Page 30

Two Years Ago

The Iljaria Tunnels

I tell Saga the story, because she hasn’t heard it before, one of the stories I read in Ballast’s book: Long ago, the Iljaria lived under these mountains, carving beauty into the earth, raising cities of stone, filling the darkness with light in a place that will never see the sun.

But they abandoned the tunnels, sealed up the entrances. Forgot them. And then they went east.

If the stories are to be believed, Saga and I could very well be the first people to set foot here in hundreds of years, stumbling by accident through one of those very entrances.

Now we stare in awe at the vast, echoing cavern beyond our cave.

The air is whispering and frigid, our presence as insignificant as pebbles in the ocean.

Stalactites gleam and drip above us, phosphorescent and strange, stretching up and up, out of the halo of our light.

I wonder if the Iljaria were the ones to carve such lyrical shapes in these underearth shadows, or if these caverns were formed in the beginning, crafted by the First Ones themselves.

And yet for all that, the darkness makes my skin crawl. I get the sense we’re being watched, unseen eyes stripping us down to bone.

“The gods have been kind,” says Saga, soft, reverent. She leans against me, keeping all the weight off her broken foot.

I flinch. “The gods are never kind. Not to me.”

Saga says no word of admonishment, but I see it in her swift glance. “We have a chance now,” she says. “If the tunnels run all the way through the mountains—”

“We have no way of knowing if they do.”

“Do you have a compass, Brynja?”

“Of course I have a compass.” It was one of the first things I stole when I started planning my escape.

Saga grins and puts one hand on my shoulder. “Then we go as far west as we can. We’ll be out of the snow, sheltered from the elements—the tunnels are a gift, Bryn. A divine gift. We can’t squander it.”

I grimace, not remotely sure that we’re safer in these caves than out of them. “And if we run out of food? And if we reach a dead end? And if we can’t get back out of the mountain again?” And if we discover why the Iljaria fled? I didn’t tell Saga quite the whole story.

“Have a little faith. Did you even think we’d get this far?”

“Dragging a one-footed princess past Kallias’s guards through a blizzard in the dark ? Absolutely not.”

She throws back her head and laughs at that, and I don’t like how her laughter echoes, eerie and overloud, bouncing off the stones, where anything might hear her.

We sleep a little, by the fire, then nibble rations from the packs and fill our waterskins with melted snow before heading west through the cavern.

Saga moves very slowly, her makeshift crutch tapping and her foot dragging on the stone.

Every step clearly still pains her, but at least nothing foul is leaking through her bandage anymore.

I itch to move faster, uneasy in the echoing cavern and the winding tunnel beyond. The mountain suffocates me, and I can’t shake that sense of watching eyes, somewhere in the dark, the itch of magic under my skin, foul and forgotten.

We walk for hours, that first cavern and tunnel blurring into countless others.

Multiple passages lead out from every cavern, and we choose the westernmost ones, though they don’t always run true.

Many of the tunnels are painted with breathtaking murals depicting the gods and scenes from the old stories, or covered in line after line of colorful Iljaria script. The walls seem to live and breathe.

The shadows do, too.

We come out of a tunnel into another cavern that’s half as big as the first one, crowded with stalactites and stalagmites that look like rows of giant teeth. That sense of being watched grows stronger, and there’s a rustling noise somewhere over our heads.

Saga notices it at last. “Brynja,” she says carefully. “ Why does no one live here anymore? Why did the Iljaria abandon the tunnels?”

I don’t want to tell her, fragile and unsteady beside me. But she can guess the answer anyway, so I do, low and tense. “The stories say the shadows grew wings and claws and teeth. The Iljaria fled because of the monsters.”

She whimpers and I gulp stale air. I give Saga the light to hold; she cradles it in her palm while I draw my knife, hardly adequate protection against whatever lurks in the dark.

“My life for a sword and a foot strong enough to stand on,” says Saga.

But all we can do is inch forward, bit by bit, and pretend we’re not frightened out of our minds. Saga prays to the Prism Goddess and the Red God and the Yellow God, her words tripping over themselves, endlessly repeating.

Halfway across the cavern, I trip over something, and Saga lowers the light to reveal scattered bones, yellowed with age, and among them a sword.

