by Lucy Tempest
“Or what?”
“Or you will face the wrath of my father, my uncle, and both their kingdoms!” she threatened viciously. “Let us out and they might spare you!”
“You have already threatened me in my own home, Princess.” Marzeya’s disembodied voice was as tranquil and cold as a graveyard chill. “Your kind ought to know better than to disrespect your hosts.”
“You can’t disrespect those who aren’t respectable!” Fairuza yelled.
Marzieh laughed harder, making me feel the cave shrink around me. I could almost hear the thousand legs of squirming, venomous bugs, and see the giant spiders above stirring in their webs.
I wanted out of this place, and Fairuza further insulting the witch wasn’t going to do that.
“Fairuza. Stop. Talking.” I shoved her aside, looking up and around to address the witch. “Lady Marzeya, please, if you mean to punish her, you can at least let me out. I wasn’t supposed to be here.”
“No, you weren’t,” Marzeya said softly. “For your agreeableness, I have left you Zafira’s necklace. Only if you find it will I let you out.”
I felt lightheaded, queasy. “But…why?”
“You offered to perform a service for me, dearie, remember?” she said sleepily, her voice fading. “That’s it. I advise you don’t waste time. And remember—don’t touch anything but the necklace.”
“But Lady Marzeya—where do I look? Just give me a clue!”
She didn’t answer.
She was gone.
Chapter Twenty-One
I didn’t know how long I stood gaping at the seamless stone where the cavern mouth had been.
It had happened again. A witch had saddled me with a task, given me no hints or guidance, with failure coming at a fatal price.
But instead of being sent to a palace where I’d found friends, I was trapped in a cave with her.
Remembering Fairuza finally burned through the ice of shock. I swung around, found her staring at our sealed exit, her face the image of stunned disbelief.
Couldn’t believe she didn’t get away with it this time, huh?
I couldn’t bear the sight of her right now.
Looking away, taking in steadying breaths, I began to think.
Marzeya was being spiteful, but she didn’t mean me any harm, so her task had to be easier than Nariman’s. Unlike the palace, that extravagant necklace should stick out like a beacon in this dusty cave.
Composing myself, I started exploring, and realized three things: the cave was the root of a mountain, it had been inhabited at one point—and magic ran through it.
I ascended a steep slope leading deeper into the cave, and candles blew to life as I passed beneath their ancient chandeliers. The ceiling soared higher and higher above me, the firelight revealing carved walls and elaborate decorations, all cobwebbed and rusted save for the rare gleam of gold.
The slope ended in a platform that gave me a plunging display of the ground below. More torches came to life, illuminating mounted staircases that spread up from the platform like wings, leading up to higher passages extending deep into the mountain.
As amazing as these feats of architecture were—hewn out of the mountain rather than built—I was in no state to admire them. The more the structures revealed themselves, the more lost I became, torn which way to go.
Fairuza caught up with me, huffing and puffing and loudly struggling with her skirt. “You could have waited for me.”
I didn’t answer her. I was too livid to speak.
Fairuza tapped my shoulder. “I asked you a question.”
My response was to tie my skirt into a big knot before taking the staircase to my left, pressing myself against the wall.
Fairuza didn’t follow me, which was a wise choice. Climbing the courthouse steps in such a bell-shaped, multilayered contraption had appeared to be a grueling task. Climbing these would be a death-wish.
By the time I reached the first ‘floor’ I was drenched in sweat and had wiped half the dust off the walls and was coated with it.
I found many open doorways to chambers filled with broken furniture. At the third level, I found a locked door. Anything locked had to be guarding something valuable.
I unstuck myself from the wall, fetched a few pins from my hair and went to work.
The lock proved trickier than its basic appearance suggested, with a complex interlocking mechanism inside. The door itself was a block of solid wood no battering ram could have barged through. This had to be guarding the necklace!
I finally opened the lock and braced my feet against the gravely ground to push the heavy, partially stuck door. Once open enough to slip through, I looked inside and—a shout exploded in my chest.
I jerked back violently, nearly tipping myself off the edge. I barely stopped, flew forwards, breaking my nails on the stone as I pulled myself back. I trembled all over with shock and fright as I peeked back inside the chamber.
Where three corpses sat.
Browned, leathery flesh, jaws clenched or gaping to one side, and empty sockets like holes into the void, the bodies still had hair, as long and as red as Ariane’s.
Young women. Girls. All in their nightgowns. One in a rocking chair with a book on her lap, another on the bed, a comb in her hand, and the third propped against the wall, like they’d been having a night-in, when something had killed them where they sat.
I remained frozen by the doorway, unable to look away.
Then the thought hit me and I choked on nothing, gagging on my own tongue. Marzeya might have left the necklace on one of them, or somewhere in their room.
I had to go in and search them.
Gritting my teeth to keep from retching, I went inside and searched with only my eyes. Since she’d insisted that I touched nothing, the necklace had to be unmissable.
Finding nothing, I rushed out to lean on the wall, gasping for air that didn’t taste of ancient death.
I forced myself off the wall and continued my search through every locked room I found on this level. Behind every door was the same macabre scene.
