Chapter 19
Mollandra
Year Three
The first chamber beyond the gates had been hand-hewn from the bedrock like the one before it, but towards the rear the mouths of natural tunnels yawned, carved by the stream in times when it must have been a river and run a different course.
Undu had given them each an oil lantern and had let Treecie go ahead. The girl had hurried off into the leftmost tunnel, the lantern light painting a glowing ring on the rock around her until she disappeared past the bend.
“Off you go.” Undu nodded to Mollandra. As the challenged party Treecie got to choose her ground, so Undu had let her run off to find it.
Mollandra eyed the options, glanced back at the watching acolytes, then set off after her quarry at an unhurried pace. She held her lantern ahead of her, and the smoke helped with the rotting stench of the place.
The first thrill of fear ran through her as she entered the tunnel.
Mollandra knew it as something external, like cold.
Some of the girls had noted early on how Mollandra never seemed scared by the horrors that the Kindnesses heaped on the class.
All of them had calluses on their souls now, those who had survived nearly three years of the Academy.
But Mollandra had arrived pre-numbed to violence and abuse.
It wasn’t that she was immune to terror, just that for her it tended to spring from different sources than those of her fellow acolytes.
To be wholly without fear was to lack imagination, and imagination—though a two-edged sword—was important for survival.
Mollandra had plenty of imagination. Right now she wished she had considerably less.
The fear that wafted over her set her shortest hairs on end and tightened her stomach into a knot.
It was sourceless and primal. As if the raw emotion had been bottled like one of Instructor Jane’s poisons, creating the need to flee without any attending reason.
Mollandra clenched her teeth and walked on, trying to focus on what lay directly ahead in case of ambush, and also to prevent her mind from racing off to invent its own stories to justify her pounding heart and cold sweat.
The tunnel twisted in its descent, often so narrow that Mollandra could almost have touched both walls at once, the ceiling low enough that in places someone tall would have to stoop.
Mollandra trod the hardpacked dirt and navigated the water-smoothed rocks jutting through the grime.
Smoke had darkened the walls and roof. Generations of instructors had carried the Academy’s waste product along this route, an almost daily pilgrimage.
When the tunnel finally opened onto the next chamber, Mollandra stopped in her tracks.
Without knowing how, she was sure that the dark ahead of her concealed some vast space that the meagre light of her lantern couldn’t touch.
The walls to either side lay thick with flowstone, stone teeth descending like the wax dribbles below the candles in the altar shrine.
Shelves had been carved into the rock, arcing away into the blackness, and scores of skulls watched her, their empty eye sockets angled towards the entrance.
Mollandra descended the steep slope to the floor of the cavern and found herself walking on bones, a field of them stretching beyond the circle of her vision.
They clacked and shifted beneath her boots, soiled by the passage of many feet.
She saw arm bones, leg bones, ribs. Whether the carpet was inches deep or yards she couldn’t tell, but it lay even and undisturbed by rocky protrusions.
She paused, unsure of the way. Treecie would no doubt find her eventually, but Mollandra didn’t want to give the girl any more time to prepare than she had to.
With eyes closed, she turned slowly. Completing her revolution, she took the direction she least wanted to go in, letting her fear guide her.
If something terrible was lurking out there, better to face it head on than to let it stalk her.
Treecie had said that the catacombs would do the work for her. This place, she’d said, would kill Mollandra. So it made sense that she would have gone as far in as she dared, challenging Mollandra to follow.
It took a hundred yards before a wall loomed out of the darkness to intercept Mollandra’s light. Bones had shifted beneath her feet all that way. Acres wide and of unknown depth, a garden of misery grown from the suffering of those who lived above it.
Mollandra followed the wall and came quickly to the mouth of another tunnel, this one even narrower than the first. She patted for the hilt of her knife out of habit, finding it gone.
Neither of them had brought any weapon save themselves.
Mollandra shivered as she entered the tunnel, hugging one arm across her chest. Another waft of external fear encompassed her, filling her with the need to run but still supplying no reason.
