“To what end? There is no cure. My husband raged, of course, as men will. I salved his need for retribution with a quest, an old fable I’d heard about a maddened god who grants wishes. I always knew it was folly, but he needed this, he needed to do…something.”

“Should I escape this place,” Pilgrim promised her, “I will be your vengeance.”

“I’m no seer, but I sense you have exacted enough of that in your time.” Her eyes flicked to the sword handle jutting above his shoulder. “That was not crafted by a human hand, and you detest it. I see it in your face every time you draw it. That is why you came here.”

He saw Priest raise a hand as they came to a more brightly lit stretch of walkway, bringing them to a halt. The additional illumination came from an opening at its far end through which Pilgrim could make out a trickle of daylight, revealing an expanse of stone so pockmarked it resembled the vast abandoned hive of unfeasibly large hornets. Looking up, the reason became obvious. The cavern roof above was riven with numerous holes, each wide enough to allow passage of a huge snake. Their irregular edges indicated they had been crafted over the course of many years by a near-constant drip of caustic venom.

“To step upon that is death,” Seeker stated flatly, her eyes lingering on the holes above. “It’s waiting.”

Maisha went into another round of coughing, the worst yet, her heaving so violent Pilgrim was forced to set her body down lest she wrest herself from his arms. “My pack,” she gasped. “I have something…to banish the pain.”

He unslung the pack from his shoulder and handed it to her, turning to the others as they bickered over their options.

“Why not just run across?” Book suggested.

“You’ve seen how swiftly it moves,” Seeker said. “We can’t hope to outrun it.”

“Perhaps,” his tongue emerged to lick at sweat-salted lips, “if we all ran as one. It—” his tongue licked again as his bright, moistened eyes flicked between their faces. “It can’t get us all.”

“Then you won’t object to going first,” she suggested, with a pointed glance ahead.

“I, ah, don’t run so fast. Why not,” his throat constricted in a hard swallow as he nodded at Chena, “send it first. As bait, I mean to say.”

“Shut your craven fucking mouth,” Seeker instructed. “I mean to say.”

“It goes against all sense to favour the life of a dumb beast over our own…”

He fell to an abrupt silence as Pilgrim stepped forward, clamping a hand on his fleshy shoulder. “There is some sense in your words,” he said, taking a firmer grip, “regarding bait.”