Watching Mak fall from her own perspective was… Mercies and Sorrows, it hit me hard.

  I didn’t have a great relationship with falling. Going out that way will do that to a girl. Even if I did get much, much better, I had two moments of absolute terror burned into my memory. Experiencing the same thing through Mak’s eyes and hearing her startled scream through her own ears brought that memory back like a sledgehammer to the head — something else I had painful, personal experience with.

  And even if that hadn’t been enough to make me freak all the way out, there was the fear bordering on despair of knowing that Mak, my sister, friend, and treasured servant, had just fallen.

  I was on my feet, about to push my way past anyone on the narrow stairs and to hell with the consequences, when Mak stopped. She couldn’t have been falling for much more than a second, but I knew very well what a fall like that could do. But Mak wasn’t me. Mak had twisted in the air and gotten her feet under her. When the rope had snapped taut she’d swung with it, gauged the distance to the bottom, and bent her knees and rolled when she hit.

  When I fell the first time, I was out for an unknown length of time. The second time, I died.

  Mak laughed.

  “Ow!” she shouted, but it was a relieved, exaggerated sound, not one of actual pain. “That was fucking rough on the everything!”

  “Oh thank the Mercies!” Herald called down, far more relieved than Mak. “I got worried when the rope went slack! Are you all right?”

  “A bit scuffed, but I’ll be fine! Doesn’t look like there’s any way out of here, though. Or if there is, it’s covered by the slabs. Let me get the stuff I dropped and I’ll be up.”

  Once Mak had climbed back up to the guard room she came outside to reassure me that yes, she was indeed entirely fine. All she needed was to circulate a little bit of magical healing to deal with some minor bruising. Then she and Herald spent considerably longer just sitting with me until I managed to banish the memories of my last day as a human.

  I couldn’t say what that did for my image among the others. I didn’t care. I’d just faced the prospect of losing Mak. She might not be Herald, but she’d become a close second to her sister as the most important person in my life. That might have been surprising to both me and her not too many months earlier, but we’d gone through so much together since her betrayal.

  I’d heard it said that to truly hate someone, you had to love them first, and the deeper your love, the stronger your hate. I was convinced that it worked the other way around, too, if you could manage to turn hate to love. For a short time, I’d hated Mak. I’d hated her in a way that I’d never hated anyone or anything. And now, I would ruin nations for her. For Herald I’d let the whole world burn, but the difference was mostly academic at that point.

  It made me wonder what I might feel for Zabra if I ever let myself get truly close to her. I tried to force the thought away. I wasn’t ready to let myself implode again.

  As if sensing the beginning of another spiral — which she probably did — Mak said, “Hey, Draka? How do you feel about helping out down there? I need someone to toss me thirty feet into the air. I mean, we could climb the wall, but…”

  Despite myself, I laughed. “Sure,” I told her. “Sounds fun. Will I fit?”

  Mak lowered her voice until I could barely hear her, then switched to English for good measure. “You can, if you… you know.”

  I glanced at the others, who were sitting down until the sisters felt ready to continue. “Mag, Sarina, and Marvan?” I asked at the same volume.

  “Sarina and Marvan know about Herald, and they’re absolutely loyal to her,” Mak said, and Herald nodded — her English was really coming along! Mak continued, “Mag… he’ll have to know sooner or later. May as well be now.”

  I looked at him again, and some of my distrust and worry must have flared. “Please, Mistress,” Mak said, taking Herald’s hand. “Trust him. For Herald’s sake. And if he betrays that trust…” She sighed, looking up at Herald’s worried eyes, “we’ll figure it out. But I think showing some trust would go a long way toward making him trust you fully.”

  “You do not trust him?” Herald asked anxiously, her speech slow and careful. “I thought… after you brought him here…”

  “He’s too afraid. It worries me,” I told her, not mentioning that half the time it was her he was afraid of. If we ever had that conversation it would be in a language she had full command of.

  “Then… show there is no need? Show that he can trust you.”

