She didn’t pass out, in the normal sense. The panoply belt was Chosen arcana like the haken, a tool that used deiat, albeit a far more specialized one. It drew power from the user to protect them, heedless of how much energy the user actually had to offer. This drain, rather than the actual impact, was what made her lose consciousness, and so when she awoke it was not to a pain in her skull but rather with the trembling, sore-muscle sensation of deiat exhaustion. After suffering that kind of abuse, her connection to her power would take hours before it could be used again.

Okay. Maya shook her head, trying to clear the lingering muzziness, and looked around. So where am I?

A single torch burned in a wall bracket, illuminating a circular brick room she guessed had once been a cistern. The open ends of pipes protruded from the walls at irregular intervals, some capped off, others broken and jagged. Maya herself was propped against one wall, her hands tied to a pipe above her head with rough hemp rope. Her ankles were bound as well, and a few brief tugs assured her that whoever had done the binding knew their business.

Her haken was nowhere in sight, though she could sense that it was still nearby. They hadn’t stripped her of her panoply belt, but without a connection to deiat it was just so much silvery fabric.

All in all, it doesn’t look great, does it?

On the other hand, she wasn’t dead. Not being dead always opens up possibilities.

She took a moment to berate herself for letting her excitement get the better of her, but only a moment. Maya tried standing up a little straighter, putting some slack into the rope at her wrists, and was craning her head back to see if this could give her any advantage when a door in the side of the cistern opened.

She knew the man who came in by sight, though they’d never met. Tall, pale-skinned, with a bald dome of a skull. He wore a leather coat with a high fur lining, too hot by far for this time of year, and there was no mistaking that bulbous nose and those bushy eyebrows.

“Hollis Plaguetouch,” she said, settling back down.

“They still call”—he paused for a fraction of a second, then tilted his head and continued in a slightly different intonation—“call me that, do they?”

“I am seizing you on the authority of the Twilight Order,” Maya said. “You stand accused of practicing dhaka. You will have an opportunity to present evidence in your defense.”

Hollis laughed, loud and sudden. Maya set her jaw, waiting stoically until he’d finished.