Page 96 of Beds and Blades

We rode west, away from the mountains at first and then curving back toward them along a line of dry watercourses that Flavia called the draws. She and Gaius rode without much talk. I rode in the middle, as instructed, and watched them, which was its own education.

Autumn had begun to put its hands on the valley. A thinning in the grass, a dry gold edge to the hills, a coolness under the sunlight that made the shade feel sharper than it should have. The leaves on the scrub trees were yellow at the tips, and every time the wind moved through them, they sounded brittle. It made the whole place feel beautiful in a way I did not entirely trust.

The land climbed. The grass thinned to scrub, then to bare ground broken by stone.

After a while, the stone stopped looking natural.

I saw it before Flavia named it. A line too straight to be accidental. A block with a worked edge, half-swallowed by the hillside. Then more of them. Cut stones were scattered up the slope. Whatever this place was, it belonged to the same dead civilization that had built the arches I had seen on my first day.

“The old stones,” Flavia said. “We check the big one. There is a way down into it.”

I could not stop looking. Whatever had cut these had cared about the angles. There was a doorway, or the ruin of one, two uprights and a fallen stone support beam, and beyond it the ground sloped down into darkness.

“What is this?” I asked. “Who built it?”

“No one knows,” Gaius said. “It was here before the line. Before Newardia. The mages say they were built before our history.”

I wanted, very badly and very stupidly, to go inside.

I did not, because at that moment Gaius lifted a closed fist, and Flavia went still, and I remembered my one job and stopped my horse.

There were tracks in front of us. Fresh. And a smell I did not have a category for yet, but would never afterward forget, something underneath the cold stone smell, organic and wrong.

“Handoff,” Gaius said, very quietly. “In progress.”

Fear slid through me, cold and precise, locking my spine straight and my hands around the reins. It was the sudden, total awareness that the awful system we had been discussing in the abstract had become very real, very close, and currently had a location.

My fingers tightened on the reins.

Velox shifted beneath me, and I made myself stay still.

***

The sellsword came out from behind one of the larger stone formations.

He was big, broad through the shoulders, dressed in mismatched armor that looked stolen from three different dead men. A sword hung in one hand. His other hand was locked around the arm of a young woman.

She looked to be in her twenties. Her wrists were bound. A gag was tied across her mouth. Her eyes were enormous above it.

Behind them, the stone arch opened into darkness.

Something waited there. I could not see its body. I could only see two points of red at the edge of the shadow, low and steady and patient.

The old ruin made the air around them feel older and colder. Cut stone. Dead carvings. A black mouth in the hill. The kind of place that made every reasonable part of my brain want to file a formal objection and leave.

Flavia slid down from her horse with her bow already in her hands.

Gaius kicked his horse forward.

The sellsword shoved the young woman to the ground and turned to meet him.

Velox decided that this was the line. He shied. I came off.

The ground hit me hard enough to drive the breath out of my lungs and knock my glasses clean off my face. They flew somewhere into the scrub and stone.

The world went soft at the edges. My field of vision was blurred enough to make everything less trustworthy. My prescription was not catastrophic, but it was real, and for one terrible second, my brain left the vampire-handoff situation entirely and went straight to the logistical nightmare of optometry in Mytharo.

The sellsword saw Gaius bearing down on him and roared, the sound scraping off the old stones and vanishing into the dark mouth of the ruin.