“I’m safer with you all,” Kajja protested. Then, under her breath to Jak, “Should’ve seen the cave after they finished. Fucking blood bath.”
Innan kept scribbling, making notations and adding tunnels to the next map. “You might need me,” they said.
Bartolo stepped up behind them, watching their work through slitted eyes. “Why, Innan?”
“Not sure you can get in without an earthsinger.”
“Then how does anyone get in?” Piret wondered.
“I don’t know,” Innan admitted without looking up. “But there are huge, empty caverns all over, especially below. I can open them up, if we need them. Could be an escape, could be a blind, all kinds of possibilities.”
Dagan’s heart swelled a little, to see Innan so very, very in their element. Underground, master of rock and stone, almost as if they’d been made for this very moment. “You have a plan?” Dagan asked.
Innan shook their head. “Not yet. We need to know what’s in here.” They tapped the large cavern at the nexus of winding tunnels they’d added on the first map. “Once we do, we need to end it. Or seal it away.”
“How can you be sure the thing we’re hunting is there?” Piret wondered.
Innan finally looked up, fixing her with a wide-eyed, sincere gaze that brooked no argument. “Life hasn’t existed down here for a thousand years. The stone is screaming. We have to help.”
Bartolo, Piret, and Jak took the lead while Hen, Dagan, and Gareth brought up the rear. Kajja and Innan padded along silently, sandwiched between six nervous warriors on high alert. Kajja held a candle, and Innan held a map.
After a good ten minutes of fumbling through the dark, Hen suddenly said, “Sister Eva never showed?”
“No,” Gareth replied, clipped and quiet.
“If she’s fucking us…” Hen didn’t finish the thought aloud, though.
“Where’s the benefit to her?” Dagan wondered aloud. “Why would she arrange all this only to thwart it? There have to be easier ways of climbing the power-ladder than this.” Arranging a delegation to the Heart Wood. Bringing back research. Sneaking everyone in. She could’ve just fed them Piret and the gods knew how many other resistance people ages ago and spared everyone the drama for the same ends.
Hen shook his head. “If she’s not a traitor, she’s dead or in a cell somewhere. Cover blown.”
Which meant, realistically speaking, they weren’t leaving these catacombs alive. So long as they took something evil out with them, Dagan would be alright with that, as deaths went. He’d keep fantasizing about his future with Hen in the Heart Wood to keep his spirits up, of course, but time to set the expectation where it should be. Past time.
“Then we finish this,” Piret said with finality.
They went on in silence again, the path widening as they turned into a different tunnel. The uneven stone wasn’t just craggy, Dagan realized now, but rutted as if by wagon wheels. Someone came this way often enough to leave smooth marks. He recalled the stories of wooden boxes holding children who’d been lovingly reared just for slaughter, sacrifices with their throats ripped out. How many had come this way? Had they already been dead, or had they been rolled down here alive and given to whatever waited deep in the belly of the mountain?
Hen halted suddenly, somewhere in the dark. Gareth bumped into Dagan when he paused, too. “What is it?” Dagan craned his neck to catch a glimpse of Hen’s face in the candle light.
“Do you smell that?” Hen’s voice quivered, sounding like someone else, someone smaller altogether.
Dagan sniffed. Underground, earthy smells, dust, disuse, an utter lack of living things that broke him out in shiver-bumps. And—yes, something else. Fragrant, like incense or sweet candles, and warm. But beneath those sweet notes, harshness, something almost sulfuric. “What is it?”
“Oil.” Hen’s eyes flashed in the candlelight. “Halt,” he said a little louder, strange, shaky seeming to bounce off the tunnel walls endlessly.
The group before them stopped moving and turned almost as one.
Hen felt along the wall. “Innan. Is there a tunnel here?”
Their head popped up. “Yes. Well, a little room. Just to your left.”
Hen moved, and his hand disappeared into darkness of a sudden. “Piret,” he said. “Come here, please. But don’t step inside. It’s not safe. I just need your light.”
With some jostling, they rearranged themselves to allow Piret and her candle through. She held it aloft just over Hen’s shoulder, and the shape of a crude doorway appeared as if from nothing.
“I wouldn’t even have seen that if I didn’t know it was there,” Dagan whispered, reaching out to stick his hand through. Innan may be enjoying these tunnels, for which he was glad, but Dagan most certainly was not. They were fucking unnatural, dark as the magic that twisted lifecasting for death and destruction.
“I walked right by and didn’t see it,” Piret commented.
“The design seems natural, but in fact it’s ingenious and very, very human,” Innan commented.
“Doesn’t seem human to me,” Dagan muttered. “Hellish, more like.”
“Higher, please,” Hen said.
Piret lifted the candle. Tall, round shapes appeared in the depths of the hidden room, unmoving. “Water?” She guessed.
“No. The smell. It’s oil. The oil that burns like magic.” Hen’s face contorted as if in pain, but he covered his mouth and nose. “Stone and fire, there must be tons of it.”
“Why is it back here?” Piret wondered.
“They must pick it up on their way. When they’re clearing out the bodies,” Hen said, taking a staggering step backwards. “I have to move.”
Without another word, everyone reformed the line, precisely where they’d been in the order before, Piret in the lead, Gareth in the back.
Dagan thought of the long, pink scar on Hendrik’s left arm, a scar Dagan adored as part of him. This was a stark reminder that Hen had come by it in pain and death and preternaturally burning oil. After a few long, heavily silent moments, Dagan ventured to ask over his shoulder, “Alright, Hen?”
“Absolutely fucking not,” he said with a grimace, though his voice was back to its normal, softly growly tones. “But what’s new? Sorry, the smell. Just—took me right back there. Burning bodies on the beach.”
