Neve breathed a faint, thankful sigh.
But then she heard a high clicking sound coming from somewhere behind them. Almost like huge chitinous legs moving closer.
She paused, boot in the air, head whirling to look behind her. “Did you hear that?”
“Keep moving,” Solmir said, answer enough.
Neve turned back around, finally putting down her foot without checking to make sure it was going where Solmir’s had. And that was enough to push her off-balance, into the muddy edge of a pool of black water.
At first, she thought it an easy misstep, simple to fix. But the mud at the edge of the pool sucked her down like a swallowing throat, devouring her to the knee before she could cry out, already to her waist by the time she did and Solmir came running.
Cursing, he grabbed her hands, tried to pull her backward out of the mud—at her shoulders now and still going, her hands slick with it, hard to grasp on to. Neve didn’t have the energy to scream again, everything in her concentrated on finding a handhold and pulling herself out of the bog before it reached her mouth.
But then, down by her feet—air.
She froze, wild eyes going to Solmir’s. “There’s something down here. A cavern or something.” Kings, she could taste the mud; she had to tilt her head up to talk, the lower half of her body breaking through to whatever was below the pool.
“Tunnels,” Solmir said, swiping his hair back from his forehead and leaving a streak of dirt. He looked away, calculation in his eyes. “When you fall through, be quiet. I’ll come for you.”
“Are they still in the tunnels?” Panic made her voice high and jagged. That clicking sound reverberated across the marsh again, faster this time. “Solmir, if they’re in the tunnels, what do I—”
The mud closed over her face before she could finish.
It felt like being buried alive. Mud seeped into every available orifice—her mouth, her eyes—damp and bitter and incongruous with the way she could freely kick her legs, having already slipped through the bog barrier into whatever lay beneath it.
When the bog finally let her go, with a disgusting squelching sound, the drop was short. Neve fell to the ground, knocking the wind from her earth-laden lungs, pulling in deep, gasping breaths of sour air. Mud caked her hair, her face; she clawed it away from her eyes, willing them to adjust to the dim.
A cave. A cave with rooty walls and a damp floor, smelling of earth and something almost fecal, animalic. Above, the bog, held in suspension by the strange physics of the Shadowlands, the leftover magic of the Rat and the Roach.
The reminder of the two gods who’d lived in this territory and their children who still did made her pulse thunder. Neve stood, trying desperately to quiet her breathing.
And when she managed to hold air in her lungs instead of heaving it, she heard something else breathing.
Slowly, Neve turned, barely able to make out shapes in the dark. Furry bodies piled in the corner, a heaving mass of flesh that inhaled and exhaled in tandem. She saw tails and tusks, the pieces of creatures all jammed together. They looked attached, tangled rats that had become one being instead of many. Ridges of dried mud marked bristling fur, fusing the already huge beasts into something of monstrous proportions.
Neve pressed her mud-caked hand to her mouth. She quickly glanced at the rest of the cave, looking for roaches, afraid that if she saw them, there’d be no holding back the scream in her throat. But it seemed the only thing living in this cave was that awful jumble of rats.
Something above, pressing through the mud. She crouched, hands over her head, but when her eyes opened it was to a tall, spare figure with muddied hair, not some looming rat god.
“Well,” Solmir whispered, “this is disgusting, isn’t it?”
A grumble from the rat tangle in the corner, movement that made both of them crouch, Solmir pushing Neve behind him. When the creatures settled, she whispered, “So how do we get out?”
He jerked his head to the side—there, hardly visible, a tunnel. “Cave entrance.” Barely any sound at all, mostly mouthed, and only seen because she stood so close. “They open up to the cliffs above the sea. We can still get to the Heart Tree that way, though it’s a bit of a walk.”
“I think we’re past worrying about a bit of a walk.”
“Agreed.”
Neve’s eyes darted toward the beasts in the corner again. “Are there more? Or… the other kind?”
“I’m sure there are. So keep your mouth shut.” With that less-than-reassuring pronouncement, Solmir grabbed her hand and led her into the tunnel.