Chapter 22

Angharad was first into the burrow.

Boar moles were almost as broad as they were tall, so while the ceiling on the tunnel was low enough she had to bend her elbows Angharad did not feel too cramped at the shoulders. It had been a concern, given that she had a broader back than most. Mother’s inheritance: she’d liked to say that Tredegars were built to shoulder their way through life. Still, it would have been something of a blow to Angharad’s pride were she found to be broader than any manner of boar.

Bending her head low and hoping her hat would keep the worst of the crumbling dirt out of her braids, she crawled forward and down. On three limbs only, however, as she had to carry forward the small lantern that Tristan had lit. The air in the burrow had begun to feel fresher and cooler despite the burning oil near her face, hinting she must be near the end. Moments later, a cut of light revealed that though the tunnel turned left the backwall had crumbled: the lantern glow’s rolled past the edge, into what seemed like dark cave. The larger tunnel Tristan had found.

Angharad crawled up to the edge, glancing inside – there was nothing but dirt and stone – then put the lantern’s handle in her mouth and twisted around in the tunnel until her feet were first. The cloak fought her even more than the sides of the burrow, but after a few moments of indecorous wriggling about she was set to drop down. She landed on her feet about ten feet below, on a bed of tightly packed dirt, and pricked her ear. The oil inside the lantern wobbled slightly, the light swaying as it did, but the paleness cast on the walls revealed nothing but dirt.

“Safe?”

Shalini’s head had poked past the edge, one of her pistols along.

“For now,” Angharad said. “We can proceed.”

She brought up her rifle, just in case, and cast a look around as Shalini made her descent. She could see why Tristan had hazarded a guess this might be a smuggler’s tunnel: the ceiling was more than ten feet high and almost as large. And while the dirt of the floor was tightly packed, Angharad saw there were small marks on it. She knelt, running a hand against it and found there were small regular indents of an almost oval shape. Some kind of digging tool, or perhaps a tamper to pack the earth? The indents were too regular to be from spadework.

In moments Shalini was down with her, Izel not far behind, and while the tinker helped down Zenzele she took a closer look at the walls. They had the same indent marks as the floor; the ceiling did too.

“That’s either some Antediluvian tool or a creature’s work,” Shalini noted. “Too even otherwise.”

Angharad, still kneeling, leaned closer to the slight angle where the floor of the tunnel touched the wall. The indents there were noticeably smaller. More than one creature, or different sizes of the same tool? She hoped it would be the latter, because while most of the tunnel was dirt some sections were stone and they carried the same marks at the rest. Teeth that could chew through stone would chew rather more easily through flesh.

“A creature that can carve through stone,” Angharad muttered. “I cannot remember one on the Steel list.”

Not that the Marshal had collected every fearsome monster under firmament that could be kept in a cage, despite what had no doubt been a spirited effort to do so.

“Neither can I,” Shalini said, then hesitated.

Angharad glanced back at her, seeing from the corner of her eye how Tristan dropped down with a cat’s light feet. He must have been trained in that, she thought.

“What is it?”

Shalini cleared her throat.

“Speaking of the Steel list,” she said. “You never ended up setting a date for the slaying crew meeting you were putting together before Misery Square.”

“It has somewhat fallen by the wayside,” Angharad admitted. “The Marshal has barred me from the Acallar due to unforeseen circumstances, so I cannot lend a hand to the effort.”

Since Marshal de la Tavarin had dismissed Skiritai classes for the second years this week in favor of splitting his time between Lamb Hill and the underclassmen, Angharad had not had to tell any of her guildmates as much until now. Still, much as she would have preferred saving herself the slight embarrassment it had been bound to come out eventually. To warn her own crew in advance, if nothing else.

“Huh,” Shalini said. “Then what will you do for lessons?”

“He has prevailed on Professor Nandi Khota to tutor me instead, though I will have to pay a fee,” she replied.

Angharad had no complaints in that regard. The Skiritai half of the wedded pair teaching them Warfare might not be a titled swordmistress, but Angharad suspected that if she reached for the title she would find obtaining it trivial. Angharad wasn’t even the only student to have such an arrangement, apparently. Shalini crossed her arms, clearing her throat.

“I’d suggest putting the word out that you’re ending the plan,” she said. “There’s been some grumbling about you dragging your feet.”

Angharad blinked. Most crew captains she had approached were part of either the hunt or the exploration now, why would they- no, not just most. All but one.

“Lindiwe Sarru?” she asked.

