Chapter 8 — The Sanctuary

  As Sayer swore, he clutched his forehead where the stone had struck him and rolled onto his hip, trying not to tangle himself in his sword belt on the way up. Across from him, Ammon laughed so hard he had to hunch over his staff, thin shoulders shaking while that coffin-creak cackle rattled out of him.

  "AHAH! Like a baby bird shoved out of the nest. Grace itself, my boy," Ammon wheezed.

  Sayer rubbed the knot already swelling between his eyes and glared through watering vision. "A little warning next time would've been neighborly." He got his boots under him and stood with a grunt. "That was… intense."

  Ammon only laughed harder as he turned and resumed his crooked, deceptively quick march up the path. "I suspect it has to happen to everyone at least once. Most folk worth knowing have a story much like that one. Wait until we reach our destination, then try again. That spell is not easy to control while moving."

  Sayer adjusted his belt, settled his swords, and caught up. "Well, that's Hunter's Vision. What about the others? Chosen Tongue and Growth. It says those are my racial abilities. What are they?"

  "Simple. Chosen Tongue lets you speak and understand any language."

  Sayer blinked at him. "Any language? Truly? Do you know another one so I can test it?"

  "Of course. Tell me how this sounds, my boy?"

  "...The same."

  Ammon smiled wider. "And now?"

  Sayer frowned. "Still the same. Exactly the same. Are you mocking me?"

  "No! My boy, I’m truly speaking different languages," Ammon said cheerfully. "Chosen Growth merely lets you advance faster. Rare enough, but not unheard of. Chosen Tongue is another matter. Supernaturally fluid. One of the simplest gifts I've ever seen, and one of the most potent. It truly is divine."

  Sayer tried to get his head around it and failed. "So I just understand anything anybody says?"

  "Within reason."

  "We had stories back home about gifts like that," Sayer muttered. "God-given things."

  Ammon perked up at once. "Really? I thought you said there wasn't magic where you're from."

  "We didn't call it magic." Sayer shrugged. "Half the people hearing it didn't believe it happened at all. We called them miracles. Unexplained things."

  Ammon rolled the word around thoughtfully. "Miracles. Hmmm, indeed." He swatted at some invisible thing that had blundered too near his face. "Magnificent thing to witness, really. No stutter. No slur. No searching for the right word. Chosen, I've met say it's so seamless they barely notice it at all. Though truly alien concepts can still lose shape. Probably the same reason some of what I say to you lands like a shovel to the head."

  Sayer snorted at that, but the humor did not hold. His mind had already gone elsewhere. He thought of dusty trails under hard sun, of frightened strangers with hands too close to holsters, of tense camps where one wrong word could curdle into blood. A gift like this would have saved lives. More than once. Maybe more than a few.

  A few different times, he thought, it would've spared us the need to kill at all.

  The thought left an old, bitter taste in his mouth.

  While he wrestled with that realization, he failed to notice that the path had begun to rise more sharply beneath their feet. Ammon had slowed, and the world around them was changing again with that same unnatural abruptness Sayer had felt at the clearing. One moment, the swamp pressed in hot and wet as a fever dream; the next, the air thinned and cooled against his sweat-slick skin. The droning insects fell away behind them. The breeze that moved through the trees no longer carried the wet-bellied heat of rot and standing water, but something gentler. Cleaner. As if they had stepped across a line no eye could see.

  "Ammon," Sayer asked, lowering his voice without meaning to, "did we just enter your sanctuary? It feels… different here."

  Ammon turned to him, and Sayer realized only then that the soft glow the old man had worn through the dark forest had faded some time ago. In its place, a new light had begun to build from the ground itself. Strange lichen clung to roots and stones around them, glowing a cold blue through the dusk. Ammon gestured with one bony hand. "Yes, my boy. We have just passed into the graveyard of our people. A sacred place to us. To most of Alcondria, though, it is a place of fear, superstition, and stories told to make children behave."

  Then he waved Sayer onward and picked up speed again, his quick hobble bordering on insulting. "We are near the northern entrance. Come along. Let's hurry so we can finally be somewhere truly safe."

  Sayer lengthened his stride to keep up and muttered to himself, “Old bastard can really move.”

  They passed between old stones and worn monuments half-swallowed by moss and root. Graves filled the spaces between the trees in such number that the forest itself began to seem built around them. The blue lichen washed everything in an eerie funeral glow. The smell of the place had changed, too. The rich stink of swamp mud and crushed leaves had faded; in its place hung the sharp scent of ozone, clean and strange, as if lightning had once passed through here and decided to linger. Creeping fog began to roll low across the earth, coiling around the gravestones and drifting over their boots.

