Dawn Walker

Dickoff Iron did not report anything to Mihos.

He should have.

He knew that.

He knew it while running.

He knew it while pushing past his own terrified servants.

He knew it while shouting for the inner gates to close.

He knew it while descending into the lower private levels of his mansion with blood on his clothes and smoke still in his lungs.

Still, he did not report.

Fear had already entered too deep for duty to matter.

The Iron House mansion stood above ground with all the old signs of wealth still clinging to it. Thick walls. Ironwork balconies. Dark red banners. Stone beasts carved into the corners. Wide receiving halls. Guard posts. Locked rooms. Hidden ledgers. It still looked like a powerful house if someone only saw it from the street.

That was the insult.

Because inside, Dickoff knew the truth.

The house above was still standing.

Everything under it had been cut away.

Its shops were gone. Its warehouses were gone. Its hired blades were dead or missing. Its guards had failed. Its lower routes had been broken. Its workers had been killed, scattered, or captured. Even the men he had counted as useful filth in the underground and outer trade lanes were gone.

And the two people Mihos sent to save the situation were dead too.

That part hit him hardest.

Not because he cared about them.

Because they had been strong.

Truly strong.

Mihos had sent them and they had still died.

That made the night feel cursed in a way numbers never could.

Now Dickoff sat inside the underground treasure room beneath the mansion, breathing hard in stale air that smelled of old metal, sealed coins, and locked fear. He had ordered the outer basement passages closed. He had ordered the hidden iron door sealed. He had brought two lamps down with him, but only one was lit now. The second remained on the floor beside a half-open chest because his hands had been shaking too badly earlier to manage both.

The treasure room itself was not large by noble standards, but it had been designed by a family that trusted metal more than people. The walls were thick. The hinges were reinforced. The shelves held locked strongboxes, coin chests, wrapped bars, private records, and smaller storage cases meant for things too valuable to leave in the counting rooms above.

Dickoff did not feel rich in that room.

He felt buried.

His shoulder still hurt where Raka’s claws had torn through armor and flesh. A servant physician had tried to bind it before he fled below, but the bandage sat crooked now under his clothes, already darkening through. His right hand shook whenever he stopped clenching it. His throat felt tight. His mind kept replaying the same images over and over again.

The underground market.

The dark gate.

The two women falling out of it.

"Ouch!"

That stupid sound still echoed in his head because it had been so absurd and so wrong for that kind of battle. Then the same women rose and killed like monsters.

He rubbed one hand over his face.

No.

He needed to think.

He needed to stop replaying.

He needed to decide what to do before morning came and made everything harder.

Report to Mihos?

That thought turned his stomach.

What exactly would he report?

That he had lost the first stage?

Then the second?

Then the whole lower business body of Iron House in one night?

That the city had watched his stores burn and his routes break?

That the two people Mihos sent to help him were dead?

That he himself had run?

No.

No, that could wait.

He told himself it was tactical. He told himself he needed facts before speaking. He told himself the mansion still stood, and as long as the mansion still stood, he had not fully lost. But all those thoughts were weak, and he knew they were weak.

The truth was simpler.

He was scared.

Not of Sekhmet alone.

Not of Raka.

Of failure itself now. Of what Mihos would sound like once the full scale of it reached camp. Of what it would mean to stand in front of a man like that and admit not only defeat, but humiliating defeat.

Dickoff looked around the treasure room as if the coin chests might offer advice.

They did not.

They only sat there in rows and iron-bound corners, mute and heavy and suddenly much less comforting than they once had been.

Above him, somewhere in the mansion, servants were still moving.

He could hear it faintly through the layers of stone and iron. Running steps. Doors. One woman was crying and trying not to cry too loudly. The creak of weight shifting where guards changed posts. Someone dragging something heavy across the floor above. Perhaps a desk. Perhaps a barricade. Perhaps a body.

Dickoff swallowed.

His own mansion no longer sounded like home.

It sounded like people trying to protect a corpse before the smell fully spread.

Far away from the Iron House mansion, in Mihos Dawn’s camp, the report came properly.

Of course it did.

Not from Dickoff.

From Butler Stephen.

Stephen entered the command pavilion in the way only a truly old servant could enter such a place. Not timid. Not loud. Simply correct. He had served long enough that other men’s tempers had become part of the work instead of something frightening. The guards at the outer line stepped aside for him without a word. The clerk outside the inner section lowered his head and did not ask whether now was a good time. Stephen would not have come if now had not been the time.

Inside, Mihos was still awake.

He had not been sleeping well since the first setbacks began, though no one in the camp would have dared call them setbacks aloud unless ordered to summarize failure. He stood near the long side table beneath the main lamp line, one hand resting on the wood, the other holding a cup he had not finished.

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