used it as a battering ram to break the door open, thunderous echoes rolling away into the passages of the fortress with each strike. It took some effort, but they eventually succeeded, breaching the door and pulling it apart.
Beyond was a passage that led deeper into the mountain. After a few hundred feet, they came to a wide spot with a fifty-foot-deep pit barring their way. On the far side was a drawbridge operated by a winch with a hand crank.
“If you and Prince Trajan would stand back, I can cross and lower the bridge,” Hector said.
Trajan frowned but followed Isabel back the way they’d come far enough for Hector’s magic to work. By the time they returned, the bridge was in place. The corridor, roughly hewn from the mountain and having only rudimentary supports, continued for another hundred feet, opening into a small round cave with three hallways leading out. Two led back toward the part of the fortress occupied by the House of Karth, but the one directly across from them led farther into the mountain.
Another fifty feet and they entered a large irregular cavern lit by a vein of naturally luminescent crystals running through the ceiling. The place was a scene of squalor and filth. At least a dozen creatures had lived here, sharing this single living space, wallowing in each other’s excrement. The stench was nauseating. The flies, revolting.
“This is where the Sin’Rath slept,” Ayela said.
Trajan turned away from the room. Two of his men vomited.
“I’ve seen enough,” Isabel said, covering her mouth and nose.
“There may still be a witch here,” Trajan said. “We must search these chambers, no matter how distasteful it is.”
“Well then, let’s be quick about it,” Isabel said, drawing her sword and heading to one of the exits, with Hector falling in behind her.
They searched for over an hour, covering an extensive network of passages and rooms, some locked, some open, others without doors. From this network, the Sin’Rath could view and hear most of the important rooms in the fortress and had access to many of the more important areas via secret passages that connected with the other networks of passages but that locked from the inside.
Isabel was especially interested in one room they found. It opened onto a balcony encircling a pit below. On one wall of the pit was a stout door locked from the outside. A hole in the ceiling of the cave allowed a stream of daylight to fill the well of the pit while plunging the rest of the room into shadow. It looked very different from here, Isabel thought.
They found a few passages leading to the surface but they were all still locked and barred from within, so they decided to keep looking, reasoning that the Sin’Rath had escaped by some other route.
While the search revealed nothing new, it did serve to reinforce the absolute nature of the Sin’Rath’s treachery. For Trajan and Ayela, it felt like mockery. The Sin’Rath had been in control of everything … for their whole lives. They’d been watching, waiting … planning how they would use each member of the Karth line in their schemes.
Having completely searched the fortress, they left through the secret escape tunnel from Severine’s chamber, walking into the cool breeze toward the surface. It opened behind a boulder inside a cave with a natural underground river surfacing in a rushing torrent and cascading out of the cave mouth and down the hillside.
Isabel knelt down, Trajan right beside her, examining footprints in the soft riverbank soil.
“Many people came this way,” Trajan said.
“They’ll be easy enough to follow,” Isabel said. “The hard part will be spotting when the witches break away from the refugees.”
“Not with all of us looking,” Trajan said, motioning for one of his men to take point. They followed the trail from the cave and into the jungle for several hours before they came to a clearing littered with bodies, some were fallen soldiers from both the Regency and Karth, others were just people fleeing the Regency; some died by the blade, others were killed with magic.
The many paths leading from the clearing were all filled with carnage as if the refugees fleeing the fortress had scattered into the jungle the moment the Regency soldiers ambushed them. Trajan and his men began the painstaking process of following each path for a small distance and discovered that they all circled around to the same place, behind and to the left of the spot where they got