"How do you know it was knee-crow mancers?" Opellia asked.

Her cousin, Versaes, wiped the tears from his eyes. "Does it matter? They got Raff…"

"They were wearing all black… and one of 'em had a silver skull for a pendant," Aldo said.

"That does sound like knee-crow mancers," Mailyn observed, and I had to agree. Waring all black with skulls and bones and such was very much 'knee-crow mancer' chic.

"Well?!" Zev spat, his nostrils flaring. "We have to rescue him! Uh… them!"

Zev wasn’t wrong - Nate was a friend and Rafael was a friend to our artificer comrades. If somebody had kidnapped Mailyn with intent to harm, I'd have dragged as much of the Collegium across the city as I could manage to make battle with the evildoers… and even though Nate wasn't a friend in the same way that Mailyn was, I'd happily foist whatever retribution I could manage at his abductor. My innermost little Selenite princess, as always, urged me to find somebody in authority, to plead with an adult to help. But my rational mind knew that there was no help nearby an time was of the essence. We'd already seen the sorts of adults the canals produced - the kind who quarreled amongst one another to see who'd get to rob the kids who'd wandered onto their turf.

"Do you remember where it is?" I asked.

"Course I remember," Aldo said. "That's the very first thing I did, isn't it?"

"Then lead the way… and everybody stay together!"

With a determined not, Aldo headed westward, crossing the southern end of the Foreign Canton before passing into the canals, darting through alleys and clambering over causeways without so much as a moment of hesitation… he clearly knew where he was going. In fact, if he hadn't insisted that this was his first time in the canals, I'd have guessed he delved into the canton before… the little lying delinquent!

"Come on!" he hissed.

"We're going… as fast… as we can," Opellia gasped - the artificer kids didn't spend hours every day scampering around the streets of Floria and didn't have quite the endurance we did.

"We should leave 'em," Zev said tersely.

"We stay together," I repeated. "Unless you want to waste more time arguing?"

Zev glared at me. "Nate better be okay… this was your idea, Vix…"

"And he was in your group," I observed. "We all want to find them, right?"

"You two done nattering?" Aldo snapped. "We stopped for fifteen seconds and already we got eyes on us…" he pointed up toward the roof of the lopsided tenement behind us. "Another fifteen seconds, and those eyes might decide to do something."

I gestured toward the rickety stairwell in front of us. "Well?"

With a nod, Aldo pattered down the stairs and further into the press of the warrens. He led us across catwalks and along vertiginous shantytown edifices with the surety of a mountain goat. And, as amped up as Zev was, he wasn't too much slower, bullying along without Aldo's nuance but with even more determination.

"Keep up," he spat.

We made our way through the stinking labyrinth of tin shacks and across a deteriorating ship's mast that spanned the thirty meter 'grand canal' that formed the backbone of the canton. We tiptoed across a little archway south into the increasingly bifurcated terrain, the canals growing more frequent, the slope of the land sinking into reeking, dark water. Finally, the land gave way to the Green Stones, the water around them thick as soup.

I could feel the history in those stones, could see the glyphs carved into them in the alphabet of the native Perditans. There was old magic in these stones, further buttressed by earth magics to keep these remnants of the Old City's once-proud ziggurat from sliding beneath the waves with the rest of the city's sediment. The pirate-mage Longshanks Alhred had once dredged these stones downriver after his second rout of the Priestess's Army and set the stones at the river's western mouth to build a fortress that the natives' greater numbers could not march upon.

That fortress was long gone, but the stones remained, each block of forty or fifty massive stones forming a small city block upon which buildings had been crammed as much as humanly possible, if not more so.

Like storm-sieged sailors passing into the eye of a typhoon, we wandered into what appeared to be a normal city avenue. The road was paved and well-kept and the buildings to either side all had their original limestone edifices with only a little of the oozy green-brown moss that seemed to grow in patches everywhere in the canton. There was even a broad pavilion bridge crossing across the water to a city block of green stone that you might ride two carriages abreast.

"They took them here?" I said. "You followed them?"

"Don't look at me like I did something wrong! That was the plan, right?" Aldo said. "Follow the bastards back to their hidey hole and then regroup? So that's what we did. See, I came up with this master plan to flush out the knee-crow mancers. We told folks we were looking for cultists who took kids, figuring that maybe they'd tell us, or else maybe the word would get back to the cultists and they'd find us."

