Something hissed. Tarragon pivoted on the balls of her feet, blade hissing right back. A bank of old devices she imagined as terminals waited in the gloom, and a shape scuttled behind them. She raised her sword in cross guard. “I don’t think we’re alone. I think⁠—”

  A rat the size of a pony launched from behind the terminals. She breathed out, stepping sideways into Courtier’s Rise, Requiem moving from cross guard to high cut. The sword hummed, and she felt how it was just slightly wrong. What had Sands Apart said to her? She cast about for the Feybrind woman and saw her battling another giant rat with Sight of Day.

  Nothing about this is belief.

  If bringing the Storm wasn’t belief, what was it? Requiem sliced through the giant rat, the beast thrashing as burning metal cut it in half, cauterising the innards and leaving it to land in two places. The top half, complete with claws and giant rat fangs, dragged itself toward her. She moved into Courtier’s Rise’s second and third steps, slipping backward into a low stance that mocked a half-bow. A second rat, destined for her face, sailed over the top of her.

  It’s a simple matter.

  Simple or no, she conjured no Storm. And yet she felt something, the lightness of her sword belying its true weight, the smoothness of the floor at odds with its crumbled, crusted surface. She should have been hot and wild, the blood surging in her veins, but she was calm. An eye at the heart of nothing, no Storm to hold her. Tarragon brought Requiem left to right, taking off a giant rope of tail from the latest rat, then stabbing down, skewering the original half beast as it reached her ankles. The air here was foetid, carrying a foulness beyond age, but she only felt it as a passing breeze. And she remembered Sands Apart’s last words.

  You’re leaning forward too much.

  Tarragon straightened no more than a finger’s width. A third rat joined the second, bounding from the gloom, red eyes gleaming in Requiem’s luminance. She brought her shoulder blades closer together, pushing the barrel of her chest out just so. I’m not Big. Everything else is small.

  The chime of a bell tolled, and snow gusted past her. The edge of Requiem glimmered gold amid the blue-white. She raised her sword and stepped to meet her foes.

  Lightning arced from the doorway behind her as Myryntir blasted the room. Energy leaped from wet surfaces, surging between rat bodies in the dark. It connected hundreds of them, a brilliant, glimmering net of charring as the lightning coursed through ranks of foes.

  Tarragon lowered her blade, the rats before her now ashy forms frozen in mid-strike. Was that the Storm? Did I call it? Did I really see Light on the edge of my blade? She poked a rat, and it crumbled into ruin. She glanced to the doorway where a smug dragon peered inside. “Maybe you should go first next time.”

  Evanne walked from the dragon’s side, coughing as she stepped through a stray haze of ash. “What is this place?”

  “It’s a fabrication facility.” At literally everyone’s blank stare, Tarragon said, “They make things. Machines,” she pointed to the slumped, corroded devices, “worked tirelessly to make stuff. Like Curators, but that doesn’t feel right. These aren’t big enough.”

  “There are a lot of them,” Vertiline said. “Did they make the rats?”

  “The rats are new,” Tarragon said. “Just ordinary rats, but big. Maybe came in when the wall broke.” She eyed the northern fissure.

  “What did they eat?” Armitage kicked a rat into a pile of silted ash.

  “Wrong question,” Tarragon said. “What were they fabricating?”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Evanne picked her way through the ashy remains of the rat horde. Mama and Papa had stayed in front of her, iron and stone before an army of paper, but the dragon had made it all moot. She wondered if anyone would have died if Myryntir hadn’t been there. I bet the ancients liked having a dragon on their team.

  She gave Tarragon a small, shy smile, feeling awe at her lover’s poise and courage. Evanne knew Tarragon was good with a sword, but skill and bravery weren’t the same thing, and Tarragon had just charged right in. Unless Evanne was going blind, Tarragon was close to commanding a sliver of the Storm, the icy gust of snow accompanying her pattern a dead giveaway to anyone who’d spent time slumming about Mama’s school.

  The room they were in had seen better days. Evanne turned over a fallen hunk of metal, trying to work out what it was. Chair? Table? It looked more chair than table, but the frame was too long, the arms too stunted. She kicked it aside, covering her mouth as ash drifted.

