Thirty-Six

Less time passed than in the previous hallway, or so Toinette thought. She hadn’t yet gotten into the habit of counting footsteps or breaths. After enough time she felt she might pick it up, as little purpose as it would serve. They were there for as long as it took, the labyrinth was as large as it was, and trying to learn too much about the place might well lead to madness or, at best, headaches. Counting would be a way to occupy her mind, as prisoners were said to make marks on the walls of their dungeons. She wasn’t that desperate yet.

So she wasn’t sure how long they’d been walking when a second hall crossed theirs, and she didn’t much care. She breathed out through her teeth and stood with Erik, staring down the options: three more paths instead of two this time, and no doors.

“Thread or breadcrumbs?” she asked, remembering tales she’d heard abroad.

“Cloth.” Whether Erik knew the stories or not, he followed the trail of her speech well. He held up one arm. “Cut at the elbow, if you will. I’d rather not take the time to get undressed. And don’t have the hand off with it.”

“I’ll try to resist the temptation,” said Toinette. “I’m only glad you volunteered. I’ve little enough left to sacrifice.”

“I noticed.” He cast a glance down her figure—lingering at her breasts and then her half-bare legs—that warmed her despite their grim surroundings.

She flashed a smile back. “Don’t distract me while I’ve got a knife.”

Cutting off the sleeve without piercing skin was indeed a small challenge, but the cloth did fall without any bloodstains added to the general grime of their travel. Toinette picked it up and began cutting it into strips: small, but with luck still visible on the floor in front of a passage.

“Rightmost?” she asked. “It’s not likely to be worse than the others.”

“Aye,” Erik began, then stopped short and stared. “Look there.”

He pointed with his bare arm. The skin above his wrist was paler than the rest by several shades. As he gestured to a blurry spot of red above the center door, he looked momentarily like a saint in a window, indicating a mystery revealed.

In very broad strokes, Toinette supposed there was a similarity. She had no intention of telling Erik as much.

The shape lasted longer. It became a square before it started to fade at the corners, then blinked out of sight, leaving Toinette and Erik frowning at a patch of empty wall above a passage.

“Might be a trap,” she said again.

“Or it might not,” said Erik. “It’s not us making it happen, I know that much, for how would we have an idea of what path to take? And if this place must obey certain rules, or was constructed for a particular use, why such indication?”

“Unless it’s a warning not to go that way. Or points to the only safe path.” Toinette thought of the red glow on the mast and frowned as she spoke. Surely a mere sign, of any sort, would have been on the door or at the base of the mast, not the handholds. It wasn’t material. “Six of one, half a dozen of the other. We might as well.”

They kept to the middle, though the path didn’t remain straight for very long. It twisted around corners, rose and fell over hills, and, as it led Erik and Toinette onward, began to change again. Glimmers began to appear in the walls, like those in the rocks Toinette had seen elsewhere. The stone took on variegated shades.

Erik nearly stumbled over the first roughness in the floor. He caught himself on one wall, pulled his hand back quickly—neither of them wanted to leave their skin long in contact with any part of the temple—and blinked down at the uneven surface. “I’ll be damned,” he said.

“Likely we both will,” said Toinette, but she felt it less inescapably true than she had in the rooms before.

“It’s not so foul-smelling here either,” Erik remarked after sniffing the air. “Not pleasant, but not as bad as it was.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Toinette said, but she realized she could: the cold stench didn’t invade her nose any longer. She’d gotten so accustomed to it that being able to smell her own sweat instead was startlingly pleasant. “If it is a trap, they know how to lure us.”

“Thank you for that.”

“At your service, my lord,” she said with a mocking bow.

* * *

The smell kept dwindling as they went on, and the light gradually became dimmer as well. In the forest, that had been another sign of dread to come; this time, Erik welcomed it. Were they underground, which seemed likely, darkness was natural. In a similar spirit he rejoiced as the walls became rougher, though his toes were less philosophical about matters after the third time he stumbled.

Taking Toinette’s warning to heart, he didn’t let his guard down. For a time they both walked with drawn swords, but the tunnel narrowed as it became more mundane. Letting him take the lead, Toinette switched to her knife. “If I do trip,” she said, “this is less likely to end up in your kidneys.”

“Odd. I would have thought you’d be glad of the excuse.”

She slapped him lightly on the shoulder. “You’ve not been that insufferable. And if I stab you on purpose, it won’t be in the back.”

