Wystwood

53. Circle of the stones

The final copper rung gave way to empty air. Ada's boot fumbled in the darkness, and her hands clung a little tighter to their holds despite her aching fingers. But Yue was walking away, her footsteps echoing off seemingly solid ground, and so Ada let herself drop. For a moment she fell, weightless and wild. But then stone hit so hard that it left her ankles quaking.

As they descended, the bundles of burning sage had smouldered out above their heads. When Ada now peered up into the shaft, she could no longer make out the city above. There was no light at the bottom of the ladder either, but Yue stopped a few metres ahead and cracked her knuckles. Her bones groaned like the creaking of timber wood, and a second later, a small pocket in the stone to her left glowed to life.

The scent of sage was more pungent underground, and with nowhere else for it to flow its bitterness hung heavy in the air. But the flames gave light enough to see, and Ada pivoted out of Armestrong's way as she dropped down onto the slab Ada had been standing on. It was flat and white, glistening against the dim depths of the passage like a royal seal upon a paper parcel. The wreathed words engraved around its edges were lost to the shadows, but Ada could make out enough to identify the compass rose, now rooted in the earth.

She was suddenly squashed into the passage's rock wall as Armestrong made way for Lark. The woman gathered Min closer into her chest, but her arms were trembling slightly. It was the first sign to suggest that Armestrong was becoming weary, but she didn't drop Min, even as they waited for Lark to straighten next to them.

The bandits and Ada gathered behind Yue, heads bowed beneath a low ceiling that was furrowed with channels of stone. Deep currents of ochre ran through the rock, only visible when cast upon by the faint sage-light. When Lark stepped off of the compass' face, a deep rumble hummed beneath the earth, and the bandits watched breathlessly as the stone rose up through the air. It spiralled around and around through the darkness before disappearing up into the hollow shaft like a shard of smoothed bone.

"This way," said Yue, her voice already drifting off as she strode into a narrow tunnel. "Keep up."

Ada refrained from pointing out that there were little other choices of ways to go, as the passage was dug in one direction only. But she hurried behind Yue anyway, and the bandits caught up in time to see new tunnels begin to thread out from their own. Most were dusky fissures, but as they walked further, larger ones wove off from their path and burrowed away into the earth. Ada thought they must twist beneath the city like a system of tangled veins, almost passing as a design of nature were it not for their perfectly even entrances, which were circled by complex braidings of pebbles.

Voices occasionally floated from the tunnels, muddling together when they met at Ada's ears and humming like a distant harmony. The underground realm was rich and primal, each scent and sound adding to a world that was older than any city could claim to be. There was a beauty to it, but a whisper, too, of a danger dredged up from ancient earth, now built into a dark labyrinth. A labyrinth sure to swallow you whole were you to wander too carelessly.

Behind Armestrong, Lark spat a curse. Ada turned and caught a flash of grey skid across her boots, and claws skittered against stone as a creature dodged around Yue and blundered off into the shadows. The woman huffed, feigning a kick into empty air as dust shivered up around her shins. 

"Mangy beast," she said, but followed it around a corner.

Ada squeezed after Yue through a breach in the stone and walked straight into a wooden barrel. Its hollow thud echoed endlessly around the rock antechamber she now stood in. Above her was a domed ceiling that reached twice the height of the previous passage, and below her, the floor was fitted with ageing planks of wood. The room was lined with capped barrels and boxes, though the walls were undecorated apart from the multitude of doorways carved straight through the bare stone.