The black door opened under Orra's boots and tried to take her with it.
Old crown water rushed down the new gap. Orra jumped clear, but one palace hunter lost his footing and struck the rising door on both knees. Dagna caught the back of his breastplate with her bare spear before the current pulled him through.
"Your king keeps an unfriendly cellar," she said.
Orra helped the hunter stand. "My king does not keep that door."
A human heartbeat knocked through the water below them.
Aylin leaned toward it. She stopped only when Jiang clamped Pell's cuff and hauled against her arm.
He wanted to reach the living body too. He also wanted one person in this palace to remember that a heartbeat under a hostile throne was bait until proven otherwise.
Aylin looked down at him. Her fingers were shaking more than his feathers now.
"I heard you," she said.
Orra lowered a torch through the opening. Stone stairs descended beside the black door, wet but intact. Beneath them waited a hall built around the underside of the royal throne.
"King's Flood Hall," Orra said. "Stay off the center glass."
They went down with the palace hunters first, Ista and Brann behind them, then Aylin carrying Jiang. Rian, Ossin, Dagna, and Tovin guarded the open stair. Tovin kept his injured hand inside his coat. Blood had already reached the cuff.
The hall made the palace above feel like a lid.
Four iron flood wheels stood in the walls. Crown bells hung upside down over channels cut through white saltglass. At the center, a clear floor showed dark water moving beneath the throne's stone base. A speaking grate had been set into the dais, low enough for water to wash its copper mouth.
Kings apparently ruled Eres from directly above the plumbing.
Jiang might have respected the honesty if the floor had not been cold enough to hurt through his feet.
Aylin set Pell's shirt on a dry wheel platform and lowered him onto it. From there, his eyes were almost level with the clear floor.
The water showed Aylin before she approached.
Her reflection wore no burned coat. It stood beneath the glass in a clean winter mantle, hair dry, blue seal whole at its throat. When the living Aylin lifted her injured arm, the reflection lifted the other one.
"That is not mine," Aylin said.
The reflected woman smiled.
Black-green water climbed the seams around her face. It did not leave the wet saltglass. It did not need to. Every step Aylin took toward the center gave the reflection another pane beneath her.
Orra's hook came up between them. "Back from the glass."
"There is someone under it."
"There is something wearing you on top of him."
The speaking grate rang.
"Captain Orra Sen," said King Edric's voice. "Close the Black Door. Kill the returning face before it reaches the Crown water."
Orra turned toward the dais.
Her hunters watched her, waiting for the order they had been trained to follow.
The voice came again, warmer this time. "You have kept my house when my own blood abandoned it. Keep it now."
The youngest hunter reached for the chain that would lower the Black Door.
Orra caught his wrist. "When did you last see the king give an order?"
"I have never seen him, Captain."
"Then you heard a pipe, the same as I did. Guard the bodies you can touch."
From inside the speaking grate, the young hunter's own voice whispered, "I have never seen him."
He pulled his hand away from the chain.
Orra went to the speaking grate and drove her hook through its copper mouth.
The borrowed voice broke into wet coughing.
"Every sealed order we received after the king withdrew came through this grate," she said. "No guard entered the Black Door. No guard saw who spoke."
One of her hunters looked at the hook buried in the royal mouth. "Captain, you answered those orders."
"I did. That is my mistake to survive."
She wrenched the grate loose. Black water poured from the wall and ran toward the center glass.
The false Aylin rose with it.
Her reflected hands pressed against the underside of the floor. The glass bowed upward beneath Aylin's boots.
Jiang called once from the platform.
Aylin moved back. The reflection lost height, but it kept one hand inside the pane where her foot had been.
"It needs her over connected water," Ista said. "Give it less water."
Brann limped to the nearest flood wheel. He tested it with his good hand, then put his shoulder under a spoke. "These wheels do not drain the well. They move water between crown layers."
"Can you uncover the body?" Aylin asked.
"If the lower layer still exists."
"And if it does not?"
"Then we learn why the floor is bending."
Ista began laying furnace sand across the nearest glass seam. Rian flattened it into the joint with the stiff packet he had emptied in First Row. The black-green shine stopped at the first dry line and gathered behind it.
Ossin planted his broken hook stump through a wheel spoke. "Tell us which direction."
Brann listened to the water. "Toward the throne until the second bell. Stop before the third."
Dagna joined him. Tovin tried to follow.
"You hold the stair," Dagna said.
"My useful hand still works."
"Then use it to keep the door from closing on us."
