The complete lack of sound in the Dark Below started to break apart long ago, interrupted by faint hissing, bangs echoing, the sounds of footsteps. Civilization. Even the smell changes—moss and sterile stone replaced by cooking oil and metal and tobacco smoke. The door is made of stone like the tunnel is, like everything in the Dark Below is.

Malachite turns to us, knitting his fingers in his broadsword handle. “If they ask you questions, don’t say shit. Let me handle it.”

“I thought you’ve been disowned?” Fione lilts.

“I can speak to them,” Yorl asserts. “My grandfather was a prominent figure here—”

“If I hear you say ‘my grandfather’ one more time, I’m gonna make you meet him,” Malachite snaps.

I slide in and put a hand over Malachite’s mouth, smiling at Yorl. “I’ll go first. I’m a great talker.”

“A greab horbseshitter,” Malachite grumbles through my fingers. But when I release him he plays mild and leans on the stone door to crack it open for us. I blink away the light, everything so bright and sudden, and walk over the threshold.

The feeling of a blade at my throat is almost immediate, but I can’t see them through the eye-searing light. Sound works a little better.

“Who are you? Identify yourself immediately or face death!”

The voice means business, so ragged and furious, the joke in my throat dies. The clink of bone armor and the feel of cold steel against my neck. I adjust slowly to the sight of a beneather holding a fanged dagger to me, the same dagger design I’ve seen on Malachite’s hip. The room is well-lit by clusters of brightmoss in clay jars, the kind I grew used to in the underground arena where Yorl and I trained Evlorasin. But this moss is much brighter and all in the same golden-orange color, nearly simulating the hue of fire torches. Incredibly intricate and rich tapestries line the walls in the hundreds, made of what looks like white valkerax hair stained in differing shades of green and rust. Remarkably, they’ve gotten the persistent valkerax-y smell of blood out of it; the whole room thick with the saccharine smell of incense and oiled metal.

“My name is Zera Y’shennria,” I say slowly. “And I have some information for the ancestral council about the valkerax horde.”

The eyes of the guard holding the dagger to me widen, the ruby a darker wine-red than Malachite’s but their skin the same paper-bloodless-white, if a little grayer. Their eyes dart to the door behind me, and the guard barks, “The rest of you come out. Now.”

Lucien, Fione, and Yorl ooze around the door, but when Malachite comes out, the guard’s eyes narrow.

“Olt’reya,” they say with a full snake’s worth of venom.