“That thing has been dead for a while,” Solmir answered. “Whatever magic it had is gone.”
“To the Kings?”
“Unfortunately.”
Neve kept her neck craned as they passed the corpse, unwilling to completely turn her back on it until the path curved and it was lost from sight. Even then, she couldn’t shake the gooseflesh rippling over her shoulders.
What started as one tunnel into the earth expanded the deeper they went, more corridors bored into the stone walls at irregular intervals. Some of them were large enough to walk through, but others were so narrow that you’d have to crawl. Neve didn’t let herself look at them for too long. Just thinking of inching through the earth like that made her palms clammy.
Finally, their path leveled off, terminating in a circular cavern. Tunnels branched in all directions, too dark to give a clue to what they held. Solmir stopped and dropped her hand, turning to glare at each tunnel in turn.
Neve crossed her arms. “Well? Where to now?”
“Give me a minute.” For the first time she could remember, Solmir looked completely unsure. He shook out his shoulders, making his hair sway over his back. A moment, then he flexed his fingers, wiggling them as if he could coax some direction from the air. Trying to feel out the Serpent’s power.
Trying, and apparently not getting very far. “Are you finding the right tunnel or calling a wayward dog?”
“Your Majesty, I beseech you for the gift of your silence.”
She shifted back and forth, looking warily around the circular space while Solmir tried to figure out which tunnel to take. Her vision was somewhat hazier down here. Shadows curled around the stone walls, thick and dark and ominous, and she fought the urge to slink closer to Solmir again, just for the solid reassurance of not being alone.
For all her mocking, she understood the principle of what he was doing. Power attracted power, he’d said, and he was full to the brim. So was the Serpent. If he listened to the magic within him, all that power he held so she wouldn’t have to, it should pull him toward the dying Old One.
Hopefully, before the dying Old One was pulled to the Five Kings, stuck in their Sanctum.
The Seamstress had told them that the Serpent was holding on, purposefully trying to avoid being absorbed by the Kings, increasing their magic with its own. But there was no way to know if it had been successful. No way to know until they went down one of these tunnels and found either a god or more empty darkness.
Both options made her wrap her arms tighter around herself, cocooning in Solmir’s coat.
After what felt like an hour, Solmir’s hands dropped. He turned to her, and Neve had been wrong—it wasn’t surprise or even fear that looked most alien on his sharp-boned face. It was defeat.
“I don’t know,” he said, like it was as much a shock to him as it was to her.
For a moment, Neve stood in confused silence. Then she advanced a step, hands curling tight against her arms. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“Exactly what it sounds like.” Solmir reached up, nervously rubbed at the puckered scars on his forehead. His pointer finger turned the ring on his thumb round and round. “The magic isn’t telling me where to go. The power should call me, but it’s… it’s just not. Or, rather, it’s trying to, but…” He shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s like the Serpent doesn’t want me to find it.”
She was right next to him now, glaring up as if she could use her eyes as daggers. “You mean you took us all the way down here, and you don’t know—”
His palm over her mouth muffled the rest of her poison, and Neve had her hand half raised to try to twist from his grip before she saw why.
The shadows at the edges of the room were closer. Thicker, almost opaque. A small circle of unshadowed stone surrounded Neve and Solmir, but other than that, the whole room was covered in viscous darkness.
And emanating from it—a low, gibbering sound.
Shadow-creatures. Unfettered magic, like what had burst from the broken ground, like what had seeped out of the lesser beast as her thorns made it unravel. But there was something different about these. They were still, uniform, as if they were being controlled.
As if they’d already attached to something bigger, their magic directed by something stronger than they were.
Solmir turned slowly, dropping his hand from her mouth when it became clear she’d stay quiet. But his other hand found her wrist, squeezed so hard it hurt.
“Magic from the Serpent?” Her lips barely moved with the question, like sound would shatter the shadow-creatures’ stasis. Even as she asked, though, she knew the answer was no. If the Serpent was dying, it wouldn’t have the strength to hold all this raw power at attention.