Chapter Forty
FORTY
ASPETH
“To the door,” Lark barks out, pushing in front of me with her shield at hand. “You all go to the door and get it open. Kipp and I will protect you.”
“We’re roped together,” Mereden cries. “We have to stay together!”
“I’m opening my eyes,” Gwenna warns.
That makes me panic. We’re so close to finding whatever it is it’s pointing us to. “But the dowsing—”
“Fuck the dowsing,” she says, fumbling for her sword. “It’s no good if we’re dead!”
A ratling jumps toward us from out of the shadows, and I shriek, batting at it with my staff. The light in the room wobbles wildly, causing the others to yell out. “Sorry!” I blurt. “It’s on my weapon!”
“We need it to see!”
The ratlings swarm toward us. They’re smaller than I thought they would be, each one about a head shorter than Kipp, who comes to my thigh. But there are so many of them, and they’re aggressive. I can absolutely see why we need weapons training, now that we’ve run into the horrid little monsters. I try to keep my staff upright, flicking the butt of it at any ratling that gets near and kicking at them. Mereden has a shortened staff like I do, but she swings it fitfully, not connecting with anything. They circle around us in the midden heap that is the ruin, and Lark swings the shield outward, trying to bash anything that comes close.
“Door,” I croak out when one tries to climb my skirts. “We need to go through the door.”
“Hold the light steady,” Lark barks out at me. “Get the door open if you can. We’ll hold them off.”
“I’ve got your back,” Gwenna says, moving to stand behind me. “Do what you can, Aspeth.”
Me? I’m supposed to open the door? But I can’t use my weapon, so I suppose it does fall to me. I don’t argue, just rush forward up the three steps to the massive square door that fills the archway. It’s classic Prellian architecture and normally I would love to admire it except for the fact that it’s made of some sort of tarnished metal and has a ring and a weird contraption for the door lock made of swivels and golden stems encrusted with jewels. I’ve never seen its like before, and I fumble with it for too long before making a sound of frustration and pulling my knife free from my hip holster and jamming it into the works. I think I’ve just broken a priceless mechanism of some kind but I can’t find it in me to care.
I wedge it into the lock and tug on the door. It holds fast, and I scream in frustration.
Gwenna cries out as a ratling flings itself at her, and she jerks backward, the rest of us pressed together on the stairs falling together. “Kick it back!” Lark cries. “Kick all of them back!”
“Door!” Mereden pants. “Open the door!”
I jerk on the door again. “I’m trying! I’m trying!”
“Try harder!”
I groan in frustration, pulling on the door with all my might. It doesn’t budge. Frustrated, I slam my hands on the heavy doors.
They fall open. Inward.
Oh.
“Inside!” I yell at the others, grabbing Gwenna by the waist and hauling her with me. We tumble inward, and the ratlings surge after us. Kipp stabs one, the creature screeching and thrashing on the floor as another grabs the wounded one and drags it backward. The others jump on it, attacking and biting it, and Lark shield-bashes another, then kicks it down the steps. The other ratlings chase it—looking for easy pickings—and we slam the door shut.
It immediately shakes, the force of several ratling bodies flinging themselves against the door.
“Barricade,” I pant. “We need to barricade.”
Mereden immediately shoves her staff through the metal handles of the door, preventing them from pushing it open. I nod agreement, wrapping my belt around the handles to double the effect.
“That’ll stop them for a while,” Lark says, catching her breath. She’s still clutching her ribs, which is worrisome, but there’s nothing we can do about it right now. “We need to find a better place to hide out.”
“Where are we anyway?” Gwenna asks, wiping her brow. “Is this another wine cellar?”
I cast my light around, and my bad wrist sends a wave of pain up my arm. I ignore it, because there’s nothing to be done. This room isn’t a mess like the other one. It’s a smaller chamber with a low ceiling and looks like it’s been carved directly from stone. There’s a stone couch at the far end of the room, and several more short ones carved into the walls, all of them littered with long-rotted debris. I move toward the one at the back of the strange chamber and touch the decaying flowers across the bench. They turn to dust, and I wipe it away. As I do, I see the glyphs written across the slab and groan.
