Something pale was half hidden in the dirt. Lore nudged it with her toe—a bone, the end sharp. The surface was pockmarked and pitted, as if it’d been here a long time. “Maybe you were right about the revenant.”
Bastian’s nose wrinkled. “Good for me.” He nodded down the branching tunnels. “Which way?”
She jerked her head to the right and continued on, a little quicker than before. She kicked the bone into the dark.
They kept up the faster pace, torches sputtering. Lore thought it’d been a little over two hours since they descended through the well—still plenty of time before sunrise, but Gabe would be worried. He’d be pacing, she was nearly sure of it. Pacing and pulling at his eye patch.
“Do you think he’s all right?” It pushed past her lips without her conscious thought to voice it.
“Remaut?” Beside her, Bastian stiffened, but his voice was even. “I’m sure he’s just fine. Maybe he’s taking the opportunity to get some sleep. He’s looking less than well rested these days.”
“He sleeps in front of our door,” Lore said. “To guard it.”
“Always one for dramatic shows of chivalry.”
“Maybe you could learn something from him.”
A stretch of silence. Then, “Would you like me to, Lore?”
It could’ve been flirtatious, easily said in his usual flippant tone. But it wasn’t. It was earnest, and Lore didn’t answer.
Her mental map guided them through a handful of turns, torches flickering against the damp stone. In her mind, the white lights of her and Bastian drew closer to the knot of Mortem, until the two were on top of each other. They’d reached their destination.
Which was, apparently, a solid wall.
“Dammit.” Lore slammed her hand against the rough stone. “Fuck!”
“There has to be a door somewhere.” Bastian waved his torch, casting shuddering light in either direction. “Maybe there’s a trick latch or something?”
“There’s not.” The hall was narrow; Lore could lean backward and hit the opposite wall. She slid down it, pressing the heel of her hand against her forehead. “There’s nothing here.”
“There has to be. You led us—”
“I led us wrong, Bastian.” She dropped her hand, looked up at him with daggers in her eyes. “I was wrong. Maybe we’re wrong about this whole damn thing. Maybe we should just leave it.”
“Leave it,” he repeated, cold. He stared down at her, the firelight making him look as regal and distant as a statue of Apollius. “Just let my father and my uncle collect bodies for who-knows-what purpose and march us into war?”
Lore didn’t drop her gaze from his, but neither did she respond. She was tired. Tired of trying to fix something she didn’t fully understand. Tired of being yanked along in one direction or another, used from every angle. Maybe some of those angles were justified, but they still stung.
Bastian cursed, pushing his torch into a small pile of rocks to keep it upright, then slowly ran his hands over the wall. Still searching for that hidden latch.
She watched him for a moment, unable to make herself stand. Then, with a sigh, she pushed up and did the same.
He glanced at her sideways but stayed quiet. Smart man.
As predicted, there was no hidden latch. But as Lore’s hand passed over one section of rough stone wall, her palm… stopped.
She frowned. She could move her hand if she tried, but her skin seemed drawn back to that one spot—smoother than the rest of the rock, and colder, too. At first Lore thought that was the reason her hand strayed there, a simple matter of texture. But as she pressed her palm to the stone, she felt something thrum. A swirl of winter, slow-clotted blood.
Mortem. Mortem, calling to her. Gathered here and knotted.
“I think I figured it out,” she murmured.
Bastian stopped running his hands over the wall, his dark hair gilded with dust. He stepped back, palms open before him as if in surrender. “What do we have to do?”
“It’s a lock,” she said, hand still pressed to the stone. “But with no key. A mechanism that has to be tripped with magic, not something physical.”
“Magic is all you, unfortunately.” He swallowed, narrowing his eyes at the wall. “Is it safe?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Well, then.” Bastian stepped behind her, like he could offer some support. “I’ve got your back. Try not to die.”
Lore closed her eyes and tipped up her chin, probing her senses forward into the wall as she took down her mental barrier, the forest that would always make her think of Gabe. She tried to gather Mortem from the surrounding stone, but the way it’d already been worked into this hidden door kept her from pulling it forward.
She took a deep breath, held it until stars spun behind her eyes. When they opened, her vision had gone grayscale—the wall before her was a writhing tangle of black, her hand against it the dim-glowing gray of a channeler at work. More Mortem lurked in the wall behind her, in the dirt; Lore pulled it up, thin threads of darkness winding around her fingers. Lore channeled it through herself, quick with practice. Then, gently, she pushed it into the wall.
The Mortem in the wall had been fashioned into a puzzle box, a knot in the center, other strands outlining the shape of a door. To open it, she’d have to solve the puzzle box.
This had to be Anton’s work. It reminded her too much of what he’d done at the leak, twisting threads of Mortem into an intricate knot, working it in ways she’d never seen. But whatever Anton had done at the leak was simple compared with this. She’d never known Mortem could be used this way, twisted and fashioned rather than run quickly through a channeler and into dead matter. Made into a tool. It must’ve taken intense concentration to channel and shape it at the same time.
But had he channeled, at the leak? Now that she was thinking of it, Lore wasn’t sure. Anton had shaped the Mortem, but she didn’t recall seeing the opaque eyes and necrotic fingers that meant he was moving the power of death through his body.
Had he just shaped raw Mortem? Made a tangle of it, then sent it to her to channel inward? Such things had been done before, but it’d been centuries ago.
No time to wonder over it now. Lore sipped air through her lips as she probed at the puzzle box, the strands of Mortem she channeled picking at the ones from the Priest Exalted, thin fingers on violin strings.
The goal of the puzzle was clear—unravel the knot in the center, and it’d be a straight shot through the box and around the outline of the door, an easy thing to trace her own threads along and open. The untangling would take ages, probably. A series of tiny movements, one after the other, executed in exactly the right way and exactly the right order—
One of her threads slipped, the effort of pushing through stone making it go sideways. Something in the puzzle box slid into place.
The tangled knot smoothed.
For just a moment, Lore stood still, not quite able to believe she’d solved the intricate puzzle box by accident. Then, with one last push, she sent the Mortem she’d made down the line.
A crack. The wall before her swung open.
Lore stepped back, the threads of Mortem falling away as she gasped in air, color returning to her vision and blood coursing into her fingers. Cold emanated from the now-open door, and the dark beyond was tar-thick. She picked up her torch with shaky hands; even the flame-light didn’t penetrate more than a foot or two into the chamber.