The stair turns and turns like a throat that doesn't want to swallow.
A faint glow waits far under us—soft, not holy, not cruel. It looks like morning remembered by stone.
Kirella's hand is in mine. We move together. One step, one breath, one whisper of leather against rock. Above us, the bathhouse is quiet again, but quiet means nothing here. Quiet can hide a knife.
The air grows warmer. The glow grows brighter. The stair opens into a narrow hall cut from black rock, the walls rubbed smooth by many hands. Carved lines loop across the stone like vines. I touch one and feel a hum, a low, kind note, the opposite of the glass-bell sting upstairs.
"The old ones made this," Kirella says softly.
"Or people like us," I say. "Tired of locks."
We walk until the hall ends in a round door with three shallow niches. Symbols are carved above each niche: a coin, a knife, and an open hand. Between them, words are scratched in a script I half-know from market stalls and prayer banners. The letters are crooked, but the meaning is straight.
HAPPINESS IS NOT BOUGHT.HAPPINESS IS NOT BLOOD.HAPPINESS IS A PROMISE KEPT.
Kirella reads it too. "Three offerings," he murmurs. "Or three choices."
I slide my fingertips over the coin symbol. The stone is warm from the glow beneath. "They'll ask for what we carry," I say. "And what we don't."
Boots whisper against stone behind us. Far away still, but not far enough. The sound is patient.
Kirella puts himself between me and the dark. "We don't have time to think like priests," he says. "We choose."
I take the pouch from my corset seam and count by feel: three gold, a bite of silver, a scatter of copper. Ten quiet years if I stretch them thin and learn to be small. Ten quiet years is a dream, not a door.
I press one gold into the coin niche. The metal clicks and holds. The door hums, a breath deeper.
"Your turn," I say.
He studies the knife symbol. His jaw tightens. He draws his short blade and weighs it like a man weighs a habit. Then he turns the blade and sets it into the knife niche hilt-first. Not the killing end. The holding end.
The hum deepens again.
"Last one," he says.
The hand symbol waits. My palm still remembers the heat of his. I put my hand against the stone. It is cool. It does not take blood. It takes only weight and skin and a choice.
"Speak," a voice says, not a voice but a shape of sound that feels like an old woman smiling.
I swallow. "What do I say?"
"Truth," the not-voice answers from everywhere and nowhere. "A promise that is not for you alone."
I look at Kirella. He does not look away.
I speak.
"I will not spend my freedom alone," I say. "If I escape, I will pull others through the door behind me—monsters, humans, anyone the Light taught you to laugh at while they died."
The stone warms under my hand. The hum turns to a low chord that trembles in my bones.
Kirella sets his palm beside mine. "I won't leave her," he says. "Not for my safety. Not for coin. Not for orders. Not for fear."
The chord brightens. The three niches glow—gold, steel, skin—then the light slides into the seams around the round door. A slow click. A soft shift.
The door rolls aside.
Warm air rushes out, scented with citrus and dust and something like bread. The room beyond is small and round, lined with little shelves of glass. Some jars hold stones that shine like captured dawn. Some hold paper, folded like birds. Some hold only air with tiny lights inside it, like fireflies that forgot how to fly.
At the center stands a pedestal with a bowl of frosted glass. Inside the bowl, a lantern the size of my two hands rests on its side, as if it fell asleep halfway through a story. Its metal is blackened, but the glass panels glow from within, dim at first and then steady, like a heart that decides to keep beating.
"The Lantern House," I breathe.
Kirella doesn't move. He looks at the shelves like a man in a church. His eyes are careful. "Traps?" he asks.
"Tests," I say.
"Same thing," he says gently.
We step in together.
The hum of the room grows brighter when our feet touch the floor. The lantern in the bowl brightens too, then dims again, as if sniffing the air. I stand over it and see tiny writing scratched into the handle: FOR TWO HANDS, FOR TWO LIVES.
I reach. The glass warms my skin without burning it. I lift the lantern, and it wakes a little more. Kirella slides his hand under mine, steadying the base.
The glow swells.
It is not temple glass. It is not the cruel light that wants applause. It is the kind of light kitchens make before breakfast and windows make after storms. It makes my chest hurt in a good way.
"Is it the Happiness Light?" Kirella asks.
"It's a piece of it," I say. "Enough to open one door. Maybe two. Enough to make liars uncomfortable."
He almost smiles. "Then we—"
A soft, polite clap comes from the hall behind us.
We turn.
The man with the key leans in the round doorway, thumbs tucked into his belt. He looks pleased, like a patron who arrived just when the music got good.
"I told you," he says. "I have all year."
None of the soldiers are with him. He came alone, or he left them to circle like dogs and waited while we did the hard part.
Kirella puts his shoulder toward me, not enough to hide me, enough to mark his place.
"No need to run," the man says. He steps over the threshold and breathes in. "Ah. I see why they call it happiness. It smells like memory."