“Sarru’s ambushed me to ask about it,” Shalini acknowledged. “If you Unluckies didn’t have a secret house that no one can find, I expect you would have found her waiting for you in the street some morning.”

“I asked her in person, it would be polite to desist in the same manner,” Angharad conceded. “I will take care of it next firstday, my thanks for the reminder.”

Shalini shrugged, looking aside.

“I could come with you when you do,” the gunslinger airily suggested. “Make sure you two don’t get lost in the snippiness and actually talk.”

It occurred to Angharad, somewhat belatedly, that she might have missed a rather straightforward explanation for Shalini’s noticeable dislike of Lindiwe Sarru. Straightforward but flattering. She cleared her throat, rising back to her feet as she smiled at Shalini.

“Why, you al-”

She was interrupted by a hand protruding between her and the curvy gunslinger.

“I’ll take the lantern,” Tristan said, leaning it to ease it out of her hands. “Keep your hands free for the rifle.”

Angharad half-heartedly glared at the thief, who was being inconveniently helpful, and so did Shalini. Well, a vaguely sinister tunnel in the middle of lemure territory was perhaps not the best place for that conversation anyway. It would keep.

They set out armed and ready. Angharad took point rifle in hand, Shalini and Tristan close behind with lantern and pistols while Zenzele and Izel took the rearguard. Zenzele had a musket at the ready, but Izel had declined to borrow Tristan’s rifle when offered – he wanted a free hand for the haversack full of grenades he carried, so he’d kept to his pistol and mace.

She’d poked fun at him for carrying a bag containing ten grenades, asking which fort he intended to assault, but he’d stared her down flatly. Just walking to Lamb Hill we ran into a briarid, he replied. If the first bag weren’t so heavy, I’d carry a second. The tinker also had a small leather sheath hanging off a bandolier in front, containing a part of this ‘aether spike’ he was crafting. He popped open the button on it every few minutes to glimpse inside, not that he’d elaborated on why.

Orienting themselves from the surface, it seemed that the tunnel ran parallel to the street above. It went both north and south, and after some discussion it was agreed they should head south first to make sure it did not reach all the way back to Lamb Hill. Thankfully, that was quickly ruled out. After a mere three minutes they ran into a dead end, which despite being nothing more than bare stone yielded some answers to lantern light.

The tunnel ended in a small, raised alcove and Angharad’s eyes lingered on the small crevasse at the back it. There was no telling how far it went, but the incline was upwards so she suspected all the way to the surface. More interesting was how the stone around it bore the smallest indents she had yet seen, barely larger than the head of a pin, and the tunnel expanded like an inverted funnel from the alcove until it reached the proportions they were familiar with.

“This wasn’t made with tools,” Izel said, tone firm. “It is a creature’s work.”

“One creature, I think, that grew larger as time went on,” Angharad said.

Her fingers tightened around the rifle. How large must it have grown, to need so great a burrow to dwell in? Warier now, they turned back and walked north. There was no chatter – only the burning lanterns, the creaking of their boots and half-swallowed breaths. How long they walked, Angharad was not sure. Much longer than they had the other way, certainly. The tunnel as a straight line, and if not for darkness they might have been to see all the way to the end. As things were, though, there was nothing visible beyond the cast of the glow. So when Angharad caught sight of green hide ahead, it had her stilling in surprise. Immediately she glimpsed, cast ahead and-

(kicked the thick green hide, but the creature did not)

Oh. Ignoring the startled breaths from Shalini and Zenzele, she strode ahead briskly and confirmed what her glimpse had shown.

“It is dead,” she called out.

Even so it was quite a sight. The carcass was massive, almost as long as an elephant though perhaps only half as tall. Its shape was maggot-like, with the same sort of segmented ridges as the vermin, but the dead thing was covered in thick stripes of green hide between which hoarse hair sprouted in tufts. It had six legs, though they were small and looked almost infirm – the better to tuck under its body, Angharad guessed. She walked past the length of the carcass, finding the head, and almost retched at what she found.

It had been a foul-looking thing, even before someone pulverized part of its head. The head was outlandishly round and covered with longer strands of the same hoarse hair on its body, boasting smatterings of large round eyes on either side of it. Two broad mouths with rounded teeth stacked one atop the other, each dangling with a thick black tongue spadelike in shape, but what drew the eye was the top of its skull.

Where someone had rammed a rough sword made of beaten iron through its skull, all the way until it stuck into the packed earth beneath.

“Ancestors be good,” Zenzele said, reaching her side. “I think that’s a samir.”

