Chương 54: The Third Day

Zayn ran until his legs stopped being legs. After that, he kept going anyway. Not fast. Not straight. Not with that beautiful endurance people like to give heroes when the story has decided they deserve to survive. He moved like a wounded thing that simply refused to become a corpse in the right place. Behind him, Rhel-Fosse howled. Not with voices this time. With stone.

The Weaver had lost part of its toy, and the mine answered its anger with deep vibrations, falling dust, cracking conduits, and the snapping of filaments against the walls. The voices had not disappeared, but they had broken apart. They came out in fragments now.

"Hel—""Mo—""Zy—""Don't—" Bits of the dead. Bits of calls. Bits of lies. It was almost easier to bear. Almost. Zayn went down a narrow passage, slipped on a wet plate of stone, slammed shoulder-first into the wall, and nearly fell. His torch died in the impact. The darkness came back. Complete. For one second, there was nothing but his breathing. Too loud. Too fast. Too human. He stayed still, back against the stone, dagger raised in front of him. A value passed in the distance. 8 Then vanished. Nothing else.

Zayn slowly lowered his arm.

"Very well," he muttered.

"New rule. Don't run through an unknown mine with a dying torch while an offended demon is pounding on the walls." He waited. Then added, more quietly:"Excellent rule. A little late, like every useful institution." He no longer had enough light to relight the torch easily. He kept the charred stick anyway. A blackened piece of wood was still a piece of wood.

And a piece of wood could become a lever, a wedge, a distraction, or, in the worst case, proof that his inventory was descending into levels of poverty that were almost philosophical. He moved through the dark by following distant values and currents of air. That was his new geography. Not corridors. Not maps. Not human markings. Presences. Smells. Dampness. The slope. Sounds that came back too quickly or too slowly. Sometimes he stopped to scratch a wall with chalk. A cross when the place was dangerous.

A low line when he had already explored it. Two dots when he found water. A circle when he absolutely was not to come back. At first, it had reassured him. Then, after a span of time he could no longer measure, he found one of his own marks in the wrong place. A low line. But it was not at the right height. Too visible. Too neat. Zayn stood in front of it, motionless. He carved his marks near the ground. Always. This one was at chest height. He raised his dagger.

"Nice try." The stone did not answer. He stepped closer anyway. Not out of trust. Out of necessity. The chalk was recent. Very recent. Something had copied his system. Not perfectly. But well enough that, tired, hungry, injured, he might have followed a false trail without realizing it. Zayn stared at the mark. Then he laughed. Not long.

"So now even my notes betray me. Perfect. The bureaucracy of the depths is improving." This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report. He erased the line with his forearm, then carved another beneath it: 11. My marks can lie. He looked at the sentence. It was extremely bad for morale. Which meant it was probably necessary. He added: 12. Make mistakes on purpose. From then on, he changed his system. The real marks would have a flaw. A broken angle. A useless dot.

An irregularity only he would recognize, as long as his mind stayed straight enough to remember it. Which was becoming a more and more ambitious gamble. Time passed. Or descended. In Rhel-Fosse, the two notions were beginning to resemble each other. Zayn slept three times. Not really slept. Dropped. The first time, sitting behind a black column, dagger across his knees, he opened his eyes with a little beast at 4 licking the dried blood from his sleeve. He smashed it against the stone before he was fully awake.

[Soul strength absorbed: +0] He stared at the corpse.

"Morning to you too." The second time, he slept standing, one hand braced against a damp wall. He woke while taking a step, which struck him as a worrying development in his relationship with sleep. The third time, he dreamed he was back in Aurelis. The Glass Sun Gallery was empty. Elias stood at the center, at 107, but his face was covered by a gray Cinders cloth. Lena was drawing a thread toward Zayn, but the thread looped around his neck instead of his shoulder.

Mira was writing his rules on a wall, then silently correcting them. Jonah sat on a crate, telling him he had truly chosen the worst tourist destination imaginable. Then Maelor appeared behind them. 312. The number was no longer above him. It was everywhere. On the walls. In the glass. In the light. Zayn raised his dagger. Maelor did not move. He only said:"You still count too small." Zayn woke with his jaw clenched, his hand bleeding because his fingers had closed around the blade. He stayed still for a long time.

Then muttered:"Even my nightmares have a teaching budget now." His laugh did not come out. Hunger had taken up too much space. It was no longer screaming. It was speaking. Not with an outside voice. Not like the Weaver. More like a slow logic that returned in every decision. Save the rations. Don't eat too fast. Find water. Avoid beasts that are too large. Look for old human areas. Don't waste a movement. Don't bleed for nothing. His body was becoming a cruel advisor.

He ate a piece of black ration smaller than a fingernail and still had to stop ten minutes later to keep from vomiting. This time, he managed. Victory. Ridiculous. But victory. He drew one chalk line across his forearm. Then a second. Then a third. He was not sure it was really the third day. But it was the third sleep cycle long enough to count. So the third day. In clean stories, the third day probably had symbolic meaning. Here, it mostly meant his smell had changed.

