“I didn’t realize it would hit you so badly,” Kit said, handing him the exhausted bottle. Its glow was totally dead.

“Neither did I,” Gyre said. “Remind me not to do that again.” He took a long breath, stomach settling. “Are you okay?”

“So far.” She rummaged in her pouch and came up with a vial of nighteye, adding a drop to each of her eyes. After blinking for a moment, she stared around with huge, dark pupils. “Wow. This place is … big.”

“It is unique,” Naumoriel said. “We had never attempted anything like it before, and certainly nothing like it has been constructed since.” The canopy of his war-construct popped open, and he took a deep breath of the cold, dusty air. His undistorted voice echoed from the distant walls. “Welcome to the Leviathan’s Womb.”

Chapter 24

Maya had never traveled into the Shattered Peak mountains, except for her brief foray to Deepfire, but from everything she’d heard she expected it to be a difficult and dangerous affair. They’d agreed that speed was of the essence, so she’d used the bulk of her travel funds to buy three swiftbirds in Grace, and stocked up on supplies and maps to supplement Marn’s mumbled directions. Unlike the crossing from Uqaris, once they were away from Grace, the land was sparsely populated, so she and Tanax could protect the party from plaguespawn without risking exposure as centarchs. When they’d ridden out through Grace’s considerably less busy northern gate, just skirting the unmetal hull of Grace in Execution, Maya had prepared herself for a rigorous trip.

Instead, if anything, the journey had become more pleasant as they went along. The foothills of the mountains rose rapidly north of Grace, and they left the stifling heat of the plains behind. Maya’s swiftbird was a friendly, biddable creature named Blackbar for the color of her tail feathers, and her long, loping pace devoured the distance and coped easily with the rocky ground. Contrary to their name, swiftbirds were slower than a warbird over short distances, but they had much greater endurance, and Blackbar seemed to be able to maintain her steady stride indefinitely.

With the maps and a little guesswork, Maya surmised it was a five-day ride to the place Marn had specified, the foot of a tiny nameless valley at the bottom of a jagged mountain called Cracktooth. Away from the main passes, the map grew vague, but according to Marn all they had to do was find the outlet of a certain stream and follow it as it wound its way upward. Finding the right stream, in a mountain range full of little creeks fed by snowmelt, might be a challenge, but Maya was determined to try.