Through another crystal hallway, they reached a roughly circular chamber with no roof. There was no sky above her, so she did not think they were outside. The reflected light of the crystals only reached so far, and then the walls became common stone, eventually shrouding the way in darkness.

  A staircase of crystal spiraled the perimeter of the room nearly to the stone. Adeana walked with her all the way to the top, which ended at a small ledge. Vero could see easy and regular handholds in the last length of crystal before the rock.

  “Good luck to you, Ser Virgil.” Adeana kissed her, then turned and left. “Think on me kindly sometime,” she said, from the stair.

  “I will.”

  Vero looked up the long shaft which stretched above her through the core of the mountain. The stone surface was hardly sheer. Vero spied rougher places she could use as further handholds, which suggested that the climb would not be particularly difficult. There were also several ledges which looked large enough for her to stop and rest.

  Once she was in darkness, things would get more difficult. But she believed she could see a way to keep going by walking rather than climbing. She could also use spells to let her eyes take in more light. None of her reagents had been spoiled by their journey through the lake, possibly due to Adeana’s intervention.

  The nymph's boots and gloves possessed remarkable friction and made the climb very simple. They, and the cloak, were also wonderfully insulated to keep her warm.

  Even with the rapid pace she advanced, after several hours she still seemed no closer to the top. Looking back down, however, demonstrated the distance traversed to sufficiently queasy effect.

  She was precipitously high. If she fell, and the line she tethered herself to did not hold, then she would certainly die. There was only so much rope she could take with her, not enough to travel the whole way. Where she saw easy routes forward she would free climb as far as she felt safe before anchoring her next lifeline.

  Vero took advantage of a wide ledge to take a rest. She served herself a meal of salted herring Adeana packed away with her gear. Vero believed that she was beginning to develop a taste for their unusual texture. Dora would have been very pleased to know her appreciation of fish was growing. Once her dinner was over, she started to climb again.

  Climbing the interior of the mountain she was robbed of all heavenly bodies, and could only count on the rhythms of her own body. When she began to get hungry again, she suspected it must be evening. When she felt fatigue wearing on her, she knew it must be night.

  She camped on another wide ledge, which she tethered herself to securely. Vero never engaged in somnambulism, so far as she knew, but this would certainly be the worst possible place to discover the habit.

  When she woke the next morning, she performed a spell working to brighten her eyes. She made signs and prayed to those secret names of Luna which she knew for illumination. Then she made a mixture of ox liver oil, parsley, belladonna, and a few drops of her own blood, which she used to paint her eyelids. Now that she could see farther ahead of her, it appeared as though the end might be drawing near.

  Vero saw a rope ladder hanging from a roughhewn staircase ahead of her.

  She stretched out her limbs. The mental effects of her time in the nymph’s pool were fading, but her muscles were still very relaxed.

  What curious creatures nymphs were. Vero intended to return Adeana’s kindness, if she or one of her sisters were ever in need of aid.

  Were dryads also so friendly? Vero hoped to find out some day.

  At least she could free Adeana from the blight of the Black Palatine. If Vero could, she would put Adeana's lover Hector to his final rest as well.

  It well might not be possible. Hector knew the Curia; he was part of their scheme to extend their lives. Pentarch would want to know more. Only some of the Curia kept their correspondence with Hector, in secret. If she could find evidence, perhaps they could turn the tables on their enemies. Or, at least, finally discover their identities.

  If Hector was even still alive. What connection did he have to this Countess Elizaveta who now claimed his home?

  The rope ladder looked too old for Vero to trust it with her weight. She climbed beside it until she reached the staircase. The steps were very high, but also uneven, and her legs started to burn before she reached the top.

  The stairs terminated at a sudden drop she would not have seen without the benefit of her spell. A single thick rope hung down from a higher ledge. Vero tested her weight on it.

  It held. She shimmied up it, once she gave her legs a chance to rest.

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  The rope was anchored to a stone arch. It was bisecting the shaft, but only wide enough for a single person to cross at a time. The shaft was becoming narrower as she climbed.

  Next to her was a hallway that had been collapsed by natural walls crushing it from either side. Across the bridge from her was another thin staircase going up. She crossed carefully, but the arch bridge was steady under her. The distance beneath her still gave her vertigo.

  It was a slow climb. The fall would be all too fast if she took it.

  What was it about high places that drew out such strong reactions of Thanatos and anti-Thanatos all at once?

  The next staircase had more moderate steps, and they came at the same regular intervals. She suspected it was constructed at another time, and by another hand, then those below.

  There were more hallways she passed. Most were collapsed, but a few led to abandoned rooms covered in dust and cobwebs. She tried her best to stay out of the labyrinth, but at times a collapsed bridge or staircase would give her no other choice.