He noticed it while washing his hands in an underground stream. Dried blood, sour sweat, smoke, damp stone, beast-hide badly tied around his forearm, rotten rations. He smelled less like a human than like the contents of a bag forgotten by a very pessimistic soldier.

"If I find the group again," he murmured, "Lena is going to try to heal me or burn me for hygiene. Both options are understandable." He stopped. Find the group again. The phrase still had weight. Less than before. But still. He wondered what they were doing. Elias would be searching. Lena would refuse to give up too soon. Jonah would say he was probably surviving in the most morally unpleasant way possible, which would be offensive mostly because it was correct. Mira would understand.

That thought was the most dangerous one. Mira would understand too much. Not everything. Not the numbers. Not the messages. But the shape of it. She would read the delays in his movements. The corpses used. The dead left behind. The places where he could have chosen differently and did not. Zayn washed his blade. The water reddened, then went dark again. He thought of Lena. Not for long. It had become dangerous to think of her for long. Not because it made him better. Because it slowed him in unpredictable ways.

Guilt was a bad compass. It often pointed toward traps with far too much conviction. He started walking again. Farther down, the black galleries opened into a different area. The ceiling finally rose. A broad cavern crossed by several natural bridges. Stalactites hung like teeth. At the center, a circular basin reflected a very faint red light from the veins in the stone. Around the basin, remains. A great many. Human bones. Nonhuman bones. Split shells. Rust-eaten weapons. Fragments of Marches armor.

And several older bodies, dried out, their proportions too strange to belong to any of the beasts he had seen so far. Zayn stopped at the entrance. Values? None close by. Not alive. That itself was suspicious. He descended slowly toward the basin, testing each step before putting his full weight down. He threw a stone. Then another. Nothing sprang out. Nothing spoke. Nothing bit. The silence here was older. Not safe. Old. At the edge of the basin, he found a broken spear planted in a blackened mass of bone.

The weapon was human, but the body was not. A long rib cage, two broken horns, thick vertebrae, claws as long as knives. Not a small demon. Not a Weaver. Something heavier had been killed here. He set a hand near the bones. Cold. Very old. The stone around them bore marks of fire, claws, and magical impacts. A battle. Not recent. Possibly from before Rhel-Fosse even became a human mine. The men had dug above a place that had already known war. Very intelligent. Truly.

Local humanity had apparently looked at an area full of ancient demonic bones and thought: excellent place for mining operations. Zayn crouched beside a human skeleton in shattered armor. The breastplate bore an old royal symbol, almost worn away. He searched it. Nothing. Then, beneath the rib cage, he found a sealed metal tube. This time, he did not open it at once. He turned it between his fingers. Not a Cinders tube. Older. The seal had been broken and then crudely resealed.

He finally forced it open with the point of his dagger. Inside was a piece of hardened parchment. Most of the writing was nearly unreadable, but certain words still stood out. … level predating the mine… … do not reopen the lower chamber… … presence linked to remains from the previous cycle… … the voices are only a symptom… … if the relays activate, burn the access points… Zayn read the line again. The voices are only a symptom. Very well. Wonderful. So the Weaver was not the main problem. Or not the only one.

He tucked the parchment beside the Cinders plate. His collection of written bad news was becoming respectable. Soon he would have enough to open a very specialized library: Documents Proving Everything Was Worse Than Expected. At the back of the cavern, beyond the basin, a passage sloped downward again. Not wide. But marked. Not by miners. By huge claws, very ancient, all going in the same direction. Down. Zayn stared at the passage. His body said no. His stomach said no. His injuries said no in several dialects.

His mind, on the other hand, took inventory. The outer grate was sealed. The upper conduits were controlled by humans or the Weaver. The voices were damaged, but not dead. The parchment said the voices were only a symptom. And an old lower chamber existed farther on. He would have preferred a more reasonable option. An inn. A ladder. A horse. A rental contract with an anti-demon clause. None of those presented themselves. Instead, a value appeared briefly in the descending passage. Far away. Very far. Not 47.

Maybe lower. Or more hidden. The number never stabilized. Just an impression. Something beneath the cavern had moved. Zayn stepped back half a pace without meaning to. Then he tightened his grip on the dagger.

"Good," he murmured. His voice was rough. Almost calm.

"Third day. Guided tour of forbidden ruins. If I survive, I'm officially banning mines. Not abandoned mines. All mines. Ore will have to file an application to come up by itself." The silence did not reply. That was almost polite. Zayn descended toward the passage. Before entering, he carved a mark at the base of the wall. Not an arrow. Not a cross. A short sentence, with its deliberate flaw in the last stroke: If I come back here, do not believe I climbed back up. He looked at the sentence.

Then entered the black throat beneath the cavern of bones. Behind him, the red basin remained still. And below, something ancient, patient, and far too silent to be the Weaver was waiting in the chamber the humans had tried to forget.