Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(107)

“As a matter of fact,” she said.

*

The red lightning struck more often as Tara and Shale descended into the mountain.

Not without warning—always the growl behind them or ahead. When crystal veins in the rock took fire, they ran or hid. Once, they could not run. Tara knelt in the tunnel’s center, Crafted a ward, and held Shale close as the fire buckled her shield. If the mind that moved this mountain wanted to crush them, it would.

“Are you certain there’s a mind?” Shale asked.

“I hope there isn’t, so I’ll assume there is.”

They descended for hours. Back on the mythical surface, the Alt Coulumb express winged east. Tunnels turned back on themselves, confounding Tara’s stubbornly two-dimensional map. She could see Craftwork woven through the stone, which would help her retrace her steps; finding a way down was harder.

She thought she recognized a triple junction through which they passed. Were they lost? She carved a glyph into the stone above the center passage. When they reached the triple junction again, the glyph was gone. Either she’d been wrong, or the something erased the glyph.

Cave air tasted close and dank.

She had to sleep, after a while. “That or collapse.” One side chamber, hewn to store drill bits and spare equipment, had walls free of crystal, which she hoped meant they’d be safe from the lightning here.

Shale kept first watch. Tara unfolded a sleeping pad from her pack. She hung her jacket on a lantern hook, made a pillow of her knapsack, and slept in a cave silence broken only by Shale’s breathing.

Nightmares struck, as hoped: a message from Wakefield, reporting the Alt Coulumb team was ready to defend Kos. Next she saw Abelard, praying alone in an enormous chapel; the altar grew, and the chapel’s flames melted his flesh from his bones. She did not know if Abelard sent her that dream, or if she built it for herself. After that, the bad dreams were real.

A hand on her shoulder woke Tara to the tunnel’s black. She recoiled from the touch, scraped her knuckles against the wall, cursed, and summoned a light. Shale crouched beside her. “We should go.”

“You kept watch without lights?”

“I thought we should save the hand torches,” he said. “I hear well.”

She smoothed the wrinkles in her suit and adjusted her slept-on hair. A small rodent had crawled into her mouth, died, and rotted. She swished canteen water in her mouth, gargled, and spit in the corner. Checked her watch again—the dawn flight had left already. “Any more lightning?”

“Five clusters passed.”

They returned to the tunnels and the blunt smell of undisturbed stone.

“Do you think the lightning-balls are guards?” Shale asked.

“Bad ones, if so. We’re not dead yet.”

“They’d have killed us already if not for you.”

“And the first would have got me if not for you. Good thing we keep each other around.”

“Glad to hear I’m a useful asset.”

“Not an asset,” she said, remembering the dragon’s voice.

“What, then?”

“A friend,” she said. “If you like.”

He chuffed, and she thought she saw him smile. “What are they, if not guards?”

“A goddess, maybe. Or god.”

“A goddess is doing all this?”

“She might be all this. Remember the myths about this place: the lady and the fire.”

“Myths,” Shale said. “Fingers pointing at the moon.”

“That’s an interesting point for you to make, knowing someone who is the moon.”

“Our Lady is not ‘someone,’” he said. “And the goddess in the guidebook story lacks even a name. Who believes in her? What life could she possess?”

“Human minds are a good divine substrate,” she said. “But they’re not the only one. Goddesses can be trapped with bone thorns and blood-cooled silver and other tools. The traps keep the goddess from fading when her faith is broken. Maybe something similar’s at work.”

“Sometimes I forget how evil you can sound.”

“The Craft,” she said, “is not inherently good or bad.”

“Its best efforts notwithstanding.”

“The point is, to trap a goddess, you might build a system much like this: a conductive lattice webbed through a rich deposit of necromantic earths.”

“You’re suggesting the mountain is artificial, and alive. And nobody discovered this during the mining operation.”

“Miners bind local spirits before major excavation, but this place is too big, too rooted, for it to even notice normal bindings. All this”—she tapped a crystal vein—“anchors the goddess, puts her on a clock so slow mortals don’t register. Excavation must have woken her, made her mad.”

“Hence the zombies.”

“It’s a theory.”

They walked for some time in silence.

She folded the map, refolded it, frowned. “We should have found Altemoc’s team already. The chart shows a huge chamber that isn’t here. And we’re running out of time.”

Shale hummed. “You say we’re inside a goddess.”

“Maybe. Or something like one.”

“And it is hurt.”