“How can you be sure?” she whispered.
The look on his face made it seem like Solmir could read her anxieties in her eyes. The line of his jaw softened beneath his beard, the furrow in his brow smoothed. His hand half raised to her, sparking with silver, then dropped by his side as he turned away and started to walk. “The two of you have overturned worlds for each other, Neverah. It’s hard to get more matched than that.”
They walked until they ran into another pile of bones.
A few heaps of rubble from the mountain’s collapse had blocked their way already, but they were easy enough to climb or skirt around. This one, however, was not. Upon a closer look, it seemed like one massive bone rather than a pile of them, smooth and strangely jointed, stretching from the larger mound of shards that had made the mountain out toward the shining line of the horizon.
Solmir approached the bone and rubbed his hand over it, trying to find a foothold. Then he stepped back, crossing his arms. “Well,” he said conversationally, “shit.”
Neve had to squint to peer up to the top of the bone. “Can we go around?”
“Not without ending up in the marshes.”
“Is that bad?”
“The marshes were the Rat’s territory,” Solmir said. “And the Roach. Their children are hard to kill.”
So they were probably still around. Neve grimaced.
With a kick at the bone, like it had personally offended him, Solmir pivoted, stalking down its length. “But it looks like we don’t have much choice. Stick close.”
Chapter Nineteen
Neve
Maybe an hour of walking later—still next to the massive bone—the landscape finally started to change.
First, there were trees. Nothing like the white, inverted trunks at the edge of the Shadowlands, but small and needlelike, spearing upward and laced with thin leaves that looked more like thorns. Then the ground changed, going from cracked and dry to almost muddy, pocked with pools of shining black water.
It was just as desolate as the desert had been, with no places for anything to hide. Still, disquiet prickled over the back of Neve’s neck.
“The Rat and the Roach,” she muttered to herself, picking her boot up from the marshy ground. It took effort; the dark mud sucked at her soles. “Of course there would be a giant rat and a giant roach.”
“It is the underworld,” Solmir said quietly from up ahead. “And technically, it’s only their lesser-beast children who are left.” He turned her way, face stern. “But keep your voice down. We don’t want anything to know we’re here.”
Sound advice. Neve pressed her lips shut.
“And from here on out, watch where you put your feet.” He twisted on his heel and placed his boot very deliberately, a test before he stepped with his whole weight. “The ground here gives way easily, and the Rat’s children like tunnels.”
“Ew.”
“Precisely.”
The jagged end of the massive bone was finally in sight, thrust out into the air above their heads. The sight of it drew a relieved sag into Solmir’s shoulders. “Once we get to the end, we turn around,” he murmured. “We’ll be safer near the mountains.”
Neve breathed a faint, thankful sigh.
But then she heard a high clicking sound coming from somewhere behind them. Almost like huge chitinous legs moving closer.
She paused, boot in the air, head whirling to look behind her. “Did you hear that?”
“Keep moving,” Solmir said, answer enough.
Neve turned back around, finally putting down her foot without checking to make sure it was going where Solmir’s had. And that was enough to push her off-balance, into the muddy edge of a pool of black water.
At first, she thought it an easy misstep, simple to fix. But the mud at the edge of the pool sucked her down like a swallowing throat, devouring her to the knee before she could cry out, already to her waist by the time she did and Solmir came running.
Cursing, he grabbed her hands, tried to pull her backward out of the mud—at her shoulders now and still going, her hands slick with it, hard to grasp on to. Neve didn’t have the energy to scream again, everything in her concentrated on finding a handhold and pulling herself out of the bog before it reached her mouth.
But then, down by her feet—air.
She froze, wild eyes going to Solmir’s. “There’s something down here. A cavern or something.” Kings, she could taste the mud; she had to tilt her head up to talk, the lower half of her body breaking through to whatever was below the pool.
“Tunnels,” Solmir said, swiping his hair back from his forehead and leaving a streak of dirt. He looked away, calculation in his eyes. “When you fall through, be quiet. I’ll come for you.”
“Are they still in the tunnels?” Panic made her voice high and jagged. That clicking sound reverberated across the marsh again, faster this time. “Solmir, if they’re in the tunnels, what do I—”
The mud closed over her face before she could finish.
It felt like being buried alive. Mud seeped into every available orifice—her mouth, her eyes—damp and bitter and incongruous with the way she could freely kick her legs, having already slipped through the bog barrier into whatever lay beneath it.
When the bog finally let her go, with a disgusting squelching sound, the drop was short. Neve fell to the ground, knocking the wind from her earth-laden lungs, pulling in deep, gasping breaths of sour air. Mud caked her hair, her face; she clawed it away from her eyes, willing them to adjust to the dim.
A cave. A cave with rooty walls and a damp floor, smelling of earth and something almost fecal, animalic. Above, the bog, held in suspension by the strange physics of the Shadowlands, the leftover magic of the Rat and the Roach.
The reminder of the two gods who’d lived in this territory and their children who still did made her pulse thunder. Neve stood, trying desperately to quiet her breathing.
And when she managed to hold air in her lungs instead of heaving it, she heard something else breathing.
Slowly, Neve turned, barely able to make out shapes in the dark. Furry bodies piled in the corner, a heaving mass of flesh that inhaled and exhaled in tandem. She saw tails and tusks, the pieces of creatures all jammed together. They looked attached, tangled rats that had become one being instead of many. Ridges of dried mud marked bristling fur, fusing the already huge beasts into something of monstrous proportions.
Neve pressed her mud-caked hand to her mouth. She quickly glanced at the rest of the cave, looking for roaches, afraid that if she saw them, there’d be no holding back the scream in her throat. But it seemed the only thing living in this cave was that awful jumble of rats.
Something above, pressing through the mud. She crouched, hands over her head, but when her eyes opened it was to a tall, spare figure with muddied hair, not some looming rat god.