Great. I’d let it corner me. Amateur mistake for a smuggler and a Captain of the Imperial Guard. I much preferred fighting a dozen men in the open streets to this one beast in an enclosed cave. Always check your exits. Always leave a way out. But if some other person fell into danger, my brain became muddled as the melon pulp at the bottom of the wine barrel. I’d told myself so many times I wasn’t a hero.

I lifted my staff to the side, opening my arms, inviting the construct to attack.

Maybe I was a hero. And heroes were idiots.

Its jaws opened, saliva dripping onto the floor. It lunged.

I brought up my staff – too slowly. I felt as though I were watching myself from the side, everything in that moment clarified, distilled to a fine point of fear.

They didn’t usually sing about the heroes’ grisly deaths in the folk songs. Usually the hero swooned at the end of a battle, bleeding prettily from one wound, a single tear escaping. There wasn’t going to be enough of me left for that.

The beast froze.

I came back to myself in bits and pieces. My painfully tight grip on the staff, my clenched jaw, my heartbeat kicking wildly in my chest.

The construct was frozen and I wasn’t dead. Mephi? Was this some new power he’d granted me?

A soft scrape sounded from behind the construct and I nearly jumped out of my skin. Lin strode around the bulk of the beast, a few shards of bone in her hand, the lamp held high in the other.

“Would you care to tell me what you’re doing down here?”

Despite her stature, there was something of Shiyen in the way she held her head, the way her gaze seemed to pierce through mine. I’d never met the man, though I’d seen his portraits. He hadn’t smiled for any of them.

“My job,” I answered simply.

“I didn’t ask to be followed,” she said. She glanced to the side, where Mephi was watching from the hatch. “And you brought him along too. That’s two mouths I need to keep silent.”

“So you’re hiding things.”

“Of course I am,” she spat back at me. Her eyes flashed nearly as brightly as the construct’s had. “This place isn’t mine. It’s my father’s, and he never told me about it. I don’t know all the secrets he kept. You would propose instead that I open up all his locked doors for everyone to inspect? Imagine some poor servant coming down here and falling victim to this construct.”