“Er,” said Csorwe. “Not so much.”
Shuthmili gave her another thin smile. “I knew it,” she said. “If you were a real student you would have fallen over yourself to tell me about all the inscriptions you’ve translated.”
Csorwe blinked, taken aback. “You’re right,” she said. “Sethennai sometimes needs a blunt instrument. That’s what I am.”
“Aren’t we all,” said Shuthmili mildly. “And he’s sent you to steal some valuable Qarsazhi cultural heritage, apparently.”
“Ah,” said Csorwe. “Yes. Well.”
“Don’t worry,” said Shuthmili. “This world died long before Qarsazh existed. It’s hardly ours.”
“So didn’t you mean what you said?” said Csorwe. “About protecting part of your history and all that?”
“Of course I did!” said Shuthmili, then seemed to recall who she was speaking to, and looked down ruefully. “Mostly. I just don’t want to leave. I know Warden Daryou wants to take me home. He’s probably right, really, but … I just need a little more time.”
“For your translation.” Csorwe recalled her days labouring over Parza’s texts and wondered how anyone could be so eager, but Shuthmili was clearly an unusual specimen.
“Yes,” said Shuthmili. “I’ve worked hard on it. It matters. We do have a responsibility to the past—and to the future—to save what we can before it falls away.” She looked hard at Csorwe as if she thought she might be laughed at, then lowered her eyes. “And I want to make it good, since it’s probably the last thing I’ll do under my own name—”
“How’s that?” said Csorwe.
“Well, this is just a holding assignment for me, until my Quincuriate assessment,” said Shuthmili, then noted Csorwe’s expression. “Oh, you don’t know—”
“Sorry,” said Csorwe, biting back a smile at Shuthmili’s obvious eagerness to explain.
“The Quincuriate are the strongest Adepts in Qarsazh. I’ve been training since I was a child. I always wanted to join Spinel Quincury and research new magic—build new devices—but I wouldn’t mind any Quincury really, even Cedar—that’s civil engineering—” She paused, looking more enthused than Csorwe had ever seen her. “I’m sorry. I’m going too fast. I’m just not used to talking to someone who doesn’t already know all about it.”
“It’s all right,” said Csorwe. Shuthmili almost sounded like an ordinary person when she was excited. No, in fact, not an ordinary person, because Csorwe didn’t know anyone else who got this excited about magic besides Sethennai, and he was less ordinary than most. “Go on,” she said.
“There are only ever a set number of Adepts in the Quincuriate,” said Shuthmili, needing no more encouragement than this. “They work in teams of five. There won’t be a place for me until one of them dies, so they sent me out here until then to keep my skills sharp.”
“Sounds like they’re pretty certain you’ll pass the test,” said Csorwe. “You seem smart.”
“Well, I can’t get complacent,” said Shuthmili, though obviously pleased. “I mean, I think I’ll pass. Probably. But you know—this is the one thing I do—this is my one path—I want to do it as well as I can. The work here is important, but it’s just one Precursor world. It’s not really that much in the grand scheme of things, I know. Once I’m joined to the Quincury there will be bigger things—projects that can affect all of Qarsazh. But this was the one thing that was given to me to do, for now, just as myself. I really wanted to do my best here.”
“Yeah,” said Csorwe. “That makes sense.” They were all here to do their best, after all. The plan had always been to arrive, search, and leave, and there was no real reason to change that. Quick and clean, like a knife going in. But she did find herself hoping they wouldn’t do too much damage to the Qarsazhi in the process.
* * *
The Hollow Monument was a windowless bulk of black stone, not high but very broad, crouching at the bottom of a bowl-shaped valley. From the air, it looked organic rather than architectural, as though it had been held and hollowed out by the elements alone.
A wall of dry stones encircled the valley. They landed Prosperity on a ridge outside this enclosure. The five of them disembarked and set off toward the wall. There was no sign that anyone else had been here recently, no sign of the enemy’s mazeship. Csorwe wondered whether she could have been wrong. Even so, they couldn’t afford to let their guard down.
