“It’s just a stone cistern for cold storage,” Renthrette whispered, beginning to lose patience. It had, after all, been minutes since she’d killed anything.
I climbed in and looked around, stretching to take the lamp from her. By its light, a rusted iron grill shone dully in the corner of the floor. The shaft beneath it looked like a drain of some sort, but it was quite dry.
“I think this is it,” I said.
“You think?” said Renthrette, dropping easily in through the hatch and peering at the grate.
“See any other possibilities?”
“Not here.”
“Then this must be it.”
The grill was held in place by heavy nails driven into a timber frame. We hadn’t brought tools, so I squatted down beside it, wondering how we were going to move it and smelling the cold, damp air that drifted out of the shaft. Renthrette nudged me aside and planted her boot squarely in the center of the grate. She pushed and it bent noticeably, scattering red flakes of iron into the hole beneath. Leaning on my shoulder she stomped at it twice more, until I hushed her, sure that someone would be attracted to the noise. We waited, holding our breath and looking at each other. Then, without warning, she did it again, and this time her foot went straight through.
Two bars of the thin metal had snapped clean out, and several more had buckled enough that they could be bent out of the way. Renthrette went first and I lowered myself awkwardly into the shaft after her, her hands closing about my waist, drawing me down toward her in ways far less erotic than they sound.
“Drop,” she said. “It’s only a couple of feet.”
I did so and she braced me against the impact embarrassingly.
“I’m fine,” I spluttered. “You don’t have to heave me around like a child, you know.”
“I was just trying to help,” she said, affronted.
“Don’t. Now where the hell are we?”
We were in a passage. The shaft we had just dropped through had been alarmingly narrow and I had had visions of crawling, as we had done through the cistern drain at the Falcon’s Nest. But this was quite different. Once in the tunnel proper, we were able to walk upright and side by side. The lamp showed the same carved buttresses and gargoyle ornaments that we had seen elsewhere in the city, but here you could see the goblin heads that had been smashed elsewhere. The ancient kings or tribe leaders of Stehnmarch stood proud, though strange to our eyes, and noble. Renthrette lifted the lamp and gazed at them.
“So it’s true,” she said, her voice hushed. “They were here first. The ‘fair folk,’ Sorrail. . It’s all been a lie.”
“I hate to say I told you so but. .”
“No, you don’t,” said Renthrette. “You love it. And to be precise you never
“I implied it,” I said. “I was skeptical.”
“You always are.”
“Thank you,” I said, smiling and bowing slightly as if she had paid me the highest compliment. Renthrette was moving off down the passage, however, staring at everything except me, and didn’t notice.
The passage was straight and there were no doors or corridors leading off it, so we made rapid progress in what felt like a slow turning and descending spiral. The flint underfoot seemed newly cut and showed little sign of wear, but patches of dark moss clung to all the surfaces and water dropped from the arched ceiling in places and coursed in rivulets down the walls. It seemed to be getting colder as we progressed, and in minutes I was catching sight of tiny icicles gleaming in the lamplight like quartz.
Then came a staircase, broad and steep, and at its foot, a round chamber, with relief carvings on its walls showing the Stehnites laying out their dead. There was a single door leading out of this chamber and I stopped Renthrette before she opened it.
She gave me an impatiently inquiring look.
“Did you look at the carvings?” I said.
“No. This is hardly the time for artistic appreciation.”
“They’re funeral engravings,” I said.
“So?”
“This is a burial chamber.”
“I thought you said this was an escape route from the city,” she said.
“That was its secondary function, yes, but it was also where they brought the bodies of their rulers and dignitaries.”
“So?” she parroted.
“So we are about to enter an underground graveyard, a mausoleum. I thought you should know.”
“You said,” she said, unmoved, and in truth I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say. I suppose I thought we should somehow feel a sense of respect for those who had died, but since we had recently been doing our best to kill their successors, that didn’t make a lot of sense. Maybe I wanted her to feel guilty like me.
She pressed the handle until it clicked dully, then she pulled the heavy door, its timbers dragging, wide open. Inside, though the tunnel was about the same size as the one we’d just come through, it seemed tighter, more restricted. The air had a dusty staleness that you could smell through the damp, and where the walls had formerly been plain, they were now lined with doors, each no more than a few feet square and set at waist height. They were made of some hard, reddish lumber designed to resist decay, though few had after all these centuries. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of them, and where the portal timbers had crumbled or been eaten away by worms, you could see the black, arched hollows where the corpses lay.
The place smelled of death. Not death like in a butcher’s shop, all caked blood and internal organs, or the stench of decay like a rat left out in the sun, but ancient and forgotten like the world the people buried here had inhabited. It smelled of age and all the time that had gone by since their passing. Some of the bodies had monuments carved into their sepulchers and the corridor around them swelled into a kind of vault, others were marked only by a line of indecipherable script. We inched along the passage, Renthrette, for all her earlier casualness, slowing as if awed by a sense of dread or sadness. And around us, stacked and arrayed in their decayed finery, lay the dead.
The tunnel ended abruptly in a tight spiral staircase that wound upward.
“We must have missed it,” I said, suddenly afraid for reasons I couldn’t say. I began to bustle about in the low and shifting lamplight, scanning the various tombs with growing alarm. “It must be here,” I muttered into the stillness. “We must have passed it.”
“What are we looking for?” said Renthrette, calm and quiet.
“A mausoleum with a figure of a warrior carved into a pillar: life-size. Tough to miss, you’d think.”
“We’ve seen a lot of tombs.”
“But have we seen
“How would I know?” she returned.
“Brilliant,” I remarked. “So we’re stuck here.”
“If worse comes to worst we’ll go back the way we came,” Renthrette answered with a reasonableness that sounded labored. It was getting to her, too, however much she pretended otherwise.
“What if we can’t?” I barked. It suddenly seemed more likely that we would be locked in, that we would be entombed here forever. The idea chilled me to the bone.
“We have to get out,” said Renthrette, urgent.
“We can’t,” I replied, suddenly quite sure. “We’re going to be walled up with the dead. We’ll never get out. . ”
“Stop it, Will,” said Renthrette, slapping her hands over her ears. “Don’t say that. There’s something trying to stop us, distracting us. The dead are confusing us.”
For a moment I thought she was right, but then it hit me.
“No,” I said, suddenly clear and moving away from her. “It’s not the dead. But something
“Why must you?” said a voice.
I turned hurriedly and found myself looking at Garnet. He was coming down the corridor toward us, armed for
