and swinging into the shaft. I climb down as fast as possible. The rope is rough. After fifty feet, blisters start to form on my palms. After sixty feet, my muscles are on fire. I take controlled breaths and keep going. Seventy feet, eighty feet, ninety . . . The rope comes to an end. I secure my grip and look down. “Ailesse?” I shout. Sweat drips down my forehead. “Ailesse!”
“Bastien!”
Relief floods me. Her voice is muffled by thick air, but she can’t be very far away. I notice a dim ring of light below—the end of the shaft.
“Jump when you reach the end of the rope!” she says.
I climb down a little farther until I’m hanging by the hook. I let go without thinking twice. I trust her.
The fall isn’t long; I don’t need to drop into a roll from the impact of landing. A moment after my feet hit the ground, Ailesse’s hand weaves through mine. I kiss her before taking a look around us. “Do you see the bridge?” I ask. We’re not closed in by tunnel walls anymore; this space is wider. She holds up the lantern. A few feet ahead, the edge of the ground falls away into a dark void.
“I think so.” She leads me twenty or so yards around the curving edge of the pit. Solid circles representing the full moon are engraved on the ground along the way. Ailesse points to the symbol of the bridge over earth at the foot of a stone pathway that stretches across the void. The soul bridge. “I can’t tell where it leads to or how far it goes into the darkness.”
I’m about to suggest we walk across it together when I see an unlit torch in a sconce behind us. I cross back to it and rub the top of its wrapped fibers. They’re coated in something sticky like pitch, but the resin smells strangely sweet. Whatever it is has kept stable for who knows how many years, decades, or even centuries.
Ailesse pulls out the candle from her lantern and hands it to me. I light the torch. The flame is strong and burns without smoking.
“Look, there are more.” She points to two nearby sconces along the wall. As we light the torches inside them, we notice others and keep walking around the circular pit, lighting all of them until the ledge ends, about halfway around. At least we can see what’s across the other side now—a curving, natural wall of stone.
It has to be about a hundred feet tall, where it blends into the cavern ceiling. The wall is pocked with boarded-up tunnel openings. Each marks different levels of the catacombs and mines above us—places that must have been carved out before people realized they’d drop off into this cavern. But the strangest thing is that no tunnel has been carved across the pit on our level.
“I don’t understand.” I scrutinize the thirty-yard-wide pit and the natural bridge that runs across it. “The bridge leads to a dead end.” There’s no wide ledge to stand on over there, like we have on this side. “What about the Gates of the Beyond that you said you have to open?”
Ailesse reverently gazes at the end of the bridge. “They won’t appear until I play the siren song.”
I nod like that makes perfect sense. I guess it will when I see them.
I study the bridge harder. It’s five feet wide—much narrower than the land bridge I caught a glimpse of during the new moon. It’s also five feet thick. Below the bridge is only air. It looks like wind or water whittled the rest of the stone away. Except there is no wind or water down here, and the rock is durable limestone, not sandstone. The thought of Ailesse standing on a bridge so thin and fragile-looking makes my pulse race.
“Do you think it’s midnight yet?” I ask her.
“Almost.”
“Are you ready?”
“Yes,” she replies without the slightest tremble. “But you need to stay on the ledge. The Chained could catch you off guard and toss you into the pit.”
I hate the fact that I can’t see these monsters.
“Be careful with that black powder, too, or you might destroy the bridge.”
I nod, begrudgingly removing the two packs from my shoulders. I set them fifteen feet back, against the far wall of our ledge. I hoped blasting the powder could help control the number of Chained on the bridge. I was going to ignite each cask, one at a time,