All the chambers were filled with families forever stuck in their last moment, their deaths a surprise that had ambushed them before they could even sense the danger.
There wasn’t a word for what I was feeling as I went back down. Or I was feeling too many things at once. Sadness. Pity. Confusion. Dread. Horror.
“What did you find?” Fairuza asked when I rejoined her.
She looked concerned, not by our situation, but by however I looked now. I forgot why I was so angry at her.
Those girls up there, in their room, reminded me of all of us two weeks ago. Girls in nightgowns in one big room, part of a vast, beautiful palace, a court that housed hundreds like this mountain could have.
And they were still up there, decades past rotting. Forgotten.
We would be too if we didn’t find the necklace. And so would Bonnie if I didn’t find that lamp. All our lives hinged on a disjointed scavenger hunt
Somewhere, up there, the gods of every land were looking down at me and laughing.
“What is it?” she repeated, softer than I expected.
“This place was inhabited…” I whispered, my throat tight.
“I can tell. This must have been a court of some ancient king.”
“No, I mean the bodies are still here.”
“So, it’s a graveyard?”
I swallowed. “It’s the remains of a curse.”
Fairuza flinched. I couldn’t blame her.
But I’d thought the necklace would be in the upper levels, as people usually hid their valuables in the highest places possible. But since I hadn’t found it, it might be in whatever passed for a vault in this place. I started heading down.
The temperature dropped the further we descended into the bowels of the cave, so I couldn’t tell if my shudders were from the cold or the sights I’d witnessed above, and their implications. I forced my focus back on the mission as I swept t
hrough the interconnected spaces, searching for a hint of sapphire.
Mind whirling with conflicting thoughts, I at one point found myself between the statues of a longhaired, bearded man gripping a real, massive hammer with both hands, and a woman with a peacock crown holding a water lily.
I recognized them as Ataxsh and Anaïta, Cahramani gods whose shrines I had visited with Cyrus while searching for the gold lamp. They were crudely made, not as life-like as the sculptures around the palace and Sunstone. They had to have been made by a more primitive people. A civilization that predated Cahraman, possibly even the Avestan Empire.
I wished I knew about these lands and their history. I wished my mother had told me where we came from, who her family and my father were, instead of leaving me ignorant and alone forever.
Banishing the yearning and giving up on this area, I turned to find Fairuza bowing before a heavily pregnant goddess who carried a child in one arm and a scepter in another.
She fully knew her ties to this land, and to the one that claimed her as its princess. And if not Cyrus, another prince would marry her and her children would be taught everything from birth about their family trees and culture. She’d end up having it all, while I would never have anything. The only man for me was Cyrus, and the only family I knew had been my mother and the Fairborns and I’d probably end up losing them all.
Exhaling the bitterness, I stopped by her side. “Who is this?”
“I believe she is Queen of Heaven, goddess of the moon, women and fertility,” she said, head still bowed, eyes closed, a pinch of concentration on her face.
I exhaled as I searched another area. “Does she have a name?”
Ending her prayer, she straightened. “It differs in each land. The Gemishti call her Hat-Hür, the Merjani Athirat, and in both Avesta and Cahraman her name is ‘Asherah.”
“What about in Almaskham?”
“Ellat.”
My heart fluttered. “Sounds like ‘Adalat.”
“My mother says ‘Adalat was an Almaskhami import. Before her, justice was one of the many jobs of the head sun god, Xorsham.”
At the mention of her mother, her eyes opened into a glare. She remained like that, staring menacingly at nothing in particular, until I nudged her. “Let’s go.”
“Shouldn’t we be searching in different places to cover more ground?”
“It’s better if we stick together.”
She crossed her arms. “Why? The first one of us to find the necklace wins.”
“This isn’t about the test anymore, Fairuza.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it isn’t, and you made sure of that!” I snapped, my prior anger resurging. “Now because of you all we can hope for is getting out of here.”
Fairuza turned her face away but remained in step with me as we entered another hall.
We emerged on the other side and fire basins mounted on basalt columns burst to life in lieu of torches. In their fiery light, the first thing that caught my eye was a glimmer of gold at the very end of the deep, uneven space.
It was two slightly larger-than-life opposing statues of crowned kings, each with a golden hand held out. Beyond them was another slope that led up to a wider space. We found many open chambers with signs of previous life, with belongings ranging from rusty swords to harpsichords to cots. Thankfully, there were no more bodies.
Then I found a closed, curved door. I was reaching for the ring-handle when the sight of the three dried up girls flashed before my eyes.
I turned to her. “Why don’t you check inside and I’ll check out here?”
She didn’t look at me. I grabbed her shoulder and turned her around. “Did you hear me?”
She looked up, eyes swimming with tears that tracked down her cheeks. “Yes, I heard you.”
Half of me wanted to yell at her, for having the nerve to cry when I—someone who had plenty of reasons to—didn’t. The other half wanted to ask her what was wrong.
The latter half won. “Are you scared?” Then the first half reared its head. “Or are you finally experiencing the peasant emotion that is ‘guilt’?”
Instead of a snappy retort, she sniveled, a sad, wet, undignified noise. “Not exactly.”
“Then what is it?”