“What?” Gwenna asks, turning to me in a panic. “What now?”
“Remember how Lark said we’d landed in a graveyard?” I ask, tired. “And I said no, the Prellians buried their dead in their houses because they wanted them close by?”
“NO,” Gwenna cries, realization dawning on her. Kipp slumps, his hand on his snout.
I nod. “We found the crypt.”
The others sag with defeat. I know how they feel. It’s like we’re being hit with bad luck over and over again. The door shakes and rattles once more, and everyone looks uneasy. Lark and Kipp untie their rope leads, and I don’t blame them. I untie mine, too. We’re not going anywhere.
“We need to reinforce the door,” I point out. “I don’t think there’s another way out of here, but at least they can’t get in.”
“Yet,” Lark adds.
“All right, all right, enough sunshine from you,” Gwenna tells her. She holds the piece of shell back out to Kipp. “You can have this back. It’s caused enough trouble for us so far.”
He cradles it to his chest lovingly, stroking the hard, jagged edges.
The door jerks again.
“Reinforcements?” Mereden asks in a small voice.
“What can we use?” Gwenna looks around, frustrated. “I don’t see any furniture and this is the one place there are no fallen rocks.”
I hate myself even as I brush the dust off the bier at the end of the small crypt. “This has a stone lid. We can use it.”
We all pause, considering.
“Ugh,” Gwenna says after a moment.
“I know. I want to smack myself for even suggesting it, but I think whoever is in there would understand.” I want to wring my hands but my wrist feels like loose shards of glass. “It feels wrong, but to me it’s more wrong to let those things in.”
“Even more wrong than wrong if we let them kill us,” Mereden says. “I vote we grab it.”
“Let’s just do it and we’ll apologize to the dead later,” Gwenna says.
We five move to the side of the stone bier. The sides are high, the sarcophagus deep. The lid looks thin, barely two knuckles wide, but the weight feels near impossible. It takes all of us heaving and struggling to even lift it just enough to tilt it off to one corner. From there, we slide it to the floor and then continue to slide it over to the door. Once we lean the stone against the double doors, I collapse against it, exhausted.
Nothing’s coming in through this, that’s for damn sure.
“I could sleep for a week,” Lark says dramatically, flopping her pack down beside me.
“Even with all these dead bodies around?” Mereden asks.
“Even with.”
“Not me. I’m going to have nightmares about Magpie and Barnabus and rats,” Gwenna states as she slides down to the floor across from us. Kipp nods, still petting his shell fragment.
“Magpie and Barnabus and rats? Aren’t they all the same thing?” Mereden jokes. We groan, and she smiles with fatigue, looking over at Lark. “Sorry.”
Lark waves a hand. “She’s dead to me after this.”
It’s easy to say such things when you’re in a bad place and hurting, but something tells me that Lark will have a harder time detangling herself from her aunt’s influence, especially if Magpie remains our teacher. Just the thought makes me want to burst into hysterical laughter. To think I’d counted myself lucky—lucky!—that the famous Magpie was going to be teaching us.
I should have run for the hills.
Gwenna comes to sit next to me. “You all right, Aspeth?”
Her kind words make me shrug. I genuinely don’t know if I am or not. Of all of us, I’d thought I had the most to gain or lose—but it’s all the same when you’re about to die, isn’t it? The door shakes again, but it’s clear nothing is coming through, not with the heavy slab parked against it and us leaning on it. The ratlings aren’t leaving.
Well, neither are we. There’s nowhere for our Five to go.
But Gwenna wants a better answer than a shrug. I can tell by her expression. “Just thinking about Hawk. If he finds us, he’s going to be really, really mad.”
“At us or at Magpie?”
“Both.” I imagine his furious expression, his eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared, and instead of making me worry, I feel a bolt of longing so intense it hurts. I miss him. I wish he were here. Hells, I wish I were at his side instead of down here in the catacombs.
