Page 5 of Bite Bonded Bride

I pull out my sketch pad and get to work. Time stops meaning much when I'm working. I measure arch spans, sketch wall sections in overlapping grids, notate the marking intervals in shorthand and cross-reference everything against the forbidden charts until my hand cramps and I switch it. The commission sitting folded in my satchel, map tunnel stability, standard survey, all becomes a distant, theoretical concern. Whatever this archway is, is not on any survey record and doesn’t want to be found.

I was always going to find it. That's practically a professional obligation at this point. I'm reaching out to trace a marking on the far wall, a habit so automatic I don't register doing it until my chalk is already moving when the stone moves back.

Not toward me. Around me.

The vibration starts deep, below the floor, below anything my feet can read, a sound more than a sensation, a low, geological groan of ancient weight redistributing along load lines that have held for longer than anyone alive. I know this sound. I have heard versions of it in a dozen unstable shafts, in my father's mine, in the two tunnel collapses I've walked out of and one I barely did.

I'm already moving before I know it. Back toward the passage entrance, fast, controlled — don't run, running is how you miss the crack before you step into it — but the tunnel reads the shift faster than I do. There's no dramatic fracture, no warning groan with enough lead time to be useful. The floor simply stops being there.

I drop.

I hit stone at least twice on the way down. I feel the sharp numbing pain, a streak of damage I cannot fully inventory until I can see myself properly. My lantern separates from me somewhere in the fall and I hear it go, the particular shattering of hot glass on cold rock, and then I hit the bottom and darkness comes up to meet me.

I don't lose consciousness fully. I lose time, which is almost worse because there's a gap between the impact and the moment I become aware I'm lying still, breathing, hurting in several specific and unkind locations. I take stock the way I've been taught: fingers first, then hands, wrists, elbows, work outward from center, methodical, no panic. Everything moves. Several things report in at volume. My satchel is still on my body, which means most of my maps survived. My chalk is gone. My lantern is gone.

The darkness around me is complete, and textured. Not the darkness of a room with the candle out. The darkness of somewhere that has never seen light and is not sorry about it.

I try to move.

The torchlight finds me before I manage it, bright and blinding. Multiple sources moving in organized formation, unlike the scattered bob of miners carrying individual lamps but coordinated. I track the movement by instinct before I can see the figures carrying the light and when I see them my brain performs a short, spectacular refusal to process the information correctly.

Too tall. Too still and quiet. Then the light catches pale skin and the particular color of eyes that should not glow and do, and the specific geometry of a face that is beautiful the way the edge of something sharp is beautiful, technically and distantly, not at all to do with safety.

There are at least eight of them. Armed. Silent. They surround me in the time it takes me to get one hand under myself, and not one of them makes a sound that isn't intentional.

Monsters beneath the mountain. The old warning Theren's miners mutter into their cups at the end of every shift. The thing mothers in Hollow Mountain's surface settlement use to threaten children who won't come inside at dark.

Looking at the figures closing around me now, their predatory stillness, the way they take up space like they own the air in it, I understand with sudden clarity that the stories are not exaggeration. They are an understatement.

Someone grabs me. My bruised limbs protest and I groan. I’m hauled upright with one hand in a grip that feels unbreakable. I open my mouth and get as far as drawing breath before the passage opens up around us and every word I had evaporates.

The underground kingdom spreads out before me on an impossible scale.

Architecture cascading downward through cavern levels, carved from living rock with the same deliberate proportions as the archways above. Light sources I cannot name lining passage walls in dull amber and cold blue. And figures moving at corridor intersections, disappearing around corners, watching from doorways with glowing eyes tracking my movement through the city.

Not monsters. Civilians.

4

ZARETH

She is smaller than Veyrik and barely reaches his shoulder, and Veyrik is no giant by Vrakken standards. The civilians clustered along the walls, the ones too weak or too stubborn to leave when I ordered it watch her come in like they’re expecting something worse than her already to follow.

She is cataloguing the room.

I see it happen in real time. Those amber eyes move across the chamber ceiling first, noting the height, the structure, the points where the carved stone shows stress fractures, then the walls, then the civilians, then me. Not in the order a frightened person looks at things. In the order a cartographer does.

Interesting.

I file that observation away and keep my face exactly where it always is: somewhere between bored and dangerous.

"Leave us," I say to the civilians. Most of them go. A few of the older ones linger near the far archway, too exhausted to move quickly. I let it pass. They have earned the right to be slow.

Veyrik shoves her forward. She stumbles and one knee nearly hits the stone before she catches herself through what looks like pure refusal to fall. There is something almost architectural about the way she holds herself upright. Deliberate. Load-bearing.

"The surface intruder," Veyrik announces, as though I cannot see her.

"I have eyes," I say.