a sorcerer’s experiments with fungi. They wouldn’t burn out over time, and they wouldn’t blow out in a gust like fire.
It was a deliberate marker.
Left, then.
“This way.” Cab directed them, all too aware of Einan breathing down his neck. He couldn’t help but feel like she wanted something more from him, although Cab had already sworn his allegiance and couldn’t think of what else he had to offer.
Another rumble beneath them. Cab dodged a fall of pebbles. He jerked back from touching the wall for balance. Behind him, Einan scrambled to do the same.
Among Queensguard recruits, whispers suggested that the catacombs remembered everyone who touched their stone. The walls remembered. The old queens remembered. And so every recruit kept their hands firmly to themselves on their tours, glad of the thick bootsoles between them and the stone floors.
After he’d fled the Queensguard, Cab came to suspect those rumors were probably gossip encouraged by the recruits’ officers, who didn’t want the rowdy youths touching everything in the royal burial chambers. He hadn’t realized how deeply the old superstition still affected him.
He wasn’t willing to test his theory. Not with others depending on him.
“Hands in,” Cab said gruffly. “Don’t touch the walls.”
Einan didn’t have to follow his orders, but she did follow this one, and Cab was grateful. He could only help as much as she’d let him.
He gestured reflexively with two fingers, an old Queensguard signal that meant they were to move along around the corner. Einan replied with a ruder variant.
“I’m no soldier,” she said, had the good sense to get in close and keep her voice low, “and I don’t respond to commands like a dog.”
“Right. I’m going around the corner.” Cab barely moved his mouth. When he glanced back at Einan, he had only an impression of her face. She was so alive. High color in her cheeks, the sheen in her eyes like light through a whiskey bottle. So unlike the mirror-glaze of the Queensguard’s gaze. Not a soldier, and obviously terrified, but there was anger there, too. Determination.
She wanted to be here.
That was Cab’s impression as he moved, nearly stepping into open air. Einan slammed solidly into his back.
For one sickening moment, Cab thought he’d swing forward and down through the hole where the floor had given way.
Someone had triggered one of the traps before them.
Then someone else had come along behind and turned the triggered trap into a passageway. Real torches stuck into the walls, casting haphazard orange light through the empty space. Steep slopes on all sides faded into almost total darkness below. The bottom wasn’t visible, but Cab thought he could see something—someone—moving down there. Deep, deep down.
“We’re going down,” he said.
Einan was unfazed. “You afraid of heights, handsome?”
“Not that I know of,” said Cab.
“Figures.” Einan replied. “Why should this next bit be a nightmare for you?”
In the torchlight, Cab could see strange markings carved into the stone. He didn’t understand them, but they were too deliberate to be claw marks from vermin. They formed a pattern.
It was nothing like the beautiful, barren halls of the queens’ catacombs. And yet something about the structure of the hall below mirrored the hall above. Dark and light. Night and day.
Better hurry if you don’t want to lose them, One said.
I’m going, Cab said, but didn’t move yet.
Do you think I’d ask you to do anything unsafe?
Properly scolded, Cab jumped—and slid on his ass through gravel, past torches and carvings, into the dark. Panic rose, louder than the inner voice demanding to know why he was shredding his backside for a Resistance he’d fought to put down not so long ago.
The answer to that was obvious. The fullness of his heart with One in it made his transgressions impossible to ignore. There was no honor in hiding if he could use his skills to combat the Queen’s brute might.
The real problem lay in trying to figure how he could stop sliding without smashing into a wall or cutting himself to pieces on debris.
Cab jerked his forearms in against his chest, squinting at the flicker of torches as they whizzed past. Behind him, Einan’s soft voice muttered something that sounded part prayer and part vulgar action with a plate of mashed potatoes. Then he heard a crash of gravel that meant she was sliding down after him.
Kept going for a while, until he rolled into a wall. The impact didn’t quite wind him.
Einan’s secondary impact was the blow that did him in.
One followed them, picking her way