  "There must be thousands," Sayer whispered.

  The fog thickened as they walked, and then, as if the darkness itself had taken shape, a towering structure emerged ahead, stopping them in their tracks.

  The trees had grown larger without him noticing, their trunks thick as church towers, but even they seemed to bend around what waited beyond them. Sayer craned his neck. The structure's black steeples rose nearly a hundred feet, stabbing up into the gloom. The blue glow from the lichen brightened against its stone so that, even with the sinking sun completely cut off by the canopy, he could still make out its massive outline. Fog moved across it in sheets, swallowing and revealing it by turns. It reminded him of old southern towns vanishing behind walls of river mist at dawn.

  What stood before him looked, in Earthly terms, like a mausoleum built by someone with too much grief and too much stone. No windows broke the dark walls. Cracked pillars leaned along the entrance, and Sayer eyed them with immediate suspicion, certain the whole damned thing might decide to collapse as soon as they stepped inside. Two enormous wooden doors sealed the way in, their hinges furry with rust. Stone steps rose from the mossy ground to meet them, carpeted in green growth thick enough to look soft. Vines climbed the walls. Pale flowers bloomed from the cracks. Up close, it looked like nature was doing all the work of holding the old ruin together.

  Ammon moved to the doors, then turned and spread his arms with a little flourish. "Welcome to your new home, my boy!"

  Sayer looked from the sagging pillars to the door and back again. "It looks like one hard sneeze away from becoming a pile of rubble…. maybe… maybe we stay outside."

  Ammon furrowed his brow. "Nonsense. This thing is as sturdy as me." He placed one hand against the wood and gave the door the gentlest push imaginable.

  The great slab swung inward at once without so much as a whine.

  Sayer stared. "How? Those hinges are rustier than a veteran whore."

  Ammon winked. "And, as any real man knows, those are the ones worth their weight in gold, my boy."

  Sayer snorted. "That is absolutely not true."

  "To each their own," Ammon said with a shrug, and shuffled inside.

  Sayer followed more cautiously. His fingers brushed the cold iron banding of the half-open door as he stepped through. The darkness within was thick enough to feel physical, pressing at his eyes while they struggled to adjust. A quiet dread tightened his shoulders. He had seen enough bodies in one lifetime to stop being squeamish about the dead, but there remained a difference between stumbling over corpses on a battlefield and willingly entering a place built to house them.

  He glanced toward Ammon. "I don't mind the dead," he said, keeping his voice low, "but I do try not to make a habit of disturbing where they rest. Are we disturbing any resting places right now, Ammon?"

  "My boy, I am the keeper of this place." Ammon's voice had lost its usual teasing edge. "It is my duty to watch over it until Belfast is freed and takes his rightful place again. We are not disturbing anything."

  That assurance helped. Some.

  Then Ammon tapped the butt of his staff against the floor, and a dozen wall torches roared to life all at once.

  Sayer flinched at the sudden blaze and threw up a hand. Light flooded the chamber in a hot orange rush. As his eyes adjusted, the world before him snapped into focus, and he recoiled with a strangled yelp.

  Bones.

  Walls of them. Pillars of them. The floor underfoot looked like a mosaic of packed bones and staring skulls. Rib cages and knotted arms formed great obscene patterns through the architecture. His boots kicked finger bones loose as he stumbled backward. The dry, snapping rattle they made against the ground hit him like a gunshot. He skidded toward the entrance, heart trying to batter its way out through his ribs.

  "I swear!" he barked, voice climbing. "I swear, you damned liar!"

  Disgust, fear, outrage, horror, all of it crashed together so hard inside him that he could not have sorted one feeling from the next if a gun were to his head.

  Ammon turned, looked at him, and then, to Sayer's astonishment, laughed. "Sorry, sorry." He waved his staff once.

  The room warped.

  In a single blink, the bodies vanished. Bone became cut stone. The floor became a smooth expanse of fitted gray slabs. The pillars rose clean and elegant. The walls stood solid and whole. Only the hammering in Sayer's chest and the phantom crackle of bones under his boots remained to say any of it had happened at all.

  He sat there staring, breath ragged, ears still haunted by that horrible dry snapping. "What... what in God's name was that?"

  "A security measure," Ammon said, sobering a little. "It has been a very long time since I brought anyone here. I forgot some of the old defenses were still sleeping in the stone. It is a spell meant to convince intruders that this place is a barbaric mass tomb, and that they ought to leave quickly and with great enthusiasm.” With a little twinkle in his eye, he said, “We are many things, my boy. We were never so savage as to build our halls from our dead, mostly."

  Sayer dragged a hand down his face. The memory of the false bones still lived in his nerves. "Well," he said between shuddering breaths, "I surely hope you haven't forgotten anything else."

