The Dawn Spire loomed to their left, a pale fang stabbed into the sky. The wyrms around its base shimmered faintly in the pre-dawn dark, a skin of red-gold light.
She could feel the Underserpent’s distress, the constant tremble. It was panicked, but there was an awful resolve in it, the braced stillness of a creature preparing itself to die.
She knew that feeling painfully well.
A bloodwyrm crossed the mouth of the alley ahead, its silhouette blotting out the firelight for an instant. It dragged a dead Brighthand in its jaws, the man’s armor clanking dully over the cobbles. Steam poured from the wyrm’s nostrils, curling in the dawn chill.
Rhalir held up his hand. They pressed back into the shelter of a recessed doorway. Mallow’s arm came up automatically across Lain’s chest, holding her in place. She expected the creature to scent them, to turn, to bare its teeth.
It didn’t. It shook the corpse once, like a dog killing a rabbit, then slithered on.
“He’s keeping them clear of the Spire,” Mallow murmured.
Lain swallowed. Morgan was somewhere out there, on the edge of the bond, leaving a bloody taste on her tongue and a fevered pressure at the back of her eyes.
Rhalir’s tail flicked once. “Move.”
They slipped forward, weaving between toppled carts and abandoned bundles. Here and there bodies lay in the gutters, some civilian, some Ashborn, some Brighthand in gleaming armor half-stripped by looters. One of Rhalir’s men stopped, a young, stag-faced soldier whose shoulders shook as he recognized a fallen friend. Rhalir touched his arm once, lightly, and they moved on.
The alley opened onto the eastern side of the Spire’s square.
Lain had always entered the tower from the grand plaza, under the carved arch and great bronze doors. This side of the tower had been built to be unremarkable. A blind curve of white rock, the ward-sigils carved at ankle height along its base where the foundations met the paving. Tonight those sigils burned like a line of coals. Each serpentine curve glowed red-white. Heat shimmered above them, distorting the air. Someone – many someones – had poured fresh oil along the base, dark and glistening, waiting to be lit.
Above, arrow slits watched the square like narrow, hooded eyes. Lain could see movement, the glint of metal, the quick bob of a helm.
Rhalir halted them in the shadow of a half-collapsed colonnade. “There,” he said quietly, nodding to a section of wall where the sigils clustered more densely. “There’s a maintenance door for the ward-runners. A postern. They’ll have barred it from the inside. Even if we brought a ram, the wards would throw us back.”
“What about them?” One of his men whispered, jerking his chin toward the arrow slits. “They’ll pick us off before we get ten paces.”
“Not if they don’t hear us,” Lain whispered.
They looked at her.
She drew Fillan’s bell from her bandolier. In the half-light it looked almost black, the gold buried deep in its metal. The carved wyrms and suns along its rim seemed to shift as she turned it. “The book said: ring once for silence. Twice for opening.”
“And thrice for truth revealed,” Mallow murmured.
Rhalir’s ears tilted back, wary. “You’re sure about this?”
“No,” she said. “But the Underserpent doesn’t have time for our doubts.”
He studied her for a beat longer, then nodded once. “We go on your mark. My men will shield you as far as the wall.” He glanced up, gauging the distance. “If the archers loose, they’ll aim for you first.”
“I know,” she said.
Mallow stepped closer to her shoulder, as if to guard her side.
Rhalir didn’t argue. He turned to his soldiers. “Shields up. Keep your heads low. No one breaks rank. If you go down, make yourself a wall. Are we clear?”
They nodded, faces set.
Lain took a deep breath, feeling the starbloom vial pulse against her sternum. The Underserpent’s presence throbbed below her.
She lifted the bell of Saint Fillan.
It felt heavier than it should. She thought of Fillan in the wheat, antlers chiming with a forest of bells. Of the wolf’s teeth closing on nothing but air. Of the crozier tapping against Lain’s own bell, and the words: bells bind. And bells free.
“Ready,” she whispered.
Rhalir nodded. The men raised their shields.
Lain struck the bell once.
The sound it made was impossibly small, a single clear note that might have been mistaken for a far-off clink of a stein. But the air around them changed.
Sound folded.
The crackle of distant fires dulled. The growl of a hunting wyrm cut off mid-breath. Rhalir’s eyes widened. His lips moved, testing, but Lain heard nothing.
