Chapter 25

My legs are sore again when I wake up. I groan weakly. This is going to be a long day.

Khysmet kindly rubs the lotion over them again, but I somehow doubt that it’s going to last for another ten-hour walk. He packs some drinkable pain medicine for when the lotion wears off. We also pack an appropriate amount of food for such a long venture this time.

I assumed Rhys would be accompanying us as usual, but Khysmet insists he stay behind.

“I can carry you for a while when you get tired, but I think I would have more difficulty carrying him as well,” Khysmet explains. “Probably better to let him stay behind and rest, don’t you think?”

“That makes sense,” I admit. “You better be good at fending off giant spiders, though, because that was Rhys’s primary job, and I’m not going to pick up the slack.”

“I’m a bit out of practice, but I think I can manage.”

Rhys usually brings a spear so he can keep the spiders at a distance, but Khysmet chooses to bring a sword instead, claiming his excellent swordsmanship will be sufficient to keep anything we might encounter at bay. In the whole time that I’ve been here, I’ve never actually watched when he goes to help train the guards, so I have no idea if he’s as good as he says he is. I’m choosing to believe him now, though, since doubting him will only make me twenty times as terrified for probably no reason. I reassure myself that we’re taking the spider repellant anyway, so it won’t be a problem. Rhys has never actually had to do more than nudge a spider with his spear to get it to move anyway.

When I pull out the map, he looks at it in horror.

“You weren’t kidding about how difficult it is to navigate down there,” he says.

“You don’t know the half of it,” I say. “Wait till we actually get down there. Every damn intersection looks exactly the same. After I recover from today’s venture, I need to go down there and remove all the markers pointing toward the castle, because the maze really is an excellent security feature.”

Along the way, I have a fun time explaining everything I’ve learned in the process of finding the entrance and mapping the tunnels. I’ve talked about it with Khysmet in more vague terms before, but I don’t think he actually realized just how much I have put into this project. He’s in awe of the detail of the map, impressed by my strategy with the labeled signs, and amazed by how confidently I navigate the tangled web of passageways, especially as time draws on. He asks question after question about my process, about how I figured all this out. I’m feeling very puffed up with pride as I lead us through the maze and explain in detail the lengths I have gone to to get this far.

Then we run into our first spider cavern, and the pride fizzles away.

“I would have thought that after all this time, you’d be more comfortable with them,” Khysmet comments as I cower behind him, always keeping his body between me and the spider, clinging to his shirt with desperate, grabbing hands.

“It’s only been a month,” I protest. “That’s nothing. Also, it’s a reasonable fear. If we got trapped down here long enough for the repellant to wear off, we could actually be attacked.”

My reasonable argument is summarily ignored and laughed off. We make it through that cavern without the spider even twitching, and now instead of being praised for my accomplishments, I am being teased for my weaknesses.

“By the way, are you that grabby with Rhys, too?" Khysmet asks. "I didn’t realize I had any reason to be jealous of you spending time down here with him.”

“No, I’m not grabby with Rhys," I say, making sure he can see me roll my eyes, even in the dark. "He hates it when I touch him at all, even by accident. I think he's still terrified of what you'd do to him."

"Hmm. Smart man. I'll let him keep his fingertips a while longer."

By the time I get us all the way to the final intersection, my legs are not doing so hot. Khysmet moves his backpack around so it's hanging off the front of his body and lets me climb onto his back for a while.

"I won't be able to carry you the whole way, unfortunately," he says. "You're not too heavy by yourself, but all the water and lantern oil really adds up."

"Don't push yourself too hard," I demand. "Tell me when you need a break."

As nice as it is to rest my feet, I don't let him carry me for very long. Being pressed against his back, I can feel his breathing grow more ragged over time. We still have a long way to go, and I'm not going to let him tire himself out needlessly. It takes some convincing to get him to set me down, though.

I take a swig of the pain medicine and we keep going. Fortunately, the entire walk doesn’t have any real technical difficulties. There’s a slight slope that’s going to be worse on the way back, but it’s not terrible. We take regular breaks at my insistence, move at a steady but not too strenuous pace, and generally make good progress over the next few hours. It helps that I've already done this once before, so I'm counting the number of caverns we walk through as an indicator of how much longer we have to go. Khysmet is holding up very well. He doesn't complain once, and offers to carry me once an hour or so. He's more talkative than Rhys – not at all surprising since Rhys is a very quiet man – and that helps the time pass much more quickly.

One thing he talks about as we get closer to the catacombs is the cult whose emblem marks the casket we are travelling towards now.

“When they rose to prominence in my childhood, they called themselves Civil Twilight,” he says. “I think to best explain their religious views, I might need to explain some things about the general spiritual climate of Veilsung. What do you already know about our gods?”

“Very little,” I admit. “No one has ever mentioned anything about their religious beliefs in the whole time I’ve been here. I guess I haven’t asked.”

“My people tend to be rather private about their spirituality, so I’m not surprised. I’ll try to sum it up briefly. Essentially, we believe that everything in existence sprung up from a point, from a being, deep within the earth, a goddess named Tal. All life bubbled up from underground along with the spring water that sustains our communities and feeds our rivers. Even the gods of the sun and moon are born from the earth and return to it upon their death every day.”

“Your sun and moon gods die every time they set?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Depends on who you ask. Some say they sleep, some say it’s the same gods, just reborn anew each day, and some say that each sunrise brings us a completely new god that will die and return to the earth, just like all mortals do.”

“That’s beautiful,” I say reverently.

“Tal herself is too far below the earth for any living being to reach. Her children are many, though. Every mountain, every cave, every river, every spring is believed to have its own god. The god of the mountain upon which Dimos rests and the one of the spring that feeds us have many shrines across the city. To commune with the great point of origin, you have to go through her sons and daughters.