  He put weight on the last words so even the dead would've caught the meaning.

  Ammon scratched his mustache with a sheepish little laugh. "No... I think..." He spun, tapped his staff here and there with brisk certainty, then whipped back around. "I think I've got everything."

  That did not inspire confidence. Still, Sayer made himself step fully into the chamber again, and this time he saw what the spell had hidden.

  The interior was breathtaking.

  Outside, the place had looked like a ruin waiting to surrender to rain and age. Inside, it was grand enough to humble a king. A high vaulted ceiling soared above them, held up by thick stone pillars set in deliberate, generous rows. Great slabs paved the floor, each one so precisely cut he could barely see the seams between them, yet they felt faintly soft beneath his boots, almost like old pine boards worn smooth by time. Metal inlay ran through the stone and the pillars alike, flowing in curling patterns that at first resembled script and only later revealed themselves as ornament. Tapestries in purple, black, and gold hung between the pillars, their woven scenes alive with battle, triumph, and mourning. There was nothing cramped or funereal in the room. It felt ceremonial. Reverent. Built for memory, not storage.

  High above, the ceiling bore a vast mural. A crowned skeleton draped in black mist stretched out its arms as though in welcome rather than threat. Sayer found himself staring at it with his mouth half open.

  "Wow," he breathed. "I heard stories back home about artistry like this, but I never saw anything close to it. It's... beautiful."

  Ammon watched him with a sad, warm smile as they walked. "Yes. I often forget how wondrous it is." He tilted his own head back to look at the ceiling. "Once, our people were counted among the greatest artists and builders in all Alcondria. Now they are gone, and their work has fallen into the fog of history, forgotten by all."

  Sayer laid a hand on one of the pillars as he passed, feeling the cool metal inlay under his fingertips. "Nonsense. You remember them, don't you?"

  That drew a real smile from Ammon. "A fair point, my boy. Come. We have traveled far, and you'll have time enough to admire the architecture later."

  He led Sayer toward the rear of the chamber, where an altar stood beneath the mural. In its center rested a dark gray plaque of smooth stone. Candles burned around it with low, steady flames, and a dried bundle of black flowers lay across the altar's face. The plaque was carved with the same symbols Sayer had seen running through the walls and pillars.

  As he drew close, the hairs on his arms prickled. The symbols meant nothing to him, no, that wasn't quite true. Chosen Tongue let him feel that they meant something. They looked like language. They carried the shape and weight of meaning. But beneath that, there was only confusion.

  "What does it say?" he asked quietly.

  Ammon looked back at him. "Nothing."

  Sayer blinked. "Nothing?"

  "Precisely."

  He frowned at the plaque, then at the flowing symbols winding over the chamber around them. "What do you mean, nothing?"

  Ammon's smile widened, showing off those insultingly white teeth. "We were a secretive people. Paranoid, if you prefer the unkind version. These symbols are designed to tempt the curious. They borrow from fragments of an ancient dead language, but they say nothing at all. The hope was that if anyone fought through our other defenses and reached this altar, they'd spend years trying to decipher a lie."

  Sayer muttered, "That is a special kind of distrust."

  Ammon laughed. "Remember, my boy, in the end, they hunted us down and killed everyone but me. So tell me, was it paranoia?"

  Sayer opened his mouth, thought better of it, and shut it again.

  Ammon placed one hand against the plaque. "This one, however, does have a purpose." He looked at Sayer, and for a breath his expression softened into something almost devotional. "Listen well. These are true words."

  Then he cleared his throat and recited.

  "Belfast, who keeps the lantern at the door,

  Father of Death, whose hands are gentle still;

  You gather every weary soul ashore,

  And hush the trembling heart against its will.

  Not as a thief who steals the breath away,

  But as a guide who knows the quiet road;

  You lift the weight of terror from our day

  And bear our sorrows like a sacred load.

  Where others shout, you speak in softened tone;

  Where others strike, you offer tranquil sleep;

  No life is lost to you, but led back home,

  Past storm and scar, past promises we keep.

  So take us when our final candles die,

  'Rest now, my child, onto eternity you fly.'"

  At the final line, the plaque answered with a deep, mechanical click.

  The altar began to slide backward across the floor.

  Stone ground against stone. Hidden gears woke somewhere below. As the altar moved, a breath of old air hissed up from the darkness beneath and fluttered the candle flames. A wide staircase descended into the earth, revealed step by step.

  Sayer had listened to the poem with the kind of attention a starving man gives food. It felt less like a verse and more like a prayer cut from grief and reverence both. It stirred something old and tender in him, memories of his youth spent in prayer and songs of worship. He stood staring into the opening, then looked to Ammon.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  "That was beautiful," he said. "Where did it come from?"

