Samvin Carroter dead. Again and again.
His look of shock and disbelief accompanies me as we stay crouched low in the snow.
Waiting.
And waiting.
And waiting.
The girls spent the morning cutting down dry branches, covering them with what oil we could spare, making a pile perfect for a bonfire.
I don’t know how many of her hand bombs Visylla will use to ignite it and make a sufficient sound to draw away the guards, but I get an idea when the first blasts go off. Snow slides from a nearby mountain, the sound a deep rumbling that’s enough to get anyone’s attention.
While the men are distracted, Kearan and I creep ever closer, waiting for some of the guards to run and explore the sound. When their numbers are sufficiently thinned, we gain more ground, until I can see the opening in the rocks.
They left only two men behind aside from the lookouts, who now have their backs to us.
I don’t need to signal Kearan what to do. We each get behind one of the men and simultaneously slit their throats.
Normally, I know the men I’m killing. I know their misdeeds and their characters. I know why they deserve to die. This doesn’t feel quite the same. I don’t really know these men. All I know is they sunk my ship and killed Bayla.
But that’s reason enough for me.
Samvin Carroter dies again, and that small high carries me through the opening into the ground.
The light dims at first, only the sunshine at our backs lighting our way through a thin, rocky tunnel. But soon more light shines ahead, and I follow it into a cavern opening.
I am not easily impressed, but the sight before me takes my breath away. The ground, the ceiling, the walls—they all look as though made of light blue glass. But I know it’s ice. Cicles from the ceiling hang over our heads; some have grown so long they connect with the ground at our feet, making columns of ice. The sun shines through the transparent ceiling above us, lighting up the whole place brightly. There must be feet of snow above the icy ceiling, hiding this cavern from sight, but it’s not deep enough to keep out the light.
As I take my first step onto the ice, I nearly lose my footing.
“It’s slick,” I tell Kearan. I put one hand on the wall to my left to help me keep my balance, and we continue. Past the chamber of ice is another tunnel, this one just as slippery, and we traverse ever deeper and deeper. So far, the path hasn’t forked at all, so I’m confident about the return trip.
When more light streams ahead, I hurry for it, silent as ever, and come to a stop before I step foot in the new chamber, taking it in before I expose myself.
It’s much larger than the last opening, with more pillars and blocks of ice strewn about the place. Only this time, I can see shapes within the ice. When I deem the area empty, I creep closer to get a good look at one of the frozen blocks.
There’s a skeleton within its depths.
Kearan scrambles on the ice behind me, and I look in time to see him reeling from the discovery of another skeleton in the ice.
“Is this a graveyard?” he asks.
“Why guard a graveyard?”
“I don’t know.”
I meander around the ice, counting compilations of bones as I go. When I reach the end of the room, I get to thirty-six.
“Now what?” Kearan asks.
“There’s another tunnel.”
He follows me through it.
The light does miraculous things to the ice, distorting the shapes hidden within. Still, I know for a fact that the first skeleton I see in the next room belongs to a child. No trick of the light can mask that. The curious thing is the skeletons are all bare. No clothing or weapons or anything else to suggest who they were. Just bones frozen forever in a timeless rest.
“It doesn’t make sense that there’s nothing remaining but bones,” I say. “In this cold, it would take forever for the bodies to decompose.”
“Unless someone carved them up. Ate them first. You remember when we met those siren-enchanted cannibals?”
I don’t want the reminder. We lost Lotiya that day. I squint at another block of ice. “Look at them; they’re perfect skeletons. Not a bone out of place. Standing upright. What held them in place like that while they were frozen? How were they frozen like this to begin with?”
“There’s something at work here more than just the elements,” Kearan says. “Do you think any of these people were from the Wanderer?”
“I can’t say. I don’t even know how to tell if a skeleton is male or female. Should have brought Mandsy with us.” She knows more about the human body than anyone.
We pass through more and more rooms, or rather crypts. Each is the same. Columns and blocks holding skeletons encased in ice. Some even stand in the very walls of each cavern. We walk deeper and deeper underground, passing hundreds and hundreds of the dead.
“Enwen would lose his shit in this place,” Kearan says.
I bite back a laugh, his comment so random it takes me by surprise. More surprising still is my response. I can’t remember the last time I wanted to laugh at something he’s said.
Just when I think it’s probably time to turn back before we’re caught, I catch sight of something new. A dark spot beneath the ice floor at the foot of the next tunnel. I crouch down in front of it to get a closer look. It appears to be some sort of metal plate?
I pull out a dagger to chip away at the thin layer of ice covering it. The second the tip of the blade presses down on the ice, there’s the twang of a bowstring, and an arrow shoots just over my head. Kearan, luckily, had been standing to the side of me, out of range.
He says, “It’s booby-trapped.”
“Then we’re getting close.”
“To what?”
“Whatever it is they’re hiding down here.”
I tap the plate a second time, but nothing happens, which means the traps have to be reset once they’re sprung. That makes things easier. I eye the tunnel ahead of us, seeing more dark spots down the path, and I start flinging daggers to activate the depression plates.
The second one sends a giant ax slicing through the frozen hallway. It cracks through a thin layer of ice in the ceiling before swinging down and across, embedding back into the ceiling once it reaches the peak of its arc. The third depression plate springs spears up from the ground.
“They’re not just guarding this place. They’re also maintaining these traps,” I note. “Else everything would just freeze over completely and be useless. They clean and sharpen and reset these constantly. They’d have to.”
“Best we see what they’re hiding from us.”
More daggers fly from my hands. A few more arrows spring free from different directions. A guillotine-like blade falls from the ceiling. I start to notice the holes and divots along the walls where all the traps spring from. When I strike the last plate, which deposits a net of some sort, I tread the path down the tunnel, retrieving my knives as I go.
Kearan follows but has to stop halfway down the tunnel, where some of the still-swinging weapons block too much space for him to squeeze past.
“I’ll wait here,” he says. “Talk me through what you find.”
When I reach the end, I enter a small room. Five skeletons stand in the ice walls, as though guarding the tomb in the middle.