They had left the bridge behind an hour before, entering the huge arched portal at the point where it met the granite massif. Maisha had initially refused to move, speaking in a monotone whisper, her eyes empty of anything save grief. Seeker eventually coaxed her to her feet, though the combined depredations of her loss and illness meant Pilgrim had to assist in conveying her into the tunnel. Their way was lit by an iron torch with dry coals in its basket found sitting in a stanchion at the tunnel mouth, presumably another gift from servants of the Church who had sacrificed themselves to prepare the way. At Pilgrim’s insistence, Maisha had partaken of her curative at their first rest stop a mile or so into the featureless passage. She drank it all in one gulp and tossed the bottle aside before sinking down into a huddle, knees drawn up and face buried in her crossed arms.

With its attention fixed on Player, the voice felt no need to offer dark witticisms on Maisha’s grief or observe that the loss of her husband might mean she no longer felt any desire to pray to the Mad God. These conclusions Pilgrim reached by himself, though they shamed him. Her intervention had saved his life, and he retained an attachment to the notion of an unpaid debt.

He won’t be easy to kill, my liege, the voice said, its concern expressed in a sharp thrum from the sword. Pilgrim glanced over at Player, sitting nearby and rubbing his ribs as he sighed in apparent distress. It would help if I knew his rank. I’d guess Fourth Circle…

Pilgrim closed his mind as it droned on, as it was given to do when obsession took hold. Once it had chattered on for three solid weeks without interruption regarding the need to kill an outlaw band on the western coast of the Fifth Sea, the result of some ancient vendetta birthed long before Pilgrim had ever grasped the sword’s handle. In the end he had hunted down and killed every miscreant over the course of two months just to shut it up. In the aftermath, he began to take a keener interest in tales of the Execration and the Mad God who answered the prayers of those willing to risk its countless dangers.

“I assume this tunnel has a name?” he asked Priest who sat close by. “Everything in this place seems to.”

The young cleric seemed distracted, his eyes set in the concentrated stare of one subsumed in memory. “The Supplicants’ Path,” he said after a short interval. “The route followed by those who survived the Crucible’s scrutiny.”

“May we assume,” Player said, the empty ovals of his mask tracking over the bare brick of the tunnel wall, “it will not be as uninteresting as this for its entire length?”