I’ve failed in my end of the bargain, too. I’d promised him I’d be his wife and partner through the Conquest Moon’s grasp and instead ran away into the Everbelow only to get trapped. He won’t have anyone for his Conquest Moon. He’ll think I’ve betrayed him, that I haven’t held up my part of our deal.
Poor Hawk will have to rely on sex workers. I picture him in the alley, women crawling all over him and begging for him to touch them, and something deep inside me dies.
I don’t want anyone to touch him but me. He’s mine.
It’s just another thing I’ve ruined. Another person’s life I’m casually destroying.
Strangely enough, it hurts more than everything else. Perhaps it’s because I’ve had time to get used to the idea that I’d be hunted like an animal if I didn’t get artifacts to save my father’s hold. I’ve bedded down with that realization for months now. But the loss of Hawk is new, and it aches. I’d allowed myself to hope for something more.
That maybe after all the dust had settled, he’d still want to share a bed with me, still want to talk to me late into the night, just telling me about his day….
“Hawk will understand,” Gwenna says, interrupting my melancholy thoughts.
I don’t think he will. Even now he’s probably bending some woman over in an alley while we wait for ratlings or starvation. “He’s not coming for us. It’s the Conquest Moon. He’s going to be…occupied for the next several days.”
And cursing my name the entire time.
“And there are no other Taurians in the city right now. Not any guild ones.” Lark leans against the slab heavily. “We’re in for a long wait.”
“But you do think someone will come?” Mereden asks.
“Oh, I do. They’re bound to come after the ring.” She waves a hand at the ring tied to the top of my staff, the red glow continuing to pour forth. “It could take a long time for them to find it—and us—though.”
Kipp gets to his feet. He dusts off his tail, licks his eyeball, and then looks around the chamber. He moves to the far corner of the crypt and we watch him from our spot by the door, and when he pokes and prods at the walls, I finally speak up. “What are you doing, Kipp?”
He turns and gestures. It takes me a moment to realize he’s indicating that he’s looking for a way out.
I sit up. “This room is sealed. It has to be, or else the ratlings would be coming in. They’ve probably had a nest in that room for ages.”
Kipp slumps, nodding. Then he shakes himself off and goes back to his prodding. To him, it doesn’t matter. He’s still going to look for a way out. He’s not going to give up.
I’m filled with intense affection for the slitherskin. “He’s right,” I say. “We can’t just give up. We should try to find a way out. I don’t want to die here.” I think of the tomb robber we’d found in the drop just a short time ago and hope that’s not our fate. To come so close to success and yet die on the way.
The doors surge again, and Gwenna gets to her feet. “Two of you keep leaning against this at all times. We can take turns searching the room.”
I get up, ignoring the throb of my bad wrist. “Mereden, why don’t you come sit with Lark?” They’re both the worst injured, though Lark would probably deny it. “I’ll help Gwenna and Kipp look around.”
They settle in against the slab, and Mereden’s face looks tightly drawn in the shadows. Her curly hair is covered in pale dust, which I know she has to hate. She’s particular about her hair.
“Hey,” Lark tells her softly.
“What?” Mereden looks over at her, her expression weary.
“I need to get something off my chest just in case we don’t get out of here.”
Mereden sits up, her focus on Lark. “What?”
Lark leans in and gives Mereden the lightest, sweetest kiss on the lips. “That.”
“Oh.” Mereden touches her mouth, but she’s smiling.
They make me ache with how cute they are. I bite back a smile of my own as they link their fingers, and I wonder about Hawk. Does he miss me right now? Or is he furious at me for disappearing right before the Conquest Moon after I’d promised him?
I wanted to keep that promise so badly, too.
With a miserable sigh, I shake out my now-torn skirts and stretch my legs, eyeing the crypt. Everything is awash in crimson shadows, making it seem far more ominous than it truly is. It’s just a crypt of Old Prell, I remind myself. Where they honored the dead. Gwenna walks briskly to the far end of the crypt and leans over the open sarcophagus, and then turns back to me, her expression stunned.
Oh gods, what now?
“Aspeth? You need to see this.”