Go, Mallow mouthed.
They moved. Across the open stretch of cobblestones, their boots and hooves hit the ground in eerie silence. The shields that should have clanked against armor made no sound at all. Lain’s breath tore in her chest, but she could only feel it, not hear it.
Above, one of the arrow slits shifted. A torch was brought closer. Someone leaned out to scan the square.
Her group paused.
A gaze seemed to pass over them and slide away.
The wards burned hotter as they approached. Heat licked up her shins, making her eyes water. The sigils were beautiful in a terrible way: coils and bells and stylized scales, woven together into a seamless band of light.
She stopped an arm’s length from the wall. Up close, the sigils made a pattern she recognized from Fillan’s statue: the curve of a serpent, a bell, and two branching horns. Hidden in the Dagorlind’s own warding. Kelthi work, buried under layers of sanctified script.
Lain pressed her free hand to the stone.
The Underserpent’s agony roiled through her.
It was not anything as simple as pain. It was the weight of centuries of enforced sleep twisting in on themselves, the pressure of a mind stretched between chains and told to be grateful. Now those chains were tightening, the wyrm bracing as a body does when it sees a blade coming.
Tears blurred her vision.
In the mask of silence she told the wyrm she was coming.
She raised the bell again. Twice for opening. Her hand shook so badly she had to steady her wrist with the other hand. She struck the bell a second time.
The note that followed was deep, as if pulled from the mouth of a cavern. The wards flared white-hot, then dimmed and smoked, colors running as if someone had poured water through molten metal. The symbols twisted, shapes bending and unhooking from the Dagorlind script to slide back into the Kelthi curves they’d once been. Light spidered outward in thin, bright fractures.
Rhalir flinched. The Ashborn behind him shifted uneasily, shields lifting higher.
For a terrible moment, nothing else happened. Then the section of wall directly in front of Lain’s outstretched hand went dark.
The carved sigils guttered like dying coals. The granite between them thinned, lines appearing where there had been smooth white marble an instant before. A door resolved out of nowhere, its edges outlined in faint blue.
A voice shouted above.
An arrow slammed into Rhalir’s shield, the head piercing through the wood by an inch. Another struck stone near Lain’s ear, glancing off the ward-grown cracks.
The bell’s silence frayed.
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“Inside!” Rhalir barked. This time she heard him, thin and distant under the roaring return of sound.
Lain grabbed the edge of the newly revealed door. Its surface was cool, too cool, as if untouched by the ward-heat. It didn’t budge.
A torch came to the slit above her; she could see the fire reflecting down the granite.
“Lain!”
She still had the bell in her hand. Ring once for silence, twice for opening, thrice for truth revealed.
She looked up at the door, then at the faintly glowing script around it.
The Underserpent shuddered under her palm.
Truth, then, she thought wildly. Let it be truth.
She struck the bell a third time.
The note that burst from it had no business fitting in such a small space. It rang through her skull, her teeth, her spine, and all the fur along her tail stuck straight on end. For an instant everything went utterly white – she could not see the Spire or the square or the men around her, only an endless curve of scales and an eye the size of the world, looking back.
Truth, it said, though there were no words. Only the certainty of recognition. You.
The wards screamed, and at the same instant the torch fell to the oil, setting the earth below the spire ablaze.
The carved bells along the tower’s base lit all at once, then shattered into streams of light that poured upward, racing along the Spire’s skin, unraveling the sanctified patterns as they went. Bells tolled wild from the tower’s inner chambers, answering the rupture.
The door in front of Lain vanished, leaving a gaping mouth and steps spiraling downward.
Heat from the flames rushed toward her group.
Arrows rained down, clattering off shields, sparking against the newly bared threshold.
“Go!” Rhalir snarled, shoving Lain toward the opening.
She stumbled into the dark. Mallow backed after her, moving sideways, sword raised until the last possible moment. An arrow glanced off his breastplate; he grunted, but didn’t fall. Rhalir came last, half-dragging one of his men who’d taken a shaft to the thigh but refused to drop the shield.
The moment all of them were inside, the light of the wards snapped out, the smell of burnt cloth filling their noses. The last man smacked at his burning slacks until the smoulder went out.
The door appeared behind them, sliding into place with awful finality.
The thick, natural quiet of deep earth met them. The sounds of battle outside were nothing now, distant as a storm surf on a faraway shore.
