We clasped wrists. “Edrin Walker,” I said. “Call me Walker. I hate Edrin. Bloody parents, eh.”
He frowned. “I haven’t heard of a House Walker before.”
“Ain’t no house at all,” I said, preparing to judge him by his response. “My father is a dock worker. Walker comes down from my mother’s side. It’s a clan-name.” It was how I chose to honour her, that and I preferred it to dreary old “Edrin of Hobbs Lane”.
Lynas looked embarrassed, but showed no sign of the derision I’d learned to expect from high-born magi and initiates. “Oh. Sorry.” He took a few deep calming breaths and seemed to relax a bit. “So they pick on you as well?” he ventured.
I shrugged. “No more than anybody else who isn’t from a High House. What about you, pal, are you…?”
He shook his head. “I’m not one of them. I’m the heir to House Granton, but we are just a Low House. Grandfather distinguished himself during the last big war in the colonies and bought his way up into the Old Town. My family have…” He seemed to search for the correct words, but gave up. “We’ve lost almost all our money, to be honest.” He looked at his feet, face reddening. “It’s my father. He gambles.”
He didn’t need to elaborate. That particular curse hit high and low alike. He may have been low nobility but he didn’t seem the same as those arrogant, self-entitled pricks who thought that locking us down here was a bit of a lark and a jolly old jape. Their families probably had enough money and power to let them get away with anything they liked – especially when it concerned little first-year initiates like us without any connections, and whose Gifts hadn’t matured yet, and might never.
I uncorked the oil reservoir of my lantern and peered in. “Stinking book-lickers have left me hardly any.”
Lynas frowned. “Book-lickers?” He checked his own and cursed.
I sneered. “You think those boil-brained buffoons have any idea what to do with a book?”
The tunnel ahead sloped away into the yawning darkness like we were sliding down the gullet of some huge beast. We shivered and clutched our lanterns tight. “I’d better turn this down low,” Lynas said. “We need to ration the oil.”
I blinked. He was right. To my chagrin I hadn’t thought of that; instead I’d been wanting both lanterns up full for as much light as we could get. I turned mine down as well, the darkness creeping closer as the light dwindled.
At first the tunnel was square and formed from blocks of cut stone, but as we trudged on into the depths it changed, becoming a cruder passage hacked though the black basalt rock below Setharis. Yellowed skulls grinned at us from niches cut into the walls. They might have sat there for unfathomable eons for all we knew.
We paused to scrape an arrow into the wall with a shard of stone, joining a collection of other symbols that valiant adventurers like us had left in past years, decades, or even centuries. We took the right-hand passage and walked for a good half an hour, carefully marking each new turn and split until we came to a circular chamber with five stone archways leading off into the depths. Human bones carpeted every wall and each block of stone in the arches was inlaid with grinning skulls. Lynas shuffled closer to me.
“They’re just bones,” I said, but it didn’t seem to comfort him much. Their hollow stares were a little unsettling, but I wasn’t about let him know that. We made idle chatter as we walked, more to hear the comforting sound of our voices than anything else.
While Lynas had his back turned studying a tunnel, I grabbed a skull and held it up at his head. He glanced back, “Which way do you–” He shrieked and I dissolved into laughter.
“Not funny!” he grumbled.
“Oh come on, it was a little bit funny,” I said. “It’s just bones, they can’t hurt you. Don’t be so serious.” He glared at me, but his lips quirked into the first smile I’d seen from him.
“Let’s go through here,” he said, waving me to go first. The tunnel walls were slick with damp and stalactites grew from the bones of the ceiling and doorways. The only sounds were our ragged breathing and the steady drip-drip of water.
We felt compelled to keep our voices down. Everybody knew that monsters made their lairs deep in the catacombs, their burrows dug into piled bones of the dead.
“Why am I the one in front anyway?” I said. “I’m no leader.”
Lynas just shrugged and scanned the room, peering into each doorway in turn.
I carefully slid my eating knife from my belt. I’d concealed it at dinner after seeing Harailt watching me, then lean in close to his lackeys and laugh. Dull-edged as it was, I felt safer with the knife in my hand.
Lynas noticed, gave a scared little chuckle. “That’s why you go first.”
Despite my fear, I returned a grin. “Smartarse.” That caused him to smile again.
Some of the doorways led nowhere, fresh rubble and piles of shattered bone filling the tunnels beyond. Above one blocked passage I noticed a small opening in the ceiling. I edged closer, listening for any sign of further collapse. A faint breeze caressed my skin.
“Lynas,” I whispered. “Over here.”
He crunched over, gaze following my pointing finger. “Is it a way out?” His voice trembled with hope.
I bit back the caustic reply I was about to make. No wonder I didn’t have any friends. “Hope so,” I said instead. I put away the knife and tried to scramble up to check it out, but the scree was too loose to get good purchase and I refused to let go of my lantern. “Give me a hand.”
Lynas interlocked his fingers to create a foothold, hoisting me up. The extra height allowed me to clamber up over the lip of the hole. I lifted up my lantern, turning the oil flow up to illuminate the room.
“What’s up there?” Lynas said.
The cracked walls were slick and black, made of some queer sort of stone, and the ceiling was high and tapered to a point. “I don’t know,” I said. “An old bedroom maybe. There’s a rotted old heap of slime in a wooden frame that looks like it used to be a bed, and what might be the remains of a wardrobe, table and chairs. There’s a breeze coming from beneath a big door up here so it could be a way out. No bones, so maybe Old Boney’s priests haven’t been here in before.” Which meant it might have something worth stealing – no, recovering, I corrected myself. It wouldn’t be stealing this time.
I placed my light to one side and stretched a hand down. Lynas passed his lantern up and then scrambled up to join me. By the Night Bitch, he was heavy! With one last heave that almost dislocated my shoulder he was up and through the hole.
He sat panting, craning his neck around the room. His eyes were bright, curiosity overcoming his fear for the moment. The floor was strewn with rat skeletons and desiccated droppings and the ceiling mostly obscured by curtains of cobweb. In the centre of the room was a shattered stone block, the eerie carvings covering every surface defaced or hacked off. What I could see of them made my vision swim. We decided to give that a wide berth.
Every initiate had heard thrilling stories of adventures in the Boneyards, of people coming back laden with jewels and sacks of gold. Somebody a few years back had even claimed to have found a spirit-bound sword amidst a pile of skulls. But then there were the other stories – the ones we whispered to each other at night, huddled under blankets in our dorms – the stories of people that just disappeared, their bodies consumed by ancient traps or ravenous monsters, and of the agonized wails heard at night that were said to be the cries of warped magi gone insane, their minds and bodies consumed by the Worm of Magic. The tutors themselves told us those dark and cautionary tales as a warning not to succumb to the lust for power and the lures of our Gift. But for the moment we were both far too excited to care: Gold! Jewels! Magic stuff! I’d never go to sleep hungry again, and I could even get a new cloak, a warm one for those cold winter nights. My dreams were small and simple things.