“Not fair,” Kataria exclaimed through heavy breath. “They’re not supposed to be able to do that. How are they doing that?”
“It’s just the one. This one is different.”
“Could have shot him.”
“How would that have helped?”
“How is this helping?”
His only answer was to run. He continued on, her at his side, hurrying after the creature that had vanished from sight completely. Shadows engulfed them as the chasm began to close overhead and become a tunnel. The earth grew damp beneath their feet, the sand squishing instead of crunching.
Soon, before they knew it, the earth was gone entirely, swallowed up by still, stagnant water that rose to their ankles. And still, he pressed on, despite a rather strong argument.
“Do you seriously not see what’s happening here?” Kataria called after him. “It’s leading us into water so we can drown, because it thinks we’re stupid enough not to turn back.”
Probably not an unjustified thought, given the idiocy of following it in the first place. Lenk did not think about that. Instead, he focused on a flash of light ahead. A golden ray punched through the roof of the wall, illuminating a vast, pale face staring directly at him.
A stone face of a woman he had seen before, adorning the walls of Jaga. A woman with a broad smile, wide eyes, and a neck shattered into pieces as her head lay atop the fragments of her broken stone body.
The statue lay in a heap, half-drowned in the water, her head a crown atop a haphazard burial mound scraping a hole in the ceiling, the last trace of light in the void. A chance at escape, the only thing left in the darkness.
That was reason enough to climb. Without a sound save for the occasional grunt of effort as they helped one another up the rubble, over the rubble, and over each other. It was only when they stood perched upon the statue’s nose that they shared a look.
“Could be an ambush,” Lenk said.
“It could’ve been an ambush when you first started chasing the thing. Better opportunities back there, too.” She looked up to the hole in the earth, the pit through which the stone lady had fallen. Her ears trembled. “I don’t hear anything up there.”
“What if they’re just. . quiet?”
“Well, goodness, I guess if my enemies have learned how to be quiet I’m just a little screwed, aren’t I?”
“Fine,” he snarled. “I’ll go up first.”
“Why you?”
“Well, if you give me a bit, I can come up with something about feelings, heartache, you having protected me and me wanting to return the favor and it’ll probably involve the words ‘my personal autumn.’”
She clicked her tongue. “Go on, then.”
He hurled his sword through the opening, pulling himself up after it. The daylight was not particularly bright, filtered through a hue of gray, but after the darkness of the chasm it was more than enough to send him shielding his eyes as he crawled out onto the sand.
And there was plenty of sand. Stretching out like an ocean all its own, bereft of coral, kelp, or bone, it ran flat and featureless for what seemed like miles in a vast ring. Circling it, a low stone wall segregated the small desert from the kelp forests beyond. Stray fish would fly over it, around it, above it as they passed from one copse of kelp to another.
Never through it.
The light that had seemed so bright beneath the world was all but vanished. Much of it was smothered behind the endless swirling halo of clouds that swam overhead, but most of it was muted to a dull, dim gray by the shadow. The mountain stood impassive at the far end of the ring, stoically ignoring the rivers that wept down its craggy face to collect upon a long, stone staircase that ran from its rocky brow down to the sands of the ring.
That would have drawn more attention from him had he not found himself transfixed by dozens of stares upon him.
Cold stares. Stone stares.
She was everywhere. Surrounding the vast, valley-like ring of sand that stretched for at least a mile in all directions, she stood above the coral and kelp swaying in an endless forest surrounding the ring. Tall, proud, clad in stone silks, raising stone arms, stone smile broad, stone hair scraping the sky, the statues surrounded the great ring of sand.
Tall.
Proud.
Broken.
By chain, by boulder, by chisel and grit and a sheer determination to see her fall, she stood in varying forms of decay about the great ring. Here, her head lay in fragments. There, she stood smiling with her limbs torn off. Behind him, she was nothing more than feet, the rest of her collapsed into the pit from which he had climbed.
Even in stone, he knew her. He knew the smile. He tried to look away, but everywhere he turned, even where she was headless, she was there. Looking back at him.
Ulbecetonth. Proud and broken.
Transfixed by her gaze, he stared at the omnipresent smile. Straight stone teeth in cold stone lips. And yet somehow, he swore he could almost see them moving. Somehow, he swore he could almost hear her.
“I took pity on you. I gave you a chance. Never again. You come here to die.”
“How the hell did he get all the way over there?”
When he looked at Kataria, she was standing beside him and staring out toward the far end of the valley. And there the creature sat, on the bottommost step of the long staircase climbing the mountain’s face, beneath a halo of stormclouds slowly circling a hidden peak.
Half a mile away, its yellow eyes were all but pinpricks beneath its cowl. And yet, he could still feel the creature’s stare, as he could feel dust settling upon his skin. It unnerved him.
Not enough to hold him back, though. He shouldered his sword and began to walk toward the creature. Kataria was by his side, though her bow remained in her hands with arrow drawn.
“This is a bad idea,” she whispered to him.
“He’s not running,” Lenk replied. “He has answers.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“It was your idea to come here. You said the tome would be here. We don’t have a lot of other leads.”
“It could be an ambush.”
“There’s no reason to think that.”
“Right.” She kept her voice low. The sound of a bestial hiss carried clearly to his ears from behind. “Except for the ambush.”
He glanced over his shoulder into half a dozen yellow eyes. And then a dozen, then two dozen. And more and more as they came from the kelp forest. Seeming to melt off the swaying fronds like water from ice, the Shen came, warpaint bright as blood, eyes sharp and fixed upon the two, weapons decidedly more so.
He didn’t draw his sword; it would have seemed rather pathetic to offer it against the machetes and hatchets drawn on him. Kataria apparently disagreed, as evidenced by the groan of her bowstring.
“I can put one down,” Kataria whispered. “The others might back off for a moment.”
“There are thirty of them. What do we do after that?”
“I’ll shoot you, then myself. We’ll deny them the pleasure.”
“That’s insane.”
“At least I’m contributing.”
Enough bows were trained on them that they’d both be perforated before she could even twiddle her fingers. Enough machetes were drawn to suggest that whatever happened to them next would probably involve the words “fine stew.” And yet, the arrows remained in their strings. The machetes remained in their claws. The Shen remained well away.
“They’re not attacking,” he noted.
“They’re not retreating, either,” Kataria said.
“Then we keep moving.”
More came, emerging from the forest. More arrows were drawn, more machetes slid from their sheaths. More yellow eyes were fixed upon them, more guttural hisses, mutterings in a thick-tongued language followed them.