  Ammon's smile faded into an old sadness that made him look every bit his age and then some. "It was written long ago by a very kind young man. He loved his God almost as fiercely as he loved his family. He wrote it after losing someone dear and spending years in mourning. Belfast visited him in a dream and showed him the mercy inside death."

  "And he wrote this after that dream?"

  "Yes."

  Ammon took up his staff and started down the newly revealed stairs, the click of wood on stone echoing with every step. Sayer followed. The passage swallowed them in cool air that smelled of dust, wet stone, and age. The walls were a uniform gray, too clean to be a natural cave and too worn to feel new. A faint breeze moved through the stairwell in slow breaths, as if whatever waited below inhaled and exhaled through the throat of the mausoleum.

  Ammon spoke again without turning. "He wrote the poem in his journal. When he passed, I found it among his things. I had always wondered what peace he found in death that so many others could never bring him."

  Sayer heard the sorrow in that confession and kept his own questions to himself.

  Behind them, stone scraped. He twisted and saw the entrance beginning to close, the great altar grinding back into place overhead. The light from above narrowed by degrees until only a blade of it remained.

  Before that last seam vanished, one small stone in the ceiling above them bloomed into soft blue light.

  Then another, farther down. Then another.

  The lights continued in a descending chain, running down and down until the stairs vanished into a pale blue distance far below.

  Sayer looked over the edge and immediately regretted it. The stairs dropped so far that his stomach seemed to loosen in his belly. Claustrophobia and vertigo met halfway and had a fine laugh at his expense.

  “If I fall,” he thought grimly, “it'll be a very long way down. Unless I manage to take that old sack of bones with me.”

  "Now, Sayer," Ammon called as they continued the descent, "when we reach the bottom, you may be a bit overwhelmed. They haven't had a living visitor in a very long time. I expect curiosity will overtake manners. Be polite if you can, but we shall want to move quickly. We have much to do."

  Sayer stumbled on the next step and caught himself. "I thought you were the last one. Are there more Graymen down there?"

  Ammon laughed. "No, no. Not Graymen. Spirits. Souls I have gathered and kept from drifting into the greater purgatory."

  "Spirits?"

  "Yes. I am a shepherd of sorts." His tone went thoughtful, almost priestly. "Before Belfast was imprisoned, my duty was to wander Alcondria and help the dead move on when they lingered too long. Now the work is nearly backward. I gather them where I can, bring them here, and help them remain themselves instead of being swallowed by the endless sea of trapped souls."

  Sayer tried to picture that and couldn't. "So you gather them and bring them here and... what?"

  "Perhaps someone else can explain it better than I can."

  Ammon glanced back over one shoulder, not at Sayer but at the empty air beside him. "Thane, we are within my boundary now. You may reveal yourself."

  For a heartbeat, nothing happened.

  Then a mote of white light the size of a silver dollar popped into existence beside Sayer's head and shouted at full volume, "Finally, Ammon! I was growing weary of this hiding nonsense! Easy there, little broth-"

  Sayer very nearly died of surprise on the spot.

  His heel slid off the edge of a stair, and he sprawled backward with a barked curse, slamming one elbow into stone and just managing to catch himself before tumbling headfirst down the endless stairwell.

  The mote bobbed in front of him like an excited firefly while a deep voice boomed from it. "Ha! Still, I send my enemies fleeing before me! You see that, Ammon? Young pup's terrified of the big dog!"

  "Thane!" Ammon snapped, not stopping. "If you make him crack his skull and respawn in the Fen, I'll throw you out and let you join your comrades in purgatory."

  The light, currently zigzagging back and forth in front of Sayer's nose while he tried to swat it away, gave a visible little shiver. Then it zipped upward. "You make jokes and tease, it's all holy wisdom. Someone else does it, and suddenly you're a monk of bleeding intolerance."

  "What was that?" Ammon called without looking back. "Speak up."

  "Nothing, your great priest-ee-ness!"

  Sayer climbed back to his feet, rubbing his elbow, and stared after the floating light. Whatever fear had first gripped him was already giving ground to disbelief. The thing was ridiculous.

  "Come along, little brother," the mote called down to him. "His greatness will leave you behind. He is in a hurry to get his answers."

  Sayer followed more carefully this time. "What is it, Ammon?"

  Ammon did not answer.

  Thane did. The mote zipped back so quickly that Sayer flinched. It halted directly in front of his eyes and boomed, "It? It? I am not it! I am the great Thane, lieutenant to the Wolf of Fools, a Chosen with more than eight worlds cleared under my belt, thank you very much! That makes me your senior, little brother, so you wi-"

  Ammon whipped one clawlike hand through the air. Thane streaked straight into his palm and vanished with an offended squeak.

