Their squad was waved through quickly, and he found them ushered into a tent taken up almost entirely by a shimmering doorframe that led onto another bustling camp far away.
He couldn’t tell how far, but the woman sweating and loading scales into the doorframe was an Underlord. And she wasn’t Forging the scales, either; they were coming from a scripted case at her side, and the madra shining from the purple-black scales was so intense that he had to close off his spiritual sense.
A Truegold attendant waved them through, and as the leader and most advanced member of his party, he stepped through first.
His heart dropped in an instant.
Even surrounded by a crowd of strangers, he recognized where they were immediately. The trees were black, the buildings were temporary, and the mountain looming in the far distance had a halo around its peak.
“We can’t get away,” Jai Long muttered. “There is no escape.”
They were heading back to Sacred Valley.
This time, when the labyrinth shifted, the tunnel opened over Lindon’s head and pointed straight upward. There was no ladder, but it wasn’t as though Lindon needed one.
He and Yerin leaped. They didn’t know exactly how high it was, but it didn’t matter much. If they started running out of momentum, they could leap off the walls.
It didn’t come to that. Lindon’s jump carried him into a huge, empty room that reminded him of an arena. Yerin hit the ceiling, far overhead, and had to push off. Orthos grumbled about the trip and demanded that Lindon put him down, while Little Blue cheered at the thrill.
Mercy was right behind them, pulling her way up with Strings of Shadow, and Ziel hopped up on discs of Forged runes.
To Lindon’s surprise, the last one up was Eithan. He pulled himself up the last few feet rather gracelessly, but he salvaged it by striking a pose when he made it all the way up.
“This isn’t fair,” he said. “You all know Enforcer techniques are my weakness. That, and fine imported silk.”
[These weaknesses have been logged for future reference,] Dross said dutifully.
Eithan looked startled.
Lindon had already started glancing around the room. What he had first taken for rows of seats were coffins, each carved with the image of a dragon. They were all very different in appearance—from four-legged dragons with wings spread to serpentine dragons with claws—and each was set with colored gemstones that would likely have matched what color the dragon was in life.
He sensed very little power coming from inside any of these coffins, but several had been opened, presumably to remove any treasures. He glanced inside, just in case, but found only a dragon’s skeleton.
Ziel only examined the script-circles around the room for a second before he said, “Death aura.”
Lindon had assumed as much. There were only a few reasons to collect corpses in a place like this labyrinth, and “honoring the dead” was probably the least likely. This had once been the place to generate death aura and funnel it away to some project.
Though, like all the other aura in the place, it had been consumed by hunger.
Lindon started to open the hand, ready to move on, when Eithan stopped him.
“There’s no exit,” Eithan pointed out.
Lindon saw he was right. The only way out was the entrance through which they’d come.
“All right,” Mercy said, “back down!”
She made as though to leap down the hole, but Lindon had unraveled the case around the hand already. Hunger filled the room, and he sensed immediately where to go. It was a hallway sealed behind a blank stretch of wall.
No enemy techniques struck at them this time, but it still left them in a quandary. Yerin sat down immediately, arms crossed.
“Bet my sword against a fingernail there’s about to be a door there.”
Mercy took several deep breaths, calming herself. “You’re right. I know you’re right, but…we’re going so slow.”
“I’m just as worried about going too fast,” Lindon said. “We want to know what we’re walking into.” He didn’t mind the chance to explore the room some more, so after packing away the hand, he immediately checked the entire room. By looking to Eithan.
Instantly, Eithan pointed to a corner of the room. “An unfortunate previous explorer. Left some records. Could be a map.”
Lindon crossed the space in one leap, landing on the highest tier around the outside wall. A skeleton huddled there, in between heavy stone coffins that had been dragged around to make a makeshift fortress. Old scripts had been painted around him, though they were faded with time.