Basysus 30, 1278: Old smuggler tunnels beneath Arth Prayogar. Sometimes you just have to fake confidence with a swagger and hope death buys it…

I’ve always liked old buildings and ruins. They have a musty scent of history in the air. Memories that whisper in my ear, mixing with whatever crumbling dust gets kicked up.

Then there was the muggy, rocky underground realm of the Deeplands.

My boots stomped through a thin ribbon of gray runoff—my bad decisions slopping along with every step. The ground rumbled under my boots like an angry purr, then stopped. My plan wasn’t great. Still, I’d done what I had to, even if certain people didn’t like it very much.

Which meant that if this worked, Mikasi and Skarri would have the window they needed to grab Kiyosi.

The old smuggler tunnels reeked of damp desperation, boiled cabbage, and fresh-brewed hops for rutabaga beer. Maybe even beet-flavored beer—it was hard to tell. Within ten minutes, it blended into a soup of stink that slicked my tongue.

I held the hooded lantern higher. Water oozed off the walls in cloying, shimmering patterns. A suspicious combination of creamy slime and the cold sweat of limestone.

Put together? It was the source of that delightful murk stream I stepped in mid-tunnel that winked rank, stagnant rainbows. At least the skittering, cobalt-glowing, ceiling-mushroom herd was oddly soothing.

“Welcome to the Deeplands,” I muttered to no one in particular.

Sadly, a certain no one in particular had a lot to say about it.

“I hate you,” Garrik Perlana hissed under his breath before he tugged his gray cloak tighter. “Worse? I hate me, because I let you talk me into this!”

“Oh, I know,” I replied in a low singsong voice, my smile all sunshine and rainbows as I flipped my braid over my shoulder. Then I fixed him with an exasperated stare before I added grimly, “But you’re safer here than being locked up in the Shackle.”

“No, I am not,” he retorted, with a nervous glance at the mushroom herd as they migrated to the wall in a flutter of bat wings. “Here, I’m a dead man walking.”

My grin was all sharp edges.

“Hm, couldn’t have happened to a better elf or thief. But, no. You were a dead man locked up in the Shackle where that lich could’ve murdered you.”

Garrik made a sour face, then stepped lightly around a lumpy, gray tube that slimed along the ground. I wasn’t sure what it was, other than that it undulated, had teeth, and smelled of swamp.

“How is this better, with a lich and her bodyguards walking a few paces behind us?” he deadpanned while we scouted the tunnel.

A shadow moved the wrong way on the ceiling. I grabbed Garrik by the front of his cream-tan shirt and yanked.

He stumbled almost face-first into the rock wall next to me as a dark shape whipped out of the ceiling. Long and thick as an arm with greasy, pebbled scales, the thing stabbed at where Garrik—or really his neck—had been. It slowly recoiled up into its near-hidden rock hole.

Flinty eyes glared daggers at us. It hissed past its circular sucker mouth of sharp, saw-like teeth. I could almost see the yellowed venom, but I might have imagined that part.

“Oh, by the sweet Raven Mother, a cave spiker,” Garrik exhaled as he tapped the back of his head lightly against the rock and rubbed his neck.

After another slow breath, Garrik shrugged off my white-knuckled grip with a perturbed look. He pushed off the wall and smoothed the wrinkles from his gray-and-green outfit as his hands trembled. I understood—we all needed a way to settle our nerves.

“Deeplands,” he mumbled. “Why did it have to be the Deeplands?”

A tremor lightly rattled the rocky tunnel around us for a second. Pebbles rattled loose as two glowing mushrooms fluttered by in a fast panic in front of my lantern. Garrik shot a look of both deep unease and frustration at me.

“Again, how is this better?”

I looked back to make sure Lady Nimad and her hired muscle were out of earshot. Then I glanced around us to check that my new elemental friend, Azure, lurked nearby. Both were true. I shot Garrik a narrow-eyed glare.

