Sneaking inside would have required planning. Which was fortunate, because the problem had already solved itself.

  The rear of the warehouse was no longer a rear in any meaningful architectural sense. Whatever pressure failure had occurred inside had vented outward in a crescent of collapsed stone, and as a result, the building now possessed a second entrance.

  Anabeth leaned forward in her saddle, peering at it. “That doesn’t look like a conventional detonation. If an aethercache had failed outright, we’d be looking at radial collapse and vitrified stone. This is directional. Hmm... More likely the outer containment framework was breached. When that happens, the cache vents pressurized aether in a single release rather than rupturing catastrophically. The inner cores should be insulated from sympathetic failure. Modern cache arrays are keyed so that one exploding doesn’t destabilize the rest.”

  I grimaced behind my helm. Storing that many aethercaches in one place already struck me as a profoundly foolish idea. Concentrated power, concentrated risk. A lesson history had attempted to teach humanity on numerous occasions.

  She pointed toward the exposed interior, where glowing sigils died along a fractured support beam. “Those are automatic venting runes. They’re meant to detect internal pressure spikes and shunt excess aether before the containment fails completely. The isolation matrices should have flagged the instability before it reached that threshold. Either something masked the pressure buildup, or the trigger condition wasn’t recognized as a fault.” She sounded like someone who had not only read the manual, but memorized it, annotated it, and then quietly corrected it in the margins.

  But as Anabeth continued, the shape of the reasoning became clearer. The caches were layered and designed under the assumption that failure was inevitable but survivable. The safeguards were extensive, yet, without human supervision, I reckoned they still had been far too arrogant.

  A city this proud would send inspectors soon. Arriving unannounced through a freshly blasted wall would make us look like accomplices who’d returned to admire their work. The promised boon was enticing, but not so enticing it’d risk me arguing jurisdiction with city authorities.

  It seemed Anabeth had concluded the same. She whispered in my ear, “You sense it too, right, Sir? Its aetheric signature. The creature is still inside.”

  I didn’t sense anything, but I nodded anyway.

  She continued, “If it escapes, it’ll likely leave the same way it came in. Creatures don’t favor novelty when panic sets in.”

  At that exact moment, something inside exceeded its tolerances. The structure yielded just long enough for a body already in motion to exit, carrying debris with it like incidental clutter.

  It fled in a dark mass of limbs that cleared the broken wall and hit the street already at full speed.

  I immediately knew two things.

  First: I was not catching that on foot.

  Second: I was not beating it in a contest of strength.

  But I had one thing going for me: my horse.

  Still, the quest had stated...

  I could just stay here and be sensible about it. Have Anabeth dismount, set her wards, bleed off the excess aether before it pooled into something worse, and the task would be done. Minimizing civilian harm was optional—

  Are you even hearing yourself, Henry? You are a Knight of Saint Merin. What kind of knight pauses to weigh his own reward against the direction a monster is currently taking through a populated street? What kind of man lets the words ‘optional objective’ do the thinking for him? You ought to be ashamed you even considered it.

  “Sir—” Anabeth sounded like she was about to object.

  Too late.

  I drove my heels in before the sentence could finish forming. Silvermane surged forward at once, hooves striking sparks from the stone as she leapt into motion.

  The creature was already half a street ahead, and I still couldn’t see the shape of it properly. It didn’t run so much as pour itself forward, limbs reconfiguring with each impact, scattering pedestrians in its wake.

  I leaned low over the saddle and tightened my knees until Silvermane’s ribs flexed beneath the pressure. No kicking; that would only spook her.

  “Hold fast,” I commanded.

  I slid one hand down the reins and the other back, hooking Anabeth’s wrist against the rear strap of the saddle before she could argue. Her breath hitched as she realized what I was doing.

  Silvermane felt it too.

  I shifted my weight forward and off the stirrups, letting my mass settle into her shoulders rather than her spine. Then I loosened the reins just enough to lie.

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  It was an old cavalry trick, drilled into me by men who believed horses survived battles in spite of knights, not because of them. You convinced the animal there was more room ahead than there actually was.

