Month 1, Day 6
The steps down into the temple were cut for giants, not for us. Each one came up past my knee. I went down them sideways, one hand flat on the cold wall, my sword scraping and knocking on the stone with every step. The blade was too heavy for me. It had been too heavy since I took it off the rack, and a giant's staircase in the dark did nothing to make it lighter.
Two torches lit our way, one at the front with Basha and one at the back. The rest of us walked in the thin strip of light between them. On both sides of that strip there was only black.
The night before, we had stood at the top of these same steps and heard something climb up them. It came slow and heavy through the dark, setting its weight down one stair at a time, and then it had gone quiet. None of us ever saw it. Now we were walking down to find it.
Jonas came down right behind me. His bad knee made the tall steps hard for him, and his breath kept catching in his teeth.
"You good?" I asked him, quiet.
"Yeah." He stopped on a step. "No. Ask me at the bottom."
"There's a bottom," Rafi said from above him. "Everything's got a bottom. Just take it slow."
"It's the bottom I'm worried about," Jonas said.
Nikita was a few steps below me, moving easy, not bothered by the dark. He didn't turn around. "Less talking," he said. "Watch your feet."
That shut us up. We kept going down.
The steps ended without warning, and the room opened in front of me. It was big. The two torches threw their light out ahead and it caught nothing at all, just spilled into the black and died. For a second I had no idea how large the place was.
Then the nearest wall came into the light, and I understood where we were standing.
It was an arena. A huge round one, cut down into the rock. I had seen the shape before, in pictures from back home. Wide stone steps ran down in rings, all the way around the room, each ring lower than the last, down to a flat circle of floor at the very bottom and center. A crowd was meant to sit in those rings and watch a fight down in the middle. Someone had carved one of those down here, in the dark, under the dead city.
I lifted my torch to find the ceiling. There wasn't one over the middle. A great round hole had been cut clean through the rock, high above the center circle, and the trunk of the tree climbed up through it. The bark went past my light and kept going, up into nothing. I couldn't find the top of it. Cold air slid down through the hole and moved past us, down toward the floor.
"I don't like this room," Jonas said behind me.
"Quiet." Basha was already counting us, her eyes moving down the line, the way she did before anything else. Then she pointed her spear at the wall. "There. That slab. Could be a door."
A flat panel of stone was set into the wall of the top ring, smooth and shut, taller than any of us.
The dwarf went to it and ran his hand along the edge. "Maybe. Hard to tell." He pulled the blue blade off the head of his hammer, fit the edge into the seam, and hit the back of it with his palm.
A chip broke off the blade and rang on the floor. The slab didn't move.
"Again," Rafi said. "Come on, maybe it's just stuck."
The dwarf hit it again, harder. Another piece of the blade snapped off. He swore, then held the edge up to the torch and looked at it.
"No." He lowered it. "This is the same stone they sealed the gate with. Same cut, same everything. I'd break every blade we've got and never crack it."
"So there's no way out," Jonas said. His voice had gone thin.
"There's that hole up top, and there's down." The dwarf nodded at the dark below. "That's the whole list."
Basha looked down the rings toward the circle at the bottom. "Then we go down. We stay together, we keep the lights up, and we find another way. Move."
Nobody had taken a step when the laughing started.
The sound came out of the walls and the floor and the black above us, all at the same time. It wasn't loud. The laugh was slow and easy, almost gentle, and it went on far too long, longer than any person could keep going.
Every one of us froze on the steps.
"Okay, that's new," Rafi whispered. "I really, really didn't want new."
A voice came next, out of everywhere, the same as the laugh had.
"You came all the way down here." It sounded pleased with itself. "Walked right into my trap. Every last one of you. And you brought your little fire."
The voice had come from above us, so we all looked up.
High on the trunk, where my torchlight gave out, something moved. The shape was coming down toward us, and it was coming fast.
It dropped headfirst, grabbing the bark and letting go and catching it lower, over and over. The closer it got, the bigger it looked, and my stomach sank lower the bigger it got. Near the bottom it let go for good and fell the last stretch. The thing hit the flat circle in the center of the arena, down at the foot of the rings. Something that size should have hit the floor with a crash. It barely made a sound at all.
Then it stood up.
It rose and rose, until its head was level with us, high as the ring we stood on. I had to look down to find its feet on the circle and back up to find its head. My torch only caught pieces of it at a time, and not one of the pieces was right.
