Page 2 of Bite Bonded Bride

The goodbye is quick because I need it to be. He hugs me at the door, longer than usual, which I allow and I press my mouth briefly to the top of his head the way I used to when he was small, sick and terrified, before I learned to be terrified for both of us quietly, from a distance.

"Don't do anything I wouldn't do," he calls after me.

"That bar is on the ground, Eddie."

His laugh follows me down the lane and I don't look back.

I smell Hollow Mountain before I see it. Rock dust, torch smoke, and an undertone beneath both that always reminds me of deep mines. Wet, ancient stone untouched by weather for a thousand years. The settlement is still operational. Equipment is staged, lanterns lit, workers present in the right numbers. But I’ve surveyed enough unstable sites to know the difference between people working and people pretending to work. This is the latter. Men clean tools that are already clean. Conversations die when I pass. Nobody goes near the lower sectors.

Whatever happened here, it happened recently enough that the fear still has teeth.

I file it and keep walking.

Theren Mordane finds me before I complete a full circuit of the staging area. He's a lean, weathered man with the specific energy of one who has rehearsed being relaxed so many times the rehearsal has started to show.

"Cartographer." He steers me away from the other workers with one hand barely touching my elbow. "Glad you made it. Let's talk somewhere quieter."

Quieter turns out to be the far side of the equipment shed, out of earshot and out of eyeline. He wastes about thirty seconds on pleasantries before the performance cracks.

"Another crew," he says, low and tight. "Full eight-man team. Lower passage, sector four. Gone by morning count with nothing left but their tools and a cave-in at the entry point."

I keep my expression neutral. "That's three crews now."

He flinches. "Three."

I do the arithmetic quickly and don't let it show on my face. "And Lord Malachar's official position is still structural failure."

“His direct position,” Theren says carefully. “The cave-in explanation came from his office. He wants the mines open. No outside investigation, disruptions or attention.” He glances at the workers nearby. “I hired you privately because I need to know what’s down there before this forces a shutdown. You understand the distinction.”

I understand perfectly. Malachar wants answers quietly, controlled. Theren wants them before something worse happens. The money is good enough that I don’t ask which situation I’m walking into as I take the contract.

The upper passages are structurally sound by most reasonable standards. I move through them methodically, chalk markers on stable points, measurements noted, rough draft sketched in margins as I go. The work is familiar enough to be almost meditative, which is why I notice when something breaks the pattern.

The claw marks are about forty minutes in, partway down a branching side passage that the official tunnel charts mark as surveyed and clear. They are not claw marks from a cave-in. Stone fractures in specific ways when it fails — jagged, irregular, following the existing fault lines. These are parallel. Deliberate. Carved into the wall at intervals that suggest something moving at height, something with reach, something that was here long enough to mark its path rather than simply pass through it.

I crouch, studying the depth without touching. Deep enough that whatever made these was not small and was not incidental.

The mining tools nearby have dried blood on them. Settled into the grain of the wood handles, oxidized dark on the metal joints. My stomach does something I don't acknowledge. I document both findings in my notes, stand up, and keep walking.

I am deep in the branching passage when I see them. Two points of light in the absolute dark beyond my lantern's reach. Crimson. Faintly luminous. Too high off the ground for any tunnel animal in my catalogued experience, and completely still. They don't blink. They don't move. They simply watch with a patient, ancient quality that preceded me and intend to continue long after I'm gone.

My heart thunders to a jarring stop. Then it restarts, beating very fast and very loud in my ears, and my body just freezes me in place while my mind catches up with itself. The eyes don’t hold for more than one second. Then it’s swallowed back into the dark. Gone so completely I could convince myself I imagined them.

I don't convince myself. I've been in too many mountains for that.

I stand still, lantern burning, chalk in my hand, blood dried on a pickaxe ten feet behind me. Any reasonable person would mark the exit now. Any reasonable professional would seal this tunnel on her report and let someone else figure out what lives in the dark. I breathe through the rampage in my heart, shake it off, and unroll the forbidden maps instead.

They spread across the tunnel floor, old and thin and smelling of dust, and the passages they chart extend so far below the current mine operations that the paper almost seems to breathe with it, vast and hidden, in the way Hollow Mountain has never quite let anyone see before tonight.

My pulse is a living thing in my hands. This is not fear anymore. This is what I know better, adventure and a feel for dangerous jobs. A cold, irresistible certainty that I have just found the edge of a secret. And I am constitutionally incapable of leaving one unmapped.

2

ZARETH

The creature dies the way all corrupted things die, badly and with noise. I pull my blade free from its throat and let it fall. Around me, the remaining three members of my hunting unit finish the last of them without breaking stride. Swords, stone, whatever works. After enough runs, it stops feeling like violence and starts feeling like maintenance. The lower corridor stinks of rot and an unnatural dark that clings to anything that’s come through the breach.

"Seal it," I say.