  I breathed out slowly and pressed my heels in a second time. Silvermane lengthened her stride.

  Not faster yet. Longer.

  Her gait stretched.

  “Ah... I didn’t expect—” Behind me, Anabeth made a small, startled sound and then went very still.

  I finally closed the distance enough for the creature to take shape. It was a ferret-like creature moving like a spill that refused to stop spreading. A leymire, then. I had only ever seen them illustrated, always politely diagrammed and safely dead. In motion, it was worse. Its mass was translucent and dense in equal measure, folds of semi-coherent aether dragging wetly along the stone. Wherever it struck, the street flashed and lamps guttered.

  “Ah! Why is this thing here?” Anabeth exclaimed. “It looks so exquisitely ugly.”

  Silvermane thundered after it. At this speed, the city stopped being a place and became an obstacle course made of right angles and bad decisions. Pedestrians scattered too late, slipping on their own terror.

  The leymire darted between two cargo carts with a fluidity that made mockery of joints. Silvermane could not follow that path.

  I rose in the saddle instead, bellowing, “WOMAN OF SCRIBBLE! KEEP YOUR HAND CLOSE TO MY BACK STRAP!”

  Silvermane neighed, gathered herself without breaking stride, and we took the carts. The wheels shattered. The yokes collapsed.

  The landing was ugly. Her hooves struck sparks, slid, and found purchase again. I absorbed the jolt through my legs and let the reins slip a fraction, giving her her head before the stumble could become a fall.

  The leymire surged ahead, skimming along the street’s centerline. It swerved left, then right, then left again, trying to cut me off. I matched it as best I could—however, Silvermane, with the finesse of a creature of six hundred kilograms, corrected our course by simply occupying the space it wanted.

  A fruit stand exploded in a spray of citrus and righteous indignation.

  “HEY!” a vendor shouted as oranges bounced down the street like panicked suns. “THAT COST ME FIVE HUNDRED KOHNS!”

  Silvermane answered by kicking the stand’s remaining leg clean off its hinges as she thundered past. The fruit cart collapsed with a sound like surrender.

  “I APOLOGIZE ON BEHALF OF THE ORDER,” I bellowed over my shoulder, which felt like a reasonable thing to say while actively committing infrastructure crimes.

  The leymire zigzagged again, narrowly missing a crate the size of a child. I did not.

  Silvermane clipped it with her shoulder.

  The crate shattered into a thousand shards.

  Somewhere behind us, a man wailed, “THAT WAS MY WEDDING INVENTORY!”

  “CONGRATULATIONS!” I shouted back, which was not the correct response.

  The creature poured itself beneath a laundry line, sending shirts, trousers, and one extremely personal undergarment snapping loose into the air. I ducked instinctively.

  Silvermane did not.

  We burst through in a storm of fabric. Some personal undergarment slapped across my visor and stayed there.

  I did not have time to investigate so I simply shook it away.

  A stack of vases and jars later, the orderly canyon of stone and glass broke open into a long, straight artery where the buildings simply... stopped. Yet, the leymire veered instinctively toward the glow and geometry of the city, gnawing at the lamplight as it passed, leaving brief blackouts in its wake. It wanted density. It wanted power. It wanted more to eat.

  If it stayed on this street, it would find all three.

  I wrenched the reins left. She protested with a snort, but trusted me anyway, angling toward the open road.

  The leymire didn’t follow.

  I must devise another plan.

  “Lady Anabeth!” I bellowed. “THE MARSH DOES NOT OBEY LAWS. Demonstrate your mastery and draw the creature into the wetlands. NOW!”

  “I would love to, Sir,” Anabeth gasped, pitching her voice with the rhythm of the gallop, “but this motion is making it extraordinarily difficult to form anything more precise than—”

  “I SAID, NOW!”

  “As you command, Sir,” she whispered.

  Light bloomed behind me; the same color as the heatless aether I’d seen her while she fought the magnetic creature.

  Then a whip shot out from her palm.