  The old hermit lifted his closed hand to his mouth and muttered something too low for Sayer to catch. When he opened his fingers again, the light drifted out dimmer and much less pleased with life.

  A twitch tugged at Sayer's mouth.

  After a theatrically unnecessary pause and a noise that sounded like an invisible throat being cleared, Thane spoke in a far more dignified tone. "Young Chosen, I am Thane. I have been the one teaching Ammon the ways of the Chosen for these past centuries. I fell in battle while trying to clear a particularly nasty boss-soul that had taken root near the Fen and was spilling its influence into the Confederacy."

  He paused just long enough for his light to swell with importance. Then the outrage returned. "And ever since, the old bag of bones has dragged me around like an enslaved library!"

  Ammon rolled his eyes. "Thane is what many in this world call a will-o'-the-wisp, or simply a wisp. An unanchored soul. Most people think such spirits are evil or, at the very least, an ill omen. In his case, I would say the latter with confidence."

  The wisp darted close to Sayer's ear and whispered loudly, "I wouldn't object if you used that sword on him. Purely as a favor to a fellow Chosen. We don't need him anyway."

  Sayer smiled despite himself. The little ball of light was quickly becoming his favorite thing in the stairwell.

  “Finally, another Chosen I can ask questions to,” he thought. “Even if he is just a loud floating candle.”

  "So you died," Sayer said, "and Ammon caught you with that staff of his?"

  Ammon continued downward. The wisp followed beside Sayer, and Sayer forgot entirely about the depth below him for a little while.

  "Yes!" Thane boomed. "I was grievously wounded while delivering a killing blow to a mighty corrupted dragon, thereby saving the nearby towns from complete destruc-"

  "It wasn't a dragon," Ammon cut in. "It was a drake. And it was the Wolf who landed the killing blow while the beast was busy trying to swallow your upper half, which had become lodged in its throat."

  That did nothing but further invigorate Thane. "Yes! By my final heroic effort, I lodged myself in the drake's gullet and created the opening for victory! A noble and strategic sacrifice!"

  Ammon only shook his head.

  Sayer was grinning openly now. Thane's blustering reminded him so sharply of Bill that something warm and painful twisted under his ribs. The feeling passed quickly as a match flare, but not before it stung. Reminding him he still hadn't had time to mourn his lost friend.

  "You lodged yourself in its throat?" Sayer asked. "And isn't drake just another name for a dragon?"

  Before the wisp could answer, Ammon said, "A drake is as much a dragon as a lap dog is a wolf."

  "A lap dog!" Thane cried. "That lap dog's mobs burned more than two towns and drove us all the way back to the Ebon Halls before we turned it! Its brood killed thousands of Ebon citizens. The Golden One herself would've found it an ugly fight, and yet the Fools wiped it from Alcondria!"

  Sayer caught on to one piece of his sentence. "Who are the Fools?"

  Thane brightened so fiercely he nearly doubled in size. "The Fools? Why, little brother, they are the greatest fighting force the Chosen have ever assembled. A guild of fearsome warriors, each more deadly than the last! And at our head, the Wolf - a commander so fierce the Bastion leaves the whole southern half of Alcondria in our capable hands. Our claws reach far and-"

  "A guild of rejects and halfwits," Ammon interrupted. "Led by a thoroughly unhinged Tier Four Chosen who spends most of their time drinking, fighting, and setting cities on fire."

  Thane shot at Ammon's face level, quivering with incandescent offense. "How dare you. These are words no honorable spirit should be forced to hear. Were I not currently a ball of contained glory, I would strike you down where you stand!"

  Ammon ignored him with saintly calm that somehow looked ruder than if he'd argued back. "We are close now, Sayer. The stair opens into a very large chamber. Keep your eyes on the ground if you can. You may be surrounded by our more excitable guests, and there are great soul anchors in the ceiling. They work much like my Beacon. You must not look at them. They affect you... differently."

  At once, Thane vanished again into Ammon's hand with an outraged sputter. Sayer glanced to where the wisp had disappeared. "Did you do something to him?"

  "Why," Ammon asked dryly, "have you grown fond of the blowhard already?"

  "Yes, actually. More than I am fond of you."

  That got a genuine laugh from the old trickster. "Ha! Fair enough. He's tired, my boy. Being away from the anchors too long drains him. If he does not rest in their glow, the other side starts calling him, and he may not have the strength left to refuse."

  Sayer frowned. "Why didn't you let him out earlier? Has he been with us the whole time? Just hidden the way you hid yourself in the clearing?"

