Chapter 6: Under the Old Stones

The stair swallowed the torchlight in twenty steps.

Beyond that was only the dark and the sound of their own breathing and, below, a dry shuffling that might have been rats or might not. Erlich went first, shield forward, spear point riding the gloom. Godwin came behind him with a shaft already on the string. Then the baron, then Tomas with the torches held high and both hands steady now, then Brunner at the rear with his splintered shield and the same dour patience he'd worn through the dock fight and the scrub.

The steps were cut from the native rock, worn in the center where centuries of feet had climbed and descended. Orc feet, orc priests with their meat-offerings, the carnivore-gods they'd fed in the dark. The air thickened as they went — warmer, fouler, tinged with rot and something acrid that caught in the throat.

"Something's been burning down here," Godwin said. "Not wood."

"Charcoal," Erlich said. "And worse. Alchemy."

The stair delivered them into a corridor of fitted blocks, dry-set and tight, the old orc-builders' work still holding after two centuries of neglect. The ceiling was low enough that Erlich's hair nearly brushed it. The walls pressed close. A place made for things shorter and broader than men.

The first dead thing came out of a side passage without warning.

Brunner caught it on the shield — a solid blow, the rim catching its chest — and drove the spear home before it could grapple. It collapsed onto the stone and the one behind it stumbled over the body. Godwin put an arrow into that one's skull at three paces, the string-thwack loud in the stone close, and the thing dropped.

"They're thinner down here," Leofric said.

"He spent the horde on the surface," Erlich said. "These are the leftovers. The ones he couldn't be bothered to throw at us."

They pushed on. The complex ran deeper than the surface ruins suggested — corridors branching and doubling back, rooms opening off them, the old orc-builders' geometry turning in on itself. In places the dressed blocks gave way to rougher cuts, older stone from whatever the temple had been built atop. The air pressed in, heavy and stale, and the torchlight washed orange across walls that had never seen the sun.

More dead came. One at a time, two at a time, shambling out of doorways and side-passages. The six killed them methodically — shield and spear, arrow and hatchet, the rhythm they'd learned on the docks and hardened in the scrub. Tomas kept the light forward, and his hands were steady now, and he did not flinch when one of the dead lurched into the torch-glow three feet from his face.

"Getting the hang of it," Godwin said, between thrusts.

"Don't jinx him," Leofric said.

The living were absent. No voice, no footprint, no sign that anyone breathing had walked these passages since the war. The place was deserted of everything but the dead and the dark.

Then the corridor opened, and they found the camp.

It was a side chamber, half-curtained with rotted cloth, and Erlich pushed the hanging aside and let the torchlight in. A straw pallet, slept in and sour. A table covered in the wreckage of a month's bad work — broken crucibles, spent charcoal crumbling to dust, vials of greenish liquid gone thick with age. A bowl of water filmed grey. A half-loaf hardened to stone. And everywhere, on the table and the floor and the walls, the iridescent stain of exhausted magic — the air itself tasting burnt, the way the air tastes after lightning, and the corners of the room shimmering faintly where magic had pooled and dried.

"Here," Erlich said. He pointed with the spear at a stone mortar on the table, and inside it a fine white grit. "The finger bone. Ground to powder."

Godwin took a step closer. "All of it?"

"Near enough. One bone, a month of this — he's been spending mana like water. No pacing, no husbanding. Just pouring it through his hands." Erlich's voice was flat. "A wizard with proper training would stretch a bone like this across a career. This one's burned through it in weeks. Raising a town's worth of dead on panic and a full well."

"Imagine what he does when the well runs dry," Leofric said.

"It's nearly dry now. We made sure of that." Erlich straightened. "Move. The camp means he's close."

"Lieutenant." Brunner's voice was low, the first words he'd spoken since the stair. "Blood is running down the baron's arm. Leofric can't put weight on the ankle. The boy's come through something he shouldn't have had to. I'm asking you to pull back."

Erlich met his eyes. "Denied. He's spent his mana and his dead. If we stop, he refills both."

Brunner said nothing. His grip tightened on the splintered shield, and the resignation settled into his face like a man shouldering a weight he'd carried too long.

"Move," Erlich said again.

They pushed deeper. The corridors tightened. The dead grew thinner — the dregs of the dregs — and then stopped altogether. The complex ran out of rooms, out of passages, out of choices. The last corridor ended in a wall of fitted blocks, tight and sound, no seam wide enough for a knife.

A dead end.

The six stopped. Torches up. Blank stone.

"That's it," the baron said. His voice was hoarse. "The warrens must run further, but there's no way through."

"It's not a dead end," Leofric said.

He had been running his hands along the wall since they'd stopped — palms flat, fingers tracing the joins, the way a lockpick reads a lock. Now he was crouched at the base of the left-hand block, thumb working a groove no one else had seen, his face intent and almost happy. His expression was that of a man doing the one thing he was better at than anyone in the company.

"Leofric," Godwin began.

"Hush. I'm working." He pressed something. The stone stayed still. He pressed something else, ran his thumb along a hairline invisible to anyone not searching for it, and leaned his weight into the seam. "Hives of villainy, friend. You spend enough nights in them, you learn where the secret doors are."

A block pivoted. Slow, grudging, on a pin set before Magyar was a town. Behind it, black air and a draft, warm and foul, blowing up out of the dark.

Erlich looked into it. The draft was warm against his face, and the smell that rose with it — rot and charcoal and something older, something sealed in the stone before Magyar was a town — made the torch-flames gutter. For a long moment no one spoke. The dark beyond the pivoted block went deeper than the light could follow.