The hydra had eaten through three restraints, not two.

  Brutus discovered this when he came down the sublevel four staircase and the hydra's leftmost head came through the doorway at approximately face height and tried to remove his face. He ducked. The head took a chunk out of the doorframe instead. The other six heads were visible through the gap, thrashing against the remaining chains with the focused energy of something that had decided today was the day.

  Seven heads. Three loose.

  "Good morning," said the voice.

  "Shut up."

  He didn't have food. He hadn't had time to get food. He had come down here on the theory that the hydra would recognize him and calm down enough to assess, which in retrospect was an optimistic theory given that three of its heads were currently free and it hadn't eaten in four days and recognition in a hungry hydra was a significantly more complicated ask than recognition in, say, a hungry wyvern.

  The leftmost head swung back around for a second attempt.

  Brutus grabbed it behind the jaw with both hands. The hydra yanked. He planted his feet and yanked back, which accomplished nothing except communicating that he was strong enough to be annoying, which was sometimes enough. The head thrashed. He held on. The other two loose heads swung toward him and he thought very briefly and with great clarity: this was a bad idea.

  Then the middle head stopped.

  The big one. The one that had always been slightly calmer than the others, the one he'd spent three weeks getting to eat out of his hand two years ago when it was roughly the size of a large dog and considerably less capable of killing him. It stretched toward him. Slow. Cautious. The way animals move when they're deciding between two very different things.

  He let go of the left head, which immediately retreated to reconsider, and held his hand out to the middle one. It sniffed him. Long and thorough, the way animals check whether something is food or familiar. Then it made a sound low in its throat — not a threat, something older than that — and the other two loose heads slowed.

  "What's in the dungeon right now that I'm not going to miss," Brutus said.

  "Fourteen goblins in the east wing who have declared themselves a sovereign nation," the voice said. "Three of Maldred's undead wandering sublevel two since she forgot to give them instructions. Two dungeon staff members who are actively planning to rob the armory. And the adventuring party, though they've split up. Four in the treasury, one rogue unaccounted for, and two more somewhere in the residential wing based on the last ping I got before I lost them."

  "Lost them."

  "The dungeon integrity is twenty-three percent. That means roughly a quarter of my sensor network is dark. They found a dead zone and they know it."

  Brutus looked at the map on his overlay. Two blinking question marks in the residential wing corridor, last known position, timestamp already three minutes old. Three minutes was a long time for people who knew what they were doing.

  "The goblins," he said. "Can you open the east corridor door."

  "Yes."

  "And the sublevel four access shaft. The one that connects directly to this room."

  A pause. "You want to open a direct path between the goblin sovereign nation and the hungry hydra."

  "The goblins declared sovereignty," Brutus said. "Sovereign nations make their own choices."

  The voice made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "Opening doors."

  The screaming started four minutes later. Brutus was already heading back upstairs by then, listening to the distant sounds of a territorial dispute being resolved at speed. The screaming had the quality of something that wasn't going to go on very long.

  "Six," the voice said. "Seven. The hydra is in a much better mood."

  "Good." He took the stairs two at a time. "Keep the door open until it stops eating. Then close it."

  "And the remaining goblins?"

  "They'll figure it out."

  The armory was on the main level, east corridor, third door. The lock had been forced — not broken, forced, which meant someone had a key they weren't supposed to have, which meant this had been planned before Onetooth left. The door was slightly open and from inside came the low sounds of professional theft: the careful movement of someone trying not to make noise and mostly succeeding.

  Brutus pushed the door open.

  Two of them. A goblin and a half-orc, working opposite ends of the third weapons rack. The goblin was arguing with himself in a whisper about crossbow weight and the half-orc was stacking shortswords with the focused economy of someone who had mentally already left this place. They heard the door and spun. The half-orc had a shortsword up fast — good instincts, trained — and the goblin knocked over a rack of spears that clattered across the stone floor and then froze with his hands up.

  "How much are you owed," Brutus said.

  The half-orc's sword didn't move. "Eight weeks. Each."

  "Put it back. You'll have it by tomorrow morning."

  She looked at him for a long moment. The calculation behind her eyes was visible and he let her run it — he'd learned a long time ago that interrupting that kind of math made people nervous and nervous people made bad decisions.