  Then a memory from their first day in the Fen snapped into place. He stopped mid-step. "He was who you were talking to in the swamp."

  Ammon nodded. "Yes. He spent most of that time in my ear begging to reveal himself so he could speak with you. I refused because he leaves a distinct mana signature when he grows too active. Thane was well known in life. If another Chosen caught that trail and knew it for his, they might have followed it back here."

  "You can track people by their mana?"

  "Some can. It's a rare skill and not an easy one, but there is a higher concentration of trackers among the Chosen than elsewhere. One must already know the signature one is hunting. Even then, it is like finding a single buried thread among a million. Still, any chance at all is more risk than I care to take."

  Sayer had three more questions lined up in his mouth, but the stairs ended before he could ask even one of them.

  The final steps carried them into a short hall lit by the same blue stones that marked the ceiling above. The air had grown colder as they descended; now it made a faint shiver pass through Sayer's shoulders beneath his light gear. The smell of dust and mildew was gone. In its place lay a thin sulfur tang that called up memories of old cave systems, damp rock, and the mineral taste of limestone he'd licked off his lips as a boy after crawling through tight places he had no business entering.

  The hall itself ran only a few dozen feet before ending in a perfectly smooth wall.

  Sayer squinted at it. To his eyes, it was a dead end, though such a thing felt too obvious to be real after everything else this place had shown him.

  Sure enough, Ammon approached the smooth stone, tapped it once with his staff, and Sayer felt something move through the wall. Not a vibration. Not quite. More like a dark breath passing inward through the rock.

  “Magic,” Sayer thought. Another ward. Another lock.

  With a long hiss of air, the wall split down the middle and slid apart, revealing a concealed archway beyond.

  Past it waited a cavern so vast that Sayer's first instinct was to stop and simply stare.

  Sulfur rolled out of it like a living thing. The smell hit him hard and hot, thick as struck match heads and spent gunpowder. Instead of repulsing him, it made something inside his chest loosen. He inhaled deeply and let the acrid sting settle on his tongue. It calmed him in the same ugly, familiar way tobacco once had.

  As Ammon crossed the threshold, he called back, "Remember to divert your eyes, try not to look up and-"

  A shrieking wave of white lights descended from above and surrounded him before he could finish.

  "Ammon!"

  "He's back!"

  "What'd you get us this time, Ammon?"

  Voices tumbled over each other in a hundred tones - men, women, children, the old, the sharp, the shrill - all spilling from hundreds, maybe thousands, of floating wisps. They swarmed Ammon at first. Then several stopped when they noticed Sayer.

  The entire mood changed. A wave peeled off and rushed him. Their voices rolling like approaching thunder

  "Who's this?"

  "My, he's a looker!"

  "Look at the sword!"

  "What's your name?"

  They crowded him in a storm of light and overlapping voices. Sayer stumbled back, chest tightening. The noise crashed over him so suddenly and completely that for one hideous second, he was not in a cavern at all but back among the chaos of battle, bodies pressing from every side, men shouting over cannon and gunfire until individual sound ceased to exist and became one terrible living roar.

  His hand went for a gun by reflex, but found a sword hilt instead.

  Before he could draw, a flash burst overhead. Every wisp shot backward as if yanked by invisible strings. A thousand little cries of protest rose as they flew up and away out of sight.

  Ammon stood a few paces off, glaring toward the ceiling. "He's been here five seconds, and you've nearly stopped his heart, you bunch of slack-jawed trolls! Back up there and charge yourselves, all of you! You'll meet him later, and you'll do it next time with more sense than God gave pond scum!"

  A few indignant shouts drifted back down, too muddled for Sayer to parse.

  Then Ammon turned, and the irritation dropped from his face into embarrassment. "Sorry, my boy. I should have known better. I told them I would be bringing a guest home. They simply didn't believe me until you appeared."

  Sayer was still trying to untangle himself from the ringing in his own head. He managed, "It's all right. They were just... enthusiastic." He swallowed. "For small things, they press in mighty hard."

  Ammon smiled more gently. "Many of them have been here for a very long time, and some understand what it means that you are here now. Give them a little time to settle. They'll be easier to survive afterward."

  He raised his hand and made a small motion. Three wisps detached themselves from Ammon and drifted up into the hidden ceiling.

  One shouted as it went, "See you in a few days, little brother! Big dog needs a wee nap!"

  Sayer stepped forward into the cavern at last.

  Warm blue light filtered down from the unseen ceiling in sheets, enough to paint the stone with a dreamlike glow. He wanted badly to look up and find the source of it all, but Ammon's warning still held. Worse, he remembered too vividly the sensation of his soul being ripped toward the lantern in the swamp. So he forced his gaze low and followed behind the hunched robe instead.

