“There are no Naga women in this region anymore. There haven’t been in my lifetime. But the carvings show the original wardens bonded with human priestesses. The bond does not require the same species. It requires something deeper.”
“That’s why you went to the bride markets.”
“Yes.”
“Your father died when you were young,” she says. Not a question. She has read the building.
“My mother continued alone. The system was built for two bonded keepers. She ran it on one. She could do that because the residual bond from my father sustained her venom. Not clean, not full-strength, but functional. She was running on what the bond left her. It took fifteen years to run out.”
The third level. The vibration begins. Low, irregular, coming up through the floor. She puts her hand flat on the stone.
“That’s it,” she says. “The thing that was sealed.”
“Yes.”
The vibration changes while we are stopped there. For a count of three, maybe four, it develops a rhythm. Organic. The rhythm of something that breathes. She presses both palms to the floor.
The rhythm stops. But in the pause between one vibration and the next, I see her face change. She felt something I felt too. Direction. The pressure was not pushing randomly against the floor. It was pushing toward us. Toward the place where two warm bodies held still on the stone.
It settles back to its irregular hum.
“Go on,” she says. Her voice is steady. Her hands are not.
“The channels had been degrading for centuries. Slowly. After my father’s death, it accelerated. Without a bonded pair, the venom weakened. The flow narrowed the passages, deposited calcification, choked the grooves shut.”
We are moving slowly now. She is beside me. Her shoulder near my coil.
“She died five years ago. The duty passed to me. I was never bonded. My venom came in twenty years ago, and it has been weak since the first day. Weaker than my mother’s ever was, because she at least had the residual bond to draw on.” I pause. “The gray on the stone where I rest. The dead patches. The decay. That is what an unbonded warden produces.”
She stops walking. She turns to face me in the corridor.
“How long until the seal fails?”
“Months. Weeks, maybe. The degradation has been accelerating.” I look at her in the lamplight. “My venom has been getting cleaner since you arrived. This morning’s compound was almost clear.” I stop. “The bond is forming. Between us. My body is responding to you the way it was always meant to respond to a bonded partner.”
She is silent for a moment. The vibration hums through the floor under us.
“Vadh.”
“Yes.”
“I have something to tell you too.”
She leans against the corridor wall. The stone is warm behind her.
“I didn’t come to that auction by accident.” She folds her arms. “My mother was an adventurer. She took commissions from whoever was paying. Someone hired her to find this place. A client who’d heard rumors about something in the deep jungle.”
“What kind of rumors?”
“A weapon.” Her arms stay crossed. “The client thought there was a weapon hidden in Naga territory. Something old and powerful. My mother took the job.”
I look at the carvings on the wall. The priestesses. The Naga. The channel between them. A weapon. Someone, thirty years ago, heard enough about this place to mistake it for an arsenal.
“She was flying over the canopy in a small glider. Surveying. She spotted a break in the tree cover. Stonework. Your entrance. She flew closer to investigate when something brought the glider down.”
“The wards.”
She looks at me. “What wards?”
