“As far as I can,” he said. “If you believe that the Order is at stake, don’t hesitate to leave me behind if you must.”

Slowly, Maya nodded. She checked her haken and her panoply, then followed the tunnel up into the darkness, Tanax keeping pace by her side.

Dust still billowed around them from where they’d cut their way into the tunnel. Maya touched her haken and created a small sphere of light, but it still only showed a little ways ahead, as though they were walking into a fogbank.

“This place has been quiet for a very long time,” Tanax said. “Do you think—”

Two figures lurched suddenly out of the murk. Maya recognized them as the strange plaguespawn whose corpses they’d seen earlier—human in shape, underlying muscle black instead of red, with metal skins instead of splintered bone. They looked—better constructed, somehow, than the usual nightmare amalgamations of human and animal parts, as though someone had put them together deliberately instead of simply pressing fresh bits in whenever they could be had. Barbs and blades gleamed all across their metal armor.

Maya raised a hand and sent a wave of fire at the first one. The flames reached it but broke across its surface, withering into nothingness. She glanced at Tanax.

“That’s new,” she said.

He raised his haken, the twisted blade forming. “Let’s see how they like being cut to pieces, then.”

Tanax charged, meeting the second monster head-on, ducking the swing of its bladed fist and slashing up and across its blank faceplate. Part of its head fell away, and it staggered back a few steps but quickly recovered. The other plaguespawn turned to attack Tanax from behind, and Maya ignited her own haken and drove it through the thing’s midsection. The creatures might not have looked like plaguespawn, but they bled the same, thick black gore gouting from the wound. It spun, both arms reaching for her in a bear hug, and Maya danced back out of range.

The monster was smarter than it had any right to be, too. It used the greater reach of its long arms to keep her at bay, as though it were playing for time. Maya chopped a dozen small pieces out of each limb but couldn’t land a killing blow, and in the meantime Tanax and the second monster had vanished up the ramp and into the billowing dust. Frustrated, she feinted to one side, then bulled forward, letting metal blades scrape against her panoply field as she pivoted on one foot and brought her haken around in a horizontal arc. Blood hissed and charred in the flames, and the strange plaguespawn fell into two pieces, bisected at the waist. Even then, it kept struggling, and Maya skirted its remains as she hurried onward. She was breathing hard, the chill of drained energy from her panoply fading only gradually.