Angharad blinked at him, for she had heard that name before in Teratology. It was… some kind of lares?

“Are they not meant to be the size of a grain of rice?” she skeptically said. “Used for engraving jewels and the like.”

The creature licked things with its tongues, coating them in a saliva which could turn the hardest of materials into something with the texture of lettuce, then grazed minerals with its teeth.

“They get bigger,” Shalini told her, having caught up to them. “I once saw one the size of a dog, back in Ramaya, held in a lead cage. Some Dragadan prince wanted it as a pet.”

“You could fit a whole kennel of dogs in this fellow, Shalini,” Tristan said. “But agreed, it does look like a samir. It’s like a gargantuan cousin to the ones I saw inside Old Town jewelers, back in Sacromonte.”

Angharad decided not to think too closely as to why Tristan, a man she had never once seen wear jewelry, would be familiar with the appearance of a lemure mostly used for precision work on precious metals and stones.

“The species does not grow quickly but will keep growing so long as it eats,” Izel said, sounding fascinated. “They prefer precious stones, but will grow off even stone and dirt. This one must have lived for more than a century, to grow so large, and eaten all the while.”

“So it was no threat to us?” Angharad asked.

“A samir will eat any sort of stone and ore, save for lead, but it will not so much as nibble a leaf or a cut of lamb,” Izel confirmed. “They are spooked by loud noises, but not aggressive.”

Tristan cleared his throat.

“Samir spit goes fifty ramas a bottle – and not a big bottle, either – and it is rumoured some unscrupulous sorts use it as a thief’s tool.”

A pause.

“It works very well on glass. I hear. Although so does a rock, and you can get those for free.”

Shalini, proving entirely Ramayan in some regards, immediately knelt by the lemure’s mouth and tested with the edge of her cloak whether there was still spit inside.

“Dry,” she sadly told them. “How quickly does their spit fade?”

“Not very much at all,” Izel said. “It must have been dead for days, if not weeks.”

“It does not smell strongly, for a carcass,” Angharad said.

“Its body is almost as much mineral as flesh,” Izel told her. “It will not rot for years, and even then only somewhat.”

“So its flesh is solid even when not covered by the hide?” she asked with a grimace.

He nodded, seeming surprised.

“Why does that displease you?”

“Because I don’t see any other wounds on the samir,” Angharad said. “Meaning that whatever killed it was strong enough to do it in a single blow, through hide and skull.”

That sobered their party significantly. She approached the head of the carcass, studying the sword more closely. Izel soon joined her.

“There is a grip but no guard,” she said, frowning. “And I am not certain the sides of that blade would cut.”

“I expect not,” Izel said. “Look at the marks around the point – it was sharpened like a stake, not a proper sword.”

He leaned in.

“This was an iron rod, or perhaps a pillar,” he said. “It was heated and hammered flat, then flipped twice to hammer a grip and the point sharpened after. Rudimentary work, but done with great strength and precision.”

“Devil work, do you think?” Zenzele quietly asked from behind them.

The tinker shook his head, drawing back.

“They wouldn’t bother with something so large,” Izel said. “This is lemure’s work, one of the smarter breeds.”

They traded a look, for their party had encountered one such creature recently: the briarid roaming the streets. Suddenly the tunnel felt cramped. She looked at it with a fighter’s eye and found it was the worst of both worlds; too cramped for real maneuver yet too large to be used as a chokepoint.

“If there is truly a briarid at the end of this tunnel,” Zenzele said, “perhaps we should reconsider this expedition. I am no Skiritai, but these do not seem to me good grounds for facing such a creature.”

“They aren’t,” Shalini agreed. “And there’s an argument to be made that we found out what we were after: the samir was the digger and it’s dead. The briarid won’t be coming up that mole burrow.”

“That… is a fair point,” Angharad conceded.

Her eyes strayed to Tristan, whose shadowed face was unreadable. Suddenly, he reached into his coat and produced his watch. He popped it open, then hummed.

“I’ll subtract two minutes for our gawking at the carcass,” Tristan said, tone absent-minded. “And three for the time it took us to double back from the other dead end.”

He then smiled, closing the watch’s case with a snap.

“Ten minutes, give or take,” the thief finished, everyone’s eyes on him. “That is how long we have been walking in a straight line, and we aren’t even at the end of the tunnel.”

Izel was first to catch on.

“It’s like an underground road,” the tinker said. “You think this might be a safe shortcut to the Old Canals.”

