Chapter 148: Pit

It was not a graceful operation.

Khan went first and slid straight off the other side. Eva followed more carefully, using one shadow-hand as a rope. Petra scrambled up like she had been born to ride crabs and took the front, perched on top of its head. I took the last spot, with my sword across my knees and my boots hooked under a ridge of shell. There was nothing behind me to hold but air, so I held the shell harder.

The shell was warm, which I hadn’t expected. Warm and faintly damp, like a stone left out in the sun after rain. Petra patted its head twice, and I swear the crab leaned into it.

At Petra’s word, the crab began to walk.

All eight legs moved in turn, in a rolling, rocking rhythm that threw my stomach around. I gripped the shell with both hands. It rose, fell, tilted to one side, rose again.

It felt like sitting on a camel.

I had ridden a camel once, on a mission, and had sworn never to sit on one again. It had been a miserable week, and I still remembered the smell. Now I was in the Realm of Evil, riding a giant crab that had charged at us minutes ago, and I was starting to hate it a little less.

After some turns and twists, along a route Petra seemed to find by instinct, we reached the place that would take us to the place.

I know how that sounds. It is the best way I can put it.

It was a road. An old, worn track climbing the mountain in neat switchbacks, and the way up was beautiful in a quiet, tidy sort of way. Stairs, carved out of the stone itself, wide enough for three people to walk abreast, with shallow grooves worn into the center of each step by countless feet. Every step was the same height as the one before it. Someone had cared about that. Nobody carves a hundred identical steps for fun. They do it because they expect a great many people to walk them, for a very long time.

’Someone made these.’

I had thought it before, about the wooden slabs at the lake. Now the thought had grown teeth.

We rode on, and the farther we climbed, the more I noticed.

There were small houses along the path. At first I thought they were rocks, low and rounded and half swallowed by dry brush. But the closer we came, the more sense their shapes made. Walls. Doorways. Whole little rows of dwellings, built along the slope like beads on a string. One still had its shutters. On another’s windowsill sat a clay cup, upright, as if its owner had only stepped out. I looked away from it quickly. A cup that still waits for its owner is harder to bear than a ruin.

And water.

I almost missed it. Beside one of the walls, set neatly into the ground, there was a small round hole, lined with stone. Then another a few paces farther on. Then another. Between them, faint grooves ran along the earth where something had once been laid. A water system. Pipes and channels carrying water down from the mountain to every house on the path. I counted nine holes before I stopped counting. Nine homes, at least, each with its own tap of cold mountain water.

Whoever lived here hadn’t been camping. They had planned. They had cared whether their children had something to drink.

Further along, the path was made of ruins.

Broken walls leaned against each other like tired old men. Crumbled doorways opened onto nothing. It looked as though people had lived here once. If I looked closely, I could even find those same small round holes dug close to the rubble, neat and deliberate, as if they had once served as a water pipeline.

The thought sat strangely in my chest.

The silence made it worse. A place with such houses and things should have been full of noise, of voices and footsteps and fires. Children shouting. Someone sharpening a knife. A pot boiling over. Instead there was only the wind, dragging its fingers through the empty stone.

"It’s so quiet," Eva whispered, and her whisper sounded loud.

Nobody answered her.

Of course, I told myself, what could a person expect from the Realm of Evil other than this? Every kind-looking place here hides something. I had learned that on my first trip, at fourteen, and I had not forgotten it.

But something under my ribs refused to settle.

I kept walking. Or rather, the crab kept walking, and I kept watching, and the ruins slid by on both sides like a funeral procession.

After some minutes, we reached an area that was flat and open, a wide terrace cut into the mountainside. The wind was stronger here. Petra whispered a word, and the crab sank into her shadow and vanished. All three of us flinched.

"Sorry," she said. "I’ll get used to it."

Before us rose a flight of stairs, leading higher up the mountain.

They were not like the other steps. These were greasy, slick with something dark and slimy that shone dully in the grey light like oil on water. I put a boot down and felt it slip. I caught myself with a hand on the wall, and the wall came away sticky. I wiped my palm on my trousers and it didn’t come clean. It smelled faintly sweet, which was somehow worse.

’Careful.’

I stepped lighter after that, one foot at a time, testing every stone. Behind me, Khan muttered something rude. Eva said nothing, but I heard her sword scrape the wall as she steadied herself.

We were halfway up when I noticed the problem.

A stair was missing.

Right in the middle of the flight, one whole step simply did not exist. There was only a gap, a hungry mouth in the stone, wider than a man’s stride, with the next step waiting on the far side like something on the other bank of a river. A cold breath rose out of it, smelling of wet iron.

I stopped. The others stopped behind me. Nobody said a word. Even the wind seemed to hold off for a moment.

We would need to jump over it. Otherwise we would fall to the area beneath.

I knelt at the edge and peered over.

The area beneath awaited nothing but death.