The quiet, the musty draft, the candlelight licking strange shapes over the walls, over the soft set of Ava’s face, hard to read – the worn spiral, down and down and down into the deepening dark. The silent stirring of their breaths; the way the candle bowed, delicate and precarious, in every stiff breeze. Tom didn’t linger long in that space, though a handful of seconds there could’ve been a hundred maw. And when he started down, careful-like and wincing, Ava just as careful behind him, he had a feeling like an anchor settling on his heart. Like, unbeknownst to them, they were restless souls passing into the Otherworld.
It was a funny thought. It was a struggle, all the way down, fingertips scrabbling at the clammy stone. He wasn’t sure how far it’d been, but the sight of the bottom was like a godsdamn rescue; he – or Anatole’s aching hip, maybe – could’ve got married to the stones.
But he knew they’d only begun. The meager light from the candle barely brushed the stonework overhead, and in every direction, the empty dark yawned. They’d got this far: pick a direction, he reckoned, thoughts working fast, then blanking; wasn’t much point in thinking –
When he heard Ava’s soft voice, he turned. A strange, bitter smile played out on his lips, watching her leave a dark line of lip color on the stone with her fingertip. It was subtle; the candlelight caught it, glinting like a snail’s track. He met her eye and bobbed his head once. More than anything, he reckoned, it heartened him that she thought they’d make it back here.
There wasn’t much use in thinking about that, either, one way or another. Restless souls, he thought again, as they moved off down a tunnel.
Once, he heard a soft rushing, through the gap of a half-open doors, in the blackness underneath grating, beyond the reach of their little bobbing candleflame. Now and then, he caught the whisper of a breeze against his face, stirring his hair – carrying on its back the smell of stale water, bitter sulfur, the rotten tang of refuse. The smell of a river, too, or what a river’d left behind.
The silence was loud, and it made everything else loud: every drip or trickle, every nameless shuffling thing. And the deep dark etched every brief flash of clarity – every ghastly flicker of light over every half-glimpsed room – vivid against the dark in his head. He was grateful for the shape that moved beside him, quick-like and silent, in the shifting sheen of sap-red silk.
Tom’d never been here; he never would’ve known this place was underneath the Pendulum, and he reached and scrambled to cobble the implications together. All the same, he’d been in places like this. He’d worked with tools like these. He knew the empty loops of chains, the smeared tables, the rusty implements. His heart got heavier and heavier, weighing him down like a stone, but it beat sluggish in his chest. It was his stomach that turned and boiled. Once, just before they passed the tiny room, the wavering light caught on a patch of glistening black. Fresh.
Ava must’ve heard something, then, ’cause she pressed herself up against the stone. He saw the glitter of her eyes in the dark, followed them toward a solitary door; he froze, too, fighting the urge to snuff out the candle. The light’d already crept up to the door, crept through the crack, cast a sliver of itself into the room beyond.
“Who’s there?” rasped a man’s voice, high and soft and slurry. This time, Tom heard it, too. There was a scrape, a shuffle, then: “Where are ye?”
Tom swallowed thickly, fingertips hovering over the burning wick. His hand shook, flickered away. He shut his eyes for a space, then opened them, meeting Ava’s. He set his mouth in a thin line, grit his teeth hard, then moved for the door.
It was heavy, and this time, the hinges creaked something laoso. Tom winced at the sound; it wasn’t loud, but it tore through the thick silence like a scream. Inside, the light picked out a long, narrow aisle, the stark shapes of thin, close-spaced metal bars on either side. They cast grids of light and shadow on the floors beyond, lengthening and warping as Tom took his first shaky steps into the room.
A gasp. More shuffling. “Havakda, havakda,” the voice strangled out.
Cells. Tom could feel a thin film of cold sweat on his brow; he wiped it away roughly with his sleeve and grit his teeth even harder. The first one on the left, empty. The second and third cells were empty, too, but as he got halfway down the aisle, he saw movement behind the bars. He caught a glimpse of half a thin face, a ratty tangle of a beard, the glistening of eyes underneath a brow knotted with pain. Then the figure scrambled back into the shadows, out of the light, and all Tom could see was a tall, thin shape.
He hissed under his breath, taking a step closer, forgetting himself.
“Ent nothin’s changed,” came another rasp from the dark. Tom thought he caught another flash of eyes. “Ent tellin’ ye nothin’, ye chen? Havakda!” His voice rose, but then broke, and he coughed wetly and groaned.
“Hush,” Tom whispered, squinting through the dark for the wick again. “Boemo, boemo. We ain’t here to hurt you.” He cast a desperate look toward the door, still half-open, his eyes wide.