Lain stood with her back against the unseen door, chest heaving. The bell in her hand had gone dull again. The starbloom at her breast flickered once, then steadied, its glow throwing faint blue shadows along the rough walls.
The injured man groaned and sweated painfully on the steps, the arrow protruding from his thigh. It couldn’t have gone too deep – it would’ve had to pierce two layers of leathers – but it was enough to immobilize him.
“I’ve got you, Marcus,” said another soldier. He looked up at Rhalir, whose hand was braced against the tunnel wall. “I’ll stay with him.”
“Brighthand will come along this side looking for us,” said Mallow. “Can you try to guide him out, Travis?”
“I’ll do my best,” Travis said with a nod. He was the stronger of the two, even without an arrow in Macrus’ leg, and with an encouraging nod he pulled Marcus to his feet.
Rhalir nodded. “Surrender if you’re outnumbered. Better to live and fight another day. Find Sena, she has a gift for treating the wounded.”
Travis nodded. Rhalir patted him on the back before they moved around the curve of the Spire and out of sight.
Lain stared into the darkness below. The Underserpent moved, a vast and caged presence, the weight of it bowing the world around it.
She lifted the starbloom pouch, letting its pale light spill forward, revealing the first steep steps cut into rock.
“We must move quickly,” Lain whispered. “Once Morgan realizes the wards are gone, he’ll be right behind us.”
They descended.
The spiral stair was steeper than any civic passage had a right to be, the steps narrow and irregular, worn down in the middle by feet that may not have walked here in generations. The air cooled with each turn until Lain could see her breath fog in the starbloom’s thin blue light.
After countless flights the scent of the city faded. In their place came wet rock, something iron-rich and faintly sweet, like wine that had been spilled long ago.
Mallow’s boots scuffed behind her, careful on the slick treads. “How far down does this go?” he muttered.
“Far enough,” Rhalir said quietly. “Listen.”
They all did. At first Lain heard only their own breaths and the soft brush of cloth and leather. Then came a steady roar of water.
“The river?” Lain whispered.
“Couldn’t be,” Rhalir said. “It’s east of us, isn’t it?”
“Not all of it,” Lain murmured.
All down the wall, songstones were pressed into mortar, which hummed faintly as she passed. She ached with nostalgia. Only one in ten ever resonated for a Tuned, supposedly, but all of these did for her, chiming sweetly in her presence.
Morgan arrived in her Tuning with a roar of excitement. She stumbled, her vision doing that odd doubling to see through the eyes of a wyrm. The wyrm loped toward the receding flames of the Dawn Spire. Morgan was close behind, surrounded by black shapes, who undulated about him catching arrows and strengthening him further as they died, and then a bolt pierced her in the gut and she roared –
Mallow caught Lain as she slid against the wall.
“It’s Morgan,” she gasped. “He knows the wards are down. They’re fighting him off, but he’s coming.”
“Then we’d better hurry,” Mallow said.
“Give me a moment.” She reached into the threads again as she had before, finding that command – two this time, guard and kill. She wiped them clean and sent another: flee.
A hoard of bloodwyrms turned to run.
Morgan caught it immediately. In a fury he slammed his mind down – upon the command, upon Lain – and she was catapulted away from the channel with such ferocity that she tumbled backward and struck the wall, hard enough to see stars.
“Saint’s sake,” Mallow cried. He pulled her to her feet. “What happened?”
“I was trying to interfere. Morgan… stopped me.”
“Enough of that,” Rhalir said. “Save your energy. We must move.”
With Mallow’s arm beneath hers, they continued down the stairwell.
The stair twisted once more, then spat them out into a circular chamber. The ceiling arched above them, supported by white pillars carved in the shape of entwined serpents. Their eyes had once been set with some kind of stone; now most of the sockets gaped empty. Lain’s light picked out flecks of scale embedded in the mortar between the floorstones, shimmering faintly with their own inner colors of blues and greens and deep, oil-slick black. Her heart lurched. She knelt and brushed a thumb over one. It flared weakly, then went dark again.
“Old,” she said. “Older than Ivath. Older than the Dagorlind.”
Mallow’s gaze moved along the walls. “This is where it used to lie.”
