Of Truth and Beasts

Chane pulled her toward him, not knowing what else to do. She dropped her forehead against his upper arm, gripping his cloak, his arm, and burying her face.

He hurt for her pain, but he was not sorry she had failed.

He was not sorry at all. 

Suddenly embarrassed, Wynn released Chane’s arm and pulled away, completely uncertain of what to do next. The thought of leaving empty-handed was too much after all this. She couldn’t even look up at Chane, though she felt him watching her expectantly. She knew exactly what he wanted to do—just leave.

She turned her head and spotted Ore-Locks still standing by the taller, right-end breach. Why had he brought them down here after his futile attempt to find Deep-Root in the caves of the honored dead? He hadn’t even looked at the basalt coffins of the Fallen Ones. Perhaps he knew what she would find: Deep-Root wasn’t here either. Ore-Locks’s ancestor had fallen for the atrocity committed here.

She stepped away from Chane, but he reached after her.

“Where are you going?” he asked. “This is over.”

Evading his grasp, she went to the left-end wall and looked into its wide breach. Inside, another dark, raw shaft ran both up and down. She shuffled down the chamber, all the way to Ore-Locks.

The previous pale anguish on his face had been replaced by confusion. Obviously, he hadn’t expected to find a dead end. Something final, perhaps, some last discovery, but not this.

“Not here,” he whispered. “How could they not be here?”

Those words sharpened Wynn’s awareness.

Ore-Locks was too focused in his task and far too knowledgeable for someone who’d never been inside this seatt. But someone else had been here—Ore-Locks’s ancestor, that spirit who had supposedly called him to serve among the Stonewalkers.

Did that treacherous mass murderer guide Ore-Locks’s steps?

Wynn’s fear and revulsion of him magnified. In the face of her own failure, she lashed out at him.

“What are you looking for?” she demanded. “Deep-Root wasn’t among the honored dead—he couldn’t ... never will be! So, what are you after now?”

Ore-Locks’s red hair was dirty and wild, even bound back as it was. The beginning of a beard showed on his jaw. Confusion vanished from his face, and he turned on her in equal anger.

“His bones! Why else would I endure your ignorant judgments ... endure traveling with that?” He pointed at Chane. “I found no truth here, but at the least I could have put him to rest. Now I cannot even do that.”

Wynn stared at him, not knowing what to think. Everything Ore-Locks said sounded almost honorable, as if Chane had been right back in Dhredze Seatt. When Ore-Locks had come at her that night she’d found the coffin effigy of Thallûhearag, he had denied that his ancestor was that monster. If only he didn’t wish to honor one who’d murdered thousands, tens of thousands. But if his ancestral spirit called to him now, deceived and used him even unwittingly, Ore-Locks still couldn’t be trusted.

“It cannot end like this,” he whispered.

No, she thought, it cannot.

Holding her crystal high, Wynn stepped to the tall breach, leaning in, and her heart jumped. This one wasn’t a shaft.

“Did you look inside here?” she asked.

For an instant, Ore-Locks didn’t appear to understand. All breaches so far had exposed raw, vertical shafts. Blinking, he gripped one side of the opening, pushing in beside Wynn. They both peered into a rough tunnel running off left and right from the opening.

Wynn’s light only showed perhaps forty or fifty paces either way. The wall had certainly been broken by pressure when the mountain fell. She stepped into the raw tunnel, its floor as rough as the walls, and looked back as Ore-Locks followed.

Shade stood beyond the opening with her ears flattened and jowls twitching, and Chane glowered, his eyes narrow.

“Are you coming?” Wynn asked.

Chapter 24

To Chane’s dismay, the tunnel behind the breach went on and on, deeper into the mountain. Each time he thought Wynn’s perilous mission was finished, it began all over again. Worse, this tunnel was nothing like the ones above.

Roughly hewn, it had been gouged out in a rush, rather than skillfully excavated. Had someone been left alive after the seatt’s fall? If so, why dig here, farther into the mountain’s depths? Even more puzzling, the tunnel was surprisingly wide and without any supports, but the ceiling appeared sound. Chane could have driven a horse and wagon down this passage.

Ore-Locks still led them. Although his manic drive had resurfaced, he appeared less certain of his way, advancing more slowly. Wynn stayed right behind him, her breaths coming too quickly. When she looked back, her lips were parched.

“Drink,” Chane said, pulling the water skin off his shoulder.

She took a long swallow and tapped Ore-Locks’s shoulder. When he turned, she handed him the water skin. Once he’d finished, she dropped to her knees, set down her staff, and poured water into her hand.

“Here, Shade.”