Tovin disliked the order enough to obey it.
They turned the wheel.
The first crown bell filled with water and gave a low note. A pale layer slid beneath the central floor, carrying the false Aylin sideways. Her clean mantle stretched across three panes while her face remained under the living woman's feet.
The second bell rang.
"Stop there," Brann ordered.
Dagna and Ossin held the wheel. Brann dropped beside the exposed edge of the cistern.
The wheel kicked in their hands and tried to turn toward the third bell. Black-green water had entered its hollow hub.
Dagna braced the bare shaft of her spear across two spokes. The wood gave a warning crack. Ossin drove his leather-wrapped hook stump against the floor and took the next kick through both shoulders.
"What happens at the third bell?" Orra asked.
"The Kingwell empties into this hall," Brann said. "Anything under the throne arrives without choosing which side of the glass stops it."
Orra stripped a dry chain from the wall and passed it around the wheel post. Her two hunters pulled the ends apart until the links bit stone. The third crown bell waited above them with its mouth empty.
The wheel kept pushing toward it.
Something moved below the reflection.
Aylin saw the face and took one step.
Jiang saw the bubbles.
They were small and uneven, slipping from beneath the false woman's hair. The reflection had no lungs. Whatever lay deeper in the Kingwell did, and it was fighting for each mouthful.
He left Pell's shirt.
Aylin heard his claws on the wheel platform and turned. "Jiang, the glass is wet."
He flattened himself and slid only as far as the dry sand line. The cold bit his belly again. From that lower angle, torch glare vanished from the glass and the water beneath became clear.
A man's hand drifted under the reflected face.
The fingers were thin. A flat white scar crossed two knuckles, and the smallest finger bent toward the palm as if it had healed badly.
Jiang struck the floor beside it with his beak.
Brann crawled closer, keeping his coat out of the water. He stared at the hand until the second bell's note died.
"I saw that scar on the lower wheel," he said. "The night River-Open failed. He caught the brake barehanded before he threw his lamp into the spill."
Aylin crouched behind Jiang. She did not cross the sand.
The submerged thumb rubbed once against the crooked finger.
Her good hand closed around the blue shard. "He did that when he was trying not to reach for me."
Orra watched the hand beneath the glass. "Is that proof?"
Aylin's voice roughened. "It is a habit I wanted to see. That makes it dangerous."
The reflection turned its head toward her.
It used Edric's voice. "My daughter."
Aylin's knee crossed the dry sand line before she noticed.
Black-green water raced beneath the glass to meet her shadow. The false woman's arm lengthened toward the living hand below.
Jiang threw his body against Aylin's boot.
Her next step stopped.
She backed away with him pressed against her ankle. The reflected arm struck the underside of the floor and cracked the pane where Aylin would have knelt.
"Ista," Aylin said, never looking away from the man. "Tell me where I can stand."
Ista widened the dry line with her remaining sand. "Where I put the ground, not where your father asks you to put it."
They worked around the cistern instead of reaching through the center.
Rian peeled wet copper from the western seam. Orra and her hunters lifted a narrow maintenance grate beside the throne base. Dagna held the flood wheel at the second bell while Ossin jammed his broken shaft through the spokes. Brann guided the lower water into Ista's sanded channel.
Tovin secured the dry chain at the stair with his useful hand and his teeth. Aylin tried to take the free end, but the burn across her coat had soaked through to the lining. Ista slapped her wrist away and gave the chain to Rian.
"The water already wants your shape," Ista said. "Do not gift it a handle."
Aylin hated the sense in that. She stayed beside Jiang while other hands opened the way to the man wearing her father's face.
The false reflection lost one pane, then another.
Under it, the Kingwell gave up the shape of a man.
He floated in a narrow saltglass chamber directly beneath the throne, too thin for the royal coat hanging from his shoulders. Pale cords held his wrists and ankles. Three black-green strands circled his throat without piercing the skin, touching the water whenever he tried to breathe.
His face belonged to the man Aylin had called father in the memories she still distrusted.
She reached through the open maintenance grate.
Jiang caught her sleeve with his cracked beak.
The water already held her reflection. Her fingers would complete the bridge.
Aylin looked at the man's mouth working beneath the cords. Want pulled her arm forward until the burned fabric tightened between Jiang's beak and her wrist.
Then she withdrew her hand.
"Build me a dry way to him," she said.
The man's eyes opened under the throne.
He looked through the glass at Aylin, then at the broken blue shard in her fist.
"Which one came home?" he asked.