Chương 56: Chapter 49 — The Eastern Cave

Breakfast was quiet. Grace had put out bread still warm from the oven and the last of last year's preserves, the jar nearly empty now, scraped almost to the glass. Morning light came through the east-facing window, falling across the table in a long pale stripe that caught the steam off the kettle and made it glow for a moment before it dispersed. They sat where habits dictated.

Grace at the head, Edie across from Will, Fenwick in the chair that had been his as a boy, the one with the worn patch on the left armrest where his hand had rested through a thousand breakfasts. Thomas's chair was empty. Edie ate with little appetite, breaking her bread into small pieces and not eating most of it. Will sat with his eyes on his plate, turning his cup slowly by the handle, around and around, not drinking from it.

"Hunger 5," said Will. Fenwick stopped with his cup halfway to his mouth.

"What?" Will looked up. He looked at Max, sitting quietly near the door where he'd settled himself out of the way, and then at a point somewhere just above Max's head that wasn't quite Max at all.

"There's a thing that says Hunger 5. Above his head." He frowned slightly, the small furrow of someone noticing something for the first time and not sure if it mattered.

"It was higher yesterday. Six, I think." Fenwick slowly lowered his cup. His hands shook a bit from excitement or fear; it was too early to tell.

"You can see that," he said.

"See what?"

"The — " Fenwick stopped himself. He looked at Max, then at Sindy's status screen. Of course, the system overlay was visible to Max, who lived inside it. It was visible to Fenwick, because the summoning magic extended to those who summoned a new hero — they had access as part of the training and teaching, bringing a stranger to this world would include. Nobody else saw it. Not Grace, not Edie, not the dozens of people who had stood within arm's reach of Max since the day he arrived in this world.

Will had never been near a summoning. Will had been born in this kitchen.

"You see his numbers," said Fenwick slowly.

"All the time. Not just right now." Will shrugged, the easy shrug of someone who genuinely hadn't thought it was strange.

"I thought everyone could." Fenwick looked at him for a long moment. The kettle ticked as it cooled. Outside, something moved through the grass near the window, a small rustle and then quiet again. Then he looked back at the number Will had said aloud, because the number itself was the actual emergency hiding within the larger one. Five.

It had been six yesterday, and it was five now, and Fenwick had not noticed, had not checked, had spent three days walking a road with his eyes on nothing and one full evening drowning in his family's grief, and had stopped watching the bar that kept Max's mind intact.

"Max," he said.

"Eat. Now." Max didn't argue. He reached into the pack at his side and pulled out a strip of jerky, dark and dense, and ate it. The smell of it — salt and smoke and something gamey underneath — drifted across the table. Edie made a small face. Grace did not. Fenwick glanced at the air above Max's head as Sindy updated the hunger stat, turning to Will's face instead for the only confirmation available to him.

"Six," said Will, after a moment. Then, watching longer: "Seven."

"Better," said Fenwick, and felt something in his chest unclench slightly, though not entirely, because there was still the matter of how Will had been seeing this for who knew how long without anyone — including Will himself — understanding what it meant. Grace had been watching the exchange with the particular stillness of a parent doing arithmetic.

"What is happening?" she said. Not a question. A demand dressed as one.

"I don't know yet," said Fenwick.

"But I'm going to find out." He pushed back from the table and stood.

"I need to look at the cave." The kitchen went quiet.

"No," said Grace.

"Mother—""Absolutely not." She had not raised her voice, which was somehow worse than if she had.

"You have been home one night. One night, Fenwick. Whatever is down there took twenty-three people from this valley and burned half the town to do it, and you are going to walk up to the front door and knock."

"I'm not going in to fight anything," said Fenwick.

"I need to see what we're dealing with. Whether there are cages—" He stopped. He couldn't say the rest of it, not here, not to Grace and Edie and Will at the breakfast table. The pattern, the marks, the other settlements — that wasn't his to share, not even with his own family.

"I need to know what kind of operation this is. Whether it can be sealed."

"Send someone else."

"There is no one else," said Fenwick, and heard his own voice land flatter and harder than he meant it to.

"I am the highest-ranked member of the Order within three days' travel of this valley. This isn't a request I get to decline. I'm not asking as your son. I'm telling you as an officer of the Eternal Flame standing in a region that currently has no other officer in it." He made himself soften the next part.

"I have to go, Mum. I'll be careful. I'm not going in deep. I'm looking, and then I'm coming back." The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Grace's jaw worked. Her hands, flat on the table, pressed down hard enough that the wood creaked faintly under them. She did not say anything for a long moment.

"Take Max," she said at last, which was as close as she was going to come to permission, and which both of them understood meant go, and don't make me regret this.

