4.

 

As Zaifyr approached the third village, the afternoon’s sun began to truly set, leaving hand-printed smudges of orange and red on the horizon, a child’s painted sky.

He had been outside Mireea for over an hour, having dropped down the Spine and into the cooling brush while the sun still remained. Before the light had begun to fade, he passed through two villages, finding them empty. No more than two dozen cheaply made buildings accounted for the two towns, but they were all bigger and better kept than those in the third settlement. This was smaller than the two before it, and he suspected it was the oldest, but from the silence that greeted him it did not promise to be any different than those he had already searched.

Earlier, after the first gate within Mireea had been lowered, Zaifyr had found himself on the roof of The Pale House. He was drawn to a large tabletop map where he, the Captain of the Spine, and the two old miners who he still referred to as the First and Second circled half a dozen villages that were along the western edge of the Spine. There, they believed, a tunnel had been made. “A difficult tunnel,” First insisted.

“A dangerous tunnel,” the Second added. “Finished with an explosion.”

“That explosion was structurally unsound,” the First muttered. “Never mind that they dug between two caverns with two cities and had only meters of rock and dirt to separate them.”

“It’s just one large city,” said the Second. “But I bet they broke through. I bet if we look we can see holes.”

“There’s no town there on your map.” Zaifyr tapped the mountain area that they had circled. “Are you sure I’ll find something there?”

“According to my report, the villages were cleared with all the others,” Heast replied. “They are the newest settlements, though, which is why they’re not on the map. They’re our best guess as to where the tunnel begins.”

Zaifyr briefly considered telling him no, that he should send someone else. The illusion of their relationship—that one had hired the other and that the positions of power they occupied were based on such a transaction—did not need to be preserved; but he thought of the haunts in his hotel room and of Ayae, who was on the other side of the gate, and he said nothing. Of the last, he had only found that out after Heast’s corporal had located him outside Ayae’s house, peering through her window determined to explain himself to her.

“It is entirely possible,” the Captain of the Spine continued, “that all these towns are part of the one force we are currently dealing with. If that turns out to be true, I will be sending out a force to deal with them, but I need to know first. I leave the east of the city nothing more than a skeleton if I do that and I would rather not take the risk if I am to collapse the western part of Mireea anyway.”

“There’s no one from these towns inside Mireea?”

“No.”

Privately, he had thought that Heast and the old men were overreacting, but after he had discovered the traps he’d changed his mind.

It was only luck that kept him from serious injury when he pushed the first door open. A crossbow bolt had sat poorly in its cradle, the winch having broken from the strain earlier. If it had not, the short black bolt would have punched into his leg or stomach. Since then, he had found another twenty crossbows, and left each of them alone.

The third village was no different than the previous two. Its silence echoed his steps, the movement through scrub around him. The similarity of it to those before gave more credence to Heast’s claim that all six villages were connected, for he could find no sign of living inhabitant either through tracks or haunt. As he progressed, he began to think that a deep stillness lurked within the village, and the ones before it, as if it had been preserved, sanctified somehow, by the men and women who had lived there before.

Leaving the third, he made his way to the fourth village, careful not to use the trail.

“I do not want to show my hand early,” Heast had said to him. The First and the Second had left minutes before, given the task of examining all of the Spine that Mireea was built against. “Collapsing the roads is inevitable, but I had hoped that the Keepers would have left by then.”

“They would still be against you retreating to Yeflam,” he replied.

“But they would be unable to stop me.”

Zaifyr had almost said that they would not, but the words died on his tongue.

At the fourth village, Zaifyr stopped suddenly, a lancing brightness startling him. It was not a natural brightness, but rather the frail light of a haunt magnified by tens upon tens that milled in and through the dirt before him. A dirt that was threaded by lines of collapse in the final smudges of light, and the light of the dead. Dirt that had given way and sunk suddenly into a depression.

He did not need to reach out to the dead around him to know the shock, the fear and the unforseen deaths that they had experienced after the explosion erupted on the Spine’s foundation.