It wasn’t a mistake. Mistakes were errors of ignorance or neglect, ineptitude or poor planning. Mistakes were miscalculations or errors in judgment. This was something else altogether, something worse.

More like a fully flowered act of madness, Kaden thought as he felt his way down the long corridor, knife held before him as though it could keep back the limitless dark.

He had counted off ten thousand heartbeats, forcing himself to silence and stillness in the center of his cell, before moving. As Tan had promised, the key turned in the lock, though the steel protested with a scream that raised the hairs on the back of his neck. By the vague light in his eyes, he could make out the outlines of the wall, the shallow standing pools. He moved slowly, carefully, but the quieter he forced himself to be, the more the halls around him seemed to stir. Air lisped uneasily through the passages, drafts rasping over the uneven stone. The plinking of water seemed to come from everywhere at once. Behind it, or below it, a sound that might have been the wash of waves and tides thrummed through the rock, so low it was impossible to be sure if the sound was real or only in his mind.

The doors lining the hall were heavy wood banded with iron, some locked, some hanging open, all of them identical—wood and iron, wood and iron.

Take him below, Matol had snarled. Lock him up with the Csestriim.

Which meant Kiel was locked up somewhere along the endless corridor. Kiel, who knew a way out. Perhaps it was folly, stupidity, to insist on trying to see Triste freed, but of all Annur’s uncounted millions, she was the only one in the Dead Heart, the only one he could help. As Tan claimed, she was dangerous—that much was clear—but she had helped Kaden, and he would be ill-fit to govern an empire if his first act was to abandon her to the unending torture of the Ishien. If Kiel was here, if he knew another way out, maybe he could free Triste, too.

After a hundred paces or so, Kaden came to a different sort of door. The original framing had been chiseled away, the banded wood replaced with a great slab of steel hung on hinges as thick as Kaden’s wrists. Five wide steel bars set into metal brackets held the thing shut—enough weight to pen an enraged bull. Dripping salt water had left long, weeping stains on the metal, gnawing the surface to pits and long flakes of rust, and though the door itself looked ready to crumble, when Kaden pushed a tentative hand against it, he might have pressed on the stone wall itself. There was no telling how thick the metal was, but clearly the rust had done nothing to compromise its strength.