"Leave," Kirella says. His voice is level, but the blade in the knife niche called to his muscles and they answered. I can feel the tension in his back, the way you feel a string just before it snaps.
"Of course," the man says, as if he were agreeing to tea. "After I take what belongs upstairs."
He glances at my hand on the lantern. "Two hands, two lives," he reads. "How poetic."
He shows me the ribbon. The key swings from his finger like a charm. Up close it is not the same as Kirella's corridor key. It is older, grimmer, cut with tiny teeth that glint like little smiles.
"You don't belong here," I tell him.
He nods, amused. "No one belongs anywhere. We make do. We make markets."
The lantern brightens in my grip. He flinches a fraction, then laughs at himself for flinching.
"Tell you what," he says. "Give me the gold you tucked away. Give me the guard. Keep the toy. It's a fair price."
He says guard like it tastes sour. He says toy like it is a truth.
"No," I say.
Kirella doesn't say anything at all. He watches the man's feet, not his hands, because feet tell truth and hands tell stories.
The man sighs, almost fond. "Neither," he mimics. "You do love that word."
He takes one step inside the room.
The shelves answer.
Light moves across the glass like fish in a tide pool. Papers flutter. A jar hums and the air inside it swirls like a small storm. The room does not want him. He smiles at that, too.
"Old doors," he says, "old habits."
He pulls a small mirror from his coat and angles it so the lantern's glow bounces off the glass and back toward us. The reflected light hits my cheek. It is not like temple glass, but even kindness hurts when it doubles. My head swims.
Kirella feels me sway and shifts closer, solid as a wall.
"Drop it," the man says lightly. "Or your vampire sleeps."
He thinks that's clever. He does not know I can sleep and still fight.
I blink the swim away and think fast. The room has rules. It opened for truth. It brightened for two. It hummed for mercy. It is not a temple. It is a kitchen with a lock and a library with a pulse.
"Kirella," I whisper. "Back wall. The sun tile."
He doesn't ask why. He never asks why when time is small. He edges left, step by step, keeping the lantern in his periphery, keeping me in his hands. The man watches the lantern, not the wall. Good. He thinks like a buyer.
When Kirella's shoulder brushes the sun tile, he presses his palm to it.
The round door behind the man rolls.
Not the one we came through. A second one—hidden between shelves. It opens soundlessly, and behind it, I see water. Not black canal water. Clear water, lit from below. A channel cut for secrets.
The man turns his head, just a little, curious.
I lift the lantern high. The glow spills across the symbols above the shelves—coins, knives, hands, and something else I missed before: a small boat.
"Two hands, two lives," I say. "Two ways out."
I take Kirella's hand and run for the new door.
The man moves faster. He blocks, lazy-quick, like a cat bored with a mouse. His key swings up.
Kirella throws the corridor key—the one he dropped and someone stole and someone else returned to make a point. It hits the man's wrist with a sharp crack. The mirror wobbles. The reflected light jumps to the shelf of paper birds.
They ignite—not with fire, but with light. The birds lift and burst into sparks that dart around the man's face like angry bees. He curses and swats.
We slide past him through the new door into the low channel. A narrow boat waits there, tied with a knotted rope. The water shines like the inside of a shell. The tunnel bends away from the bathhouse and toward the city's outer veins.
"Go," Kirella says.
I jump in and set the lantern in the little stand at the prow. The glow pours forward and the water wakes, ripples racing down the tunnel like excited dogs. Kirella cuts the rope with one clean draw and pushes off.
The boat moves.
Behind us, the man with the key steps into the channel mouth and laughs softly, truly pleased now.
"Run in circles," he calls. "Or draw me a straight line. Either way, I will find the end."
He lifts his hand. The old key glints.
A click echoes down the tunnel, old and patient.
The water surges—not forward, but back. A gate ahead begins to lower, stone sliding down into the channel like a heavy lid.
"Faster," I say.
"I'm trying," Kirella says. He digs the pole into the channel floor. Muscles bunch in his arms. The boat leaps like a fish.
The gate keeps falling.
The lantern brightens, as if it understands. The glow pushes at the water, a warm wind under the surface. The boat slides forward another hand's width, then another.
The gap shrinks.
"Hold on," Kirella says.
We shoot under the gate with a hair of space between the lantern's handle and the lowering stone. The metal scrapes. Sparks. The smell of hot iron.
We clear it.
The gate slams behind us with a heavy, final sound.
For three heartbeats there is only the soft rush of water and the slow echo of our breath.
Then, ahead, another glow wakes—daylight, thin and real, dripping down from a grate high above. A fork in the channel splits left and right beneath it.
"Which way?" Kirella asks.
The lantern's light leans left, as if the bowl itself remembers a path.
We turn left.
Behind us, in the dark we just escaped, a second click whispers to life. The old key turns a second old lock.
Water begins to rise.