by Zoë Archer
Though his neck felt like snapping from tension, he nodded. But he went to Quinn and carefully closed the dead man’s eyes, then hefted the body and set it a little farther within the cave so that it was not so fully exposed. Nathan hesitated, then reached into Quinn’s jacket pocket and took out both his Compass and the little doll Quinn had made the night before. Someone would know how to reach Quinn’s family. His niece would have her toy.
He turned, slipping the doll into one trouser pocket, the Compass in another, to see Astrid watching him. Her eyes did not glisten with tears, but sadness glimmered there.
Graves tried to stand, holding the bloodstained cloth to his head, but he could not gain his balance. He stumbled, groaning. Astrid immediately supported him, draping his arm over her shoulders. Graves was a tall man, and his size caused both him and Astrid to stagger. Without a word, Nathan took Graves’s other arm and put it around his shoulders so that he took most of the Blade’s weight.
“Hell,” growled Graves, his voice slurred. “Quinn.”
“Gone, Catullus,” Astrid said gently.
“God damn him,” Graves swore, then pressed his lips tight until they paled. Even in his addled and weakened state, fury blazed in his dark eyes, behind his cracked spectacles. “Didn’t have to—”
“He did.” Astrid’s tone was even. “He was a Blade. We see to our own.”
Rage for the Heirs and for himself, for failing to save Quinn or kill the Heirs, ate at Nathan like acid. His words came out in a snarl. “Either we stay and talk and bury Quinn, or we go into this cave and get that son-of-a-bitch bear totem.”
“Which is your totem, too, it seems,” Astrid said. “Did you know?”
“I knew there was a beast in me,” Nathan answered. “Wasn’t just wolf. Too big to be contained by only one animal. But I had no idea that I could…” It seemed impossible but also exactly right.
“Have you ever seen or heard of someone changing into more than one animal?” Astrid asked Graves, and the wounded man shook his head slightly.
“Answers inside,” Nathan said, grim. “Maybe.”
The three of them carefully turned to face where the cave pushed on into the mountain. It yawned, a black chasm, and damp, musky air swirled out. No telling how deep the cave went, or where the totem might be. The darkness whispered to Nathan, calling to him. He knew now what pulled him—the bear, also beneath his human’s skin.
“We’ll need lanterns,” said Astrid.
Graves shook his head, and the motion made him bite back a groan. “Heirs will be following. No light.”
“I can lead,” Nathan said. “Either as wolf or bear.” Incredible that he could be both.
But Astrid disagreed. “I can’t hold Catullus by myself. We still have to carry our gear. Even Catullus.”
“Can walk,” Graves insisted. “Don’t need help.”
“Like hell,” Astrid fired back.
“No light,” Nathan rumbled. “No animal to guide us. How in God’s name are we supposed to find our way through that?” He tipped his head toward the beckoning cave.
“In the packs.” Graves struggled to speak through a haze of pain and disorientation. “A small, green canvas bag.”
Astrid released Graves, who sagged onto Nathan, and darted to the packs. After rummaging for a moment, she produced the small green bag, then opened it.
Two objects lay inside. One was a pair of goggles, fashioned of leather, brass, and dark glass. The other resembled a music box, complete with a slightly oversized crank and a small metal megaphone inset into the box.
“Employs sound,” Graves muttered. “To reflect off objects. See in darkness—like a bat. Astrid. You must use. Guide us.” He turned filmed eyes to Nathan. “Going to hurt. Your ears.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Nathan answered, impressed as hell by Graves’s device even though he did not quite understand it.
After everyone shouldered their packs, divesting Quinn’s of anything essential, they all stared somberly at Quinn’s body. No one spoke, a tacit agreement to let their silence serve as the best eulogy.
“We’ll come back for you,” Nathan said, breaking the silence.
“Amen,” said Graves and Astrid.
Then the three of them—Graves, Astrid, Nathan—turned their backs to the sun and moved into the darkness.
Astrid slid on the goggles. “I cannot see anything,” she said. “The glass is dark.”
