Page 64 of Vengeance of the Pirate Queen

“Is this a graveyard?” he asks.

“Why guard a graveyard?”

“I don’t know.”

I meander around the ice, counting compilations of bones as I go. When I reach the end of the room, I get to thirty-six.

“Now what?” Kearan asks.

“There’s another tunnel.”

He follows me through it.

The light does miraculous things to the ice, distorting the shapes hidden within. Still, I know for a fact that the first skeleton I see in the next room belongs to a child. No trick of the light can mask that. The curious thing is the skeletons are all bare. No clothing or weapons or anything else to suggest who they were. Just bones frozen forever in a timeless rest.

“It doesn’t make sense that there’s nothing remaining but bones,” I say. “In this cold, it would take forever for the bodies to decompose.”

“Unless someone carved them up. Ate them first. You remember when we met those siren-enchanted cannibals?”

I don’t want the reminder. We lost Lotiya that day. I squint at another block of ice. “Look at them; they’re perfect skeletons. Not a bone out of place. Standing upright. What held them in place like that while they were frozen? How were they frozen like this to begin with?”

“There’s something at work here more than just the elements,” Kearan says. “Do you think any of these people were from theWanderer?”

“I can’t say. I don’t even know how to tell if a skeleton is male or female. Should have brought Mandsy with us.” She knows more about the human body than anyone.

We pass through more and more rooms, or rather crypts. Each is the same. Columns and blocks holding skeletons encased in ice. Some even stand in the very walls of each cavern. We walk deeper and deeper underground, passing hundreds and hundreds of the dead.

“Enwen would lose his shit in this place,” Kearan says.

I bite back a laugh, his comment so random it takes me by surprise. More surprising still is my response. I can’t remember the last time I wanted to laugh at something he’s said.

Just when I think it’s probably time to turn back before we’re caught, I catch sight of something new. A dark spot beneath the ice floor at the foot of the next tunnel. I crouch down in front of it to get a closer look. It appears to be some sort of metal plate?

I pull out a dagger to chip away at the thin layer of ice covering it. The second the tip of the blade presses down on the ice, there’s thetwangof a bowstring, and an arrow shoots just over my head. Kearan, luckily, had been standing to the side of me, out of range.

He says, “It’s booby-trapped.”

“Then we’re getting close.”

“To what?”

“Whatever it is they’re hiding down here.”

I tap the plate a second time, but nothing happens, which means the traps have to be reset once they’re sprung. That makes things easier. I eye the tunnel ahead of us, seeing more dark spots down the path, and I start flinging daggers to activate the depression plates.

The second one sends a giant ax slicing through the frozen hallway. It cracks through a thin layer of ice in the ceiling before swinging down and across, embedding back into the ceiling once it reaches the peak of its arc. The third depression plate springs spears up from the ground.

“They’re not just guarding this place. They’re also maintaining these traps,” I note. “Else everything would just freeze over completely and be useless. They clean and sharpen and reset these constantly. They’d have to.”

“Best we see what they’re hiding from us.”

More daggers fly from my hands. A few more arrows spring free from different directions. A guillotine-like blade falls from the ceiling. I start to notice the holes and divots along the walls where all the traps spring from. When I strike the last plate, which deposits a net of some sort, I tread the path down the tunnel, retrieving my knives as I go.

Kearan follows but has to stop halfway down the tunnel, where some of the still-swinging weapons block too much space for him to squeeze past.

“I’ll wait here,” he says. “Talk me through what you find.”

When I reach the end, I enter a small room. Five skeletons stand in the ice walls, as though guarding the tomb in the middle.