Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Eurydice
Air poured from the doorway, cold and earthy and putrid. Beyond the door and the key’s light, the threshold was black as pitch.
Every instinct told me to turn away. Yet this was where we had to go.
Dorian reached for my hand. His fingers slid through mine, clasped, and together we stepped through and into darkness. On the other side, stone floor gave way to earth.
I raised the sol key—and illuminated two walls of bare bones.
Femurs, tibias, skulls. Endless remains on either side, from my feet to seven feet above my head. Stacked tight, close. Eyeholes stared back at me, rows of teeth like wide grimaces.
The doors shut behind us with an echoing thud. We were enclosed.
Dorian’s grip tightened, as though he anticipated I’d jerk away. “They’re catacombs, Eury. Just bones.” His voice was too loud, resonant, like it might wake something.
I couldn’t move, could barely breathe. “Cata-what?”
“It’s where the dead are buried.”
“No, the dead are burned.”
“It’s where they used to be buried.” His thumb stroked the back of my hand. “Long ago.”
I couldn’t stop staring at the skull a foot from my head, as though looking away for longer than a blink would bring it to life. “Buried—why?”
“It was an honor, apparently.”
I forced my gaze off the bones and onto his shadowed face. “You knew this was here.”
“I had no idea.” His gaze traveled down the dirt pathway into darkness. “Not until Liora told me about it. Feyreign has catacombs, but I never thought we did.”
“You could have told me before now.”
“Would you have preferred to know before or after you stepped through the mirror-way?”
If I had known, would I have come? The braver part of me would say yes; the part that couldn’t conceive of an endless corridor of bones wasn’t so sure. “The dagger is down here?”
“According to Liora.”
“Do you believe her?”
“I believe she’d find a quicker way to kill us if she just wanted us dead.”
I shifted the light around. More bones, stacked into the dark. “So just… walk.”
“It’s all we can do.”
I took one step forward, then another. More of the corridor appeared—more bones. “How far does it go?”
“Far.” I didn’t know how I knew, but I knew. “Catacombs are said to be labyrinthine.”
Ice spread in my chest. Labyrinthine was dangerous. We hadn’t brought much for supplies—maybe a couple days’ worth of food and two canteens. “If we don’t find a water source…”
His hand moved to my wrist. He turned me toward him. “We can turn back.” Dorian’s voice was quiet. “We don’t have to go any further.”
He was right. We could stop here, turn back, climb out of the sewers and never leave the inner district. We could be fat, happy, eternal. We had that choice.
And yet…
I had been shown a vision of that dagger. Had held it in my hand, felt its tip slice through my skin. It was mine. My only hope in the Killing Fields. The sole route to continued life in a world beyond reckoning, beyond imagination.
I wanted that. And if I knew Dorian, he wanted it, too.
I unwound my hand from Dorian’s grip, reached into my belt, lifted out my pocket knife and flicked it open, the click too loud in the skull-lined silence.
“What are you doing?”
Light from my crystal caught in hollow eye sockets as I lifted it toward one of the skulls and stepped closer. With a flinch, I drew the blade across the skull’s browbone in one quick swipe, then a second swipe to make a crosshatch. I stepped back.
Dorian stared at me. “What was that, Eury?”
I pointed at the skull with my open knife. “That’s how we find our way back. At every turn.”
He made a soft noise, almost humored. Not quite. “So that’s your answer. Of course.”
“Of course what?”
“Of course you’d walk into hell”—he nodded toward the crosshatch—“with this as a lifeline.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Yes,” he said, no hesitation. “Aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“At least we’re being honest with each other these days.” He stepped past me. “I’ll lead.”
An endless burial ground. I’d lived my whole life walking—running—sleeping atop it, never knowing centuries of humans lay beneath my feet.
I couldn’t think too much about it. I hadn’t been superstitious like my mother, but this place could make anyone believe in ghosts.
The first corridor wasn’t flat; it sloped, leading us down at a slight grade. Down, down, and I could swear the air cooled as we passed the grimacing skulls and stacked spines.
Instead of a hard turn like in the Eldermaze, the corridor only curved gradually to the left, then right. After a time, we came to a split.
Dorian stood at the split, eyes shut, nostrils widening. When his eyes opened, he said, “Right.”
I smelled it, too. I moved two paces down the right path, flicked out my knife, and raised it to the nearest skull.
We walked. Sometimes Dorian led the way, and sometimes I did. Some of the corridors were narrower, some wider. In some the bones had collapsed from one wall, leaving a gaping maw into the earth, and we picked our way through them as reverently as we could.
Best not to fuck with the living. Better not to fuck with the dead.
After a time we stopped to eat and drink. It might have been hours; without sunlight, time stretched and shrank. He and I sat back to back, staring into the darkness so we didn’t have to touch our shoulders to the bones.
I bit into a piece of dried rabbit meat. “The smell has changed since we first entered.”
“Your nose has improved.”
I stopped chewing. “It’s like…”
“Sulfur and wet ash.”
“Exactly. Is that…?”
“Maybe.” He swigged at his canteen. “I’ve never smelled a dragon before.”
Dorian’s back pressed harder to mine, warm and solid. A tether to life. “How is that possible? The passage down is barely big enough for us.”
“Funny, that you should still consider anything impossible.”
I leaned my head back until my scalp made contact with his. “Haskel called it a tooth. If he’s not exaggerating—”
“Not about this,” he said.
“—then what would compel a dragon to give up a tooth?”
I felt him shrug. “Apparently Carys did so, once.”
“How?”
“If anyone knew the answer to that, I expect Liora would already be hoarding the dagger in her great golden cache.”
I stared into the darkness. “Why are there no dragons in the world, Dorian?”
“Besides the one who guards the inner district sewers, you mean?”
“Yes, besides the shit guardian.”
He let out a gusting breath. “Humans and fae only love what they can conquer. Anything else is a threat.”
My brow lowered. “Do you mean to say we’ve killed them all?”
“Yes, and all the other creatures you loved in your storybooks.”
I turned toward him, heart squeezing. “Unicorns?”
“Of course. The Aurelian throne is said to be made of a thousand thousand gleaming, spiraled horns.”
How cruel. How terrible. Yet—
I should like to see that. And if I survived the Killing Fields, then I could; I was a queen. I could travel to all of Feyreign. And I could bring Dorian with me.
For once—the first time since the night the wall had fallen—the future felt like a spark in front of my eyes. Small, bright, real.
“Dorian.”
“Yes, Eurydice?”
My full name on his lips sent gooseflesh up my arms. “If there is a dragon guarding a tooth, I’ll speak to it first.”
Now he turned toward me, a surprised half-smile on his face. “And what will you say to it?”
I stood and extended my hand down to him. “Whatever I need to.”