The other traps of the Fog Road are no less gut-wrenching—and occasionally, actually gut-wrenching. I look down at my flayed-open stomach and at the bit of hanging intestine there with faint amusement through the ripping pain.

“H-Hello again. I’d n-nearly forgotten what you looked like.”

The heavy, rhythmic thwump of the blades swinging in and out of slots in the wall drowns out Lucien’s shouts to me. We’ve tripped something accidentally, and the blades don’t seem to be stopping. I dodge out of the way of another swinging for my head, blood squelching down my legs. Five, six—seven of them, all of them longer than my entire body and sharper than my most deadly incisors. How do I stop them? The mortals will never make it through here, and Lucien can’t teleport us—his witchfire has been flickering wildly the farther down we go. Magic is hard to do in the Dark Below; Varia had the same problem when she was trying to capture a valkerax to find the Bone Tree. Malachite swings his broadsword with a weighty overhead strike, meeting the first swinging blade head-on, and for a second he makes it pause, the veins in his biceps and forehead straining.

“Go!” he bellows. Fione and Yorl and Lucien all duck beneath it, to the space between it and the next blade. I claw into my mind, trying to pull up the Weeping, but it’s even harder than it was near the surface—like someone’s been moving it away from me bit by bit this whole time I’ve been walking. Malachite whirls, letting the swinging blade go and joining the others in the in-between space.

“Body!” the beneather mouths at me. “We trade off!”

His ruby eyes flick to the next swinging blade, and I get it. I don’t like it, but I get it. Lucien hates it, but his shouts for me to stop are drowned by the grinding of metal and stone.

“Gods bless this absolute mess,” I mutter, waiting for the next blade to swing down, and I jump between it and the wall slot. The impact knocks the wind out of my lungs, and the sharp edge of the blade knocks my lungs out of my body quite literally, honeycomb-gray peeking through my ribs and the wall behind me splattering red with my blood. But still the blade doesn’t lose momentum, grinding me against the wall with vicious fervor. It’s worse than being speared by any human, but not nearly as bad as being ripped apart by Evlorasin’s thousands of serrated teeth. I can manage—or at the very least, I can hold the blade back for a few seconds.