Chapter 7 #2
I took my own lantern, the iron grip cool on my palm, and tugged the knot of cold iron around my neck. The guardsmen sent a command up into the crumbling tower.
The gate began to rise. I watched the iron door slide upwards, and it was only now that I saw the hundreds, possibly thousands, of tiny sigils carved into it.
The entire gate was one thick sheet of cold iron.
Even the stone walls of the tower were hung with horseshoes, old nails, twists of scrap metal.
A chill ran down my spine as it creaked to a halt, revealing the interior of the tower. There was no floor, nothing but a massive hole in the earth, sloping downwards.
“Come.” Wroth held no lantern, but his claws flexed expectantly as he gazed into that dark pit. “The knights and wagoneers have their orders. We will scout the way, and find the first bastion before making camp for the night.”
I found myself walking at his side as we descended the slope. It was gritty underfoot, the scent of dry, decaying dust thick in the air. “Will we not make it to Liuridar by tonight?”
He gave me a sidelong glance, but it was so brief I would’ve missed it if I had blinked. Wroth kept his eyes focused forward, scanning the smooth walls of stone. “Those who have gone Below have a saying: you can travel slow, or you can die.”
“Well, that’s blunt enough, I suppose.”
Wroth let out a sound that might’ve been a snort of amusement. “If we’re fortunate, we won’t have to step foot anywhere near that wretched city. Let us hope it is so.”
“So…this entrance…does no one know it's here?” I kept my voice low, and even my whisper seemed to bounce back to me, magnified a thousand times.
“They shouldn’t. The people believe these guards are here to hold this watchtower and keep an eye for piracy on the River Aurore. In reality, they are here to watch only this gate, and sound the alarm at any signs of egress.”
I lifted my lantern, illuminating walls that became rougher the deeper we went.
They had started as plain, quarried stone, but now they gleamed with gelatinous moisture.
The sounds of the wagons and irritated mules began to echo towards us, along with the soft clank of armor; our crew had finally begun filtering in.
“Why are we taking this path in particular? Alvar surely had to have found one elsewhere.”
Wroth lifted a claw, scraping at the wall and examining the dust left behind.
“Because this one is easily accessible, a known quantity, and will pose no insurmountable challenge to the supply lines. There are thousands of entrances to the Below. Every faerie mound conceals a door. It would be literally impossible to guard, or even find, every single one. I post sentries on those entrances which are—or were—the most heavily trafficked.”
I glanced at him, wondering if there was a limit to how unnerved I could become. There was a faerie mound I could see from my bedroom window at home. “Every mound?”
He nodded. “Every single one. The mounds, sinkholes in the earth, natural caverns…he could have found a door anywhere. But all of these doors funnel to the same places. Wherever he went, we will find him.”
“Do you have a map of these places, or do you know the way in your head?”
“So many questions.” Wroth shook his head, making his mane fly out, but he didn’t seem annoyed. “I do know the route. But Marrion has a back-up copy of the map, should anything happen to me.”
The thought of losing Wroth, a one-man army in himself, was a horrifying one, but more so was the thought of losing him and Marrion, along with any knowledge of the way out.
I hoped I kept the expression from my face, but Wroth’s muzzle curled in a cruel smile. “Believe me, fel Arron, should the bloodwitch and I fall, you would not make it out alive with or without a map.”
“Oh?” I looked up at him, the lantern light limning his soft white fur with gold. “Then how exactly is Alvar making it in and out? He’s no vampire, merely a human like me.”
Wroth looked me full in the face, and I had never, in my entire life, wanted to cringe away like I did now. In the wavering light, his teeth seemed far too sharp, his hulking size reminding me that he was a beast, a predator, and that it was only sheer chance that he was on my side.
I took a step back, nearly brushing against the oily walls, and Wroth’s face relaxed, that terrible snarl gone.
“I don’t know, gods damn it,” he finally growled.
“Very well, but I still want a map.” I glared back at him, furious that he’d used his size and appearance to intimidate me for even a moment. “If something happens to either of you, I want the choice to carry on or not within my own power.”
“The maps of the Below are a highly-guarded secret of my kind. We gave our blood, our sweat, our lives to make these—”
“And now we’re here, risking our own lives.” I raised my chin, trying to channel the imperiousness I’d seen from the lai ladies. “We deserve a fighting chance if you die. I do sincerely hope we all survive, but now that we’re actually in the Below, it’s time to consider uncomfortable questions.”