“It’s better, because now, Lady Nimad thinks you’re the brilliant thief who supposedly escaped the worst prison in the whole kingdom of Jata. Also, you’re a very loyal thief who ran to her instead of yelping to the Trade-Wardens.”

Garrik glanced away and clenched his jaw muscles.

“Delightful. Just so I can be your damn pack mule to carry those unstable poisons? Basically bait until your pet elemental ambushes everyone? You are a lunatic. This is a stupid plan. We are going to die.”

Azure melted out of a limestone runoff to our right just long enough to flip Garrik off. I named her Azure on the ride there—she didn’t object. Quietly, she slipped out of sight, eyeing him warily.

“I agree with Azure,” I snarled.

“Everything still fine?” Lady Nimad called from back down the tunnel. “Garrik, my dear, is the Windtracer dead? Do we need a fresh one?”

I jabbed Garrik in the ribs rapidly with a finger. He swatted at me as if I were a mosquito.

“Why, of course, my Lady Nimad. It’s fine. I just had to save the Windtracer from a cave spiker. She’s rather clumsy. No true grace at all.” His voice held an equal measure of mockery and a mild attempt at snide, noble arrogance. “Something about not liking snakes.”

“Ah, of course. Well, we all have cracks in our armor.” The cool, skin-crawling giggle from the lich echoed along the mold-slick tunnel. “Do your best with her. Remember, when we’re done, I’ve a personal reward waiting for you, my dear.”

“Snakes?” I growled under my breath with a glare, scrunching my nose. “Also… ‘my dear’? A ‘personal reward’? Just ew! That’s a lich! She’s one of the walking dead!”

“Shut up!” Garrik hissed. “If you get to improvise, then so do I, damn it. Now, let’s just get this over with.”

I jabbed him in the gut again with a finger and made him flinch.

“Fine. Then draw a dagger and hold it on me. Try to look like a menacing elven mercenary, not a limp noodle with bad fashion sense!”

Garrik looked mortified while he drew a dagger and pointed it at me.

“I do not have bad fashion sense!” he snapped.

The only answer I offered was a sour expression before I stomped forward.

Worst volunteer kidnapping and cave exploration ever.

Between the Trade-Warden maps and what I memorized of the stonemason model, I knew this was the correct direction. But there were dozens of small side tunnels that branched off. It was like holes in a demented giant cake made of gray, wet, pearlescent stone—with no landmarks.

“There has to be something here,” I murmured. “A mark, a sign. Something only the viprin stonemasons would notice to mark the right path.”

I found what I had hoped for a few steps later.

It was a carving low on the wall near the tunnel floor, etched into a blotch of brown stone veiled with milky quartz. The palm-sized carving was next to where yet another side tunnel split off from our main one.

The carving showed the snake-like face of the Storm-shed Sister with her sunbeam halo. First of the Sunfate Sisters, and the one associated with birth, rising, and the dawn. When I felt the water-slick ground nearby, my fingers brushed grooves of ancient wheel ruts in the limestone.

I swapped an uneasy look with Garrik. It was now or never, and never likely meant dead.

“That way,” I said loud enough to make my voice carry. Only I indicated a different tunnel across from us.

Azure flitted like a watery shadow over the floor to take up position just inside the opening I pointed at. She shaped a part of herself to mimic the Sunfate emblem I’d found in an easy-to-see location.

Garrik turned his eyes upward and muttered at least three prayers.

“Lady Nimad?” he called out in that bored, arrogant tone. “The Windtracer has finally found the tunnel. It has a Sunfate Sister mark.”

The lich caught up to us in a flurry of her black Fateweaver cloak disguise and monk’s robes. Her grin was as sharp as a polished knife. Three human bodyguards in gray cloth armor ran behind her. They spread out in an honor guard position as Garrik pointed at the wrong tunnel.