Past the opening in the wall, the air was still. A thin mist settled on the glassy earth, and on the other tombs: plain barrows and low monoliths, flocking like seabirds on a misty shore, around the great island of the Hollow Monument.
They picked their way between the tombs toward the wide, slot-like entrance to the Monument, and Malkhaya and Shuthmili examined the interior face of the doorway for curse-wards.
“We didn’t find anything last time we were here, but better safe than sorry,” he said. “If Aritsa’s to be believed, our Precursors liked a security perimeter almost as much as we do.”
“Not the Precursors that bother me so much as the necromancer,” said Csorwe, standing over them. The ancient dead couldn’t do much to harm them without the help of the living.
“You and me both,” said Malkhaya. Once he’d realised this expedition was inevitable, he had backed down with a good grace. Out here, Shuthmili and Aritsa paid real attention to his advice. Perhaps that was all he’d really needed.
He straightened up, satisfied the doorway was safe. The Monument yawned before them. The door was missing, but it was difficult to see what lay more than a few feet from the opening: the faint impression of stairs descending, and then only darkness.
They lit their lanterns and took their first steps into the Hollow Monument. The steps sank swiftly into a damp, claustrophobic chill. The light from the doorway quickly faded, leaving them with only five bobbing lanterns and the sound of their own footsteps. Csorwe realised Malkhaya was humming to himself under his breath to keep his nerve.
Csorwe traced the surface of the walls with her fingertips, feeling the cold of them even through her gloves. They were carved in places with interlocking lines, by turns sinuous and geometric.
“It’s writing,” said Shuthmili, drifting up beside her like a pale jellyfish.
“This is one of the ritual inscription forms of Precursor writing,” Aritsa added, close behind.
“What does it say?” asked Csorwe.
“It’s a lament or tribute to the dead buried here,” said Aritsa. “We are welcomed to pay our respects.”
At the bottom of the steps, they came to a series of bare, narrow chambers. Sometimes the Qarsazhi ordered them to keep to single file, or to edge one after another round the edges of the chamber. Even Tal knew better than to challenge them on this.
“This place is a nightmare,” he muttered, catching up to Csorwe as the Qarsazhi paused to examine a wall carving. “How long before we can drop them?”
“We’re sticking with them,” said Csorwe. “Safety in numbers.”
“If the priest tells me to watch my step again I’m going to push him down the stairs,” said Tal, which was as much acquiescence as she was going to get.
They came into a larger chamber, entirely carved with the indecipherable script. In the light of their lanterns, the carvings seemed to pulse and flow. Half a dozen grand corridors branched off from this chamber, and in the walls of these corridors were hundreds of little doorways, now entirely empty of doors.
“Ah, the main atrium,” said Aritsa, quite happily. He seemed to have forgotten they were looking for an enemy. “We believe this structure would have served as a royal mausoleum of sorts. Less important cadet branches would be buried on higher levels. As we descend, we will meet with the more distinguished dead.”
Each empty doorway led into a cell, and in each cell was a plain stone sarcophagus.
“We tend to find these burials in multiples of twelve,” said Aritsa. “It seems to have been a sacred number to them. I wouldn’t be su
rprised if there are at least twelve thousand here!”
The lay-sisters had kept a beehive in the gardens of the House of Silence. Once Angwennad had showed Csorwe the little hexagons, neatly capped to keep the larvae safe inside. She thought of it now. She imagined the Precursors shutting corpses away in their coffins, still fat and wriggling, ready to pupate into something grand and strange.
Beyond the rows of little tombs, they came into a confusing honeycomb of chambers and passages, which must have served some purpose long ago. All ways looked the same. The corridors overlapped and interlocked, and soon it became clear they were going in circles. If Csorwe thought about it too hard, she started to feel travel-sick.
“There’s too much space in here,” said Tal. His jaw was set, and his hands clenched at his hips. He always found this kind of thing difficult to deal with. Ordinarily Csorwe would have taken the chance to get one over on him, but she was equally on edge.
“Oh, yes, this is always fun,” said Malkhaya bleakly. “It happens in a lot of old places, when you get too far in. This is about where we had to turn back last time,” he added, half hopefully.