  “Yeah,” I sighed, switching back to Karakani. “That’s what Mak said. And I did ask you two repeatedly to help me handle people. Come on. Let’s get it over with.”

  I got to my feet and ambled over to the stairs. There was no need to look for shade there; all I needed to do was to step out of the patch of sunlight I’d been in, and the densely packed trees did the rest.

  “Maglan, Sarina, Marvan,” I said, not shouting but speaking loudly and firmly enough that they immediately gave me their attention. “I’m going to trust the three of you with a secret. Everyone else already knows, but it’s a very big, very important secret, so I hope you understand how much faith I’m putting in each of you.”

  I wasn’t sure if I should be annoyed or amused at how all three of them looked to Herald. They were practically synchronized. Herald smiled and nodded reassuringly, and I had their attention again.

  “Right,” I said. “You’re all under far too much duress to swear a meaningful oath, so I’m not going to ask you for one. I’m just going to trust you not to spread what you’re about to see.”

  I made sure to let my gaze linger a little extra long on Maglan and then, without further delay, I Shifted. The world melted into a bright landscape with patches of impenetrable darkness where the light streamed down between the trees, partially obscuring both the stair and my small audience. That didn’t hinder me from hearing their gasps, though, nor the reassuring murmurs of the others who’d seen this before. Then I sent out my tendrils, grasping the shadow around me and pushing it so that it connected with darkness in the stairwell. Finally I flowed from where I was, down the stairs, and into the tunnels under the Palace grounds. I didn’t Shift back until I was among the shattered floor slabs at the bottom of the… trench? Pit? Whatever it was, it was long, but narrow enough that I had to keep my wings pulled in tight.

  I looked through Herald’s eyes for a moment. She was calming Mag down; he was pretty worked up, but overall he wasn’t taking it poorly, as such. More awestruck amazement than horror, which was absolutely fine with me. But I withdrew quickly; it was a little more intimate than I was comfortable with. I switched to Mak instead, and she was talking to Sarina and Marvan, who were taking my disappearing act much more calmly. They’d already seen Herald do something very similar; Mag hadn’t, and that made an understandable difference.

  Pretty soon everyone was ready again, and Mak joined me down in the trench. Getting her from one end to the other meant her literally crawling over me, which I bore stoically. With her she had a rope with a regular series of large knots; she’d come down an identical one. Rope ladders would have been better, but they didn’t have any, and making them would take time that no one wanted to spend when they had a serviceable alternative. She also had a stout, four foot length of wood with her that Marvan had cut while the girls calmed me down. She threw that up through the door with not much effort at all.

  “Alright!” Mak said with far too much enthusiasm as she stood at the foot of the wall where she’d just fallen thirty feet. “This should be fun!”

  “I thought you hated flying,” I said.

  “I do! Well, I don’t. Not as much anymore, anyway. But this isn’t flying, and there’s a Sorrows’ difference between that—” she pointed at the wall, “and a thousand foot drop into the forest. Especially now I’ve survived it once.” Then she turned and grinned at me. “Besides, you’ll catch me if I miss at the top, won't you?”

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “I don’t know. Maybe you’re becoming overconfident. Taking me for granted.”

  She just kept grinning and said, “In that case, Great Lady, I would be ever so grateful if you might toss me up yon height. Doubly so if you might find it in your inimitable heart to keep me from landing on my head, should we flub it. Is that better?”

  “Much!” I agreed. “Here.”

  I wrapped my arms around her and made a stirrup with my hands, just like how I’d tossed Herald back in the other pit. Mak got into the same position Herald had, with the rather major difference that where Herald could only fit one boot in my hands, Mak climbed up and balanced with perfect ease, bent knees and all. “All right, Mistress,” she whispered, betraying herself as not being quite as cool and confident as she made out. “I’m ready.”

