Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,139

and Malachite huffs and starts striding so long it takes all my leg-length just to keep up with him.

The Dark Below isn’t so dark near Pala Amna.

The brightmoss ensures that, but there also seems to be more natural light clustered around the city—reflections on water from little bioluminescent creatures and flora that live below, or above. Maybe that’s why they built Pala Amna here. It’s most certainly why, when the twists and turns around stone and abyss finally come to a stop, we see the waiting battalions clearly—a small crowd of beneathers armored to the teeth in valkerax bone, with spears and massive broadswords like Malachite’s. They wait patiently, nursing strands of jerky as their commanding officers meander through them checking equipment readiness.

“The fabled valkerax-slayers, in the flesh.” I whistle.

“Hurry up!” Lysulli demands from ahead, waving us over. The closer I get, the more I realize just how many of the two battalions look to be Lysulli and Malachite’s age. Young.

“Much younger than I thought they’d be, but no less impressive,” I murmur to Yorl, who nods.

“Beneathers don’t have a very long expected lifespan. The spiral takes most of them before their time. Getting older than three decades is a rarity.”

“Aha.” I nod, and think to myself that’s perhaps why the ancestor council was so eager to agree to Fione’s offer—tired of seeing their young succumb to the valkerax, only to be replaced by the younger. And it explains why Lysulli is in a position of power and still so young. I watch them salute the two commanding officers of the battalions by placing their pale fingers together, lightly interlaced. From where I’m standing, the points of Lysulli’s fingertips almost look like a spiral. Always the damn spiral.

In a way, the beneathers are imprisoned just as much as the valkerax they fight.

As much as Heartless.

The battalions are much less impressed with us than we are with them—but the matronic definitely catches their attention and awe. They shoot looks at it as they march, and we march with them. At some point, we pass a long, low, flat expanse of stone, almost like a field. Amethysts have been carved into various shapes of various sizes, embedded in the stone in a way that’s all too familiar. In a way I saw that day I left Nightsinger’s forest, along the Bone Road.

Graves.

Graves innumerable, stretching into the darkness.

But these graves aren’t from the Sunless War. They’re from a thousand years of fighting. Of dying. Of sacrificing.

The bracelet of amethysts jangles on my wrist as if calling out to its brethren, calling out to the place we all go in the end. The place we’re all marching to. A place I refuse to let my friends go to. A place I’ve been many times. A place familiar to me and yet, at its core, still unfamiliar. Frightening. Comforting. A spiral.

Malachite’s scars. Evlorasin’s blood promise within me. Lucien’s memories, of a cool little room overlooking a black sand beach.

No one is ever really gone.

“This is never-goodbye,” I whisper.

30

TO PALA ORIAS

The trek to Pala Orias is far easier than the maze we traversed after the Fog Gate. Or so it feels. Having two beneather battalions of highly trained warriors cut down every hungry crawly that decides to slither toward us is a true blessing. As is having Lysulli. They know the way to Pala Orias with a bird’s mind for navigation, steering us through tight weaves of rock tunnels and devastated canyons so huge and wide, they put infinity to shame.

The canyons are more unsettling than the tunnels, frankly—the darkness stretching on forever and holding all manner of unknown horrors spun entirely by mind. My thief-brain screams that we could be attacked from any angle, at any time, and the brightmoss torches the battalions bear would detect such an attack far too late. But I suppose that’s why beneathers developed such good hearing in the first place.

And I’m not the only one worried—everyone is on edge in the canyons, Malachite walking with his sword drawn, Fione with her crossbow unfolded. Yorl holds a handkerchief up to his nose, blinking away dust and stale air as he desperately darts his low-light vision in every direction, the matronic thumping after him mindlessly. Even the battalions seem on edge this deep down—beneathers twitching in their armor at the faintest sounds I can’t hear.

Lucien seems to, irritatingly and wonderfully and as always, know how I feel. He walks beside me, close, his body heat a welcome thing in the