Men crowded him at once, their voices crashing together.

"Master Radeon, if this humble one may ask… how did you come in here so quietly that none of us even saw you?"

"Senior, would you… ah, care to tell us how you hid your aura back there?"

"Senior, if there are any small tricks for cultivation, we beg you to spare us a word or two."

Hands clapped his shoulders. Eyes shone with respect that was almost hunger. Radeon felt it roll over him. Admiration. Curiosity. The sharp edge of men who wanted what he had and would bleed for it.

"I apologize to you all. The information to get inside is a secret. However, my master, Jekyll did provide me guidance on the ways of the world. He may be strict but he is a great teacher nonetheless."

The men did not press him. Their questions broke apart and fell away as they drifted back to their posts.

Radeon let the space close around him. He should have gone straight to his master. Duty said so. Habit too.

But the alchemy room lay somewhere ahead, and that was his true target. He had to see it. Measure it. Taste its traps before he reported anything.

They were far beneath the surface now, in a warren of caverns carved into something more than a tunnel.

The place felt like a gloomy castle buried alive. Corridors of chiseled granite stretched in rigid lines.

The air was different here. Thick. Stale. It carried a faint bloody tang that clung to the back of his throat.

His mind ran through every kind of step he heard for the past week.

The slow trudging ones of those who cured the ill. The steady measured march of men on duty. The dragging shuffle of those too tired from refining elixirs.

Jekyll had drilled one thing into Giovanni before they ever moved here. Every man has a role. Every role has a route.

So Radeon chose the ones who did not greet. Men who walked with their eyes on the floor and their thoughts already somewhere else.

He had learned their hours too. The time he dragged himself out of bed was the same hour these ghosts in uniform trudged through the bloodied corridors.

He met them in ones and twos and brushed past with the dull nod of routine.

No one asked where he was going. No one cared. By the time the eleventh man shuffled by, Radeon eased his pace and let the distance stretch.

Ahead, the tunnel widened, then split into three. Left. Right. Center. The path to his master waited on the right. Radeon went left.

Jekyll had sent Giovanni this way a lot, when he was still trusted with buckets and rags instead of blades.

Carry this. Clean that. Stand here and wait. The alchemy chambers always lay at the end of this passage, wrapped in heat and bitter smoke.

This time he walked as if on the same old errand. If anyone stopped him, he would say he was looking for his master, as always.

And if that was not enough, he would bare a sliver of his refining. Just a taste. Enough to season the lie and make it go down smooth.

With that plan fixed in his mind he took the left way. Soon he counted them. Nine small doors. Two large.

All of them set into the cave wall. All of them creaky and rust rimmed, each one a mouth that opened into an alchemic chamber.

Radeon brushed every door as he passed. A knuckle tapped near the cracks where the air leaked out. His palm weighed heat and chill.

Some doorways breathed cool and dead. Others exhaled a thick swelter that clung to his skin and told him the work inside still burned.

'Four small doors taken. Big one locked.'

Radeon could not simply open a door. If another alchemic room were to open, it would mean one more cauldron in use, one more flame on the tally.

They watched those numbers. Five rooms already worked today. A sixth would make someone ask who had been told to brew and why.

He chose the worst door in the row. The one with the warped frame and the crooked cauldron that no one liked to cook behind.

They hated that three legged cauldron with a missing leg, even if they were used to it. That made it safer for him. No one stayed long beside it.

Radeon waited there with his hand resting on cold iron. Breath steady. Ears open.

Then he heard a fire die. A dull clunk of a dropped lid. The wet hiss of water thrown over flame.

Steam sighed through a crack and brushed his cheek. The sizzle of water on fire, and the faint mist that followed, were his signal to move.

He set his hand on the one empty gate. The bad door. The one no one claimed.

Giovanni had walked through this place enough times that Radeon knew every complaint of its hinges.

Which groan came first. How long before the latch bit home. When the whole frame would shudder like a kicked beast.

Now he waited for the sound of the working room beside it. The scrape of a stool. The faint curse. The heavy step.

When the alchemist lifted his latch and pulled his own door open, Radeon swung his in the same breath.

Two screams of rust rose together and blurred into one ugly noise.

He slipped through in the echo. Fast. Careful. He had no oil to soften the hinges, so he snatched a handful of dried herbs from a waste basket.

Reject leaves. Brown and brittle. He twisted them into a knot and wedged them at the base as a crude stopper.

Enough to keep the door from getting opened from the outside.

The reason he had pushed so hard to come here lay in the back of the room.

Radeon moved past the cold cauldron and stained tables and found the metal trap door set into the stone. He hauled it open.

Blood waited below.

A wide pool of dark red, kept from rotting by movement alone. Most of it had come from beasts.

Some from beastmen, thick and sluggish with their strength. All of it needed refining.

A pale array burned beneath the surface and kept the whole mass in a slow, endless spin.

The blood rolled over itself in silence. It was never given time to clot. The steady heat never let it turn to a paste or meat.

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