Mewleep nodded. “The shaft splits. Take the left fork.” He sniffed. “I am not smelling blue-men-with-blades. Not living ones.”
She did not know whether that was reassuring or not, and was about to ask what he did smell, and then just sighed. “Thank you,” she said. “Go, both of you, get the baby safe away from here. Thank you, so much, for your help.”
Akha was bouncing her son gently on one bone-sharp hip, and pushed past Mewleep to look Greta in the face. It was difficult to hold that gaze; she was sure Akha wanted nothing more than to be shut of this entire miserable evening’s business, but the ghoul simply stood looking at her for a long moment—and then reached out to touch her cheek with a chilly claw tip.
“Come back safe,” she said, the sibilant hissing between needle teeth. “You are … needed.”
Greta was appalled to feel tears threatening, and blinked hard. “I will,” she said, and looked down at the little creature in Akha’s arms, patting at his mother’s chest with a small green hand and grizzling faintly. “Go now,” she said. “Don’t forget he needs his medicine right after you feed him. I will see what’s happened, and deal with it. I hope Kree-akh and the others are not hurt, and no matter what I find in there I will come back to help as soon as I can. I promise.”
Akha nodded and looked up at Mewleep, who lifted the ventilation grate aside for Greta and then ducked his head in the brief bow she had seen some of the ghouls give Kree-akh from time to time. Then he turned, with his arm around Akha, and the sound of their footfalls retreated, leaving Greta alone again with the last of the guttering foxfire’s light.
Air touched her face in the darkness, moving sluggishly, and somewhere nearby she could hear the faint rattling vibration of a fan. Electricity’s working, she thought. I hope that’s a good thing.
Greta took a deep breath and crawled into the shaft. The glowing wood was all but useless. She dropped it and crept forward on both knees and one hand, reaching the other out in front of her to feel for obstacles. It took her much longer than she had expected to reach the place where the shaft forked off to the left, and she was beginning to feel the first swells of panic—I’m lost, I’m lost in the darkness and no one will come to find me—when she realized she could, in fact, see her hand in front of her face.
The shaft was very faintly lit with red, like a darkroom’s safelight. Greta crept forward, the light brightening all around her, until she could look down through another set of air intake louvers into a proper tunnel, dimly lit with red emergency lamps.
At first she couldn’t make out what it was she was looking at, and then she shivered as she recognized the scarring and lesions of Gladius Sancti monks tumbled in a heap of burlap robes. Nothing was moving. That was good, right? They weren’t … active.
Greta leaned as far over as she could to try to see down the tunnel, and then went very still. She knew the wingtip shoes that were just visible lying a little farther along the floor, in a dark and sticky puddle. Knew them, and their owner.
Shaking her head in stupid, mute negation, she thrashed around in the shaft until she could get her back against the curving wall and kick out at the grate with both feet. The noise was terrible, a clang and screech that couldn’t help drawing the attention of anything left down there, but she was a little way beyond caring about that now. It took two more kicks before the ancient metal finally gave way, spilling her out into the deep-level shelter tunnel to land in a heap not far from Fastitocalon.
He lay on his back surrounded by a drift of inexplicable dingy-white feathers, the pool of blood around him too dark and sticky to be human. There was so much of it, Greta thought, helplessly, trying not to do calculations about blood volume in her head, trying not to think of how much someone could lose and go on breathing. She felt it soaking, thick and already cold, into the knees of her jeans as she bent over him and reached for the pulse beneath the angle of his jaw.
Part of her had still been expecting to find one.
He was … cool to her touch, utterly still. The tightness that had crept around Greta’s chest in the time since she had lost his mental touch sharpened suddenly, abruptly, as if a screw had been turned, a fist had clenched just under her breastbone. Her eyes burned, dry, as she looked down into his face.
In the tunnel’s red emergency lights, he was all black-and-white, no color left in him at all. The sharp contrast took away fine detail. The lines that bracketed his mouth and ruled his forehead were still there; nothing could erase those completely. But the exhausted, pinched, above all worn look was gone; the expression of someone at the very end of their strength, tired almost beyond rest but gamely hanging on because there was simply no other choice, was no longer there. His eyes were closed, the deeply grooved parallel lines between the eyebrows smoothed out. His mouth was stained with blood, but the lips curved ever so slightly in a smile.
There was an awful and beautiful peace in that face, a quiet contentment she’d never seen there before. Never known he was capable of. It was the calm smile of an alabaster effigy, silent and still. The thought stirred up more fragments of phrase from half-forgotten texts: peace that passeth understanding.
She had never really understood what that meant, and she still did not. All she could understand right now was that he was dead. That Fastitocalon was dead. All of everything was over, because he was dead, and gone beyond her skill, and he was—had been—all she had left.
She couldn’t breathe; her throat closed painfully. Now, finally, the tears came, sending the world into a wavering blur. Greta knelt beside him, her hands fisted in the lapels of his jacket, as terrible raw sobs ratcheted out of her chest. She didn’t care if there were more of the blue monks coming to stick a knife in her as well; didn’t care if the tunnel caved in around them. She buried her face against his still chest and cried for everything lost, everything ruined, everything thrown away, wasted, unwanted.
Shantih shantih shantih.
Cranswell heard it before they even turned the corner into the main tunnel, following the brilliant hovering light: somebody crying, and crying very hard indeed.
Samael led the way. He had turned the wings and gold-girdled chiton into an exquisitely cut suit of white silk, which was a little easier to deal with, but Cranswell was still aware of being so ludicrously far out of his depth that he couldn’t even see the shore.