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CHAPTERSIX

Serpent spine and temptress tongue

Silent wails and bargains sung

Bowl the heart and drink it dry

Run…run…run…

Dawsyn jolts upright, gripping her chest. It is collapsing inward, suffocating her. Something with claws digs its nails into her flesh. She drags in a rasping, wild breath, and the feeling disappears.

She blinks but sees nothing. Her chest rises and falls with ease, unhindered. Sweat beads on her forehead, collecting in her palms, but she is unharmed. Her chest is intact, her heartbeats decelerate. Just a dream. It was just a dream.

Yet still, those ungodly voices and their slippery verses echo within her. She can no longer say if they did not originate inside her to begin with.

“Dawsyn?” Ryon rouses. She feels the warmth of his body at her side. “What is it?”

She lets her eyes sweep back and forth but it is a useless endeavour. The Ledge people sleep through the night, their torches stifled, the blackness all consuming. “Do you hear that song?”

Ryon is silent a moment before answering. “A song?”

Dawsyn nods – another useless endeavour. “Voices? They woke me.”

Ryon pauses again, presumedly to listen.

Serpent spine, skip down each rung.

Back to where the end begun.

But he only chuckles. “I am surprised you hear anything above Salem’s snoring. He could rival a hog.”

Fear slides its way down Dawsyn’s throat, into her stomach, joined immediately by iskra, rising to the call of turbulence. Still, she hears it, the last whispering tendrils leaking away as though the wind carries it.

Slice their bellies,

Carve the skin.

“What do you hear?” Ryon asks now, all traces of humour gone. He must feel her rigidness, the threat emanating from every pore.

It is strange. Dawsyn has met a great many terrible things in her life. Things that troubled her, scared her. Living, breathing foes that stood taller and numbered greater, all with the desire to kill her. And yet here where she is not touched, where she can see no foe – in this darkness is where she is most afraid. She is gripped by terror. Choked with it. “I hear…” Dawsyn begins, only she can hardly describe it. “I hear…”

Before she can respond, another noise makes itself known. It springs out of the quiet, black nothingness without warning, and stills Dawsyn and Ryon both.

A high-pitched cry – muffled. As though a hand were pressed tightly over a pair of lips. It is immediately followed by rustling and a whispered refrain. The refraction of the Chasm’s walls makes it difficult to discern whether it is a distant sound or not, or what direction it comes from.

Dawsyn rises to her feet and twists her head. She takes the ax from its sheath on her back, turning it over with her hand.

This is a sound she knows. It is not the murmur of something bodiless. This is horribly recognisable.

She does not light a torch. Instead, she calls fire to her palm and lets the small light serve as her guide. Dawsyn hears Ryon make haste at her back, just as alert. She hears the singing of metal as he removes a short sword from its scabbard. She has little doubt that the sounds are recognisable to him as well.

She follows the sounds of the smothered whining. Softened terror is the most heinous kind. It heats Dawsyn’s blood. The flame in her palm brightens, yet the people she passes seem unperturbed in their sleep. Deadened. It disquiets Dawsyn. How has the noise not woken them?

In a crevice along the rockface, a woman’s legs kick out against the earth, one after the other, as though attempting to gain traction. She lies with her upper body hidden within that fissure. Atop her, a dark mass shifts. A man’s form holds her down, and the quiet refrains continue, the muffled sounds of torment.

“Shut up!”the man hisses.

Ryon reaches them before Dawsyn – a stroke of fate, for the magic within her has gathered at her palm, ready to explode, and she sees very little reason not to let it.