I stare at it, heart pounding in my ears, while Saga whispers a prayer of thanks and lets her broomstick clatter to the floor.

Wordlessly, I pick up the sword and give it to her. We stand back-to-back, the Iljaria light in Saga’s left hand not nearly enough to banish the dark.

“The gods are with us,” says Saga, low and tense. “The gods will protect us.”

I don’t see how.

And then a shadow peels itself off the cavernous ceiling with a scrape of leathery wings and dives straight for us, knocking the light from Saga’s grasp. It clatters among the scattered bones and she shrieks, slashing at the thing with her sword while I do the same with my knife.

Neither of us wounds it, and it hisses and flies out of our reach, then wheels and dives again.

It’s about the size of a cat, and I glimpse dark wings, teeth as long as my fingers, and thick, needlelike hairs that cover its twisting serpentine body.

Its head is narrow and lupine, its tail ends in a knot of white bone, and it has wicked, gleaming claws on each of its four scaly feet.

Its eyes are bloodred. But worst is the sensation of its oily magic, writhing under my skin.

“ Yellow God, Save Us !” Saga cries as she swings the sword again, throwing herself off balance and landing hard on her broken foot. She screams, scrabbling to get away from the bones, her hand closing once more around the light.

Saga holds it up, and the creature emits a high, eerie screech that seems to shake the whole mountain and reverberates down to my soul.

The monster wheels above us, still shrieking, and I get the feeling that it’s calling to its kin, that soon the whole cavern will be swarming with these creatures, or something even worse.

Saga pushes herself to her feet, the sword in one hand, the light in the other. She holds it high.

I eye the winged monster, heft my knife, and hurl it upward. Fly true, fly true, I beg, but whether to the blade or the gods, I don’t know.

The knife hits its mark, and the creature falls, screaming, to the stone floor. Foul black liquid leaks out of it and it grows still, but the red eyes don’t close; they seem to watch me as I snatch my blade back, wiping it clean on the leg of my trousers.

Saga’s eyes catch on mine. Sweat pours down her brow, and her body is taut with pain. Her wound is oozing again, and my gut clenches. She tightens her grip on the damn sword.

I stand back-to-back with her once more, heart ramming in my throat.

We hear them before we see them: a rush of leathery wings, a clatter of claws on stone. Saga shakes. “Gray Goddess, guard our souls,” she whispers.

I try not to think about the bones on the floor. I try not to think that we will join them soon.

Then there’s no time for thinking.

The monsters come all at once.

There are too many of them; they block out the light. All is whirring wings and clacking teeth, scraping claws and thrashing tails, bone-shattering cries and awful magic that slides into my veins and eats me from the inside.

All is dark, dark, dark.

I hack and slash with my knife, managing to kill or wound most of the creatures that come at me. Saga more than holds her own, even with her broken foot. She slays monsters one by one; they pile up at her feet. But it isn’t enough. There are simply too many of them.

Claws rake through my shoulders and my belly; the pain is cold and wrong—these shadows drip with poison.

I curse as I fight and Saga prays, her voice at odds with the shrieking, hissing creatures. There are other monsters besides the winged ones: wolfish beings with snakelike scales and tails that sting, feathered creatures that stand upright like men and wield claws of iron.

Saga’s prayers turn to weeping as she falls to her knees and drops her sword back among the scattered bones. I stand over her, trying to protect her, but it’s no use.

The winged monsters fall on me, claws tearing at my back and my scalp. Pain and death rush up to devour me whole. I never wanted to die like this. Not in the dark. Never in the dark.

And then—

A sudden blur of orange light, somewhere outside the shadows.

An earsplitting roar and a whirl of white.

Monsters torn off me, slashed and broken and flung to the ground. A flash of teeth and the black eyes of a massive arctic bear. It towers over me, nearly twice my height, grabbing at the creatures, killing them with a single swipe of its enormous paw.

The monsters flee from the arctic bear, screaming in fear and pain, and the bear roars after them, its teeth dripping black with their blood.

I cling to Saga among the bodies, the bones, and we shake, shake.

A voice, sharp and smooth as sunlight: “Peace, Asvaldr. They have gone.”

The bear backs away from us, dropping down to all fours, and that’s when I see the man holding the torch at the back of the cavern.

That’s when I see Ballast.