Chapter 20

Celcha reflects on her gilded servitude at the library and how Hellet’s three words—“Walk with me”—have set a revolt in motion: turning the city’s methalayne gas into a soporific that ganar can resist. In the choking cave system beneath Krath, her doubts rise until Hellet agrees to try calling the ghosts back.

Maybe and Starve appear and lead them to the gas house intake: a metal horn drawing a powerful current of methalayne. Hellet explains that releasing quicksilver outside the system won’t work because the altered gas is heavier. Celcha commits to the risky route, climbs inside the pipe with sacks of flasks, and, after an exhausting struggle, reaches a horizontal section near the gas machinery.

There, Celcha wrestles with the moral stakes—drugging a whole city versus freeing the enslaved ganar—and decides. She unstoppers and pours all the quicksilver into the flowing gas, then painstakingly climbs down to Hellet. Injured and breathless, she accepts that if caught, Hellet must kill her rather than face punishment.

They retreat through the caverns, but the altered gas backs up as a rising yellow fog. Hellet notes it will spread along the floors and down stairwells, likely putting the librarians to sleep too. Anxious and coughing, he hurries Celcha through the complex toward the city.

At the library’s wolf-head gate, guards forbid both slaves leaving together. Hellet, shaken and fearing mercury has clouded his mind and that his calculations may be wrong, chooses to remain. He orders Celcha to go warn the ganar that the city will soon sleep as lights fail. Celcha, uneasy but resolved, limps downhill toward the silent, sunlit Krath to spark the uprising.