  "Three wisps?" Sayer asked. "More traveling companions like Thane?"

  Ammon shook his hooded head. "No. One was Thane. The other two were the bandits you killed."

  That answer made Sayer's attention slip. Confused about what Ammon could mean, he looked up before he could catch himself.

  His eyes lifted. High above him, the ceiling vanished into a darkness lit by thousands upon thousands of floating motes. They circled a great structure suspended in the cavern's heart. A vast chandelier-like lattice of blue brilliance, radiant as a piece of frozen lightning. It looked like the One's light, or Ammon's Beacon, magnified and made holy. The sight hit Sayer like a hand around the throat.

  Everything else bled away. The sulfur sting vanished from his nose. The chill left his skin. The weight of his sword, his boots, his own bones, all of it dimmed. There was only that light. His mind reached for it with sudden, desperate hunger. He felt, absurdly, that he could rise if he only wanted it hard enough. That he might float upward into that blue glory and leave all the old weight behind.

  “Join us,” something inside him whispered.

  "What did I say, boy!" Ammon's skeletal hand clamped across Sayer's face and wrenched his gaze down.

  Sayer fought him at once, not out of anger but out of need. He had to look again. He had to. The compulsion burned through him. Ammon grunted, dug in his heels, and hauled him bodily across the cavern.

  "Fool child!" the Ammon snarled. "You'll lose yourself up there, and it'll take me days to sort you back out! Stop fighting me!"

  Sayer thrashed anyway.

  Ammon slapped him hard. The crack of it rang through the cavern.

  Pain and fury tore the spell clean apart. Sayer roared and stopped trying to look back at the lights. Instead, he swung on Ammon with all the righteous offense of a man who had just been slapped by a decrepit swamp hermit in front of an audience of the dead.

  Ammon wrestled him the rest of the way through a nearby arch like a man dragging a rabid dog by the scruff. The pair of them cursed each other all the way, boots skidding on stone, hands flailing, until the old hermit managed to sling Sayer through the opening like a sack of grain.

  Sayer slid a dozen feet across a smooth stone floor, came up on one knee, then sprang to his feet with fists raised.

  "I'm going to strangle you with that beard, you lousy-" He stopped.

  The room around him was new.

  Sayer was confused, "How the hell did we get here?"

  Ammon bent over, panting harder than Sayer had ever seen him. He looked more hunched than usual, more fragile too, though annoyance still flashed in the blue of his eyes. "You could do with a few more points in intellect, you halfwit. Listen to me when I tell you something. You're like an infant determined to dive headfirst into every puddle it sees."

  Sayer's head still swam. The longing to go back and stare into the soul anchor remained in him, but now it was distant, a fading echo rather than a command. "You said it wouldn't hit me like Beacon," he shot back. "That felt exactly like Beacon."

  "Yes, well." Ammon straightened slowly, rubbing at his jaw where one of Sayer's wild swings had clipped him. "I thought it would not. Apparently, your soul is desperate to separate itself from your body."

  He fixed Sayer with a grim stare. "Gather yourself. I need answers. I suspect you do as well, and I am growing tired of all this mystery."

  Then he turned and walked down the hall they had just entered so violently. Sayer followed after a moment, brushing dust from his clothes and trying to pretend he had not just been hauled around like an unruly child.

  This space felt different from the cavern - more lived in, more domestic, if a place beneath a grave-city could be called that. The walls were adorned with murals, framed pictures, and tapestries, every bit as fine as the ones above, each unique and crafted with unnerving care. Several times, Sayer nearly stopped to study one in detail. It felt less like a tomb and more like a museum.

  The hall ran straight for about a hundred feet. Heavy wooden doors lined both sides at measured intervals, each inscribed or ornamented in its own fashion. The blue lights of the lower passage had given way here to a warmer yellow stone-light that made the walls feel less subterranean and more like some old fortress set at dusk. The sulfur reek was gone entirely, cut off as though the arch behind them were a seal. In its place drifted the soft scent of flowers from tall vases set along the hall. The whole passage breathed intention, comfort, and order.

  Sayer wanted to open every door. He didn't. Instead, following closely behind Ammon.

  At the far end, two massive double doors of dark metal waited, barred from the outside by a thick crossbeam. Whatever was behind those, someone wanted kept in badly.

  Just before they reached them, Ammon turned left and knocked on the last door in the row before pushing it open. The hinges shrieked. Sayer's teeth clenched at the sound. This one, at least, was not often used.

  He followed Ammon inside and halted dead in the doorway.

