Crimson Shore

His chains were gone. The strange one had suddenly appeared, warning him of the Killing Men who were coming for him, and then broken his lock. He was free now. He could go anywhere — even to the Above Place. But he had been to the Above Place… and it was not as they had promised. They had lied. What he had dreamed about all his life was a lie. Like everything else they said. The sun, they had called it. All the pain they caused him, the Blooding Knife and the rest, they said would be made up for when, one day, they would take him to the Sun, the warm fire in the sky. Darkness gone, light everywhere.

Thinking of this, thinking of the pain, thinking of the lies, thinking of the cold blackness he had found in the Above Place, just like here, the rage came back. Stronger than ever.

He went toward the Dead Ends. After the woman.

55

From the time of her childhood, Constance had been no stranger to the dark. Despite the disorientation, she moved with a sense of purpose.

The walls were damp and dripping. Sometimes her fingers encountered spiders or millipedes that scrambled off in a panic when she brushed past them. She could hear rats, too, rustling softly, squeaking and skittering out of her way. The air smelled increasingly of fungus, slime, and rot. There was no movement of air, less and less oxygen. Clearly, there was no outlet in this direction.

Feeling along the wall, she came to a corner. She paused, listening. The only sound she could hear was the low rumble of surf, the vibration moving through the ground itself, and the faint drip-drip of water. All was quiet.

She slipped around the corner, her feet finding purchase on the damp floor, her hands tracing the wall. She brushed past an insect — a centipede — and it fell down her sleeve, wriggling frantically against her skin, and she paused to gently shake it out. She once again considered trying to find a place to hide, but rejected that as a strategy of last resort; the demon Morax certainly knew these tunnels better than she. With only a stiletto, and her hands shackled, she had no hope of killing him. After what he’d done to Gavin — what she had seen, and what she had heard — she knew she could expect the same from the creature.

There was no escape in this direction. She would have to get past Morax and get out the way she had come in.

* * *

A. X. L. Pendergast turned away from the two eviscerated bodies. He backtracked and ran down a side tunnel in the direction the screams had come from, even as they now died away with an ominous rapidity. But almost immediately he came to another division in the tunnel; he paused to listen intently, but in the fresh silence was no longer able to determine from which direction the screams had come.

The extent of the tunnels surprised him. They appeared to have been constructed over a long period of time, perhaps even centuries — clearly, the style of their building changed from one section to another, indicating the work of many years. They had a similar feeling to the catacombs that he had once explored in Rome: a secret place of worship. But there was more to these tunnels, as the bizarre symbols on the walls, the smell of occupation, and other stenches far worse, would attest.

Examining the ground, he took the left-hand branch, as that seemed to his eye the more traveled. It, too, branched several times, but he continued to stay on the more beaten path. After a few minutes, the tunnel turned a corner and he found himself staring at prison bars blocking the way ahead. Set into the bars was a metal door that yawned open. The smell emanating from the cul-de-sac beyond was so foul that it suggested long occupation with an utter lack of either hygiene or toilet facilities.