With such jokes did they guide each other through the darkness, half reverting to the youths they’d once been—but now, with months of shared work and fear joined to the intimacy of their shared bodies, the jesting words were comfort rather than combat. Any too-strong sentiment would weigh them down and might be a tool for the spirits of the temple. With humor, they kept each other aloft, or at any rate walking.

It was after one such exchange that Erik noticed how the wet breathing was quieter. Their footsteps were no longer steady, broken up by the terrain, but the sound was more of the daylight world. He breathed easier himself, having lost a heaviness on his chest that he hadn’t been aware of before.

Then, once again, there were two doors: identical, wooden, and small enough that both he and Toinette would have to duck when passing through either. On one of them, the red light shone more boldly and steadily than Erik had seen it before. This time, he could easily make out the shape: a four-armed red cross, the limbs of equal length and all wider at the ends than the center.

The emblem of the Templars.

* * *

Beyond the door was a cave. The entrance was narrow at first, as well as short, but quickly opened up until Toinette could stand at her full height without dashing her skull against the ceiling and walk abreast with Erik. Beyond that, the cave didn’t get much larger, and it only stretched back a short way into the darkness.

It was dark. The eerie light had vanished. Toinette had no urge to complain. Had she been completely mortal, she would have been blind, but to her, the darkness only came as a relief. She’d stopped feeling the pull of the temple’s light after she’d refused it the first time, but its presence had still lingered.

Knife in hand, she looked around and quickly saw the distinguishing features of the cave.

At the end farthest from the door, a row of stalagmites half hid four shapes. Each was covered in cloth, but their size and outline gave their nature away immediately. Toinette went forward not out of any uncertainty but to see what other details she could make out.

From the darkness beyond the shrouded bodies, the skeleton grinned at her.

To any logic, one corpse more was no great matter, even if that one was undraped. That Toinette gasped and her heart began racing when she saw it was therefore damned embarrassing, and she hoped Erik hadn’t noticed. As a disguise, she stated the obvious. “So. Five of them. Plus the ones we buried. If there were more, likely they drowned on the way—or died elsewhere on the island.”

“So I’d think, aye,” said Erik. He drew closer to her, which gave him a better angle on all the bodies. Toinette doubted that was the only reason, just as she knew it was no accident of space that pressed her against his side. They were still solid, still living. It counted for a great deal at the moment.

The skeleton still wore the rusted remains of chain mail and helmet. He sat with a Templar’s shield across his lap and his head thrown back against the wall, and from a distance Toinette could see no clear means of his death. Then she took a few steps closer and spotted the jeweled handle of a dagger protruding from his ribs. One hand still gripped it.

“He killed himself,” she said, shaking her head. Toinette had heard of that a few times, mostly in silly stories about young people thinking their lovers were dead and acting foolishly, but she’d never thought to see it done, or even the aftermath. To one bent on self-murder, there were considerably better options—unless, she thought as she looked at the body, there weren’t.

“One of them could have stabbed him,” Erik said. “A quarrel—”

“What, and then he buried the others with a dagger in his breast?” Each of the shrouded forms had a crude cross over the breast, made of bits of rock carefully laid out. No blood stained the cloth.

“Well—no. A wound like that would’ve killed him almost instantly, unless it’s shallower than it looks.” Erik peered at the body and then shook his head. “The spot’s just right. And the angle. He’d have been a soldier, of course, but even so, the will it must have taken!”

Toinette thought of the man they’d killed outside the temple. “That’s two death-seekers,” she said.

“Aye. And this one had sworn himself to the Church.”

“Men discard those oaths when it suits them,” said Toinette, but still the gravity of it shook her.

They stood silent in the cave. It didn’t feel so wrong as the rest of the temple, but solemnity was in the very air they breathed. Men had died here, and likely killed as well—and not, Toinette thought, with the heat of a battle. One had survived to bury the others and then flee himself in the only way he could.

Had they quarreled? Had he killed them in their sleep? Had any of them begun to change already? She remembered the mention of corruption in the book.

A more urgent question: “What do we do here? Why were we sent?” Toinette frowned. “I’d as soon not disturb the bodies, but…”

She trailed off. In that uneasy silence came a scraping sound, and Toinette saw motion out of the corner of her eye. She snapped her head around and then couldn’t get breath to swear.

The sound had been bone against rock. The skeleton was moving.