Scorio angled their approach to the steps past his own tomb’s opening and saw inscribed at the base the number 37. Continuing forward, and upon placing his foot on the first step, Scorio turned to study the plain of copper one last time. He searched for movement, strained to hear a cry for help.
Nothing.
“Do you feel that?” asked Lianshi, voice soft.
Leonis frowned at her. “Feel what?”
“It’s…” she trailed off, unsure. “Like a current of air passing around us. But not. I don’t know how to explain it.”
Scorio raised his hand, studying it in the feverish glow. Trying to sense what she was talking about. There was no wind. The air was utterly still. But yet… he thought he felt something pass through him, or around him, like some subtle current he’d not noticed till now. But just as he felt it, the current disappeared, slipping away between his fingers like the dream of death that had awoken him.
“No,” said Leonis at last, shaking his head.
Asha stared off into the middle distance. “I do, I think. An invisible breeze, or… I can’t quite describe it. Different from what I felt a moment ago. Connected to it, though. Somehow.”
“Yes, like an invisible breeze,” said Lianshi, voice soft with wonder. She, too, raised her hand and gently moved it back and forth, as if caressing a monstrously large and unseen cat. “But it’s gone now. I lost it the moment I noticed it.”
“Same here,” said Scorio. “Let’s add it to the list of weird things we’re noticing and keep going.”
Nobody protested, so he climbed the steps, the amber beam growing broader and filling more of his vision as he reached the top. There he stopped, hands on his hips, and craned his head back to take in its vertiginous height. Even this close, a mere twenty or so yards away, it was easy to believe it was a solid, glowing object and not a gap between the two massive walls.
“No warmth,” murmured Asha.
Scorio approached cautiously, squinting his eyes against the violent yellow beam. He raised a hand as he drew near. There was no heat at all. Nothing but the sound of their breathing, the metallic tang in the air, the echo of their footsteps.
“So, do you think there’s a god on the other side?” asked Lianshi.
“Maybe,” said Leonis. “Though I don’t know which one. You remember any names?”
“None,” she admitted, and Scorio thought he heard relief in her voice.
Closer yet. The beam had become a wall before him, ten yards wide, absolute and all-consuming.
“Careful,” said Leonis.
Scorio slowed, each step now taking effort as if he were knowingly walking in the dark toward a cliff’s edge. Squinting, he stepped right up to the fiery wall, and realized at last that it was neither a tangible object nor a gap, but rather both—a veil of burning light rising before him, but through which he could only vaguely sense space, a continuation, a passageway.
“Looks like a curtain of some kind,” he said, eyes nearly closed. “Going to touch it.”
Nobody spoke as he reached forth. His hand pressed the burning amber, and for a second he felt resistance, like pushing against a soft cushion. Then his hand broke through and disappeared, the light moving up his wrist and engulfing his forearm as he slid it in deeper.
“There’s something beyond,” he whispered, sweat prickling his brow. His heart was pounding, pounding, and he couldn’t catch his breath. “Space of some kind. I’m going in.”
“Scorio,” one of them said, but he couldn’t tell which. His pulse was roaring in his ears. Even with his eyes slit, he felt blinded. He edged forward, arm disappearing to the elbow, then the bicep, then right up to his shoulder.
For an aching, agonizing second, he hesitated. Hung there, suspended in the balance.
He took a deep breath and stepped through.
Chapter 2
Scorio emerged on the far side into a dimly lit, low-ceilinged chamber. He received a brief impression of rusted walls, a dirt floor, and heavy shadows when instinct screamed at him to lunge aside.
Not thinking, not questioning, he hurled himself to the left and crashed down to one knee just as something metallic clanged against the iron wall behind him and spun away into the gloom.
He stared, dumbfounded, even as part of him reached within his being, seeking to grasp—what? He didn’t even know. It felt like an instinct without a home.
The glowing amber wall was gone. In its place was a heavy wall of dull iron, streaked with rust. A small fleck of bright steel shone at roughly chest height where he’d stood.
“What the…?” Frowning, he went to rise when a shape emerged from the iron wall, pushing through as if it were insubstantial, hands groping blindly, revealing Leonis’s bearded face, eyes wide, expression strained.
He grunted, almost stumbling as he came all the way through, then oriented on where Scorio knelt.
“What—?”
“Watch out—”
There was no sound, just a sense of movement, and Leonis jerked aside, obeying instincts of his own as another projectile ricocheted off the iron wall.
Scorio jumped to his feet. “The others, when they come through—”
But it was too late. Two pairs of hands emerged from the iron wall, both a good distance apart. They came through quickly with the determined steps of people committed to their fate, Asha’s eyes screwed shut, Lianshi blinking, bewildered.
“Watch out!” shouted Scorio, lunging forward to tackle Asha.
She froze, eyes opening in alarm, staring at him in shock as he crashed into her a second later.
They fell roughly to the ground, Asha’s shoulder clipping the wall, but the rigid object that jutted against Scorio’s arm told him it was too late.
“No, no no no,” he hissed, pulling himself free to kneel beside the young woman. She looked down at where a thick bolt of gray metal had sunk deep into her gut.
“What…?” Her voice was thick, hands closing about the shaft.
“Leonis!” Scorio looked over to where the massive man was helping Lianshi to her feet, one hand clapped to his bloody side. “Either of you know anything about healing?”
Blank looks as they hurried over.
“Stay with me,” said Scorio as Asha lowered her head back down, eyelids fluttering. “Stay with me, Asha.” He jerked his gray overrobe off his shoulders and struggled out of it, some mad thought of wadding it into the wound filling his mind.
Leonis touched his arm. “It’s too late.”
Scorio froze, overrobe half off, and stared down at her. Her eyes had closed, and thick, dark blood was welling up around the iron bolt, soaking into her clothing, running down her side into the dirt floor.
Lianshi took one of Asha’s hands and held it tight.
“Too late?” Scorio felt dizzy, at a loss. “But she’s still breathing, she’s…”
Leonis just shook his head grimly.
And Scorio saw that he was right. The young woman’s breath was already coming in ever-shallower gasps, ever longer pauses between them. The blood which had welled up thickly before seemed to slow, no longer pulsing.
The three of them knelt around her, watching in horror, as Asha’s breaths slowed, slowed, and finally stopped.
Scorio studied her face. The thick brows, the eagle-like nose, the high cheekbones, the parted lips. Such fierce strength, such dour resolve, all of it smoothing into an expression of peace, of gentle sleep.
And then her body began to fade. Subtly at first, then it disappeared altogether before them, and was gone.
The iron bolt dropped to the blood-soaked dirt, revealing a wicked, crescent moon-shaped head.
Lianshi grasped after Asha’s hand, as if it were a bar of soap slipping from her fingers, then covered her mouth in shock.
“Who loosed those bolts?” growled Leonis, rising and turning to face the depths of the hallway. “Who’s there?”
Scorio felt a deep and ugly rage arise within him, familiar in a way he couldn’t understand, welcome and hot and demanding. He tore his eyes away from the bloody earth and also rose, studying the depths of the hall in search of movement.