  "Tomorrow," she said finally.

  "Tomorrow." He looked at the goblin. "Pick those up."

  The goblin picked up the spears. The half-orc put the shortswords back one at a time with the deliberate movements of someone making a decision they weren't entirely sure about yet. Brutus moved past them to the back of the armory where the functional gear lived — not the decorative stuff Onetooth had kept near the front for appearances, but the real equipment, the kind with actual use on it.

  He found a brigandine that fit well enough across the shoulders. A sword that balanced properly. A belt with actual attachment points rather than the decorative ones on his current one, which had always annoyed him. A pair of bracers that had seen real work.

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  He was buckling the last one when the half-orc said: "You're gearing up."

  "Dungeon's full of adventurers."

  "You're going to fight them."

  "I'm going to talk to them," Brutus said. "Then probably fight them."

  He left them in the armory. In the corridor he pulled up the overlay and looked at the two question marks in the residential wing. Still dark. Still lost.

  "Close the doors in the residential wing," he said.

  "That traps them inside with the manticore's secondary pen and approximately forty years of—"

  "Close the doors."

  "Closing."

  He headed for the treasury.

  The treasury was on the third level, past the administrative corridor and down a staircase that had been designed specifically to be unpleasant — narrow, poorly lit, with a slight list to the left that made your body feel wrong the whole way down. Onetooth had commissioned it that way. He'd believed discomfort discouraged theft, which was not entirely wrong but was also not entirely right, as evidenced by the current situation.

  Brutus heard them before he reached the bottom.

  They weren't being quiet. That was the first thing. People worried about a dungeon's response were quiet. These four weren't worried. He could hear the fighter giving instructions in a normal voice, hear the battle mage responding, hear the sound of chests being opened and contents assessed and the occasional thud of something discarded as not worth carrying.

  They'd cleared three levels. Nobody had stopped them. As far as they knew, nobody was going to.

  He heard something else underneath all of that.

  Nothing. A specific nothing, the kind that has a shape to it. The treasury had always had a sound — Revenue's breathing, the low steady draw of air through a hellhound's lungs, the occasional soft click of claws shifting on stone. Brutus had heard it hundreds of times over fifteen years, the sound of a very large animal in a room doing its job, and he'd stopped consciously hearing it the same way you stop consciously hearing a clock. You only noticed the clock when it stopped.

  He noticed it now.

  He came through the treasury door and took the room in fast.

  The fighter. The battle mage. The cleric. A ranger near the back wall with an arrow already nocked, already aimed, which meant they'd heard him on the stairs and they'd decided before he cleared the doorframe. Not interested in conversation. The ranger loosed the moment he appeared and he got his arm up and the arrow skidded off the brigandine, which was why you wore real armor, and he moved left and put stone at his back.

  "New keeper," the fighter said. Sword out, weight settled, decision already made. "Heard the kobold's dead."

  "Yeah."

  "Dungeon's in bad shape." A casual half-step that put her at an angle he didn't love. "We're finishing the job. You can walk away."

  "Can't do that."

  "Why not."

  He looked past her.

  Revenue was against the far wall.

  On his side. Coat out — not dimmed, not banked, out, the absolute absence of fire in a thing that was supposed to be fire, the way a forge goes cold and wrong and silent when there's nothing left to burn. The coal had gone from his eyes completely. His mouth was open slightly, the last breath of smoke long since dissipated into the treasury's cold air. The siege bolt was in his chest, left of center, buried to the shaft.

  He was enormous. That was the thing people always said when they first saw Revenue — that he was enormous, that they hadn't understood what they were looking at at first because hellhounds were supposed to be dog-sized, medium, manageable, the kind of creature you could picture on a leash even if the leash was magical and the dog was on fire. Revenue had never been that. Revenue had been the size of a draft horse since before he was fully grown, which had been a source of considerable confusion when Onetooth first acquired him from a fire giant estate sale seven years ago.

  Onetooth had been furious, actually. He'd wanted something impressive. He'd wanted Cerberus — the three heads, the size, the mythology. He'd done his research, or what he'd thought was research, which turned out to be entirely based on a decorative tapestry in the dungeon's entrance hall that depicted Cerberus guarding the underworld and which Onetooth had apparently taken as documentary evidence of what hellhounds looked like.

