“Best we be careful ofeverythinghere,” Toinette said dryly.
Thirty-Six
Less time passed than in the previous hallway, or so Toinette thought. She hadn’t yet gotten into the habit of counting footsteps or breaths. After enough time she felt she might pick it up, as little purpose as it would serve. They were there for as long as it took, the labyrinth was as large as it was, and trying to learn too much about the place might well lead to madness or, at best, headaches. Counting would be a way to occupy her mind, as prisoners were said to make marks on the walls of their dungeons. She wasn’t that desperate yet.
So she wasn’t sure how long they’d been walking when a second hall crossed theirs, and she didn’t much care. She breathed out through her teeth and stood with Erik, staring down the options: three more paths instead of two this time, and no doors.
“Thread or breadcrumbs?” she asked, remembering tales she’d heard abroad.
“Cloth.” Whether Erik knew the stories or not, he followed the trail of her speech well. He held up one arm. “Cut at the elbow, if you will. I’d rather not take the time to get undressed. And don’t have the hand off with it.”
“I’ll try to resist the temptation,” said Toinette. “I’m only glad you volunteered. I’ve little enough left to sacrifice.”
“I noticed.” He cast a glance down her figure—lingering at her breasts and then her half-bare legs—that warmed her despite their grim surroundings.
She flashed a smile back. “Don’t distract me while I’ve got a knife.”
Cutting off the sleeve without piercing skin was indeed a small challenge, but the cloth did fall without any bloodstains added to the general grime of their travel. Toinette picked it up and began cutting it into strips: small, but with luck still visible on the floor in front of a passage.
“Rightmost?” she asked. “It’s not likely to be worse than the others.”
“Aye,” Erik began, then stopped short and stared. “Look there.”
He pointed with his bare arm. The skin above his wrist was paler than the rest by several shades. As he gestured to a blurry spot of red above the center door, he looked momentarily like a saint in a window, indicating a mystery revealed.
In very broad strokes, Toinette supposed there was a similarity. She had no intention of telling Erik as much.
The shape lasted longer. It became a square before it started to fade at the corners, then blinked out of sight, leaving Toinette and Erik frowning at a patch of empty wall above a passage.
“Might be a trap,” she said again.
“Or it might not,” said Erik. “It’snotus making it happen, I know that much, for how would we have an idea of what path to take? And if this place must obey certain rules, or was constructed for a particular use, why such indication?”
“Unless it’s a warning not to go that way. Or points to the only safe path.” Toinette thought of the red glow on the mast and frowned as she spoke. Surely a mere sign, of any sort, would have been on the door or at the base of the mast, not the handholds. It wasn’t material. “Six of one, half a dozen of the other. We might as well.”
They kept to the middle, though the path didn’t remain straight for very long. It twisted around corners, rose and fell over hills, and, as it led Erik and Toinette onward, began to change again. Glimmers began to appear in the walls, like those in the rocks Toinette had seen elsewhere. The stone took on variegated shades.
Erik nearly stumbled over the first roughness in the floor. He caught himself on one wall, pulled his hand back quickly—neither of them wanted to leave their skin long in contact with any part of the temple—and blinked down at the uneven surface. “I’ll be damned,” he said.
“Likely we both will,” said Toinette, but she felt it less inescapably true than she had in the rooms before.
“It’s not so foul-smelling here either,” Erik remarked after sniffing the air. “Not pleasant, but not as bad as it was.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Toinette said, but she realized shecould: the cold stench didn’t invade her nose any longer. She’d gotten so accustomed to it that being able to smell her own sweat instead was startlingly pleasant. “If it is a trap, they know how to lure us.”
“Thank you for that.”
“At your service, my lord,” she said with a mocking bow.
* * *
The smell kept dwindling as they went on, and the light gradually became dimmer as well. In the forest, that had been another sign of dread to come; this time, Erik welcomed it. Were they underground, which seemed likely, darkness was natural. In a similar spirit he rejoiced as the walls became rougher, though his toes were less philosophical about matters after the third time he stumbled.
Taking Toinette’s warning to heart, he didn’t let his guard down. For a time they both walked with drawn swords, but the tunnel narrowed as it became more mundane. Letting him take the lead, Toinette switched to her knife. “If I do trip,” she said, “this is less likely to end up in your kidneys.”
“Odd. I would have thought you’d be glad of the excuse.”
She slapped him lightly on the shoulder. “You’ve not beenthatinsufferable. And if I stab you on purpose, it won’t be in the back.”