He drew back, gazing at me with incredulity for a long moment before turning his attention back to the tunnel ahead. Wroth shook his head again as though brushing away an obnoxious gnat, his brow drawn in a stormcloud scowl.
I walked in stony silence at his side, raising my lantern.
The walls had changed again, now strangely organic and softly ribbed, no longer quite like natural stone, but neither had they been worked on by human hands.
It was more like…something had grown here, within the earth.
A throat, descending into a leviathan body.
And we weren’t even that deep. I estimated we were no more than sixty meters from the surface.
We soon outpaced the clanking and clop of hooves, descending into a dank twilight of eerie quiet. I drifted closer to Wroth, the soft tread of my footsteps out of place here.
The tunnel abruptly culminated in a stone wall.
A gaping hole, large enough to admit not only a fiend, but the mules and carts, lay in the middle.
And as I stepped through and found myself walking over broken stones and piled dirt into what looked like a hall from an ancient fortress, I stopped in my tracks.
“What?” I whispered, looking down. My boots had left soft prints in the earth of the tunnel. Now we stood on chiseled stone, worn smooth over centuries.
I held the lantern to the tunnel entrance, looking at the dripping, softly ridged walls. Then I turned back to the hall, taking in the stones laid in neat patterns, even the thready, skeletal remains of an ancient tapestry hanging across from me.
“How is this possible?”
Wroth stood in the middle of the hall, peering from end to end, nostrils flexing as he breathed deeply. “The Below is a liminal place. Time out of time, spaces that may never have existed, and will cease to be once we have passed.”
“Wonderful,” I muttered, gritting my teeth. “Do you suppose Alvar came this way?”
“No. No one has passed this way in a long, long time.”
The fiend moved aside as Marrion stepped into the hall, raising her left hand, palm outward. She had carved the sigil of an eye into her palm, blood running freely down her wrist.
Marrion shuddered, turning to lift her hand in the opposite direction, and with my own jitter of unease I saw that her eyes had turned a milky, frosted white.
Her mouth moved, silently mouthing words until she curled her hand, obscuring the eye, and blinked.
Her eyes were green again when she looked at Wroth. “No humans passed this way, Uncle. Something else did, but it’s long gone now.”
“We go right,” Wroth said decisively. “We’ll find the first bastion in that direction. Leave a marker for the crew.”
Marrion dipped a finger in the flow of blood and began drawing a sigil on the wall opposite the tunnel entrance.
Talos loomed over my shoulder, his face turned toward the end of the dark tunnel, and one of his iron fingers tapped my shoulder, then his glass chestplate.
“Yes,” I said softly, “More light couldn’t hurt. But keep it low; don’t wear down your mechanisms. I won’t be able to fully repair you here if anything goes wrong.”
Perhaps I was more cowardly than these vampires, but I had neither a fiend’s nigh-indestructible body, nor a host of magic gathered in my own blood. The idea of walking into that nearly-solid darkness with nothing but a single candle to light my way made me feel almost nauseated with trepidation.
Talos straightened, the sounds of mechanical clicking and whirring emanating from his chest, and then there was a bright spark of light behind the glass plate: frosty blue-white in this darkness, growing brighter as the gears whirled faster within his heart, lenses aligning to magnify the illumination.
He put an arm out to block my path, standing before me and aiming the beam of light down the hall.
Nothing was there. Nothing but piles of broken brick, swathes of dust, and a few cobwebs. I’d half expected to see something crouched there, staring back at us.
Wroth’s ears twitched, his tail flicking close enough to nearly brush my leg. “Fascinating,” he said, turning his pale eyes on me, and I realized that they were nearly the same shade as the icy light spilling from my golem’s chest. His pupils were so thin as to be nearly invisible. “Who made him?”
“I did.” I glanced at Talos with pride, and another, darker sensation I did my best to ignore. “That is, I designed him in full. A sanguimancer animated him, but his form and his capabilities are all my own work.”
Wroth’s gaze moved between me and the golem, and finally he turned to look at the hall Talos was illuminating. “Without sanguimancy?” he asked, taking a few steps forward.