The Stygian Flue was a roar of black water, freezing spray, and crushing stone.
Two hundred fathoms beneath the vitrified glass plains, the subterranean river ripped through a natural limestone chasm sixty paces wide. The ceiling hung so low in places that the jagged teeth of stalactites brushed the tops of their helmets, their tips dripping with ancient, mineral-heavy moisture that smelled of wet slate, sulfurous silt, and ancient ice.
Riding the broad, golden back of the elder Sun Wyrm, Lyra held tight to the thick, braided leather guide-harness they had strapped around the beast's massive neck.
Her seal-skin leathers were soaked through, freezing against her ribs, but her core burned with the furnace heat of Gideon’s body pressed tight against her spine. His massive arms were locked securely around her waist, his heavy thighs bracing her hips against the rolling, muscular surges of the three-hundred-foot sea-god swimming against the violent, subterranean current.
Behind them, clinging to the flanks of the three young wyrms, were Talia, Korina Drake, Varis, and sixteen elite Void-dancers of the Ember guard.
The three younglings swam with effortless, liquid grace, their golden scales casting an ethereal, amber twilight across the rushing black torrent, illuminating the sheer, slick walls of the tunnel as they surged deeper into the foundations of Heliopolis.
"Three miles in!" Talia shouted over the deafening roar of the underground rapids, wiping freezing water from her single eye. "The current is accelerating! We're hitting the intake gradients!"
Ahead, the cavern walls shifted from natural limestone into massive, precision-cut ashlar blocks of black basalt, reinforced with colossal hoops of cold-iron that ringed the tunnel every twenty paces.
The engineering of the Solar Empire was swallowing the river.
"The intake sluices are coming up," Korina warned, leaning forward from her perch on the second wyrmling, her boarding machetes bound tight against her thighs. "The city draws half a million gallons a minute to cool the refinery heat-sinks beneath the Sun-Pyramid. The water passes through four sets of crushing grates—massive iron portcullises that chop up river debris before it reaches the pumps."
"Can the wyrms breach them?" Gideon rumbled into Lyra's ear, his deep bass vibrating against her skull.
"Not with brute force," Lyra replied, her hazel and violet eyes locking onto the darkness ahead. "The grates are counter-weighted with lead. An impact at this speed would shatter the wyrms' snout-horns."
She leaned forward, her cheek pressing against the warm, golden scales of the elder wyrm's crest.
Her Weave-sense surged outward, penetrating the black water.
A hundred paces ahead, the river entered a massive circular conduit of forged bronze.
Barring the passage were four colossal grates of jagged, three-inch-thick cold-iron bars, rotating in counter-opposed cycles like the jaws of a colossal grain-mill, shredding logs and boulders into harmless pulp.
And operating the release winches on an iron observation catwalk suspended thirty feet above the water were twenty imperial engineers in high-collared leather suits, their faces obscured behind brass respirators.
"Hold the beast!" Lyra commanded through the link.
The elder wyrm flared its massive paddle-fins, throwing its body into a violent reverse-stroke that threw up a wall of white foam, arresting their momentum fifty paces from the rotating iron teeth.
"How do we get through?" Talia yelled over the churn. "If we stall here, the undertow will drag the younglings into the blades!"
Lyra didn't reach for her skinning knife.
She slipped from Gideon’s arms, standing upright upon the slippery, golden scales of the wyrm's back, balancing with the feral, effortless poise of a wolf on an icy ridge.
She raised both bare hands toward the ceiling.
Her star-iron circlet blazed with blinding, celestial violet starlight, casting long, dancing shadows across the churning water. The seven silver tears embedded in the metal began to hum, their pitch rising until the air in the cavern thrummed like a struck bell.
To her inner sight, the four rotating grates were not mechanical gears.
They were an extension of the imperial network—anchored by lines of stolen solar fire that powered the pneumatic waterwheels above.
