1.42. Handle It
That’s how Seth found himself crawling, shivering and half-soaked, through a rough-hewn stone tunnel barely wide enough to bend his knees in. His mite torch was clamped between his teeth. Its hexis light cast across the ridges and corrugations in the wall and danced on the chin-height water and Seth felt as though he were crawling through the mildewed esophagus of some fossilized, gargantuan white-feather seraph.
A foul-tasting, greasy speck of something dripped onto his tongue and made him dry heave. His jaw had opened the popmite trap at the base of his torch and let a droplet of ichor from the crushed bug out onto his mouth.
He wondered what idiotic part of him was responsible for this. His heart? His brain? His dick? He resolved to blame the Fox, which had been silent for days, save for a muffled snickering now and then, so faint that Seth couldn’t tell whether he was imagining it.
Perhaps that meant he was on the right path, and didn’t need its help? As his shoulders burned from the slow, bent progression of his slithering crawl, he wondered how that could possibly be true.
The water was deepening, now, as the tunnel sloped subtly downward. The current picking up. Seth twisted onto his back, in a symphony of digging stone edges and awkward joints, to keep his face above water. His hair, spiked with wet, hung limp into his eyes; his mouth was too full of flashlight to blow it away. So he dragged himself, half-blind like a brainless bottom-feeding fish, fingers palpating for purchase on the walls. A rough edge scraped a burning line across his shin. He hissed in annoyed pain and kept crawling.
Think of the shower you’ll get to have when this is done. A nice, hot, scalding, blasting shower. Think about clean, warm, fluffy towels. Think about Lisa.
Think about her wrapped in a robe, waiting in bed for you, her damp hair and her soft thighs pressing together and her warm skin and that smile she gets when you look at her body.
Think about how gentle her hands are, whenever she touches you. Gentle but tense with want. Think about those thick black-cherry lips, opening wide, and—
CLONG.
His palm slapped into a grate with a metallic sound he could hear over the rushing water. Idiot. Idiot idiot idiot.
He clicked the light off, then froze and listened over the water and the galloping pulse in his ears. When thirty seconds had passed in complete subterranean dark, and nobody had run over to murder him, he reached up to the grate with hands trembling from the chill and gave an experimental push. The metal wiggled; screws on the ends, he saw, with one missing.
He shimmied another few armspans, to get his feet into position in the narrow chute that the grate capped. He pressed his back into the floor, planted both boots on the metal, and pushed, as hard as he could and as quick as he dared.
The metal wrenched and complained. One screw cracked; another pinged. Saints, the noise. Surely any listener would hear his heart, too, the way it thundered in his ears.
The grille gave way. His foot pushed out into air. He gasped with agonized relief.
A game of inches, then, to ease himself out from the uncovered tunnel. He flopped and wriggled and wondered how he might have done this gracefully, though by the mercy of Silvertongued St. Procas, beloved of thieves, nobody was here to bear witness.
He lay on his back in the still, stale air of the crypt for a moment (or what had better be the crypt, because Seth was not about to fucking do that again). Then he sat up, slipped the grate back into place as best he could with raw, scratched fingers, and clicked his flashlight on again.
He was in an oblong chamber, its contours determined long ago by pre-Emergence builders according to some logic of geological tide. Three exits he could see, if he didn’t count the choke tunnel, which he refused to. Two tunnels into the dark, one door—a thin sheet of metal, really, with hinges spike-hammered into the much older structure around it. That looked promising, and he was pleased at how quiet the hinges were after the creaking grate.
Geometric shadows shortened and lengthened again as he passed the gridded catacomb slots along the walls. Loculi, these were called. He’d heard the word in the smoke-addled stories of a tomb robber who’d owed Rohan. Alcoves for the dead. He kept expecting to see some moldering ossuary or leering skull. None presented itself. Hannah had told no lies about the extent of the place’s hollowing.
Seth came to another t-junction and again picked the side with a door and was rewarded with a cylindrical room, the floor of which was etched with a familiar circle. The place had been swept not long ago—piles of dust and pebbles at the edges—but one stone still sat in the circle’s center.
Unlawfully taken from NovelFire, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Seth picked it up and rubbed his thumb across the Fox on its underside.
“I don’t know if you’re listening,” he whispered. “But I’m in. Found the stone. There has to be an exit. I’ll find that, too, and let you in.” His fingers tightened. “Please be listening.”
He crept from the circle chamber and across the junction to the road not taken, and then a left, and then another, searching for more of those doors and doing his best to commit his passage to memory.
The next door he found not by sight but by smell. The kind of miasmatic odor that old physikers believed carried diseases right through the nostrils. How twisted-around had Seth’s life become at the hands of the Verdugo, that now he moved toward that smell, rather than away?