"Your master plan… was to ask people where the cultists were?"

Aldo shrugged. "It worked, didn't it? We split up to canvas the area - we was just on opposite sides of the street, but it was enough to lure 'em out. We saw a trio of the bastards talking with Nate and Raff, but by the time we circled around, they'd already dispatched 'em. I reckon they used magic, otherwise no way would Nate get took…"

"They did use magic," Zev stated. "I felt 'em pulse something and Nate just fell… he was still breathing, but he might've got hurt."

"They sent mages? You shouldn't have split up!" Opellia shouted.

"Don't draw attention!" Aldo hissed. He looked around for a moment but was apparently satisfied that nobody was paying undue attention to us. "Like I said, we were only across the street. You saying you four didn't split up at any point?"

Opellia bit her lip. "Well…"

"We shouldn't even be here," Zev huffed. "I don't even know any of the kids who got took before today!"

"Well I bet it seems really important now," Opellia replied. "If it wasn't us or somebody we knew before, it's only because we were the lucky ones. So… what now, boys? Which building was it?"

"Do you have to ask?" I said, and pointed across to one of the nearest green stones.

What other building could it have been? It was a steep-roofed building wrought in jagged, ebon-dark timber, a hulking thing that loomed over all the surrounding structures by two stories. It looked like some grand backwoods temple, some site of hidden, secret rituals translocated into the middle of the Canal Canton. Really, how could the place have gone on so long unnoticed?

It was dangerous to notice things you ought not to in the Canal Canton.

"That's the place," Zev said. "That's where they took Nate and Raff after they zonked 'em out."

With Zev's confirmation that this was, in fact, where the two boys had been taken, we started toward what would have, no doubt, been an astoundingly successful seven-child siege on a cultist redoubt. However, at that moment, the black double-doors of the temple banged open and a carriage drawn by two dark, snorting destriers charged out of the building, the great wheels banging as they hit the little step up to the bridge.

Now we were faced with a critical decision and precious little information: were our friends held captive in the carriage, even now getting trundled off to some hidden place for a dastardly sacrifice? Or was the carriage going elsewhere for more victims, or perhaps to fetch an evil cult leader while our friends remained locked within the building?

My impulses told me to run after the wagon - after all, why else would they choose that exact moment to leave their temple with such urgency if not to do something with their recently-captured prisoners? And yet a quieter, saner voice told me that this was just as likely to be unrelated, that it was extremely unlikely that the cultists would have captured two boys and then immediately taken them off elsewhere to be sacrifices.

"They're taking 'em!" Aldo shouted. "How can you just stand there? Come on!"

"Can we…" talk about this, I wanted to say.

"No time!" Aldo replied. He tugged on my shoulder and then took off with the other boys - Aldo, Zev, and Versaes all sprinted after the carriage with Aldo even managing to leap onto the back of the thing, grabbing its fender. I shared a look with Mailyn, rolling my eyes.

"Idiots!" Mailyn hissed. "Why did they assume…"

"Because it's Aldo. Opellia, you and Nima should get help," I said.

"You think we can't take care of ourselves?" Opellia huffed. "If they're in there, we should all go in…"

"Now that we know where the place is, and now that we know two kids got taken here, your school might forgo the 'proper channels' do something about this. The Collegium, in my experience, won't do squat."

"We should get the grown-ups," Nima whined.

Opellia stamped her feet but relented. "Ah! Fine! What are you two doing? Keeping watch until we get back?"

"Something like that," I agreed.

As she took Nima off - and I was very thankful that I didn't have to worry about their safety for the moment - I shared a look with Mailyn. "We going inside?" Mailyn asked.

"What would Silvia Valia do? How else are we going to be heroes?"

Mailyn frowned at that, little motes of energy flickering in her dark eyes like the sun in her auburn hair. "Gentlewoman thief I can live with. I'm not sure I want to be a hero," she said.

"You want to get even, though," I said.

"Hell yes, I do," she said with fire… a bit of it literal. If you could count on anything with Mailyn, it was her sense of righteous vengeance - she knew better than most that there was no justice in the world, and that whatever justice we got we had to make for ourselves.

And, believe it or not, the doors to the cult's ebon-dark timber temple were still wide open, rocking on their hinges in the ocean breeze. Yes, Mailyn and I were going in.