“Well,” Solmir whispered, “this is disgusting, isn’t it?”
A grumble from the rat tangle in the corner, movement that made both of them crouch, Solmir pushing Neve behind him. When the creatures settled, she whispered, “So how do we get out?”
He jerked his head to the side—there, hardly visible, a tunnel. “Cave entrance.” Barely any sound at all, mostly mouthed, and only seen because she stood so close. “They open up to the cliffs above the sea. We can still get to the Heart Tree that way, though it’s a bit of a walk.”
“I think we’re past worrying about a bit of a walk.”
“Agreed.”
Neve’s eyes darted toward the beasts in the corner again. “Are there more? Or… the other kind?”
“I’m sure there are. So keep your mouth shut.” With that less-than-reassuring pronouncement, Solmir grabbed her hand and led her into the tunnel.
They walked beneath the marshlands with just as much carefulness as they’d walked above. Solmir’s hand was slick with mud in hers, but as they moved, the mud dried, solidified, fusing their palms together like the rats back in the cave. Neve didn’t think of it. She tried not to think of anything but getting out of here, hopefully without running into any more lesser beasts.
After what felt like hours in the dark, small shards of light speared the gloom up ahead—exits, somewhere close. It illuminated just how much mud they were caked in, both of them covered head to toe.
“Almost there,” Solmir murmured. “A mile, maybe, and—”
A rustle behind them. The sound of many feet all moving in the same direction, an attempt at sneaking that would’ve worked if she hadn’t been so attuned to the silence.
One heartbeat, two, both of them frozen. Then a skittering sound and the gnash of teeth, a thud that made the tunnel shake and dirt rain from the ceiling.
Solmir didn’t look back to see exactly what they’d awoken, what pursued them through the earth. He just pulled on the hand Neve held, sending her careening in front of him, slipping on mud. She stumbled; their hands were still stuck together.
Solmir grabbed her wrist and held it steady, then wrenched his sideways—she saw him grimace, saw the half second when his arm bent at a painful angle. Not enough to break or sprain, but enough to hurt.
But then she was free, and he was pushing her in front of him. “Go!”
They didn’t try at stealth, not anymore. Their boots slid in the close earth of the tunnel, as behind them, something followed, something with too many mouths and too many eyes and too many teeth, something making a terrible trilling squeak that sounded like an abattoir of rats being crushed together and fused by that sucking, suffocating mud.
Neve pulled the bone from her pocket as she ran, brandishing it like a dagger. A god-bone was only required to kill an Old One, not a lesser beast, but it was the only weapon they had and it felt good in her hand. Stabbing was stabbing—it’d worked on the Seamstress’s goat. She’d take what she could get.
The tunnel shook again, the high, screeching sounds running together into something that made her want to press her hands over her ears. She didn’t have the courage to look back, instead keeping her gaze straight ahead, trying to listen only to the squelch of her boots in the mud and the scream of Solmir’s ragged breath behind her.
Light, streaming in ahead of them, dim but seeming beacon-bright in the darkness of the underground. Neve put on a burst of speed, felt Solmir’s hand at her back shoving her forward, and almost ran into the wall.
“Shit,” Solmir swore.
Neither of their eyes had been adjusted enough to see it before it was right in front of them—the gray light that signaled open air was coming through cracks in a piled-rock wall, too small for either of them to fit through. A sob built in Neve’s throat, drowned out by the awful noise of the rat-creature behind them.
Solmir grabbed the bone from her, spun on his heel with it held like a sword. “Pull the rocks down. I have your back.”
“But if it collapses—”
“Would you rather die in a rockslide or be eaten by a giant rat-thing?”
No contest. Neve scrabbled at the rocks, pulling them down as fast as she could grip them, tearing her nails as the opening slowly widened.
The tunnel shook as their pursuer came into the light.
Rats. She couldn’t tell how many in the one horrified glance she tossed over her shoulder, but there were at least ten mouths, ten sets of milky blind eyes, ten snouts streaked in dirt and shit and dried gore. Their bodies had fused through mud in their fur, and their knotted tails held them all together as well as any graft of bone might.
The lesser beast shrieked, rearing up on too many legs, more sticking out from its sides like spines. A misshapen thing, unable to live anywhere but here, charging forward when all they had to defend against it was a sharpened length of bone.
And magic.
Next to her, Solmir lifted his hands. Black flickered in the blue of his eyes as darkness edged down his veins, creeping out from his center, as if he packed all that magic somewhere behind his heart. Thorns pushed from the ends of his fingers, slow at first, then gaining speed, a rope of brambles like the net he’d cast over that worm-thing what felt like ages ago, when Neve was newly woken in a world made of shadows.
“You might want to move.” His voice didn’t sound like his own anymore. It was low, graveled, too deep to come out of his mostly human-shaped throat.
Neve obeyed.
He spun again, one hand held toward the rat-creature, the other pointed at the wall. A net of thorns fell over the rats, their myriad voices shrieking in harmony with the crash of stone as another thorny blast of power broke through the piled rocks. Neve crouched, covered her head as stones rained down around them, as light speared through the dark. The knotted rats’ shrieking intensified, like the light hurt their eyes.
Neve ran forward, squinting; Solmir followed. There wasn’t far to go—the cave opened out onto a gray cliff over a rocky beach. Beyond it, a stretch of flat, black water, as far as she could see.
Behind them, the rat-thing screamed, high and shivering and awful, ducking its many heads back into the shadows as the light seared across it. The thorns of Solmir’s magic slowly sank into the lesser beast’s mud-mottled flesh, making it twitch and shrink. Plumes of rogue power rolled off the bristling legs, the matted fur.
Grimacing, Solmir raised his hand again.
The magic seeped into him as the rat-creature died, growing smaller and smaller as the thorns he’d thrown over it tightened. The gibbering of the shadows it let loose was quiet, quickly silenced when Solmir took them in. Still, he sank to his knees as the magic kept coming, the hand that wasn’t gathering power from the air braced on the ground, his chest heaving. He closed his eyes; Neve couldn’t see what color they were.