“Civil Twilight’s dogma was based on the idea that within every living thing is a spark of the divine, which is a belief based in traditional Veilsung mythology. However, they took it a step further and said that through meditation and certain rituals, a person can access the divinity within them and transcend the limits of the flesh. Tiny bit heretical, considering that the flesh, being of the earth, is itself divine, but not a big deal. The whole twilight imagery refers to the moment the sun emerges from the earth – the birth of a new god, in this case the god within the self. Their rituals tended toward the macabre, but their religious beliefs were not in and of themselves harmful.

“The problem is, their founder, a man named Pelos, convinced his extremely devout followers that the country needed a ruler who had awakened his inner god. Several of my father’s high-ranking ministers and even one of his advisors, were members, so they got uncomfortably close to taking him out. After their attempted coup, public opinion of them – which was already lukewarm at best – tanked completely, Pelos went into hiding, and the group seemingly dissolved.”

I hum thoughtfully. “So… now they’re back?”

“Well, the emblem you showed me is definitely the one that Civil Twilight used in the past. It would make sense that whoever is painting it in the catacombs probably consider themselves members. But is it the same group, or some kind of copycat simply parroting the original group’s beliefs? If it is the same group that never actually dissolved completely, is Pelos still its leader, or do they have a new head with a new agenda? I have no idea.”

“What would it mean if they are the same group?”

Khysmet shrugs. “Beats the hell out of me. It’s been over twenty years. They very well could just want to continue their religious practices out of the public eye. Trying to seize power wasn’t necessarily a central tenet of their belief system. It concerns me that you first heard about their meetings in the catacombs in the castle, though. Although, I suppose all you heard was that someone was meeting secretly in the catacombs. They might not be connected at all.”

“That’s a good point,” I concede. “I mean, catacombs in general seem like great places to meet secretly for just about anyone.”

“We’ll see what we find out when we get there.”

Eventually, we find ourselves at the sharp, angular turn that marks the end of our journey.

The second I can half-see it in the darkness, I motion for Khysmet to be quiet and blow out the lantern. We need to be able to see if there are any light sources coming from up ahead that might indicate that someone else is nearby.

The tunnel falls into total darkness. There’s no light coming from the end of the tunnel at all. Still, I want to be cautious. I walk straight ahead for the last hundred or so feet, reaching out to the wall frequently to make sure I won’t run into it. When I can’t feel the wall anymore, I know I’m around the corner, but still there is nothing – no light whatsoever. I light the lantern again.

Khysmet is still back in the tunnel where I left him. I motion for him to follow me and wait until he’s beside me to go around the corner. I lead him to the casket where the symbol was painted when I was here last. It’s blank.

I check the caskets next to it to make sure I’m at the right one, but I’m positive that I am. I remember it because it sticks out at an angle, while the ones beside it are more parallel to the wall. I bring the lantern close to the stone surface right where the symbol was located before and notice that the texture of the stone is different in that spot, and a slightly different shade of gray.

“I think it’s been painted over,” I say, pointing to the spot that I’m looking at. “You can see the brush strokes.”

Khysmet squints and looks closely at the spot I’m indicating. “Well that’s not a great sign. My guess would be that we’ve missed this little rendezvous.” He flicks his tongue and looks around. “There have definitely been a lot of people here recently. The scent is quite fresh.”

I groan loudly and sink to the ground, leaning my back against the casket, holding my head in my hands.

“I knew there was a strong chance we would miss it, but I was still holding out a tiny bit of hope,” I lament. I put the back of my wrist to my head with a dramatic flair. “Alas, we have come all this way for naught.”

“Maybe not for naught,” Khysmet says. “They might have accidentally left something behind.”

I cock my head. “I suppose so. Now that I’m on the ground, though, I really don’t want to get back up to look.”

“Okay, you hang out on the ground in all the rat shit. I’ll start looking.”

I make a face at his words, but I’m still not getting up. I’m already sitting down anyway, so it’s too late to preserve my cleanliness anyway. Khysmet takes the lantern and wanders around with it, kicking rocks and bones out of the way as he searches. He goes quite a distance, and it’s getting dark around where I am when I hear a rustling, clacking sound close by that makes me jump.

In the near darkness, I see a pile of bones on the other side of the corridor start to shift. Before my eyes, an absolutely massive rat emerges from beneath them, holding something between its teeth and chewing on it. Though the light is dim, I can just barely make out that the thing between its teeth looks almost like…paper. My pulse quickens. I reach for the closest object I can pick up, which appears to be half of a femur. My aim isn’t great, but hopefully I can get it close enough to make him drop the page rather than just running off with it.

I quietly pull my arm back, then throw as hard as I can.

Miraculously, I hit it spot on, and it drops the paper as it scurries away. I stand and go to pick it up, but with the lamp so far away, I can’t see what’s on it.

Khysmet, hearing the noise, calls from further down the hallway.

“Is everything all right?” he asks. “What happened?”

“Come back this way,” I say. “I think I might have something.”

The lamp light gets brighter as he walks toward me again, and I can start to see some of what’s written on the paper, but it still doesn’t make any sense to me. It just looks like a list of nonsense words grouped in threes. I can’t even begin to guess at the meaning of the words. A different language, perhaps?

When Khysmet is within reach, I hand the page to him.

“What do you make of this?” I ask.

He stares at the page silently for a while, scanning it up and down. He flicks his tongue out close to the page.

“This is new paper. It hasn’t been down here long. Recently handled by a lot of hands, from what I can tell. The ink is very fresh. This is a lucky find, Cat.”

“What does it mean, though?” I ask. “Do you recognize any of those words? What language is that?”

He looks at me with an excited glint in his eye and shakes his head.

“Not a different language,” he says. “It’s written in code.”