"It's just one," Rafi said, fast. "Just one of them. One we can maybe..." His voice ran out before the sentence did.
The thing had a face. None of the others ever did. The creatures we had fought on the way down had smooth blank fronts and a head that swung toward your warmth, nothing else. This one had a face, and set in the middle of it was a single eye. One huge eye, round and wet and dark, with no second eye beside it. The eye rolled slowly across our line and paused on each of us in turn.
I had seen it before. Mirae spoke before I could find the words.
"That eye." Her voice came small and shaking from behind me. "It's on the walls upstairs. The carvings, remember, the crowd all kneeling under the big eye. This is the thing they were kneeling to." She had gone white. "They knew it was down here."
Below the eye sat a mouth, far too wide, hanging open a crack. Teeth filled it in rows, more rows than a mouth should hold. Its arms came down too far past its body, and the joints folded twice where mine folded once.
The eye reached me and stopped. My legs locked up. Every part of me wanted to run, and not one part of me could.
"Eyes front." Basha's voice was low and tight. "I don't care what that is. We hold together."
The head leaned to one side. It looked us over, slow and patient, in no rush at all. One of those long arms came up over the rings toward us. Somebody yelled. The hand closed around Viktor and plucked him off the steps.
"Hold!" Basha threw her arm across the line. "Stay back. Nobody move."
The thing lifted Viktor into the air, turned him over once, and set him back down on the stone. He crawled away from it, gasping. A low sound came rolling up out of its chest, rising and falling, again and again. It was laughing at him. We were small things it had found, and it was having fun with us.
The eye turned up toward the hole in the ceiling, and it spoke again, not to us this time.
"I was told to wait." It kept the eye on the dark above. "He said be patient. The rest of them are still up there, waiting their turn, good and quiet." The eye dropped back to us. "I got bored of waiting."
The voice sank lower, and the easy sound drained out of it.
"You were always the favorites. His little toys. He kept you up in the light and shut us down here in the dark. We suffered for it the whole time, while he loved you." Something ugly moved under the words. "And you never even knew."
I still had no idea what it meant. While it talked, I kept looking for a way out, because looking is the one thing I'm any good for. That's how I found them.
All around the arena, behind the rings, the walls were broken by dark archways. My torchlight reached only the closest few. Every archway it touched was full. The faceless things stood crammed inside, packed in tight, perfectly still, their blank heads all pointed in toward the middle. In toward us.
Then I understood the whole of it. The rings of steps were seats. Those archways ran all the way around the arena, and every one of them was packed, far more of the things than I could ever count. They had come to watch. We were standing down in the middle of their arena, and we were the show.
My hands were shaking around the torch and the sword. The watchers in the archways were worse than the thing in the middle, so I kept my eyes off them.
I looked back at our group, and a gap in the line caught my eye. Antoine had been standing on the far right, near the lowest archway. His place on the steps was empty. I saw him for half a second longer, a shape slipping down past the edge of the torchlight, heading toward the dark at the bottom of the arena. After that, nothing. None of the others had noticed. Every face near me was turned down at the thing in the center. I said nothing. There wasn't enough air left in my chest to spend on it.
Basha stepped out in front of us and lifted her spear.
"Close up. Stay on me." Her voice was hard and flat. "There's nowhere to run, so nobody runs. We make him work for it."
We raised our weapons. That was when I saw the light.
My sword was glowing. The blue blade had gone bright, lit from somewhere deep inside the stone itself. Every weapon we carried did the same, all of them glowing a cold blue at once, throwing our shadows up the steps behind us. None of us had done a thing to start it. The light just came on by itself.
Mirae was staring at her own blade. "There are marks on it," she said. The words came out fast and shaking. "I never saw them before. The marks from the walls, the ones I couldn't read, they're carved right into the blade. Now they're glowing." She swallowed hard. "I don't understand what this is."
None of the rest of us did either.
Down in the center, the thing went still. Its head stopped leaning. The huge eye fixed on our glowing blades and jumped from one to the next, counting them. It took a step back, toward the middle of the circle. Nothing had made it back away until now.
"Where did you get those." The pleased, lazy sound was gone from its voice. "Those blades. Who put them in your hands." The eye snapped over to Basha. "They don't belong to you. Those were never meant for your kind."
Nikita stood at my shoulder with a spear in each hand. He kept his eyes on the thing, calm and still.
"One eye," he said. "So we take the eye."
The thing came up off the circle and straight at us. Our blades shone blue against the dark. And the fight began.