"You took the river from the earth," Lyra whispered, her voice multiplying into that subterranean, dual-harmonic authority that made the iron hoops of the tunnel ring. "You locked it in a cage of brass and iron."
She spread her fingers wide.
"GIVE IT BACK."
She drove her spiritual claws into the pneumatic conduits above.
She didn't sever the lines.
She reversed the waterwheels.
With a deafening, metallic screech that sounded like forty iron galleons colliding at full sail, the massive brass gears on the high catwalk seized.
Pneumatic steam lines ruptured in violent, shrieking geysers of white vapor. The twenty imperial engineers were blasted off the catwalk, screaming as they tumbled thirty feet into the freezing torrent below.
The four rotating iron grates slammed to a halt.
Then, with an agonizing groan of bending metal, the counter-weights snapped their chains.
The four massive portcullises were torn from their stone tracks by the sheer, unbridled pressure of the backed-up river, blown downstream like dry leaves before an autumn flood.
The passage to the central cisterns was blown wide open.
"HOLD ON!" Gideon roared, his massive arms wrapping around Lyra’s waist from behind, hauling her back down against his broad chest in the saddle-brace.
The elder wyrm let out a triumphant, trumpeting war-cry that shook the bedrock of the entire city above.
The four sea-gods surged forward, carried on the crest of a forty-foot tidal wave of roaring meltwater, shooting through the breached bronze conduits at eighty knots.
They tore through the dark pipes for two miles, ascending through vertical siphon shafts with dizzying, breathless speed, until the bronze walls suddenly fell away.
With an explosion of white spray and echoing thunder, the tidal wave burst into a subterranean chamber so vast it had its own weather.
The Grand Cistern of the Sun-Pyramid.
It was a circular, vaulted cavern a half-mile wide, supported by eighty colossal pillars of white marble that rose out of twenty fathoms of crystal-clear water.
Floating upon the surface of the flooded reservoir were dozens of gilded maintenance barges, their crews staring in paralyzed, slack-jawed horror as four living sea-dragons breached the surface of their sacred drinking pool, sending thirty-foot waves crashing against the marble walkways.
And rising from the center of the subterranean lake, perched atop a massive island of black volcanic basalt, was the Heart of the Pyramid: a colossal, spherical chamber of solid, glowing ruby-glass forty paces in diameter, pulsing with the blinding, volatile fury of fifty thousand barrels of refined sun-marrow.
Connecting the ruby sphere to the city above were eight massive, golden conduits that rose through the ceiling like the trunk of a burning tree.
And standing on the central basalt quay, flanked by sixty elite Solar Praetorians clad in armor of pure, mirrored gold, was the Emperor’s personal champion:
Lord Malic, the Sun-Blade.
Malic was slender, impossibly tall, clad in flowing silks of pure white samite beneath a cuirass of beaten gold. In his hands, he held twin scimitars forged from pure, translucent solar crystal that burned with an eerie, silent white flame.
He looked at the four wyrms.
He looked at the soaked northern wolves sliding from the beasts' backs onto the marble docks.
A slow, languid smile touched Malic’s beautiful, aristocratic face.
"So," Malic purred, his melodic voice carrying effortlessly across the water. "The little sewer rats finally crawled out of the pipes."
Gideon stepped off the wyrm’s back, his heavy boots striking the marble with a hollow, echoing thud.
The warlord shook the freezing water from his dark hair, his star-iron claymores sliding out of their back-scabbards with twin, terrifying roars of singing steel that promised absolute, pitiless ruin.
His amber eyes burned with feral, unyielding murder.
"Talia, Korina... take the conduits," Gideon rumbled, not looking back. "Varis, secure the barges."
He took two heavy, measured paces toward the white-clad champion, his muscles bunching like iron cables beneath his soaked leathers.
"The girl with the pretty swords," Gideon growled, his lips curling over his fangs, "is mine."
Seven chapters left.
The heart of the empire was within their blade-reach.