  Charts. Diagrams. Shelves sagging under books. Bones of beasts or people or things somewhere unhappily between. Muddy glass jars holding preserved organs, curled creatures, and anatomical nightmares better left unnamed. Papers stacked in unstable towers. Trinkets. Instruments. Dust. Clutter.

  The room was large, but the clutter made it feel cramped, almost airless. Yellow light stones glowed dimmer in here than in the hall, giving the chamber the close, fading feel of sunset. As Ammon threaded through the mess, Sayer heard old wood creak beneath him and realized the floor here was not stone at all, but planks mostly hidden under decades of debris.

  All of that was strange enough. None of it was what stopped him cold.

  At the back of the room, upon a slightly raised platform beside a great fireplace burning with warm red flame, sat an enormous cushioned chair piled with threadbare blankets.

  In that chair sat what looked like a corpse that had forgotten the courtesy of lying down.

  The figure beneath the shawl and blankets was so shrunken, so dry, so completely leeched of all moisture of life that Sayer's first absurd thought was that someone had forgotten to check on their great-great-great-grandmother for twenty years. Its skin clung to bone like old parchment. Its head lolled to one side beneath a shawl. A thick coat and the mound of blankets hid the rest of the body. From the doorway, only the head and neck were clearly visible.

  “Dead,” Sayer thought at once. “Surely dead.”

  He opened his mouth to ask Ammon whether he'd misplaced a relative.

  Ammon beat him to it.

  "Benesh! Benesh, wake up! I have need of you!"

  The corpse coughed.

  Sayer made a sound halfway between a curse and a strangled cry.

  One shriveled eyelid pulled open, revealing an eye clouded over with cataracts thick as old wax. Then the other opened. The thing, the woman, he realized distantly, smacked her withered lips, slow and awful, and swept those milky eyes across the room in search of whoever had interrupted her death.

  Very quietly, Sayer murmured, "Makes Ammon look like a spring chicken."

  Ammon leaned close to one drooping ear and bellowed, "Benesh! It's Thayen! I have a new disciple! I need you to look into him and help with his path!"

  The ancient lips parted. A frail breath whistled in. Then a crackling old woman's voice crept out. "Thayen? Disciple? Where is Mairtel? I am tired. He tells the nicest stories."

  Ammon sighed the sigh of a man who had lived too long and lost the strength to be surprised by anything. He leaned in again and shouted, "Do not worry! I will get Mairtel after! I need you to read my disciple! Something troubles his soul, and we must discern the path the Lord has laid before him!"

  "A new disciple?" she whispered. "Thayen, apprentices should not be taking disciples. You should be in your studies if you ever hope to earn Belfast's favor."

  Ammon closed his eyes for one full beat, then shouted, each word a separate hammer blow, "I obtained my seniority more than two thousand years ago! I need you to look at my disciple, right in front of you!"

  Benesh's milky gaze finally found Sayer.

  He had, despite himself, crept farther into the room while the exchange played out. Now he stood perhaps a dozen feet away from the old woman, looking up at her on her platform. The moment those cataract-clouded eyes settled on him, he felt something cold and intimate fasten onto him. It did not feel like sight. It felt like teeth.

  He took one involuntary step backward.

  Then Benesh spoke. "Sayer?"

  The recognition in her words hit him harder than he expected.

  "Sayer, what has happened to you? Why does Thayen call you his disciple? Why are you so diminished...?"

  Her eyes widened further. Her voice thinned.

  "Sayer... who is that with you? Why does he stand so close behind you?"

  Ammon turned sharply toward him, then back to Benesh. A frown dug deep under his mustache. "What do you mean? There is no one with Sayer."

  Benesh raised one skeletal hand. Blankets slid from her shoulders, and fear entered her voice.

  "Sayer. Beware." Her lips trembled. "It has conjoined itself to you. Its claws are sunk into you..."

  Then she went rigid.

  Her ruined face pulled tight over bone. Her blind eyes strained wider. Her mouth opened in a whisper so thin Sayer almost missed it.

  "He... it is watching me..."

  A tremor ran through her whole body.

  "It's smiling at me. It knows. It knows I can see it."

  Ammon's attention snapped wholly to Sayer now. He moved closer to Benesh and gripped her thin arms as they began to shake. "Benesh! Who? There is no one there but-"

  He got no farther.

  Benesh shrieked.

  The sound ripped through the room like a knife through wet cloth. Her body was too frail to rise, too wasted to do more than jerk against the chair, but panic made her fight the blankets all the same. She tried to turn away from whatever she saw behind Sayer and could not.

  "It is speaking!" she screamed. "Its words burn!"

  Then her voice broke into a final, ragged cry.

  "THE HOUND! THOMAS DELANEY! TRUE CHOSEN OF DEATH!"