He was right. The floor here bore long, shallow grooves, arcs and crescents overlapping like ripples in a pond. Not man-made. The memory of a massive body having coiled and uncoiled across the rock, over and over, wearing it down with the weight of centuries.
Lain’s throat closed.
She could feel it more strongly now, the echo of the Underserpent’s presence, a phantom coiling through an absence it had once filled.
She sensed the wyrm’s true weight somewhere above them.
“We’re beneath it,” she said.
Rhalir frowned. “How could that be?”
She straightened, following the curve of the chamber with her eyes. The old rock gave way, abruptly, to something newer. A ring of pale blocks had been fitted into the ancient floor in an imperfect circle, the edges of the new work cutting straight across the old grooves. Beyond that ring, the chamber ended in a wall that did not match the rest of the room. It was smooth and regular, made by more recent tools. No serpent pillars, no scale-marks. Just a flat face of stone, glimmering with damp, carved with the bell-and-serpent sigil of the Dagorlind.
From behind that wall came the sound she’d heard on the stair: water, rushing in unseen channels. It gurgled and bloomed, the resonance of a confined, falling weight.
Rhalir stepped cautiously over the line where old stone met new. “They brought the river in,” he said slowly. “Pipes, culverts. Fed it right under the tower.”
“To fill the pool where it sleeps,” Lain said. “They raised the Underserpent up, into the new chamber… as what? A well? A catch?”
“A coffin,” Mallow said.
The word hung.
The Underserpent shifted above them, the motion huge and muted, like a mountain rolling in its sleep. Lain staggered, catching herself against one of the ancient pillars. Her vision doubled and she saw the chamber from above, water shimmering in a vast suspended bowl of granite, chains of light sunk deep into scales, bells pressed like brands against flesh.
And below, this hollow room, the chamber that once cradled that great and powerful life.
Mallow moved toward the wall, laying his palm flat against the damp rock. “Any more wards, do you think?”
She lifted Fillan’s bell, listening for the thrumming answer of wards.
Nothing.
“Fillan’s song unbound them,” she said. “There’s no ward here now. Just stone.”
“Just stone,” Rhalir repeated, looking unconvinced. He rapped his knuckles lightly against it. The sound came back hollow, echoing in a way that made Lain’s skin crawl. “There’s space on the other side. Big space.”
“And a way up,” Lain said. “For the priests. For the Bellborn ceremony.”
She closed her eyes and reached upward, not to Morgan, whose presence still prowled at the edge of her mind, impatient and restless as he circled the burning Spire, but to the vast, chained awareness overhead.
For a moment she felt nothing but the crushing weight of its misery.
Then, faintly, the sensation of rock like a second skin. Of water flowing over scales. Of a path, thin as a vein, where the air moved: down along one coil and up again, toward light.
“There,” she said, opening her eyes and pointing toward the right-hand corner of the new wall. “The air’s moving. There’s a stair or a shaft. Something.”
Mallow moved that way, running his fingers along the seam between old stone and new. “I don’t see –”
“Here,” Rhalir said. He’d gone ahead, hooves silent on the worn rock. In the angle where wall met floor, the Dagorlind masons had been less careful; a hairline crack ran up the wall like a faint, pale scar. At knee height, someone had smudged ash over it, as if trying to hide the flaw.
Or mark it.
Rhalir dug his fingers into the crack and pulled.
At first nothing moved. Then, with a grinding cough, the wall swung outward.
It wasn’t a door so much as a section of wall on a hidden pivot, thick and heavy. Cold air breathed out over them, tinged with the smell of stale water. Beyond lay a narrow stair curling up into darkness, so tight that a tall man would have to duck his head. Or an average Kelthi man, Lain supposed, glancing at Rhalir’s antlers.
Rhalir released the hidden edge and stepped back, shaking out his hands. “There,” he said. “The priest’s way. Or their slaver’s.”
The Underserpent shifted again overhead, a desperate roll that trembled through the soles of Lain’s hooves.
Mallow looked at her. “We go up,” he said. Not a question.
Lain’s hand tightened around Fillan’s bell until the rim bit her palm.
“Up,” she agreed.
She took the first step into the stair’s mouth, the starbloom’s light bobbing ahead of her like a captured star.
Behind and above them, the city burned. Ahead and above them, the god strained against its chains. Between the two, in the thin vein of stone and air that lead toward the Underserpent’s prison, Lain climbed.