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In the morning Opeth gives him a dose of salix. He wants more sofi but she shakes her head. “No. It will make you slow.”

Opeth and Trysta have a small boat. He doesn’t ask how they got it. He has other questions. More important questions. They’re standing in the ground floor room of the keep, organising supplies. “We need to talk about how we will get inside the Rose Palace. If I am seen in Attar I can be killed on sight.”

Opeth says confidently. “I have arranged something with one of my contacts. I have made many useful connections in the Rose Palace during my time there. There will be a door left open for us on Tack Street, where the servants come and go.”

Damon shakes his head. “You made your contacts when you were with Atticul. We cannot trust them. I know another way.”

Opeth looks surprised. “You have a secret route into the palace?”

Damon nods. “Someone told me about it. A long time ago.”

Opeth looks unsure. Trysta puts a hand on her shoulder. ”You mean Lukas? The route Lukas used?” She says it carefully. Always careful with things Damon has told her in confidence. She is so loyal to Damon it makes his throat ache.

Damon nods.

“You left it open?” says Trysta.

“He promised me he would never use it again.”

“And you trusted him?”

“Yes,” says Damon. “Yes. I did. I still do.”

The secret route begins in the caves on the banks of the Gleam, northwest of the city, where the cliffs rise up steeply to the high land the Rose Palace is built upon.

It’s evening after two days at sea when they reach Attar and pull the boat up on the stones. Damon knows this place is patrolled, but not regularly. Between the caves and the Rose Palace are a warren of dangerous tunnels, prone to flooding and rock falls. But once he and Lukas explored them with the fearlessness of young boys.

Damon stands on the shore in the dark, huddled in his blanket cloak, and looks up at the lights of the Rose Palace, high on cliffs. He is thrumming, blood high like he is about to go into battle. He wishes he had the Amber Blade. He makes do with a plain dagger Opeth gave him.

He guides them into the caves, their way lit with torches made from wood taken from Sanvicta. Deep at the back, behind jagged rocks, Damon shows them a small passage leading down.

“Down?” says Trysta. “We go further down?”

“For a time,” says Damon.

They scramble down through the hole and find themselves in a narrow tunnel that eventually becomes a flight of stone steps, slippery and unused. It’s hard going. Damon feels all the new weaknesses in his body. The permanent damage from the lashing making him weak, making the muscles of his back shaky and loose in ways they never were before. His legs are weaker too, from his long recovery.

But he climbs. Determination, he tells himself, will make him stronger, strong enough. He thinks of Lyr, sweet Lyr, but his feelings for Lyr are a jumble. Pure lust, deep love, but mixed in with it now, suspicion, wariness. What will it be like seeing him again? He cannot imagine. His head pounds for the soft darkness of a dose of sofi.

After a long climb, the steps become another passageway. They follow it as it twists and turns, other passageways meet and merge, but Damon remembers the shortest route through the maze.

Perhaps, he wonders, this is the maze. The legendary maze at the heart of the Rose Palace. He hopes there is not truly a beast at the centre that eats the hearts of the unworthy. He would be consumed for certain if there is.

The first problem happens when Damon turns a corner in a passageway so low he has to hunch his shoulders to pass along it and finds the way blocked by rocks from a fall.

He turns to Trysta and Opeth behind him, faces lit orange and eerie by torches. “Are you lost?” says Opeth, who has been asking Damon if he knew the way for some time.

“I’m not lost, but the path is blocked.” He looks at the rocks. Not impossible to clear, but even making a small path through would take some time. Time he doesn’t want to spare. He scours his brain for an alternative. If they can’t get through the Rose Palace, there is another route. But it's risky. Far more risky.

It’s a risk they have to take. Damon takes the decision. A combat decision. He has taken many. “We will need to go another way. There is another route, but it will bring us through the Sarelik Temple.”

Opeth shakes her head. “The temple? We’ll be seen.”

“We won’t,” says Damon. “And if we are, we will fight.”

Trysta nods. She would take an order from Damon to leap into fire. Opeth looks warily from one of them to the other, then nods her agreement.

They double back and take a different route. This passage is more well-kept. Which worries Damon a little. They are close to the lower levels of the temple here. He leads the way, dagger in his hand. He is not so sure of himself now. This route is unfamiliar and as the passageway grows wider he feels more and more uneasy.