Page 46 of The Thirteenth Count

The sound echoed loudly throughout the room. Fern froze, glancing at the door to the hallway, expecting guards to burst in.

There was nothing but silence.

The panel swung inward, revealing a gap of darkness.

Fern took a breath that tasted like stale air and old wood. She grabbed a small heavy candle from the mantel—she didn’t dare light it yet—and stepped into the wall.

The passage was narrow and Fern had to turn her shoulders to fit. Rough stone scraped against her cloak. It was black as pitch once she pulled the panel shut behind her. The darkness pressed against her like a blindfold.

The smell was stronger here. Damp earth. Mold. And something else, metallic and sharp. Copper.

She struck her flint and tinder a few times until the candle finally lit, shielding the flame with her hand.

The light revealed a tunnel that stretched away into the gloom, barely wide enough for one person. Cobwebs hung from the low ceiling like tattered lace, thick with years of neglect.

Walk soft, she reminded herself.

The floor was wood here, old planks that groaned softly under her weight if she wasn’t careful. She learned quickly to step on the edges, where the support was strongest. Narrow slits in the stone looked out into other rooms. Guest chambers that were empty and covered in white sheets. Another showed a slice of the main hallway, a guard walking past, his armor clinking.

It was exhilarating. She was invisible, little more than a ghost in the walls.

She followed the slope. Down and down and down.

The air grew colder. The metallic smell grew stronger, turning acrid in the back of her throat.

The hum she had heard in her room was louder here. It wasn’t just a vibration anymore; it was a physical sound. A rhythmic, grinding thud.

Thrum-thump. Thrum-thump.

It sounded like a heartbeat. A massive, mechanical heart beating in the heavy silence.

She reached a junction and eyed both directions.

If you go right… well. Just don’t.

Willem’s voice was cheerful and deliberate. And underneath it, the guard’s low rasp from the corridor: as long as he doesn’t look in the cellar.

Fern turned right.

As she traversed the Keep’s inner workings, the wood floor gave way to packed earth and stone. The walls were rougher, hewn directly from the bedrock of the mountain. Moisture slicked the stone, glistening in her candlelight like sweat.

She had to stoop now, the ceiling dropping.

The sound was deafening. A rushing noise joined the thudding—the sound of liquid moving under high pressure.

Iron conduits clung to the stone like veins, slick with moisture. Whatever was moving through them roared with punishing strength: pipes, far larger than any she’d ever seen.

Sections of them were reinforced glass, thick as tree trunks. Some were dark and cold. But others…

Fern stopped, lifting her candle.

A pipe ran along the ceiling, pulsing with a faint inner light. Inside, a thick, crimson fluid rushed through the glass, moving with a speed that made her dizzy.

Definitely not water.

“Blood,” she whispered.

She gagged, clamping a hand over her mouth. The rhythm she’d felt in her floorboards, the heartbeat of the Keep—it wasn’t the mountain settling. It was this. They were pumping it through the walls like water.