skin was whiter than snow. Slag writhed and pushed Malden’s cloak off him, as if he had grown too hot. Consciousness had nearly fled him.
Malden ran over to where Cythera stood and whispered, “Will he perish?”
“Yes,” she said, looking him right in the eye. “Whether it happens in the next few minutes, though, or as much as a day from now, I can’t say. Not without knowing what kind of poison was on this dart, how much of a dose he received—and a hundred other things I can’t begin to guess at.”
“You must know an antidote, though. Surely there is one!”
“If I could get him out of here—if I could bring him to Coruth, perhaps. But she’s hundreds of miles away.”
“We have to try. If he has any chance at all.” He reached over and took her hand. “Cythera, I know you won’t want to hear it. But this means we have to escape from the Vincularium as fast as we can. We can’t go looking for Croy.”
Her mouth formed a hard line but she didn’t look away from his eyes.
“You’re right,” she said. The words came as if they’d been dragged out of her.
Malden nodded and turned around, intending to build some kind of litter out of the tents they carried in their packs. He stopped, though, when he saw that Slag was crawling across the floor.
“Stop that this instant,” Cythera said.
Slag halted his forward progress. Yet he looked up at them and said, “Fuck off. I know I’m dying. You don’t have to fucking whisper about it. Before I go, though, I have to see what’s behind that door. I have to know if it’s still there.”
Chapter Forty-six
“What was that sound, just now?” Croy asked.
Mörget turned and shook his head to indicate he’d heard nothing.
“It sounded like someone screaming, very far away.”
The barbarian stopped where he was and tilted his head to one side. “Nothing,” he said. “Perhaps a gust of wind, howling through these ruins. Did it sound to you like your woman?”
“. . . No,” Croy admitted. “You must be right. Let’s hurry onward, all the same.”
They had found a spiral ramp that led upward to a higher level. A thin stream of water rolled down the ramp and made their footing precarious, but Croy was able to climb with one hand along the rough stone wall.
At the top of the ramp they found a long, low tunnel, perhaps twenty feet wide, its ceiling not much higher than their heads. It ran away from them into darkness. Croy hardly trusted his sense of direction at that point, but he believed the tunnel headed back in the direction of the main shaft.
The floor was slick with water, and a thin vapor coiled around his ankles. The tunnel was filled with broad stone racks, standing in uniform rows. Each rack had four shelves, and each shelf was packed tight with a type of object he didn’t recognize. They were cylindrical in shape, though some were squatter than others, and some taller. Each was wrapped tightly in coarse fabric with a broad weave. They gave off a peculiar smell of dampness and must, and Croy thought they must be rotting away after so long underground in the wet.
Farther along the corridor, narrow side passages opened to either side. Mörget took the one on the left, Croy on the right, and when they came back together in the center they each could report they’d seen the same thing—more long, wet corridors, more racks, myriad more cylinders wrapped in fabric. There were at least a dozen such tunnels, and every one was filled in exactly the same manner.
Croy’s curiosity got the better of him. He mounted his candle on top of one rack to free his hands. Then he lifted one of the cylinders from the rack and carefully unwrapped it. It was heavier than he’d expected it to be, but once open, it crumbled and fell apart easily. Inside the fabric he found three pounds of stinking black dirt. Clods of it broke off and pattered down along his cloak and struck his boots. A trickle of fine dirt rolled down the sleeve of his jerkin. Peering close in the darkness, he made out pale shapes inside the dark dirt, so he broke open the larger clods for a closer inspection. Growing inside the dirt were yellow-white fans of pulpy fungus.
“This is a farm,” he said, surprised. “Of course, the dwarves couldn’t grow proper crops down here—but mushrooms prosper under