Page 5 of Kavan

"Sophie." Eli, from further back, unhappy. "The atmospheric read on this passage is⁠—"

"Four, seven, two," I say, and turn the outer ring four notches, the middle seven, the inner two.

The disc sinks into the wall.

Nothing happens for long enough that Zuri starts to say something sarcastic, and then the floor eight meters ahead of us drops out, and a section of it three meters square simply isn't there anymore.

I'm already moving toward the edge because that's the job, and the lip isn't stable, and the material under my boot goes from solid to suggestion.

A hand closes around my upper arm and I don't fall.

He doesn't haul me back. That's the part I keep returning to. He takes my weight where I already am, lets me get my own feet under me, and only then lifts me clear. He releases me the moment I'm on rock.

"Thank you."

"Don't stand on new edges."

"It wasn't new. It's twenty thousand years old."

"It's new to the floor."

Below the gap, my lamp finds a shaft going down past the range of the beam, and stairs, broad and shallow and cut for legs longer than mine, spiraling down past the light.

The team goes quiet, even Zuri.

Orrek isn't looking at the stairs. He's looking at the corridor behind us, and there's nothing on his face except a steadiness I have started to suspect costs him something to hold. Yesterday I read him as a man who wanted to control my dig. Watching him count exits in a room that has just tried to swallow me, I'm no longer sure that's what caution looks like on him.

Grief looks a lot like caution from the outside. I've seen it before.

We take the stairs. Four full turns down, they end at a landing, and the landing ends at a door.

It's enormous. Nine meters at least, filling the wall, marked with a single relief that is neither the rows nor the sphere. It shows a hand, open, palm out, fingers spread, and cut across it is the glyph cluster that means doorway.

Except the third element has changed again, and I know it, and it takes me a moment to place why.

On Threshold, that variant appears once, on a stele outside a burial complex. The accepted translation is not welcome.

It's do not.

"Marshal," I say slowly. "Nobody has opened this."

"Good."

"You misunderstand me." I put my palm flat on the cold relief of a hand that was never meant to match mine. "It has been sealed for twenty thousand years, and something behind it has been waiting to be asked."

CHAPTER 4

KAVAN

Idon't like the door.

Vesk holds his lamp on the relief and we stand there a while without speaking, because there's nothing useful to say about a nine-meter slab that our instruments read as solid rock and our eyes read as a wall.

"She's sure about the translation," he says.

"She's sure about everything."

"That's not a no."