“Are we certain this is the right path?” Lady Nimad asked Garrik skeptically. The look she gave me was pure, cold poison. “She’s a rather inventive woman.”

It’s always nice to be noticed.

“Yes, it is. Let my best friend go, lich,” I snarled. The tremor in my voice was real. So was my rage.

Lady Nimad’s smile made my stomach turn.

“Soon enough. Garrik? How did she find it?” the lich asked coolly.

Garrik swallowed, but stepped forward and tapped the rock wall above the fake Sunfate emblem.

“This symbol.”

Lady Nimad slowly squatted down and peered at it with an almost reverent look on her face. Then she frowned.

“It looks… damp?” she mused uneasily. “Wait. Did it blink?”

I jerked in surprise when a watery fist snapped off the limestone runoff and punched the lich into the opposite wall.

Chaos erupted like a sudden magic storm.

The lich hit the far wall with a bone-jarring crunch. A normal person would have been a mildly interesting paste. But Lady Nimad simply grabbed the broken parts of herself and slowly snapped them back into place.

Her bodyguards were less efficient. Stunned by the moment, they glanced around in confused alarm. At the same time, Garrik tossed over my whip, dagger, and a vial of Mikasi’s fun elixir. I snarled and let my whip do the talking.

It cracked twice, splitting the air. One bodyguard jerked back, sword hitting the ground. The second was a touch faster, but still recoiled when the whip slapped his knuckles as he tried to hurl a knife. The blade sailed high and wide to my right.

Nearby, Garrik sidestepped the last bodyguard. He ducked under a sword slice, then rammed a knife into the man’s gut. The bodyguard wheezed out precious air as pain stole his knees out from under him.

Azure grabbed his legs, then slammed the man’s head against the stone floor. He twitched, then lay still.

Victory was short-lived as Lady Nimad got to her feet with a snarl.

“I’ll devour you!”

“You two need a moment?” I asked Garrik with a grin.

“By the Raven Mother, shut up about that!” he groaned with a ragged sigh, raising his knife in defense.

Dark red magic boiled around Lady Nimad’s fingers as she pulled magic threads from the dying bodyguard’s blood. Those threads coiled, burned, then stabbed bloody fire at us.

“Down!” I yelled as I tackled Garrik.

Flames stabbed overhead as we hit damp rock. Fetid smells turned sour as magic flame burnt slime to the odor and color of old vomit. I gasped, scrunched my nose, and rolled over to hurl the vial at Lady Nimad with everything I had.

She lunged at us just as the vial shattered against her jaw.

Blue-black powder-smoke, thick as soupy fog, exploded around the lich like a ghostly hug. The ground rumbled again, growling like a hungry stomach.

Lady Nimad shrieked. Face a mask of twisted rage, she tried to dive out of the cloud, fingers burning with another spell. She barely managed a step before Azure pulled herself out of the water running down the rock wall behind her. The elemental grabbed the lich and flung her back into the smoke.

The fog swarmed the undead woman like a starving specter. Lady Nimad’s screams strangled away as her body froze, muscles rigid. But while she was paralyzed, her spell wasn’t.

That uncontrolled enchanted fire turned into a savage eruption.

“Run!” I yelled to Garrik, Azure, even the surviving bodyguards. “Back the way we came!”

We managed two steps before the spell detonated.

Flames turned the tunnel into a stone oven. Searing heat blasted in all directions, down every passageway. I felt my skin grow hot, like I’d nearly touched a frying pan. Limestone powdered and stone cracked with a craggy rumble. The ground quaked worse than before.

I glanced up to see Garrik stare at me wide-eyed, frozen in terror.

“Get out! Tell the others!” I shouted and waved as the tunnel snapped to pieces.

Garrik retreated as I stumbled to my feet and tried to run, arms over my head. But the tunnel’s ceiling crumbled into an avalanche of glowing flying mushrooms, broken sandstone, and worse.

The last thing I felt was a sudden yank into darkness.

After that? Nothing.