  The merchant who sold him Revenue had explained, with the patient tone of someone who had explained this before, that Cerberus was one of a kind. A specific creature with a specific history and a specific job. Not a breed. Not a template. Hellhounds had one head. They had always had one head. They were perfectly functional with one head. The head was not the point.

  Onetooth had argued about this for two hours.

  Revenue had sat in his crate through the entire argument, watching Onetooth with the coal eyes, not particularly concerned about any of it. He'd had one head his entire life and it had never caused him a single professional problem.

  He was still the largest hellhound anyone in the dungeon had ever seen or heard of. The fire giant must have fed him well. His coat when properly lit threw heat you could feel from the other side of the treasury and his inspection circuit took longer than anyone else's because there was simply more of him to walk around with.

  Next to him, where it had rolled when he fell, was the Sigil Stone. Its glow was the only light in the near corner of the treasury, faint and greenish and completely indifferent to what was happening around it.

  Across the room, face down, was what used to be one of the seven adventurers. Revenue had gotten that much before the siege bolt found him. He had always been professional about his work.

  Brutus looked at him for a long time.

  He thought about standing in this doorway. Every single time, for fifteen years, for any reason at all — fixing a trap, relocating a creature, dealing with the Mimic, anything that brought him to this level — he had stood in this exact spot and taken everything off. Boots. Belt. Vest. Anything Onetooth had decided could theoretically conceal a coin. And Revenue had walked the full circuit every single time. Slow. Thorough. Nose working over every inch regardless of how many times he'd done it, regardless of how long it took, regardless of who was watching or waiting or complaining about the delay.

  He had caught Brutus with a forgotten copper coin twice. A gold button from a dress uniform once. A gold filling that had fallen out of a goblin's mouth during a fight in an adjacent corridor and migrated into Brutus's boot through a sequence of events that still defied coherent explanation. Each time Revenue had sat on the item and waited, coal eyes steady, smoke rising in a patient line, until Onetooth was summoned. Each time Onetooth had arrived and laughed.

  Revenue had never once found any of it funny. Revenue didn't find things funny. Revenue had a job and he did it and that was the complete extent of his relationship with the treasury and everything in it.

  He had spent eleven weeks in this room without being let out. Fire backing up in him with nowhere to go, nobody checking, because Onetooth cared more about the gold than the thing keeping it safe. Brutus had known about the eleven weeks. He'd known because the overlay had shown him the timestamp on the last time the treasury door had been opened for a non-inspection reason, and he'd looked at it and filed it under problems to fix and then kept moving because there were fourteen problems and he'd been working through them in order of immediate danger.

  Revenue hadn't been in immediate danger. He'd just been in slow danger. The kind that doesn't announce itself.

  The ranger nocked a second arrow.

  The battle mage's hands came up, fingers already moving through the opening gesture of something that wasn't going to be pleasant.

  The fighter said something. He didn't hear what it was.

  He became aware that the fire in his throat had been building for a while without him deciding to build it. That his hands were completely still at his sides. That the rage had moved past the part where it felt like anger and into the part where it felt like nothing at all, which was always the most dangerous part, the part that lived just before the thing that came after.

  The fighter said something else. Louder this time. The word walk in it somewhere.

  He looked at all of them. At the ranger's drawn bow and the battle mage's moving hands and the cleric's raised mace and the fighter's settled weight and her decision that had been made before he walked through the door. At the Sigil Stone on the floor next to Revenue's head. At Revenue.

  He thought about the very first inspection. Revenue walking the full circuit around a junior monster handler who didn't know the rules yet, with exactly the same patience and exactly the same thoroughness he'd used on the last day. Not because he was told to. Not because he was watched. Because it was his job and his job was the whole of what he was and he'd done it right every single time without exception until the moment someone put a siege bolt in his chest.

  He thought: he did his job.

  He thought: I didn't fix the crack.

  The fire reached the top of his throat.

  He opened his mouth.

  The roar came up from somewhere below his lungs and hit all four treasury walls simultaneously and came back from every direction at once and the torches blew out and in the sudden dark the only light was the fire behind his teeth and the cold green glow of the Sigil Stone and the four adventurers frozen in the ringing silence of a sound that was not a weapon and not a word and not quite either but was, somehow, both.

  For one second nobody moved.