“Will become clear,” Catullus mumbled. “Turn the crank on the box. Megaphone facing out.”
She did so, and it emitted a whirring sound.
“Faster,” Catullus urged.
Obeying, she turned the crank more rapidly, and the pitch of the whirring rose. “I still cannot see.”
“Turn until you can’t hear the sound.”
Astrid’s hand spun on the handle. Sure enough, the whirring rose higher and higher until the sound disappeared altogether. Disappeared, but only to her and Catullus.
Nathan hissed in pain. She stopped immediately.
“Keep going,” Nathan gritted. “If it gets us through the caves.”
“Your hearing—”
“Go,” Nathan growled. He moved, and she heard him heft Catullus higher on his shoulder.
She had no choice but to continue. As she turned the crank, the whirring started up again, increased its pitch, and then vanished. Nathan sucked in his breath—it decimated her to cause him pain, yet she had to go on. Nothing happened at first, and then dim shapes emerged from the darkness, somehow shaped in grainy reddish relief within the dark lenses of the goggles. The walls of the cave, stalactites and stalagmites, the twisting stone passages that wended deeper into the mountain.
“I can see,” Astrid exclaimed. “How?”
“Material in the lenses,” Catullus said. His words slid and slurred, but he could not quite contain the pride in his voice. “Gets excited by the sound waves bouncing off surfaces. Creates…vision.”
She never lost her wonderment at Catullus’s intellect. She had not years ago, and it was true today. “The Blades are damned lucky to have you on our side.”
“I know.”
Astrid smiled faintly at this. Yet there was no luxury of time. Soon, the Heirs would return. And the faster she, Catullus, and Nathan found the totem, the sooner she could stop torturing Nathan’s sensitive hearing.
So, carefully, as quickly as they could, given Catullus’s injury and the dimness of the images produced by the sound and vision device, they pushed into the cave. Ghost images appeared in the dark of the lenses, the close walls pressing down, coiling passageways that were sometimes narrow, sometimes vaulted. Once, as an experiment, she lifted up the goggles. They were moving through utter darkness.
“I can stop for a moment,” she said to Nathan. “If you need some time.”
“No.” His pained growl caught her straight in the middle of her chest.
Even if he insisted on continuing the torment, Astrid had to give herself a respite from hurting him. “A bear,” she whispered. “You truly didn’t know.”
“No,” he said again, but the word encompassed everything—surprise but a strange inevitability.
“Neither Iron Wolf nor He Watches Stars said anything about an Earth Spirit changing into more than one animal.” She kept her voice a soft murmur. “You are special.”
She felt but could not see his rueful smile. “Never doubt that.” Then the smile left his voice. “We move forward. I feel the Heirs returning.”
Astrid nodded, then realized he likely couldn’t see her. So she slipped on the goggles and continued. They all moved forward in cautious steps, avoiding sudden gaping holes that appeared along the floor of the cave. If they were traveling blind, one of these pits would surely have claimed one or all of them. To Nathan, the cave was filled with terrible sound, but to Astrid and Catullus, there was only the shuffling of their feet, the rasp of their breathing, and the moan of long-trapped wind, like a phantom haunting the stone.
&nb
sp; Quinn was back there. Alive that morning. Jesting and eager. Now only a husk of cooling flesh, the essence of what made him, him, fleeing into memory. Like Michael.
“You didn’t tell me.” Her words to Catullus were a whisper, in deference to Nathan and to protect their location. But a hard whisper, the edge of it cutting. “Staunton. He’s here, with the Heirs.” Merely saying the name of the man who had murdered her husband filled her with sickness, like swallowing poison.
“What. Would you have done. Had you known?”
She couldn’t answer, but renewed anger surged through her. At the Heirs. At Catullus. At life and fate and everything that could not be controlled. “You should have told me,” she muttered. “I deserve to know.”
“Thought you might. Want revenge.”
She did. She wanted to make Staunton suffer. The idea of his agony pleased her, an urge that shocked her. She had been wild, sometimes reckless and headstrong, but never sought another’s pain, never enjoyed hurting someone.