  I may have over done it. When I tossed Herald I’d given her about five feet of height more than she needed, and I tried to take that into consideration. What I didn’t consider was that Mak was about half of our younger sister’s weight, or that I was stronger now than I had been. Mak had to twist in midair, putting her legs above her to take the impact as I launched her into the ceiling. Then she twisted again, somehow getting her feet on the threshold of the door and her fingertips inside the frame, gripping on to… something. Thank the gods and Mercies for Grace and Mak’s own Advancements keeping her from just bouncing off the ceiling and coming right back down as a concussed mess.

  Mak teetered there for a moment. Then she let out a sharp breath through her nose, pressed her hands outward even harder than she already was, and pulled herself in with no more grip than the friction of her fingertips on the dry stone of the doorframe.

  God, I almost wish I could hate that woman, Conscience muttered.

  I know what you mean, I replied. Mercies, what a boulderer Mak would’ve made. Leagues above anything I could have ever achieved, and that was with her so much shorter than I’d been. And then, because she was safely through the door and I couldn’t see her anymore, I closed my eyes and jumped into her head.

  Mak had stepped into a small room. It was identical to the one at the other end of the collapsing hallway, broken lightstone and all — Mak tested it — but Herald had seen as much when Mak brought the door down with her. There wasn’t anything in there to fasten a rope ladder to, but that was what the length of wood was for. She quickly tied the rope to the middle of it, then set it on the floor, against the door frame.

  “Can you give that a gentle tug, Draka?” Mak called down, and I did as she asked. Gentle for me was more than enough to test if it would hold for the heaviest members of the group, and it did, without the wood bending or shifting.

  “All set, I think,” I called up.

  “Great. Herald, Val, come over. The rest of you, get down there and wait for there to be some room. Draka, do you want to come with us, now the secret’s out?”

  A wave of excitement rushed through me at the prospect of exploring this ancient place, and Mak laughed.

  “Guess that answers my question. I’ll just break the next door open while you come up here.”

  With Mak’s lightstone unlit and Herald covering hers for my convenience, it was so dark that Shifting wasn’t even an effort. I slipped smoothly into the deep shadows, then wound my way swiftly up the rope as the sounds of splintering wood carried from the small room above.

  “Oh, gods and Mercies! Ah… air’s still good, I guess, but you need to see this!” she called, and though there was no fear in her tone, it carried quite a load of shock. I picked up the pace, flowing hurriedly over the collapsed furniture and the remains of the door and through a five-foot connecting hallway to see what had her so excited.

  The space was large and open, but not like the hub or nexus of the tunnel systems that existed under my mountain, as well as other, lesser ones. Those had all looked like natural hollows in the stone that had been expanded, and mostly existed as a crossroads for any number of tunnels to meet. This place was very different. It was… well, to be perfectly honest it reminded me a bit of an underground mall. A food court, to be specific.

  The chamber we were in was large — somewhere between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and fifty feet across — and looked perfectly round. The vaulted ceiling was high, but not ridiculously so — the walls were perhaps eight feet high, with the ceiling rising in a subtle curve to no more than twelve feet at the center. The ceiling was covered in complex designs of metal inlaid in the stone, and my gut told me that some or all of those were enchantments. Many looked broken, as though the inlaid metal had boiled out, cracking the stone, but enough was intact that, with some luck, Herald might have at least a guess at what they might do.

  All around the circumference of the chamber were empty doors and windows, which might have been shops or eateries or the public facing room of living spaces for all I knew. Directly across from us, as well as to the right and left, heavy stone gates stood open; a look over my shoulder showed that we’d come through one as well. In the center was a twinned spiral staircase, the two sets of stairs helixing down into unknown depths, and between the staircase and the wall were the remains of a large number of low tables, still covered in cups and plates and surrounded by what might once have been cushions, along with planters and other things that could once have made this into a pleasant social space.

  I only saw all of these things as a backdrop. My focus was on the bodies.

  Nowhere in the ruins had we seen any bodies. Not in the temple, not in the library, and not in the shrine. Not under the rubble we’d shifted this morning. I’d assumed that meant that whatever had happened, it hadn’t been immediately lethal. That people had been able to evacuate in something resembling an orderly fashion.