“It’s a function of the death of this world,” said Aritsa. “Theologically we would refer to it as lenition. The world becomes softer.”
“Time and space relinquish their shackles,” said Shuthmili. This must have been a quotation from something, because none of the Qarsazhi looked as alarmed by it as they should.
“It isn’t dangerous in itself,” said Malkhaya.
“Well!” said Tal. “Good to know!”
“This is as far as our knowledge takes us,” said Aritsa. “Beyond this we don’t know what we’ll find.”
They took another set of stairs down. The floor below contained more tombs, arrayed around a central hall. Here, one wall was occupied entirely by a mirror-polished sheet of obsidian. Before it was a stone pedestal, and a basin, full to the brim with black water.
“Oh, and this is remarkable,” said Aritsa, pausing before the obsidian mirror. The light of his lantern flashed and winked on the surface. “How curious! It truly does look like the precursor to a Qarsazhi temple! The offering—dish—the oracle pool—remarkable.”
Here they paused, so Aritsa could take notes, and the rest of them could eat.
“If I pissed in the corner,” muttered Tal, “do you think all twelve thousand ghosts would haunt my dick forever?”
“Yes,” said Csorwe. “Hold it in.”
He made a disgusted noise and stalked off, perhaps to find somewhere less haunted to relieve himself.
Shuthmili wafted past the mirror behind Aritsa. She caught sight of her reflection, and paused, as though waiting to see what it would do. Her reflection looked levelly back at her. Its eyes were pools of darkness, its gloves bone-white. Csorwe remembered how Shuthmili had looked during the revenants’ attack on the lodge, and shivered.
The only noises within the monument were their footsteps, their breathing, the faint metallic clinking of the hot lanterns, the scratch of Aritsa’s pencil. There was no wind. No creak of hinges. Wood and metal had rotted and rusted long ago. Only the rock remained.
There was a scream from one of the far doors.
Csorwe grabbed her sword and pelted toward the noise, immediately angry with herself for letting Talasseres out of her sight.
It wasn’t long before she found him. He wasn’t under attack. He wasn’t even hurt. He was in one of the sarcophagus cells, standing over a fresh corpse.
It was a young Oshaaru man, very beautiful and evidently dead. He had been laid out carefully on the sarcophagus. He was crowned with white dog roses, and he was quite naked. His skin was of a grey so pale he might have been carved from ice, except where the clean wounds of the sacrifice were still dark and freshly washed. He wore an expression of great tranquillity, and there was no other mark of violence on him, but at his mouth, which was sewn shut, in a line of twelve neat stitches from tusk to tusk. The sign of sealed lips.
“It’s them,” said Tal, in a low voice, on the edge of panic. “It’s them, isn’t it? It’s your death cult. Your people. I should have known.”
Her first instinct was to deny it. Tal knew far too much about her past, and he could never resist the chance to salt that particular wound, but there was no mockery in his voice this time. He was right.
At least this boy was too young for Csorwe ever to have known him. She didn’t even have the heart to laugh at Tal for crying out.
Csorwe remembered her lessons. The Unspoken One was deeply rooted in its Shrine, in its earthly mansion within the sacred mountain. To draw on its power when far from home, you needed to make a pathway. There was no surer way than this, the ritual of oblation.
Tal straightened up, and quickly managed a little cynical bark of laughter.
“They do take it seriously, don’t they?” said Tal. “These people really believe. What do they think a god of death is going to do for them anyway?”
Csorwe didn’t answer. Giving Tal a reasonable explanation was like giving a ball of wool to a cat.
“No, tell me,” said Tal, quirking an artificial smile that looked like he was having a spasm. “I’m interested. What is the advantage, anyway? Pray to the Unspoken One long enough and in the next life you’ll have all the babies you can eat?”
Before she could answer, Malkhaya rushed in, followed by Aritsa.
“By the Mother of Cities,” said Aritsa, and dropped to his knees beside the dead boy. She thought he might be weeping, then realised he was praying, his hands clasped tightly in his lap.