That urge pushed her when she heard distant voices behind them. The Heirs. Nathan, too, stiffened and growled. She felt the warm mist of his change begin to engulf him and stopped cranking the sound device.
“My beast wants vengeance.” His words were deep, hardly human.
She wanted nothing more than to join him. Leave Catullus alone in the dark, taking her rifle and pistol. Find the Heirs. Make them pay with their lives. Cold, merciless death. She couldn’t survive, though. There were too many Heirs. Even if she killed Staunton, her own life would be lost.
Then, she heard herself say, “No, we move forward.”
Nathan’s growl swelled. “The Heirs—”
“Will face judgment. Someday.”
“Not soon enough,” Nathan snarled.
Catullus said, “To be a Blade. Means putting aside thoughts. Like revenge. For the greater. Good.” He added, his voice wearying, “I want it, too. Vengeance. But there is more. Than what any of us. Want.”
Astrid and Nathan were silent. There were exchanges that had to be made. The freedom of being a Blade came at a price. The price of ethics. If those beliefs were abandoned, unchecked by a larger sense of purpose and duty, then what stopped any of them from becoming an Heir? Ruthless, manipulative. Selfish.
She stiffened when she felt a hand brush her own, then relaxed. Nathan. He threaded their fingers together and squeezed, a sign of communion, solidarity. His touch grounded her, as she did the same for him. In his touch, she felt resolve. They would move onward, together.
Then he inhaled sharply. “They’re getting closer.”
No need for clarification as to who “they” were. She, Nathan, and Catullus wove through the caves, damp stone walls surrounding them. Muffled through layers of rock came the sounds of footfalls, hard voices.
Forward, then. She resumed turning the handle on the device, illuminating the world dimly through the goggles. They walked on until the tunnel suddenly opened up, and both Nathan and Astrid froze.
“What?” asked Catullus.
“We have to make a choice,” she answered.
They stood at a crossroads. Seven tunnels branched off from the chamber, each twisting into separate paths. “I don’t know which passage to take.”
“Bear markings?”
“Only rocks and more rocks, but none of them scored with claw or bite marks. Hell.” A false turn, and they could be lost within the cave, or trapped. She stopped turning the device, plunging herself into darkness, as she considered their choices.
She heard Nathan move. “Can you walk on your own?” he demanded, turning to Catullus.
Catullus, moving away from Nathan, took a step forward, and then another. “Holding steady.”
“Good. Astrid, put the seeing device away.”
“Done.”
Clothing rustled. And then the warm mist of Nathan’s changing.
She heard the rustle of his fur, the shift of his paws upon the stone. Reaching out, her fingers brushed his shoulder and she realized with a start that he had taken the form of a wolf.
“The bear is too new,” she murmured, and he pressed the warmth of his muzzle into her hand in agreement. Then he was gone.
She and Catullus waited in darkness, hearing Nathan pad from one tunnel to the other as he drew in their scent and power. Finally, he made a soft bark. He padded back to where she stood with Catullus, then stepped underneath her hand.
“You will lead us now,” she said.
Nathan woofed in agreement.
“Take my hand, Catullus.”
“If I touch you,” Catullus noted drily, “he’ll bite me.”
“No biting, Nathan,” she warned.
He rumbled a response, saying without words, Very well. But you ask a lot.
Then, with Nathan in the lead, Astrid’s hand upon his back, and Catullus’s hand clasped in hers, they formed a strange, small chain and delved farther into the mountain’s secrets.
A silent journey in darkness. Yet not entirely silent. The voices of the Heirs and their mercenaries grew louder, though they could not be seen.
“Which one, damn it!” Staunton shouted. “Woman?”
“This I do not know,” said Swift Cloud Woman, voice brittle and bitter.
Staunton cursed. “Bracebridge?”
“Can’t say. Perhaps that one—”
“You,” said another English voice. “Go investigate.”
“Why me?” asked someone with a Canadian accent.
“Do it.”
Grumbling and swearing, the mountain man stomped off to obey.