  This underground place was full of them.

  Well, perhaps full wasn’t quite the right word, but the number of bodies I needed to see in one place before I went, “Damn, that’s a lot of bodies,” was not very large at all. When I’d first met Garal I’d seen the remains of his squad, along with those of the bandits who’d attacked them. That had been a lot of bodies. What I found in that chamber was far more. Dozens of withered corpses lay strewn about the place, but in a way that suggested that they’d died suddenly. Peacefully, even. The chamber must have been crowded, perhaps a day like any other, when something happened that caused them all to simply… stop.

  It was eerie, and it was sad. And it was a damn big intriguing mystery, too.

  “We should warn the others,” Mak said, her voice echoing throughout the tomb.

  “Right,” I agreed after Shifting back inside the chamber. “The horror of it.”

  “Yeah. Herald should be okay. Tam, maybe. But Val… we let this surprise Val. Probably shouldn’t see it at all. A few bodies he can deal with, but this is too much like a battlefield.”

  “Sure, yeah. He was a soldier, right?” I said, taking a few steps into the room. Over the smell of dry stone and old, old dust, there was something wonderful.

  “Back in Marbek, yes,” Mak said, her tone uncertain as she followed me. “He lost a lot of friends at— it doesn’t matter. Important thing is that’s why he came here. Um, mistress, shall we…?”

  “Just a moment,” I told her, scenting the air carefully. There was gold in this chamber. Gold and silver, and a decent bit of it. Close, too. I kept scenting, creeping slowly forward, until…

  One of the closer bodies had a tarnished silver bangle around its husk of an arm.

  Ah, right. Of course. That made sense. The most likely sudden death and all that. And this was pretty much a tomb. I really shouldn’t disturb the dead.

  I was very gentle as I slipped that bangle off. I felt terrible about it, but once it was in my hand it wasn’t like I could put it back.

  There was a lot of scraping behind us, and the light of Herald’s stone cut a wide, black swath out of the world visible to me with my shadowsight. Mak finally whispered, “Um, mistress, I’ll… yeah.” Then she walked the thirty-five or so feet back to the door to the collapsing hallway. I heard her talking back there, telling them what we’d found and that they should steel themselves, but I was consumed with sniffing around. Rings, necklaces, earrings, bangles and bracelets and anklets and brooches and hair pins and… there was a lot of gold and silver in that chamber. And I couldn’t bring myself to touch any of it. I deeply regretted taking that bangle as it was.

  I was pretty sure that the guilt was mostly Conscience, but there was a lot of me in it, too. I loved precious metals. There was no denying that. But stealing from the dead, from people who’d just been going about their day? No. I just couldn’t do it. Not now that I was actually thinking about what I was doing.

  Light steps behind me made me turn, even though I could feel both my sisters approaching. Mak didn’t hesitate. She pressed herself into my side, muttering, “It’s all right, Draka. No need to feel guilty. We’ll deal with it.”

  Meanwhile, Herald stroked my neck and said, “This is awful, is it not?”

  “Yeah,” I replied, to either or both of them.

  “Would it be easier if you were to go back out?” Herald asked gently. “Avjilan is keeping an eye out for monsters, but it is just him, Ardek, Kira, and the mules out there now. They could do with some protection.”

  “I— yeah, I should do that. Shouldn’t have left them alone in the first place,” I said, grateful for the excuse. But I’ll keep an eye on you all.”

  “Not too close for a little while, maybe,” Mak said. “For your own sake. We’re not the type to leave treasure lying around.”

  “Yeah, nah, I get it,” I said, slowly making my way back toward the exit. I stopped outside the guardroom to let Sarina and Marvan pass, then paused inside it to check on Val, who was sitting against the wall, taking slow, steady breaths with his eyes closed. Tam had his arm over his shoulders, and held his finger to his lips. I nodded and didn’t say anything.

  Behind me, as I Shifted and left the underground place, the soft sounds of looting began.

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