  “You should be careful.” The too-sure-of-himself Amir was by her side.

  She gave him a single raised eyebrow. “This place is proper fucked. The dragon barbecued everything. We’re fine.”

  “Flying orbs that shoot lightning. Quicksilver warriors that won’t die. Giant rats.” The warrior pointed to the fissure in the north wall. “A cave-in. This place is a far cry from ‘fine’.”

  “Mostly fine? Fine for now?”

  He gave her an easy smile, all white gleam in the gloom, before pocketing it away. “Fine for now, I’ll allow. What do you think this place was?”

  “Tarragon said it made things, but it doesn’t look like any smithy’s forge I’ve seen.” Evanne tugged her leather jacket back into line. “There are no tools. No fires or saws. Nothing to bend stubborn wood or melt metal with a hot kiss.”

  Hitch drifted through a collapsed chair-table-thing. “What if you were making ideas?”

  Evanne stared at him. Playing wholesale with another’s mind seems fanciful, but… “Sure, why not?”

  “You took that onboard surprisingly fast.”

  “It’s been a day of revelation.” Evanne raked at rust locks. “Do you actually know something?”

  “I don’t even remember my name. Just … a tug from the past.” He shrugged, all ghostly uncertainty. “I don’t think we should be here.”

  “It’s fine,” Evanne insisted. “Besides, we either go forward, or back to a dead end under a pile of rubble. Forward’s got to be safer.”

  “How do you figure the odds? Our track record shows every pace takes us farther from safe, and closer to worser.”

  “Worser isn’t a word.” Evanne peered into the gloom. Her Vhemin eyes saw no heat, her human vision giving back nothing but gloom. All cold blues and dark blacks. “What do you suppose the rats were eating, before they came for us?”

  Hitch and Amir shared a glance before the warrior said, “Why would you bring up such an unwholesome question?”

  Evanne kicked aside a rack of twisted metal, revealing a small passage. “Here.”

  “You first.” Amir crossed his arms.

  “Oh, but you’re so strong and brave,” she said.

  “Fuck it, I’ll go.” Hitch drifted through the wreckage and into the wall before emerging a moment later. “It’s a rat warren. Goes about twenty metres that way,” he pointed westerly, “before opening into a room of pipes and such. Some of the pipes have burst. Whatever magic powers this place is still pushing some kind of sludge through the pipes.”

  “Right.” Evanne slicked back her hair, hunkered down, and crawled into the passage. She ignored Mama’s Wait! because someone had to go, and Evanne could see in the dark better than humans, and Papa was too big to fit in. Made sense.

  After a few grunts and curses, she made it into the chamber Hitch spoke of. The spectre waited for her. “Took you long enough.”

  “Does it bother you that everyone can see you now?”

  He turned luminous blue eyes at her. “It spoils my surprise potential at children’s birthday parties.” When she didn’t laugh, he sighed. “I miss our thing, too.”

  “Thing?”

  “Whatever it was. Privacy. Closeness. Call it whatever⁠—”

  “Intimacy. Friendship.”

  “Those words work too.” He sighed again. “I’m still here. I’m still me. Just, all the time.”

  “We could ask the sorcerer to undo it.”

  “Best leave it. He looked so proud.”

  “Yeah.” Evanne poked about the room, finding no living rats, but much rat shit. The ghost hadn’t been wrong about the pipes. They were large, easily big enough to stand up in if she were inclined, which she wasn’t because of what was in them. A sluggish, oozing paste leaked from the cracked side of one. “I wonder if this is the same stuff Vehement Systems kept Tarragon alive with all those years.”

  “You what?”

  “When we found Tarragon she said she’d been a prisoner in an old place. Kept in a cage, with food coming in through a tube.”

  “Smaller tube, probably.”

  “Likely.” Evanne frowned. “Or, these pipes go to smaller pipes, which in turn go to the kinds of tubes you might feed a fairy with.”

  Hitch glanced at the cracked pipe. “That’s a lot of feeding.”

