Chapter 23
Jesamin
The fulmen veins went dark, flickering like a moth's wings against a candle.
I held my breath, silently praying, and a short eternity passed before the light returned.
Another deep hum reverberated through the walls and floor, subaudible, and yet powerful enough to make my ears pop and send me stumbling against the door.
The surge of the crystcore sent occult waves of energy through the chthonium, making my stomach churn and writhe within me.
I braced myself, taking a moment to simply breathe and get my bearings.
I knew Wroth was right there, just a handspan away if only the door would open again.
With the fulmen brightening again, I could even see his massive outline on the other side of the cloudy crystal, hear the faintest thuds as he brought his fists down against the door.
It was possible I was imagining the banging noises, my own fear and desperation adding sound to the motions, but I knew that not even Wroth was able to break through the Artifice of the Fae.
First I ran my fingers over the door, then the chthonium frame. It responded neither to gentle strokes, or tapping, not even the punch I immediately regretted levelling at it.
Thanks to the surging crystcore, I was trapped here alone.
I took another deep breath, then slid my fingers into my pocket and brought out the little steel emergency lighter. I hadn’t used it once since entering the Below; the reservoir should still be full of the flammable distillation I’d purchased from an alchemist in Argent.
I lit it up, holding the flame up to the door. Wroth’s shadow went still. Drawing it back and holding my hand between the flame and the door, I pressed my hand flat to the crystal, fingers splayed.
I snapped it off, wanting to conserve what little light I had, and then Wroth’s shadow put his hand on the door over mine, spreading his fingers wide.
I put my hand up, aligning my smaller fingers to his talons. If I closed my eyes, I could almost feel the warmth of his palm against mine, the comforting rumble of his voice. He had the blood charm; he could, and would, find me again. I had faith in that.
I leaned forward, trying to press into him, wishing I could sublimate my body through the door…but of course it was only wishful thinking.
Blinking hard, I slowly slid my hand from the cold crystal, watching as Wroth’s shadow did the same. Bit by bit we peeled away from each other, and I finally forced myself to turn my back on the door.
“Gods fuck it all to hell,” I whispered with feeling under my breath.
If the Lady of Light herself came down and told me that Liuridar was bent on winnowing me from the group in order to kill me alone, I would fully believe her.
It was like this place wanted to separate us, to cull from the herd at its own pace.
But the only way I would see Wroth again was by making myself move, so I did.
Turning to face the unknown path before me, I patted my pockets.
I had no more Pathfinder beetles, but I did have multiple packets of black powder and shot, and decided to keep those in reserve.
I could only pray they stayed dry. The chthonium knife I’d collected from the hive beyond the Gates was still of an unknown quantity; I preferred the sensation of a human-forged weapon in my hand now.
So thinking, I drew my sword, light catching the cold iron edge like liquid and pooling in bright puddles along the grooves in the blade.
The only path forward was a quiet, curving tunnel. I moved with silent steps, holding my sword defensively as I rounded the curves, waiting for something to leap out at me or come sniffing at my heels.
Another lab finally opened before me, and I took in the cylinders of bubbling fluid before I stepped into the open. None of them were broken. None of them, in fact, contained anything. The preserving fluid had puddled on the floor, but there was no sign of anything living lying in wait.
I looked up at the chthonium pipes. One of them was slowly dripping. With nothing but the subaudible hum of the crystcore to listen to, the plink as another drop fell was like a gunshot. Something rustled in the distance.
I want out.
That was my only thought as I moved through the room.
I would face the carrion-feeders, the orchard keepers, another primordial fiend—anything to be on my way out of this place, with Wroth safe at my side.
Another rustle reached my ears, and adrenaline flooded my veins, anticipating the need to chop into something living.
Nausea swooped in my stomach as I prepared to fight some heretofore-unseen monstrosity. I raised my sword, my muscles bunching painfully.
So it took me by surprise when I turned a corner and found a human facing me.
We both froze, staring at each other.
A man huddled behind one of the cylinders, wearing work clothes so grimy it was impossible to tell what color they had been before brownish-grey dust rendered them into a drab mass.