Undu and the older acolytes worked necromancy in these halls, but without their presence to part the veils to the netherworld the dead would lie still.
Mollandra had already seen corpses walk.
It wasn’t the worst thing she’d seen. She sniffed, spat the foulness from her mouth, and followed the passage.
The next chamber was smaller, but shelves had been carved everywhere, and skulls lined every inch. To fight off the tendrils of fear seeking to find a way under her skin, Mollandra began to talk to herself.
“Yes, I feel watched. All right.” She eyed the skulls critically, challenging their hollow stares. “Truthfully, I expected more from the catacombs…but I guess this sort of thing is the only option really. Someone got told to store a million old bones down here, not to create art…”
Her defiance sounded thin in the cave’s cold void, but it made her feel better even so.
She moved on, passing by one exit only to return to it when the next felt less threatening.
The passage led steeply down, perilously slippery at points.
Mollandra tried to imagine making the trip carrying a fresh corpse.
The grime underfoot suggested that was exactly what the Kindnesses and their helpers did.
“Perhaps Undu stands the dead up and makes them walk ahead of her…”
Mollandra had heard that in the distant chambers, the places where it was hard to say whether you were still in the living world, and where monsters from the outer dark wandered, there were treasures to be found.
Not gold and gems or books or ancient lore, but the kind of treasures necromancers crave: a drop of blood from a dead god, small enough to fit a hand but heavier than a man, a tooth from the maw of a hellhound, still too hot to hold, or perhaps an angel’s feather, razor edged and white as bone or blacker than death.
In the third chamber the terror hit her in the chest as soon as she stepped from the passage. The breath left her lungs along with the strength from her legs. She found her traitor body turning to run without instruction and stopped it by gripping the wall.
With her back to the chamber now, the certainty that something worse than she could imagine stood behind her was overwhelming.
She thrust a hand into the pocket where she’d put Brooth’s gift.
She gripped the tooth so hard that it bit into her palm.
Together with her anger it was enough to allow her to turn around.
Nothing but the darkness greeted her. What she could see of the cavern floor was paved and even, and empty save for a sparse scattering of bones, a shoulder blade here, the small bones of a hand or foot there.
As she advanced, pushing back the shadows and letting them close in behind her, a lone skull revealed itself, lying on its side, missing teeth.
Somehow the emptiness of the chamber felt more threatening than the hundreds of skulls of the previous cave. Mollandra pressed on, feeling that her small circle of illumination was constricting a finger’s breadth with every step.
The paved floor gave way to raw rock at the rear of the chamber, and a sinkhole close to the wall appeared to be the only exit.
This time Mollandra might have chosen a less frightening alternative had there been one.
Her hands had gone white and tingled with pins and needles.
Her breath came in short, panting gasps no matter how she tried to slow it, and her heart beat out a rapid tempo that her feet longed to match in a sprint to freedom.
Flowstone coated the sinkhole’s slick gullet, and Mollandra was far from confident that she could climb back out if she went down.
Doubts started to assail her. A weasel like Treecie wouldn’t have had the guts to go this way.
Maybe the sinkhole just led to some drowning pool.
She hadn’t come this far to drown like Einsa did only with much less excuse.
“Blood and shit.” Mollandra scratched her nails slowly from cheekbone to throat, using the pain to focus her.
She returned to the skull, snagged it through an eye socket, then took it to the hole.
She dropped it and the darkness gobbled it up.
The rapid clattering of bone on rock terminated without a splash.
Mollandra got to her knees and backed in, feet searching for support as her hands tried to grip the stony floor.
More natural caves followed, strewn haphazardly with bones, skulls perched wherever the processes that carved the chambers left any opportunity. The sense of dread built steadily but without any sudden shocks to the system.
Two hundred yards on and maybe fifty deeper, the biggest chamber yet waited, lit by a pale glow that revealed a cathedral-like architecture wrought by water and time, flowstone teeth meeting in columns, vaguely organic and coloured by faint sheens like the wings of ghostly butterflies.