  “For a long, long time.” Evanne took a step away from the cracked pipe as if it were a hibernating bear and spring neared. “The rats were eating it. But not all of it. Look how many pipes there are.”

  “There’s a path through, over there.” The spectre pointed at a wall, where masonry sagged like an old man’s paunch over the belly button of a hole at its base.

  They made it to the wall. Evanne bent and picked up a cracked piece of stone. “Odd.”

  “Not so strange a wall would break after eight hundred years.”

  “Strange it’s made of simple fired clay and mortar, when everything else here is wrought in metal and the magic mineral the ancients used.” She tossed the brick aside. “What if someone else moved in? Found a nice, warm place with no peskersome ancients left alive, and a handy crew of guardians to zap interlopers.”

  “And they shored up the odd wall breach to stop carnivorous rats from⁠—”

  “Aren’t all rats carnivorous?”

  “They fixed a hole to stop rats of any dietary preference from getting to them. But not recently. Because their maintenance programme is sloppy.”

  “Let’s keep on.” Evanne bent to get through the hole in the wall, finding a passage on the other side. It was constructed much like the tunnel with the silver warriors, all smooth flooring and fine materials, but much narrower. No dragons will fit in here. Perhaps four Evannes abreast could walk its length.

  She walked on, Hitch drifting at her side. They followed the passage around a left-hand turn, then back to the right. The route ended in a door. It was cracked down the middle, but otherwise unmarked—just a useless broken door she could squeeze through if she wasn’t afraid to lose a little skin. Her human eyes were useless in the midnight surrounding her, but her Vhemin blood heat vision saw a glimmer of warmth beyond. “Look, there. A door.”

  “Your powers of observation astound me.” Hitch drifted through the door, then came back. “It’s not a good news story in there.”

  “There is heat.”

  “It’s not a good kind of heat.” The spectre hunched. “There are corpses lining the walls. They are connected to machines, and I’d guess they’re what you’re seeing. If I had to guess, this is some kind of eternity chamber, a place for the wealthy to live past the reckoning. But it failed. They’re all dead.”

  “Wait.” Evanne frowned. “There are bodies?”

  “On the walls.” Hitch gave an encouraging nod.

  “And the door’s broken?”

  “Exactly as you see it, yes.”

  “And this passage was full of giant rats?”

  “I’m following along. It’s an exciting path, seeing how your mind works!”

  “Are there rats in there?”

  “Not a sausage.”

  “So,” Evanne spoke slowly, as if to a child, “why didn’t the rats go in there and eat all the bodies?”

  Hitch’s mouth worked for a moment, then he glanced to the door and back to her. “No clue.”

  “The heat means more than sleeping machines, surely.” Evanne approached the door and peered inside. Her Vhemin eyes weren’t much good for fine details, but she spied the bodies Hitch mentioned. Each was mounted on the wall, hung by their armpits as if they were tools aligned on a shelf. There were many machines inside, all giving off the delightful heat she’d seen.

  The door was stuck. It had cracked wide at the top, the bottom seized firmly shut, providing her a triangle of opportunity. She grunted her way through, skinning most parts of her not protected by leather, and flopped on the other side.

  “Truly graceful,” Hitch murmured. “Now what?”

  Evanne found her feet, dusted herself off, and sneezed. “It’s dusty.”

  “Eight hundred years will do that.”

  The edges of the floor glimmered a soft tangerine orange before waxing to a steady yellow white. It provided easy illumination for her human eyes. No lights in the ceiling flickered on, leaving Evanne slightly disappointed in the ancients’ lack of consistency. Everywhere else had lights in the ceiling. Why not here? The room was of significant size and would allow Myryntir in if he was wanting to stop by for a pint.

  There were three ways out of the room. The southern door she’d already used. There was a large door to the east, which her mental map said led to the rat room. The western door was similar to the eastern one, also still intact and providing a passage large enough for dragons. The northern wall was a giant pane of glass, beyond which were various mouldering chairs, one of which supported a corpse. The corpse wasn’t getting in Evanne’s face about anything, just being a dead person reclining in a chair. It was like the ones she’d found on the bridge of Dancing in the Storm, all skin and tissue missing, leaving hair, clothes, and bone. She turned back to the wall-ornament corpses. “Weird.”

