Kael Shadowthorn's Arc

Chapter 4 of 8

The torch showed one hall, then three. Kael led Lyra and the wolf down the steps until the passage split. Left, right, and center, each mouth breathed cold air. He raised the torch to the center tunnel. Twenty paces on, it split again. He turned back and found the way they had come now looked the same as all the rest. The stone had no marks. No trail. He could not tell forward from back. "We're already lost," Lyra said. She was not angry. She stated it, the way Aldric once stated hard truths to Kael in the tower. That memory stung. His old teacher had refused this crypt. Now Kael understood why. "Wander long enough down here and the torch dies. Then we die." Kael crouched and touched the floor. Dust, dry and thick. Then he saw it. A thin line cut the dust, pointing into the right tunnel. He held the torch low. The line was a scratch, old and deliberate. Someone had dragged a blade along the stone. He remembered the brothers in the cave. Two men had died here. Someone had tried to mark a way and failed to return. "A trail," he said. "But whoever cut it never came out." Lyra knelt beside him. Her wolf sniffed the scratch and growled low. "It smells old blood." She looked at Kael. "He walked in the direction of the arrow. Maybe he found the door before he died." Kael weighed it. The scratch could lead to the crypt. Or to a dead man and a dead end. He had no better sign. "We follow it. And we make our own." He drew his sword and dragged the point along the wall as they walked, cutting a fresh line behind them. Now they could always find their way back. They followed the old scratches through four turns. The wolf led, nose down. The trail sank deeper, past bones scattered in the dust, a rusted knife, a torn pack. Kael did not stop. The scratches ended at a wall of dressed black stone. In its center stood a door of iron, cold and heavy, banded with old rivets. "The crypt," Lyra breathed. Kael pressed his hand flat to the iron. Behind it, somewhere, waited the black arrow. His own fresh line ran back through the dark to the stairs. He would not be lost now. He had beaten the maze. But the door had a keyhole, and no key. And in the guardian's canon, a strike came when a hand touched the crypt door. Kael snatched his palm back. The floor before the door was clean of dust, swept smooth by something that moved. They were not alone down here. The guardian above had a twin below, and it had heard them coming.