Of course.
Within heartbeats he has rounded the wreckage and found his way back to the pit’s black maw. He pauses, looks up to her both frowning and squinting. The ruins radiate out about them, buzzing in the sunlight. They gaze at each other across the interval, exchanging unasked questions.
At last his eyes click to her waist, where her right hand pensively fingers the pouch.
“Yes-yes,” he says roughly. “Of course.”
Renewed, they creep into the darkness together.
She can still feel the panic, cold enough to prick, but her thoughts have become woolen with relief, as if she has found leisure at the end of some arduous task. The Qirri is forever dredging up inappropriate passions, it seems, moving her soul at angles to her circumstances. The tunnels they plumb are entirely unlike the ancient obsidian marvels they explored in Cil-Aujas, but they are the same nonetheless. Halls that flee the sun. Chutes into blackness. Graves.
And despite her terror, she finds that she does not care.
Blessed be the Nonman King … his residue …
They descend at a shallow angle. The old Wizard’s Surillic Point bleaches their surroundings with white detail. Detritus and scabbed ruin clot the floor. The walls are so scored she cannot but glimpse the shrieking legions of Sranc that had once trod them. Otherwise, the stonework is both meticulous and devoid of ornamentation.
They slip deeper into the earth, a bead of white in dungeon blackness. The air remains rank, the odour of dead things mouldering, rot drained to the dregs. Neither of them speak. The same questions move their souls, ones that only the black depths can answer. To speculate aloud, it seems, would be to waste precious wind. Who knew what air dwelt below? What foulness?
The light soundlessly shoulders away the dark, revealing a pocked and blasted region a cavity where everything tingles with sorcerous residue. Some kind of gate, she realizes, glimpsing the mangle that had once been an iron portal. They had happened upon an underworld bastion of some kind.
“They brought the ceilings down …” the old Wizard says, his eyes probing the cragged hollows above them. “All this has been excavated.”
“What do you think happened?”
“The D?nyain,” he says, speaking in the airy way of someone describing images drawn from the Soul’s eye. “They fled the walls above when they realized they were overmatched. They sealed themselves in the tunnels below. I’m guessing they brought the ceilings down when the Consult assaulted this gate.”
Her eyes roam the pitted surfaces, confirming.
“To no avail,” she says.
A grim, beard-crushing nod. “To no avail.”
The tunnels complicate beyond the destroyed gate, chambers like nodes, opening onto further corridors. Mimara finds her earlier presentiment of immensity confirmed. Somehow she just knows that the tunnels go on and on, forking and twining, veining the mountain foundations with complexity and confusion. Somehow she knows they have been designed to defeat comprehension as much as courage …
That they stand at the threshold of a labyrinth.
“We must mark our way,” she tells the old Wizard.
He glances at her, frowning.
“This place is D?nyain,” she explains.
They wander across littered floors, a bead of illumination bumping and shuffling through the black. An aging Wizard and a pregnant woman.
Cil-Aujas howls from some deep pit in her memory, rendering the silence that much more palpable, enough to squeeze her chest, freight her limbs. And it strikes her that she never truly surfaced, that the long mad flight through the Mop and across the Istyuli were but a different underworld, the endless skies a different ground, as crushing as any mountain. She tries guessing at the function of the chambers they pass through, recess after recess, walls scorched, floors chapped with desiccated gore. The spaces yield to the relentless light, lines firm and straight, reaching out with geometric perfection. Most are blasted, their contents stamped to ruin, kicked into corners. But one possesses iron racks, some kind of restraints for human forms, arranged in a radial arc. Another appears to be some kind of kitchen.
The Wizard marks every room with the charcoal nub of an abandoned torch. Crude chevrons tipped on their side, always pointing to the obscurity before them.
They pass through several more chambers, breathing cobweb-air. They clamber down a half-ruined stairwell, enter the throat of what seems a long corridor. Fragments of bone and debris gravel the floors.
She tries to imagine the D?nyain. She has heard tales of her stepfather’s martial skill, how it dwarfed even that of the skin-spies, so she sees Soma in her soul’s eye, only in D?nyain guise, battling through Sranc and blackness, his sword sketching impossible figures in the screeching dark. When the images fade she falls to pondering Koll, the final face worn by the thing called Soma, and the madness of Sauglish.