“Oh, bloody fuck,” said Malkhaya, in a hollow voice. “Look at this. What kind of—” He swallowed and straightened up. “We’ll have to burn him. We can do that for him, at least.”
“We don’t burn our dead,” said Csorwe, without thinking. He should be taken home and interred in the crypts beneath the House of Silence, as all such oblations were. It made no sense to feel strongly about this. She hadn’t known him. “Oshaaru don’t, I mean,” she added. Poor boy, to have only strangers and traitors to attend to his corpse.
Csorwe had read about the ritual of oblation, but she had never heard of anyone actually performing it. It bothered her, for reasons other than the obvious. There were not so many pious young virgins in the remote forests of Oshaar that anyone could afford to exsanguinate them at will. Their enemy—the necromancer—must very badly need to rely on the power of the Unspoken. Which made sense. You would, if you intended to raise a troop of revenants and attack a Qarsazhi outpost.
Could it really be Oranna? She had to admit it was possible—even likely. But she couldn’t imagine Prioress Sangrai authorising such an expedition, or giving Oranna permission to sacrifice a lay-brother. But perhaps things had changed since those days. Csorwe hadn’t been old enough to pay much attention to politics at the House of Silence. It was hard to imagine the librarian sewing up the lips of a corpse, but it wasn’t that hard.
Lagri Aritsa straightened up and sighed. “Needless,” he muttered. “A pointless desecration.” He looked down at the corpse, and sighed again. “You were right, then,” he said. “Our enemy is here.” He sounded more disappointed than anything.
“Csorwe,” said Tal. She ignored him. “No, listen,” he said. He reached out as though to catch her elbow, then thought better of it.
“Don’t care, Tal. Save up all your great jokes and try them out on Sethennai when we get home.”
She stepped out of reach, still looking at the corpse, with the sensation that she had missed something. That they had failed to spot some obvious trap. She looked over the sacrificial wounds again, wondering if there was some kind of message encoded there.
“Would you listen, you big moron,” he said, in a whisper.
“Shut up, Tal,” she said. Her nerves were screaming, loud as the watchtower bell. Something was wrong. Something out there was terribly wrong. “I think this is a diversion. They want to keep us busy.”
“That’s what I’m
trying to tell you!” he said. “Where the hell is that girl?”
The atrium was empty. The corridors were silent. Shuthmili was gone.
10
The Divinity Underground
DARYOU MALKHAYA WOULD HAVE searched all twelve thousand cells for Shuthmili. He seemed ready to look inside every sarcophagus, and if Tal hadn’t been present, Csorwe might have offered to help him. At last Lagri Aritsa took him by the arm and steadied him.
“Malkhaya,” he said. “Stop.”
“What do you mean? We have to find her!” said Malkhaya. He was still struggling, but couldn’t bring himself to throw the old man off. Instead he kept moving down the passage, dragging Aritsa after him. “The necromancer must have taken her,” he said. “She wouldn’t just wander off.”
“Shouting and slamming doors will not convince them to bring her back,” said Aritsa.
“She could be—”
“If that’s so, there is nothing that either of us can do to help her,” said Aritsa, marching Malkhaya back to the atrium. “If she is dead, she is at peace. If she is corrupted, then haste will do us no good. If she is alive, then we must use our heads.”
Tal and Csorwe followed at a distance, and he pulled her aside, into a corner of the atrium. He was obviously shaken, his ears quivering like a frightened rabbit’s.
“She could’ve got lost,” he said, glancing back over his shoulder. “If I lived with these creeps I’d get lost as soon as I could.”
Only a few hours ago Shuthmili had been with Csorwe in the cutter, eager to do her best. Csorwe imagined where she might be now, perhaps afraid, perhaps in pain … but she pushed the thought aside. Fretting wasn’t going to help anyone.
Tal shifted restlessly from one foot to another. “I say we ditch them all,” he said. “They’re no use to us anymore. We’re here for the Reliquary, not to get bogged down looking for some—”
“Calm down. Just because you’ve started screaming at the sight of a corpse—”
“Oh, get fucked,” said Tal, making a futile effort to sound calm.
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