“What do you care?”
“I don’t. I just want to know what reasons someone like you has to be upset.”
“Apart from the fact that I’m going to die?”
“You’re not going to die here.”
She shook her head, crying harder, nose and lips bright red in the firelight. “I am.”
“This is the first time you’ve ever been lost, isn’t it?” She blubbered, indelicately wiping her eyes with her sleeve. A cross between a snort and a bitter laugh escaped me. “I’m taking that as a yes.”
She sniffed loudly. “How many times have you been lost?”
“Plenty. I was lost for years.” I looked around, wondering if anyone had the chance to escape the attack that had ended all life here. “I still am lost.”
Her gaze grew contemplative as she wiped her eyes again. “You don’t believe you’ll die here?”
“I’d rather not believe it.”
“How does not believing it help?”
What an odd, reflective mood she was suddenly in. Because this was her first brush with danger? Or was it something else?
“Oh, I believe I will die, eventually,” I said. “It’s just that I can’t let that happen now. I have a lot to do before I go.”
“I don’t.”
She didn’t follow up that comment with anything else as we continued searching.
By the statues that towered at the end of the hall, Fairuza screamed.
I rushed to her side, hands fisted. “What?”
She pointed a shaky finger towards a chamber ahead.
It was filled with the dead. But these weren’t like the ones above, frozen in time. These were ravaged remains, bodies torn apart, pieces littering the ground, their mummified flesh picked almost clean off bones. Something had devoured their dead bodies.
But this was an ancient place and those people could have been dead for centuries. Whatever scavenger that had been, I hoped it had long died out.
“We’re going to die here.” She backed away from the sight, arm shielding her eyes, hiccupping between each word. “We’re—going—to—die—here.”
I reached for her, feeling just as overwhelmed, but I couldn’t afford a breakdown right now. We had to get out.
I tried to drag her away. “I told you. We’re not.”
“It’s all my fault.” She stumbled out of my reach, stepping on her own skirt and grabbed the gold hand of the stone king to steady herself.
A groan of muted thunder rumbled through the mountain. It reverberated beneath our feet and up the walls like a subtle earthquake, raining dust and silt down upon us.
As the tremor persisted, I began to hear other sounds.
The boiling rise of a thousand maddening whispers followed by the cacophony of rousing and rushing within the walls.
Something had woken up and was burrowing and clawing through the catacombs.
After a long, breath-bating moment, a clang of terror went through my chest, rattling my ribs and vibrating my organs.
I didn’t have to envision the worst anymore. It spared me the effort and came swarming out.
A horde of corpse-pale, eyeless, hairless beasts with slit nostrils, jaws kept apart by protruding fangs, and claws curling out of knuckle-deep nailbeds.
Ghouls!
Chapter Twenty-Two
Dread felt like wet cement pouring over my body, drying to rock in a fractured heartbeat.
Then Fairuza shrieked and the paralyzing layer cracked and fell into rubble at my numb feet. I gripped her wrist and bolted up the slope.
I only dared to look over my shoulder when we crossed the doorway into the wider passage. Heart in my ears and throat, breath shearing through my lungs, I caught a glimp
se of the ghouls crashing behind us in a frothing wave of demonic horror.
They began gnawing out each other’s throats, gashes spraying black on their pale, nightmarish faces. Fighting among themselves over who would get the chance to eat us.
I tightened my grip on Fairuza, pulling hard enough to dislocate her arm as I dragged her up a steep, ladder-like staircase. Sobbing, she stumbled in my wake, struggling to bend the arm in my grasp to lift her skirt off her feet, slipping many times and almost dragging me down with her.
The moment we reached the first platform, I panted, “For the love of Ellat, Fairuza, take that dress off!”
“I can’t reach the buttons!” she gasped,
“How do you put it on if you can’t take it off?”
“I don’t! My handmaidens do all that!”
“Are you a toddler?” I yelled. “Why would you need help putting on a dress?”
“It’s not a simple slip like yours. I can’t just pull it over my head,” she gasped. “It’s stiff, heavy—has so many requirements. Agnë threads the corset and buttons—while Meira sorts out—the skirts and train!”
Now was the worst time to criticize her impractical wardrobe. The weight of that skirt alone had almost toppled us down many times. There was also the issue of her shoes and—
“Are you wearing a corset right now?”
“Yes,” she wheezed.
That explained why she was so out of breath. Her lungs literally couldn’t expand. I had to rip it off her or else she’d soon faint mid-run and become an easy meal for the ghouls. I also couldn’t carry her like I had Cherine. Heavy skirts aside, she was almost my size, and I could barely carry myself at the moment.
We still had two more levels to climb, each connected to the next by a stone ladder at its center. The last led up to a huge, circular hole in the mountain wall. The sounds of sloshing echoed from within, like waves on a shore. I would have expected any water within here to be stagnant, a spring or a lake, but if it were a river…
We could ride the current out of the mountain!
The tiny splash of relief evaporated as the slam of a hundred bodies exploded below us in a writhing, reeking mass. They splintered, overflowing wall-to-wall like giant ants, claws scraping stone in a hair-raising chorus, all converging to the same spot. To us.