"Yes," said Max, from the doorway. The cave sat in the hillside at the eastern edge of the settlement, a black mouth in grey, weathered rock, half-screened by a tangle of dry scrub that hadn't seen rain in weeks. Up close, it smelled of cold stone and something faintly mineral underneath. Fenwick grew up hearing that he should stay away. Even now, as an adult, doing this as an official representative of the Order, it felt strange to be here.

It had the look of a place that did not want visitors and had never wanted them. They went in with a single lantern, held low. The entrance passage was natural rock, worn smooth in patches by water that no longer ran there, the air cooling with each step deeper in, the light from outside shrinking to a pale coin behind them and then disappearing around the first bend.

Twenty feet in, the passage widened into a chamber, low-ceilinged, the lantern light throwing long shadows across a floor that told its own story before either of them said a word. Drag marks. Long ones, deep grooves cut by something heavy being moved across packed dirt without much care for whatever was being dragged. Chain marks scored into one wall at about chest height, the metal itself long gone, the grooves still sharp enough at the edges that they couldn't have been there more than a week or two.

A scatter of dark stains on the floor, dried but not yet fully blackened, roughly the same age as the marks above them. Nothing recent. Nothing from the last few days at all. Max moved through the chamber with care, his boots silent on the stone, checking the side passages that branched off the main one — three of them, low and narrow, each one showing the same story when the lantern light reached inside. Used heavily. Then abandoned, roughly a week by the look of the dust settling back over everything.

"Empty," said Max, coming back from the third passage.

"Old marks. Days old." He looked toward the deeper dark, where the passage kept going, and the lantern couldn't reach.

"More down there."

"How much more?" Max considered.

"Don't know. Far." Fenwick crouched and wrote what he could by the lantern's light. The chamber's rough dimensions. The chain marks and their height. The drag patterns, all leading deeper rather than toward the entrance — whatever had operated here had pulled its activity further down, away from a surface presence that might draw attention. Enough to start planning toward a seal, assuming a seal was even possible against a system that went this deep. He stood.

"We've seen enough for today." They turned back toward the entrance passage. A whistle drifted up from somewhere behind them, out of the deeper dark. A simple, tuneless little walking-tune, unhurried and unconcerned, produced without thinking about it, the unselfconscious sound of someone going about an ordinary errand in a place they had decided, somewhere along the way, was safe enough to whistle in. Fenwick froze where he stood. Max's hand found the hilt of his sword without seeming to move at all.

They pressed into the passage wall, lantern lowered to a thread of light, and waited. The whistling continued, drawing closer, joined now by footsteps — slow, unhurried, the gait of someone exhausted but still moving under their own power. A second set of footsteps behind the first, slower, shuffling, the sound of someone being half-led rather than walking alone. A shape came around the bend in the passage.

It took Fenwick a long moment to understand what he was looking at, because nothing about this moment made sense against what he knew. Thomas had gone into the meeting hall fire seven days ago, and the roof had come down, and there had been no body, and Fenwick had spent the walk here thinking about cages and chains and patterns, never once imagining his brother had anything to do with this place at all.

The shape coming toward him — dirt-matted fur gone the color of the cave floor, eyes sunk hollow with exhaustion, one arm wrapped tight around an elderly rabbit who could barely stand on her own — did not register, at first, as anyone he knew. Then the shape stopped whistling.

"... Fenwick?" Fenwick did not move. Could not, for a moment, make his body do anything at all. Thomas stood in the passage. Seven days underground had hollowed him out — cheeks gone gaunt, fur dull and matted, the smell of cave dust and old sweat coming off him in waves — and he was still half-carrying the older adult at his side, who blinked against even the lantern's weak light with the dazed wince of someone who hadn't seen any light at all in a very long time.

Behind Thomas, an older man kept one hand fixed on his shoulder, eyes squeezed shut, navigating entirely by feel and the sound of Thomas's footsteps. Neither brother said anything. The lantern flickered against the damp stone. The old rabbit made a small sound, something between relief and collapse, and leaned more of her weight into Thomas, who held her up without seeming to notice he was holding anyone at all. Fenwick's mouth opened. Nothing came out of it.

Thomas stared at them, not quite believing what was standing in front of him. He looked at the sword across Max's back. At the cloak. At his brother's face, who had clearly not expected this.

"Oh, shoot," said Thomas. His voice was cracked and dry and entirely, impossibly normal.

"If they sent for my hero brother to rescue me, they must really be worried." ⟨ [SYSTEM PRIVATE LOG] ⟩ [Sindy — Private Log — Day 77] Will can see Max's stats. That would only be possible if he summoned him. Nobody should be able to except Order officials present at a summoning. I think that means that Fenwick's family is special. The hunger bar had dropped to five before anyone noticed. Fenwick fixed it immediately. He looked sick when he realized. ▌ Becca, if you're reading this: ▌ Thomas is alive.

▌ He walked out of that cave whistling, half-carrying a woman three times his age, and the first thing he said was a joke.