“I’m not some illiterate he can push around. I won’t be treated this way. I worked too damn hard, for years. Years! Years of study and that fucking Neanderthal comes in and waves his arms.” Ghastek skewed his face into a grimace. He was probably aiming to impersonate Hugh, but he mostly succeeded in looking extremely constipated. “Ooo, I’m Hugh d’Ambray, I’m starting a war!”

Laughing right now was a really bad idea. I had to conserve the energy.

“A war I’ve been trying years to avoid. Years!”

He kept saying that.

“Does he think it’s easy to negotiate with violent lunatics, who can’t understand elementary concepts?”

Good to know where we stood with him.

“I won’t tolerate it. Landon Nez will hear about this.”

Landon Nez was likely in charge of the Masters of the Dead. My father liked to divide his delegated authority. Hugh ran the Iron Dogs, the military branch. Someone had to run the People, the research branch. It was a position with a lot of turnover. Landon Nez must be the latest.

“Troglodyte. Dimwit. Degenerate!” Curses spilled out of Ghastek. “When I get out of here, I’ll throw every vampire at my disposal at him until they drain him dry. Then I’ll cut him to pieces and set his disemboweled body on fire!”

“You may have to get in line.”

He finally remembered I was there. “What?”

“I’ll give you a piece of Hugh to play with when I’m done.”

He didn’t appear to have heard me. “Nobody does that to me! I’ll rip his heart out. Does he know who I am?”

“Okay,” I told him. “Get it all out of your system.”

Ghastek dissolved into a torrent of obscenities.

I turned away. We had to get out of this mess and I had to check the place for the possible exit routes.

The grate above us was a pale color that usually meant the metal contained silver. Above the grate a shaft, about twenty feet across, rose a hundred feet straight up. Blue feylanterns thrust from the walls at regular intervals, illuminating the bricks. Too sheer to climb.

The grate itself consisted of inch-wide bars set in a crisscrossed pattern. Usually grates like this had crossbars that were welded or locked in by swaging, but this one showed no seams at all. It had to have been custom made specifically for this shaft.

The ends of the bars disappeared into the wall. I kicked to propel myself up, stretched, and caught the grate with my fingers. So far so good. I brought my legs up and kicked the grate with all my strength. Not just solid. Immovable. Well, at least the holes between the bars weren’t tiny.

I shrugged off my jacket, stuck one sleeve through the grate, and tied it to the other sleeve. Good enough.