Page 41 of The Immortal’s Mark

I find Ren an hour later. “I found something. We need to see it.”

He doesn’t ask what. He just stands.

“The guards—” one of his attendants starts saying.

“Stay here,” Ren says. To the guards, not to me.

We go alone.

The merchant district smells like fish and smoke and human desperation.

I lead. He follows.

This should feel wrong. Emperor trailing through backstreets behind an assassin, stepping around puddles of something I don’t want to identify, passing vendors who don’t give us a second look because I made sure we both dressed for anonymity.

It doesn’t feel wrong.

It feels like something I’m not going to think about.

“The emperor is following me through an alley,” I say. “If anyone notices, my professional reputation will never recover.”

“Your reputation as an assassin?”

“I have standards.”

The warehouse looms at the end of a narrow street. Abandoned, officially. The kind of building that exists on paper only to be forgotten about, which makes it perfect for things that don’t want to be found.

We go in through a side door. The lock is expensive—too expensive for an abandoned building—and I deal with it in under a minute. Ren watches. I don’t explain.

Inside.

The smell hits first. Damp wood. Rot. And underneath, something else—old incense, the wrong kind, metallic and bitter. The kind they burn for gods you don’t want answering.

My skin prickles.

Ritual markings on the walls. Symbols in ash and something darker, something that smells like copper and bad decisions. Void worship. The deep kind, the old kind, the kind I haven’t seen in centuries.

“Not mercenaries,” Ren says quietly.

“No.” I trace one of the symbols with my eyes, not touching. “True believers.”

I shouldn’t recognize these markings. They predate most recorded history, belong to a faith that burned itself out before I was born. But I do recognize them. Something in my bones knows what they mean.

Old magic. Older than me.

I push the thought away.

“The Hungering King,” I say. “You’ve heard the stories.”

“Some.” His voice is careful. Watching me.

“Ancient. Powerful. Story goes he was a philosopher-king who lost his wife and didn’t take it well.”

“Didn’t take it well.”

“Made a deal with something older than gods.” I move through the space, cataloging. Evidence of recent use—disturbed dust, fresh ash in the braziers. Someone was here within the last few days. “Traded his humanity for the power to get her back. Failed. Kept the power. Lost everything else.”

“And now?”