother. A blind, absolute, and unprecedented trust. The group was forged.

  ***

  The Silver Threshold was silent in the deep of the night.

  On the third floor of the Bronzed Elk, there were no rats or pools of acid. The air smelled of sweet oils and expensive incense. The walls of the discreet middle-class inn on the upper floors didn't creak under their boots.

  The four shadows stopped in the long, empty corridor.

  Nasir wasn't wearing Brog's chainmail cape. He wore only clean, dark fabric, moving pressed against the polished corners so that no sound came from his cloth shoes. The skinny kid nodded slightly to Malik. Both swallowed their own breaths in front of the sturdy oak door number seven.

  The map boy raised his fragile arm. Nasir traced, in the millimeters between his finger and the dry varnished wood, a perfect arc near the left doorframe. The agreed-upon signal. A static hidden trap contouring the lock.

  Malik positioned himself sideways. The matte new blade slid perfectly cold through the millimeter crack between the thick frame and the heavy wooden structure of the oak. The threads of Aether that Nasir saw vibrating before them were thick to his senses. The boy was in a cold sweat and pointed to another spot, lowering his right hand, in a precise command guiding his magic-blind brother away from the trap.

  The blade touched pure metal with the rough tip of the steel. Malik felt the mechanical resistance before the magic. He applied meticulous pressure, feeling the rigid drum of the room's internal key unlock behind the invisible splinters at his brother's warning.

  *Click.*

  The snap of the iron was inaudible, lost in the somber rubbing of the echo-less floorboards on the hatch and the perfumed emptiness of the dark elite wall. No spark of magical activation occurred. The alert didn't flare in the room. The heavy door receded twelve inches into a deep, opaque corridor.

  Brog wasn't wearing his armor shoulder pads that night. The hulking size of the sweeper dwarf slid through the massive crack first with the macabre and impossible grace of a bear focused on a swift infiltration. Miren flanked the entrance right after bending her own back, the polished surgical twin knives exuding no mana, icy before the gloves ready to cut deep in the back.

  When Nasir and Malik looked beyond the wood, the action was over in the lugubrious darkness at the edge of the Persian rug.

  The deserter had his back turned near the large, rumpled silk bed, hastily folding rolls of parchment and storing official Academy silver pieces in a velvet bag under the dim light of the embers in a fireplace. He hadn't even felt the air shift.

  Miren emerged from the shadows like invisible suppressed Death itself. The blade slipped perennially cold and fatally clean, cutting the rich, hot, deep lethargic vessels of the man's right jugular in a single swift surgical movement, containing a river before he could muster vocal sounds for his frightened conjuration.

  Brog's gigantic hand grabbed the falling body in a terrified deaf spasm, asphyxiating the thick red gurgles, and held them before the deserter's stained vest could slip or knock things over on the soft, clean slats tightly packed on the solid varnished floorboards. The deserter widened his eyes in terror against the tremendous force, withering before four foul, pure, dirty, blind specters of the sewers—assassins from the docks with unbreakable instincts, bypassing inviolable magic walls right before his open grave.

  The warm blood trickled down into Brog's iron boots. Malik, leaning against the doorframe, held his breath. Killing monsters in the sewers for a few coins hadn't prepared him for the grim, emotionless efficiency of a human assassination. The group had just crossed a point of no return. The weight of their first real noble target fell upon them, cementing the pack's bond with blood on the clean, perfumed tapestry of the Mid-Levels.