  “What is?” Hitch peered at one of the bodies racked to the wall. “There are like twenty of these guys.”

  “That is odd.” Evanne joined him and pointed at the head. “You can still make out the face, the suggestion of eyes under the lids. Lips, the works.”

  “It’s mummified.”

  “I’d argue it’s still juicy.” She stabbed a finger at the glass wall. “The loser in there doesn’t have their skin anymore. These ones do.”

  Hitch glanced at the door they’d entered by. “If the room had been sealed, we could have argued for hermetic containment, but⁠—”

  “Hermawhat?”

  “But as it is, that theory holds no water. I wish Tarragon was here.”

  Evanne felt her eyes widen. “You what?”

  “Don’t tell her I said that.” The spectre added, “It’s just, she’s handy with machines and such.”

  “Were you?” Evanne let her voice soften. “Before you lost your memories. I mean, I know you can’t remember what you can’t remember, but⁠—”

  “I don’t think so. I think I was a man of action. Hah.” Hitch drifted to the east door. “We should try getting this open.”

  “And such action.” Evanne followed him. The door was smooth, unmarked by time, not even a cobweb. She spun as something clicked behind her. It wasn’t the sound of metal machines or an ancients’ device, more like the pop of an unused joint. Nothing. She eyed the bodies on the racks, but none of them eyed her back. “Did you hear that?”

  “Yes. We really should get this door open.”

  Evanne felt around the sides of the door but found no convenient panels that lit to the touch of her fingers. Another pop-click behind her. She turned. Had that body on the western wall moved? She could have sworn its head was at a different angle to before. “Hitch?”

  “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Yes, you are. Get Mama.”

  “She won’t make it in time.”

  “I need her, Hitch. I think I really need her.” Evanne put a palm against the door. “And she’s just back there.”

  The spectre eyed the room, then gave a tight nod and slipped through the door. Evanne drew her machete, feeling her stomach clench. I just have to hold a few minutes. Then Mama will be here and these fuckers will be really sorry.

  The fuckers didn’t move though. Evanne felt sick with fear but also a little foolish, her machete brandished against twenty unmoving corpses.

  Then, one of them twitched. It was in the corner between the western door and the window to the north. The twitch was violent, a spasm pulling its body rigid, the sound of joints popping in rapid fire, before it stilled, only to spasm again a moment later. Evanne faced the corpse, machete held in both hands, teeth bared.

  I’m sure that wasn’t the body that moved before. It wasn’t a helpful thought to have.

  The door at her back clanged as if some massive force hit it. It shook in its frame but didn’t cave. Was Myryntir trying to get in while Vertiline came through the passage?

  Another series of pops drew her attention. A corpse near her, by the cracked door, twitched three times before spasming right off the wall and landing on the floor. It lay like a landed fish for a moment before dragging a shuddering breath.

  Hang about. Corpses don’t breathe. Three’s mercy, are these living souls awaiting the reawakening of the world as Hitch thought?

  The ‘corpse’s’ eyes opened, banishing the idea. There was hunger there, and need, but no patience or mercy. Evanne held her machete in a passable cross-guard. “Why don’t you just stay there and rest, and we’ll not have any problems.”

  The corpse got one hand under it as the one on the far wall shimmied off its rack. Great, two of them. She eyed the cracked door, wondering if she could get through, but the corpse nearest it surged upright, chest out. It bawled a challenge, its desiccated throat not quite up for the task but the rest of it spoiling for a fight.

  Fuck it. Everyone’s trying for a piece of me? A piece they’ll have. Evanne charged it, swinging her machete like a bat. She struck the monster in the arm, wound back, and hit it again, and then again. The arm came free, but what came out wasn’t blood. A sticky, viscous, sap-like fluid spattered to the old stone, her blade mottled with the same lime-green fluid. The smell wasn’t heady, rich, and bloody, but sharp, like pickle brine.