It led him to a larger chamber than any he’d seen on his way, built around a thick central column studded with upright sconces where, once upon a time, the dead must have slept standing. Concave scoops in the stone suggested skulls burrowing out from their seatings. What must it have sounded like, Seth wondered, that tsunami of bone breaking free; that thought’s grotesqueness was quickly dwarfed by the sodden canvas bags that lay in the outer wall’s loculi. And the stench. It was eye-watering in here. The kind of smell a rotting head makes, with any luck. He resolved to be about his business and then go on his way.
On the other side of the column sat a cluster of barrels, deposited against the wall like a massive insect’s clutch of eggs. Seth opened one, and was struck first by the smell, which he could not identify but which screamed wrong!!! in his mind with such force that he knew, instinctually, it was something dead that had been dead for a long time. The barrel was half-full of something. Some foul coagulation laying over a chunky, half liquid layer of…
Entrails, Seth realized. And blood. Organs and effluvia shedding gallons of monochrome grotesquerie. Those lumpen black-stained sacks stuffed into the stone shelves.
Those were unlit corpses. He had stumbled into an abattoir.
He threw up, then, but only a little, and he dragged the barrel on top of the stain to cover it, so that was fine. He steadied himself, forced the dancing spotlight in his shivering hand to stillness, and continued to cast it across the chamber. He ignored the screaming questions in the back of his brain. All this unlit blood. In the sewers. In the water system. What was this? What plot had he stumbled into?
It wasn’t all body bags in this storage room. On the far wall there was a shelf of stockpiled miscellany. Stacked bricks and trowels, a rack of rifles, a dented popmite spawnbarrel. And there, in a cleared-out spot as if given prized position:
A slack-jawed, gray-skinned, yellow-haired head. In worse shape than he remembered, its nose halfway crumbled away. But that was the head. The same one he’d stolen from Annalise’s trunk.
Seth’s mouth went dry. He drew a deep breath through his nose, and the queasy tinge the rank air sent through him was overpowered by triumph.
He raised the stone to his lips. “I fucking found it.” The excitement bumped his whisper into a near-voice. His lips were turned up of their own accord. “Shitting saints. I’ve got your head.”
He tucked the head under his arm. The uneven bumps of its dead face pressed into his side, but this was such a minor horror compared to the rest of the room that he barely registered it. “I’m coming back,” he whispered. “Can’t take that tunnel again, especially with this thing, but I—”
He froze. Around the corner there was a green, pulsing glow.
“Not alone,” he breathed. “Someone’s turned on the wall lamps. I—”
You’ll handle it.
“I’ll handle it,” he whispered, and slipped the stone into his pocket. He tied the head to his belt loop by its stringy hair. Inch by hissing inch he slid his cutlass from its sheath.
He crept toward the light, keeping to the wavering shadows, and beheld a man in the same loose, grimy worker uniform Hannah had worn. In lieu of a bell, this man had brought a cleaver, which he held across his crouching legs as he examined the grate Seth had crawled from. The broken screws. The shining puddle around it. The wet tracks.
“What the fuck,” the man murmured to himself.
He turned, then, back the way he had come, perhaps at some sound or to call out to a colleague. Whatever it was, Seth had to move now.
He detached from the wall in the hustling, long-striding crouch his “uncle” had called the Footpad Sprint. His blade tightened in his grip. One motion. One quick death across the jugular. You kill people now, Seth. You’re surprisingly decent at it. Go on.
The stories had told him that the cutting of a throat was a silent, stealthy thing. For all Seth knew, the stories were right, and he was just a fuck-up. This man did not die silently. He wrenched Seth’s arm as the blade bit into his neck and let out the start of an anguished “STOP—” that froze Seth’s blood, even as he spilled his mark’s all over the sconced wall before them.
The o in stop turned into a gurgling groan and the man’s grip slackened and he slumped forward, head cracking hard against the wall, and then he was on the ground twitching, and was he alive? No, his eyes were wide and unseeing. Just a last firing farewell of nerve and muscle forever relieved of their duties.
Seth had one heartbeat to savor his hobbled victory—then his victim’s friend darted into the chamber. A young man, gangly and freckled, and already pulling at the chipped Legion-surplus olive handle of his saber.
“Someone’s here,” Freckles cried, and his sword was out and pointed at Seth’s chest, and they shared a moment, then, or so it seemed to Seth, of confused hesitation. The tucking-away of common sense. Are we really doing this? Are we really about to kill a stranger, or die to one?
Yes.
Here it was. Two men, staring across two spans of leveled steel, and Seth would have to move first, he realized with a seasick lurch. First and fast, or he was fucked. This fellow had been drawn here by the strangled deathcry, and that meant more of them were coming, and his enemy with teeth gritted and eyes darting was in no hurry to take that broomstick step to close the distance.
And they were quite still, the thief and the cultist.
And then, quite suddenly, they weren’t.