“Exactly,” Tristan said. “If we secure this tunnel, we may have already achieved what the Marshal asked of us: more than lemure scalps, he wants a usable route to the Lord of Teeth.”

“Securing this tunnel may involve fighting a briarid,” Angharad reminded him.

“We don’t need to fight it today,” he said. “We can come back with more guns and a plan. But the only way we’ll ever know what’s at the end of this tunnel…”

“Is if we go,” Angharad finished.

He had already sold one of them on it, she saw. Izel was rubbing the sole of his left boot on the dirt with a smile.

“We could roll cannons through ground like this,” the tinker said. “We’d need to dig up a proper tunnel down from the wormway, certainly, but going underground would allow us to field proper artillery when we face the Lord of Teeth.”

Her eyes flicked to the pair from the Thirty-First. Shalini seemed skeptical but not hostile. She will go along with it if most of us agree. It was Zenzele’s word that would tip this one way or the other.

“If we fight a briarid with this crew, there will be casualties,” Zenzele evenly said.

“I don’t want to fight it,” Tristan frankly replied. “The moment we see so much as the shadow of a limb, we should beat an immediate retreat.”

The one-eyed man grimaced, hand rising to paw at a hat he had been forced to leave behind, and lowered it with muted embarrassment.

“If we can find an underground road, it would be a major achievement,” he finally said. “But I will hold you to your word, Tristan: immediate retreat in face of the briarid, or anything in that league.”

“Sold,” the thief replied without hesitation, then glance at her. “So long as Angharad agrees?”

She worried at the inside of her cheek. If they found the lemure waiting for them, she was not sure she would be able to keep all of them alive – and it was likely that should there be a fight Shalini would draw on her contract, meaning the situation would swiftly degenerate. On the other hand, from what she recalled briarids were not underground dwellers. It was odd for one to have come down here to kill the samir, assuming that was truly what had taken place.

“Izel,” she said, addressing her brigade’s best Teratology student. “Briarids tend to have multiple lairs, no?”

The tall tinker nodded.

“They clean out the local fauna too quickly otherwise.”

Meaning there was a chance nothing at all was what waited at the end of the tunnel.

“It is an acceptable degree of risk,” Angharad finally said. “You have my agreement.”

A murmur of intertwined nerves and excitement thrummed through the group as they checked their gear and put themselves in order again. They set out steadily, preferring quiet to quick, but within five minutes they had reached the end of the samir’s work. The wall of the tunnel had collapsed, partially eaten away and partially smashed open. They approached softly, the lanterns half-shuttered, and found that past the ragged edge waited a manmade room.

Tristan crept up to the ragged stone, bringing up the lantern, and Angharad popped in her head. The inside was an ancient stockroom. A tall square of a room stacked with piles – dusty ingots of steel, copper and even a few that looked like silver but also crumbled stacks of lumber and barrels of coal. There were also long rods of iron propped up against the wall, half of them fallen and others scattered around the room. The ceiling was stone, and there had once been a stairway at the end of the room but nothing more than the bare bones of the wood remained.

“No sign of it,” she whispered. “Be careful.”

The fanned out across the room, lanterns up. Izel was on the steel rods in moment, frowning at them, while she and Tristan instead eyed the floor. There was dust everywhere in here, but parts of it were smudged. It was hard to make out exactly what had done it, but it was clear that something had come down from upstairs and rummaged around the room. More than once, from the uneven layers of disturbance.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Either several people or one large creature,” Tristan murmured, crouched by the dust.

“This is the same sort of iron that was used for the sword in the tunnel,” Izel then told them, voice low but pitched to carry. “Five or six rods put together would be more than enough.”

They gathered again, slowly moving towards the missing stairs. She was not the only one to glance at the piled-up silver. Only four ingots, at her count, but that still represented a tidy sum and the Watch had been clear that anything students salvaged from Allazei was theirs to keep. Alas, an ingot of metal was not something you could simply pocket. Still, if there was opportunity Angharad intended to return. There were five of them, but they could sell the ingots and split the sum equally.

The stairs were not entirely crumbled, only mostly – some supporting logs inserted in the wall to support the structure had not rotten away, their heads protruding like jutted thumbs. Looking up, she saw that the upstairs was a much larger room than the basement and rather luminous.

“We can climb up using the logs,” Tristan murmured. “Objections?”