He was filthy from head to toe, the whites of his eyes almost shocking against the dirt, sweat, and blood caked into his skin, and his body was skeletal beneath the clothes.
He clutched a chunk of mildewed bread, his mouth full, and as my eyes dropped from the reddened stains around his mouth, I saw the thin black circle of a chthonium collar around his neck.
“Who are you?” I asked, keeping my voice low. “Are you from the Rivers?”
He started shivering, his eyes locked on my sword, and with a whimper and a completely audible, “Don’t hurt me!”, he scrambled from his hiding place and ran down the corridor.
I blinked, still rooted to the ground. He spoke Veladari; he was not some enslaved human awakened from the distant past.
He was one of Alvar’s men.
Almost before my mind could catch up, my feet were running after him.
I gave chase through several more labs and down another curving tunnel where I could only see the faintest glimpses of his dirty clothes vanishing around corners.
If he had been less emaciated, he would’ve left me in the dust, but his weakness worked in my favor.
Tired as I was, I managed to keep him in sight just ahead of me.
Until he sprinted into a circular room, and crammed his entire body into a hole in the wall.
“Wait!” I stopped short of lunging into the hole, which was just large enough for a medium-sized man to pass through. Wroth would never have fit through it.
But he didn’t come back. I heard faint scuffling noises as he drew out of reach, panting under his breath.
I leaned against the wall, frowning at the hole. The room itself was chthonium, like everything made by the Fae; this hole was a perfectly circular opening in the expanse of metal, revealing a tunnel chiseled into the solid, deep grey rock of the Below that went both up and down.
I wondered what it had been. For some reason, looking around the circular room with its lack of any identifying features, I felt the weird sensation that I was looking at a garbage chute.
Maybe where they brought the bodies, before they ended up with enough bodies to require pits full of worms to break them down.
The man’s faint sounds faded, leaving me alone in this dead end.
“Damn it,” I whispered under my breath, sheathing my sword and shoving one leg into the hole.
It dropped downwards, but rough gouges in the gritty walls gave me hand- and footholds as I lowered myself. Inch by inch, pausing every so often to listen, until my thighs and arms were shaking with the strain of moving slowly.
And my garbage chute theory felt a little more correct, because it was a straight drop. No side tunnels, no wormholes, nothing but a straight up and down descent. No fulmen lit the passage below, and I felt like I was crawling into the belly of a beast.
I jerked when my foot hit a soft floor rather than empty air, but my shriek of surprise locked in my throat, coming out as a strangled gasp. It coincided with another surge of the crystcore’s humming, my teeth buzzing and eyes feeling too large for their sockets.
I crouched, fighting the nausea until the surge passed, then flicked the lighter open, spending more precious fluid to see where I was.
The floor was thick with ash. The flue ended in a massive square box with three walls, and I nudged the ash with the toe of my boot. There were bits of charred bone buried in here.
A crematorium. I had followed the man down the flue of a crematorium, and my hands were black with the ancient remains of the dead.
I wiped them on my breeches, taking a moment to study the room outside the crematorium before allowing the flame to die.
I got a sense of rough walls, as though the Fae couldn’t be bothered to waste precious chthonium on the place where they rendered bodies to ash. Creeping from the narrow entrance of the crematorium, I reached out to touch the wall, guiding my path.
At first I thought my eyes were adjusting to the darkness, but I slowly realized there was a light from a connecting tunnel. A pale light, flickering with a ghostly hue.
There were soft sounds, and human voices.
Moving slowly, I chased the light a centimeter at a time, feeling my way with my feet so I wouldn’t run into something and give away my presence.
There was a sound I would recognize in my sleep: the clink and squeal of metal on metal. The corridor brightened, this time with the warm and natural tones of open flame, and I heard a male voice mutter something.
The flames died out, and I edged up to the open doorway, tucking my body flat against the wall to peer in.
For a moment, my brain refused to make sense of what I was seeing. The room was almost homey, the stone walls covered in midnight blue velvet drapes, the furniture made of actual wood rather than functional pieces of molded chthonium.