Whichever tunnel the mercenary had chosen ran alongside the one through which Astrid, Nathan, and Catullus ventured. They could hear the man’s rough voice shouting through the stone close beside them.
“Ain’t nothing here but—” Then a shout, and the sound of rocks tumbling.
“What the devil’s going on down there?” Staunton yelled.
“Slipped…gonna fall! Somebody come quick!”
But no urgent footfalls came from the Heirs.
“Hey! You bastards!” the mountain man bellowed. “I can’t hold—” Another shout that turned into a scream, before it faded away.
Astrid’s stomach twisted. She gripped Nathan’s fur harder, and he moved on, away from the Heirs’ betrayal of their own. And if Nathan had not been able to sense the right passage, they, too, might have plummeted to a black, empty death.
Thank God, she did not fear close spaces, or the dark, for both pressed in on every side. Yet she still felt their oppression, as much as she felt the oncoming threat of the Heirs. They may have lost one of their mercenaries, but that did not diminish their menace.
Nathan stopped abruptly, but the momentum from Astrid and Catullus sent them all pitching forward into nothingness. A vertiginous drop, and she flung her hands out, trying to scrabble for purchase. She imagined herself falling as the mountain man had fallen, to become a broken body at the bottom of a chasm.
She landed, abruptly, with a clatter. Astrid scrambled on her hands and knees, feeling hard, brittle shapes all around. Sightless, she picked up one of the objects. Slightly porous, some long, some short, knobbed on the ends. Bones. Her heart tried to push its way out of her chest.
“Nathan,” she rasped.
“Here.” He took her outstretched hands and pressed his face against them. His breath warmed her chilled fingers. They were alive. In a pile of bones. Nathan asked, “All right?”
“Yes, but—where’s Catullus?”
“Shield your eyes,” said Catullus, somewhere out in the darkness.
“All right,” she said, doing so. A sudden flare of light appeared between her fingers. Slowly, she peeled her hands from her face. Even though she had covered her eyes, it took several moments before her vision cleared. When it did, she saw that Catullus held a brass cylinder aloft—another of his newer devices—unearthly green light glowing from within it and turning the scene into something from the underworld. They knelt in a la
rge cavern, its roof soaring up into blackness. At the opposite end of the cavern was the entrance to another tunnel. Animal bones covered the floor, piled high like mounds of calcified driftwood.
She gazed over at Nathan, his face a pale jade mask as he took in the sight. He rose to standing, shoulders back, eyes sharp. Only when Astrid noticed Catullus modestly glancing away did she realize that Nathan was unclothed. She had grown so used to Nathan naked—she actually rather preferred it. The pale green light turned his lean body into a gleaming idol, ready for worship.
The thought made her smile, even in this macabre place.
“What…ah…what sort of bones are these?” Catullus asked, showing a deep preoccupation in examining the bones in question. For all his work with the Blades, Catullus was still very much an Englishman. At least he sounded as though he’d regained his rather decorous wits after his blow to the head.
“Bear,” said Astrid and Nathan in chorus.
She glanced at him, eyebrows raised. Likely he’d never seen bear bones prior to this. Yet he would know them instinctually. They were in him, in some form.
“One of these is the totem,” she said, rising to her feet. She wobbled. The bones lay so thick, the actual floor was buried beneath. “Now we have to determine which.”
Catullus cleared his throat. “Perhaps, Lesperance, you can scent out the proper one. Like a hound.”
“This whole place is full of scent,” Nathan grunted. “Bear and human.”
For a few moments, they all waded through tense silence and the rattling piles of bones, trying to find one that stood out in some way.
“There,” said Catullus, breaking the silence. He pointed at a large, long claw that rested atop one of the piles of bones. It appeared nearly three times the size of an ordinary claw. A hole had been bored into it, and a leather thong threaded through, just as it had with the wolf totem. “Rather easy,” he murmured, mistrustful. “Sources never come so readily.”
Astrid stood closest to the totem, so she cautiously started to move toward it, but Nathan’s voice stopped her.
“Stop. This totem might not want someone who isn’t an Earth Spirit to claim it. I’ll go.” He advanced toward the totem.