Shaken heads all around, not that she was surprised. Warfare class ran them through more difficult gauntlets regularly. Angharad went up second, after Tristan, and the trickiest part was keeping her rifle from dangling off – the shoulder belt attached to it was just a little too tall for her. In a sense, she thought as she moved from one protruding log head to the other, the stairs still stood. They had merely been diminished. Three minutes later she was on the floor, crouching alongside Tristan as they advanced carefully into the room.

This was a forge, she thought, in the same way that a king was a nobleman. It was a large, rectangular room with a tall curved ceiling that reminded her of a glasshouse – in no small part because the very top of the curve was rows of glass panels, half of which were missing or broken. Large balcony platforms in rusting iron stood on either side, looking down at rows of elegant working tables in pale stone inset with gold that swallowed much of the room. They were covered with dust and debris and broken tools, while the back held a large foundry and a set of gilded casting moulds.

There were a few strange machines, most of them bearing drills or blades, and on the opposite side a more traditional smithy with coal-burners and anvils. Tristan silently moved his hand to draw her attention there as Zenzele climbed up, slightly panting. The thief was pointing at the end of the row of coal-burners, where two anvils had been pushed together and one of the coal-burner looked like it had been used to burn coal sometime more recently than the last century. The briarid used the forge here.

Like most of the clever lemures their kind could not make metal out of ore, but they had learned to shape simple tools from the work of humans. It was why lemures like onjancanu sometimes ‘ruled’ villages of darklings or enslaved lucents, using men’s work for their own purposes.

They spread out, making room for the others to climb while staying low and avoiding making noise. Angharad looked foremost for ways in and out. There were heavy bronze gates halfway through the wall of the great forge, engraved with letters and appeals to a spirit she did not recognize. Old, then. They were kept closed by a bar of some dull alloy, which appeared to have been welded shut. Not through here.

Near the foundry out back part of the wall had fallen apart, leaving a plant-strewn hole through which some Orrery lights filtered, but it was too small to be how the briarid had come in. Where was – a soft gasp had her looking back. Shalini was pointing up. At the upper level of the forge, which Angharad had dismissed it as little more than glorified storerooms. The pillars supported space barely larger than a balcony on either side, in order to leave the middle of the forge unobstructed so light could come through the glass panels unimpeded.

Shalini was pointing near the foundry, where some heavy stone cube counterweights hung from a chain above a machine not unlike a stamp, and Angharad’s gaze swept up the pillars to the iron balcony. Just past the edge of it one could glimpse toes. Without nails, even the smallest thick as a fist and grayish in color. Shit, she thought. The Unluckies truly deserved their sobriquet, for theirs was the worst of luck: that had to be the briarid, though since it had not moved it might be sleeping.

Flicking a glance up at the ceiling, Angharad no longer thought it a coincidence that the nearest four rows of glass panels were gone, even the frames broken. That must be how the briarid left the place: up the balcony and through the ceiling, coming in the same way.

Silent signs had all of them informed within moments, and an unspoken debate ensued. The hole in the corner, or back down? Angharad strongly advised back down and that side carried it. Slowly, excruciatingly carefully, they began crawling back towards the basement. Not one of them had argued for attacking it by surprise, wisely. They did not carry anything with the teeth to kill a briarid in a single stroke, and fighting such a lemure inside the forge would be… tricky.

Zenzele was the first to begin the climb down, the rest of them clustered together with guns at the ready. The diplomat’s boots touched the first loghead and he hung, but as he prepared to move down onto the second his sole slipped as he misjudged the distance – he caught himself on the wall, swallowing a curse, and hung there on the edge of falling. They all tensed, Angharad’s jaw clenching tight, but the briarid’s foot remained unmoving.

She let out a shallow breath. Sleeping God, let them hurry and get out of- an ear-piercing eagle’s shriek sounded from outside the forge, loud enough that even in here they all winced.

A heartbeat passed, the foot moved and everything went to shit.

Even as Angharad rose and shouldered her uncle’s rifle, the lemure burst out of its hiding place like a monstrous jack-in-the-box – the briarid was so large that even with its two massive hindlegs on the worktables, part of its body was still on the balcony. She glimpsed ahead and-

(the briarid threw itself down among the tables, Izel’s grenade bouncing off its back. Tristan had been running forward and it casually snatched him out of the air, squeezing, and the scream)

“If we go down into the tunnel, it will catch up to us,” she evenly said, lining up her shot. “We fight.”

A curse from Zenzele, who was still struggling to get off the log, while Shalini drew her first pistol. She laid a hand on Tristan’s arm before he could run off and get himself pulped.

“Izel?” she prompted.