  She stayed in one of the lost rooms when she eventually halted for her mid-day meal. There, she debated the merits of climbing the shaft directly to the next staircase, or hoping to circumvent the fallen bridge ahead of her by venturing back into the halls.

  She decided to try the maze. The roof in the nearest hallway was low, but there was room to crawl under. She marked her way with chalk, and lit a torch for more light once she could stand upright again.

  The craftsmanship of the architecture had changed again. Now there were ornamental candle holders and other pieces of metalwork fused to the walls. The stairs through this layer were even smaller, but the overall construction was shoddier. Holes blocking her path were becoming more common as she went.

  She came around a corner and back into the main shaft. Above her, she could see castle rooms which had lost a wall and now lay exposed. There was a ledge beside her with an uneven brick surface. Several yards beyond that were a room she could climb into, and above that, was finally a firm roof which terminated the shaft.

  She climbed again, but almost in too great a hurry. Too much weight on a loose brick very nearly sent her plunging into oblivion. She caught herself with a start, and proceeded with more caution from there on.

  The chamber she was in looked like half a dining room. Now that she was at the end of the main shaft, she needed another way further up. Behind the broken dining room was an abandoned kitchen.

  The smell there was foul, but she found the end of a garbage chute from up in the inhabited parts of the castle. It was covered by a grate on her end.

  Vero judged the strength of it. The iron had corroded and it felt brittle in the frigid cold, which reasserted itself more strongly the further she ventured from Adeana’s grotto.

  She removed length of silk she typically used to bind her breasts and wrapped it around the grate bars. Using her sword in its sheath, she twisted the silk in a corkscrew until it was pulled tight. She shook the fatigue out of her arms and sucked in a deep breath. Then she strained with all her might until she felt the encouraging sensation of give, and one of the bars broke off completely.

  She then used the bar to replace her sword and repeated the process a further three times, until there was a gap of bent and broken bars large enough to crawl through up the chute.

  The steep angle and frequent patches of ice made the climb treacherous, but there was no hurry, and Vero made her way with careful effort. At the top, the chute opened into the cavernous undercroft of the castle.

  Vero lit another torch.

  The darkness receded and the vaulted arches above her came into focus. She was under a kind of four cornered dome. Each corner came down to a heavy stone pillar. Every segment would look, from above, like square spaces on a game board. There was a small hole in the exact center of the dome, directly above the shaft she entered through.

  She could see no walls, and it seemed like she might be standing in a limitless space of these regular geometric quadrants. Away from the chute, the air was completely still, but a cloud of fog covered the ground up to her knee.

  There was no noise or movement, but Vero had an uncomfortable sense that she was not alone. The feeling reminded her of waking as a child during the night, when it was too dark to see, but she instinctively knew that there were rats in the barley. There was something in the undercroft with her, somewhere out of sight.

  It had always been rats in her childhood nightmares. Perhaps that was all it was in the present, or bats… perhaps.

  No. This time, you, are the rat in the barley.

  Vero approached one of the pillars cautiously, looking for any runes carved into its surface which might indicate the presence of warding spells. There were none. She took the broken bar from her bag and tossed it between two of the pillars. It landed on the other side with a clang, which the tunnels amplified to terrifying proportions.

  Surely someone must have heard. The defenders would be descending on her at any moment. Then she could surrender and get this farce over with.

  But nothing happened, and so Vero decided that she must proceed further. Perhaps there really were only vermin hiding in the fog and darkness after all.

  She passed through the same space herself, stepping cautiously to check for either tripwires or pressure plates. She marked the path with chalk, and ran through the same procedure again in the next quadrant with the same result, always avoiding the center where she might fall down a chute like the one she climbed up.

  When she threw the bar for a third time, it vanished from sight with no sound at all. It was simply enveloped by the mist, and then gone. Then, after several moments of waiting, there was the distant sound of an impact. It came from somewhere far below her.

  Vero was certainly glad that it had been the bar and not her, but she also now had occasion to wish that she brought more weights with her. She marked that direction with an X and turned to her right. After debating which of her own pieces of equipment she could most afford to lose, she continued, using her dullest iron crossbow bolt.

  The way was clear, but then she turned left to return to her original direction again, after marking the way behind her as safe. She had no way to know where the exit to the undercroft was, but she felt that the most sensible thing to do was to find a wall and then follow it. There was no obvious reason not to take a safe and methodical approach.

  Vero felt her hairs stand on edge in instinctual horror. She did not see or hear anything, but there had been a change. She was now certain that something else was down in the undercroft with her.

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