“Okay,” I said, my heart thumping. “Okay. So If I don’t turn myself in by tomorrow, they’ll kill Erdinand. Okay.”

Harris put his big hand on my shoulder from behind. “What’re you going to do?”

“I don’t know.” I looked at Chetty. “What’m I going to do?”

Old Chettur spat on the floor at her feet. “Lose a friend. Ga. That’s what you’ll do, boy. Lose a friend.”

“That’s enough, Mother.” Chetty gazed into the darkness of the underground chamber. “We could give the Sixers a human body that looks like you, to claim that you’re dead. They might fall for the ruse. Except Wren is not credulous. They’d probably proceed with the execution regardless.”

“Where do they execute people?” I asked

“Gallows Square,” Tansy said.

I snorted a bitter laugh. “I probably could’ve guessed that. So, uh, I need to break Erdinand out tonight.”

“No,” Hollis said. “We need to break him out tonight.”

“Which is exactly what they’ll expect,” Chetty said, rubbing her tired eyes. “That’s what they’re hoping for, planning for. You lost to one of the twins, Alex. Can you beat both of them, plus Wren, plus Kathina?”

“He can with our help,” Tansy said.

“Ga! You’re a fool if you believe that.”

I grunted. ”I can’t just leave him there.”

“So the first step,” Chetty said, “is more information gathering.”

“What is there to learn?” I asked.

“We don’t even know where he’s being held tonight. How’re you going to break him out if you can’t find him? There’s no question that they moved him before the ... tomorrow.”

“Oh,” I said.

“And other that that?” Chetty chewed her lower lip thoughtfully. “Hm. I’m not sure what else we need to know. In fact, that is the first thing we need to know.”

“Stupid girl,” her mother grumbled.

I exhaled. “Okay, so you handle finding him and ... all that, and I, uh, I’m going to take a look at Gallows Square.”

“They’ll be watching for you,” Chetty said.

“I’ll shave,” I said.

“I’ll take him through the cellars,” Hollis said.

Everyone turned to him. Mostly with alarm, though Tansy was bright-eyed with excitement.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll stay out of the Old City.”

“There’s no path between here and Gallows Square,” Chetty told him.

“Alex is impossibly flexible,” Hollis said, meaning that I could turn to smoke. “The bottleneck will barely slow him down.”

“What’s the bottleneck?” I asked.

“It’s like the neck of a bottle,” Tansy explained.

“Yeah, I mean--”

“A collapsed corridor,” Hollis said. “Impossible for most people to pass though.”

They talked for a while longer, but I didn’t pay much attention. I kept thinking about Erdinand. Another decent guy--like Oksar--who could get cut down for no good reason. Like that ollie teenager, too, just trying to protect the kids. And like Lemmy the whipping boy, Lord Usim’s friend. Murdered for ... for what? For disagreeing. For being too weak to defend themselves.

I wasn’t about to lose Erdinand.

Forget about that grandiose quest. Forget about saving the world. I couldn’t fight Plagues--not for the next few years, maybe ever. Hell, I couldn’t even fight elite warriors on small-time islands. But I wasn’t going to hide in the bushes while they killed a friend. Not this time.

“Ready to go?” Hollis finally asked me.

“Yeah,” I said.

I expected him to lead me to a stairway leading deeper underground, but apparently different sections of the ‘cellar’--the top two floors of the underground--didn’t always connect with each other. There were too many cave-ins and regular basements in the way. So we needed to head for the surface first.

We climbed to the street, where Hollis and Tansy led me through the fresh air of the half-ruined city. And, uh, we dressed as an ollie family first. Hollis being the father, Tansy the older sister, and me the young brother, after they gave me a sort of hooded onesie that ollie kids often wore. Which amused the hell out of them, and apparently was supposed to embarrass me--dressing up like a toddler--but the ‘onesie’ reminded me of a boiler suit. Like I worked at a garage or was going to fix your washing machine. I thought I looked pretty good, y’know? Competent and professional.

Anyway, that’s how they smuggled me across the city to a lot of weeds in the middle of an abandoned block. Huge square stones that must’ve tumbled from the fallen tower next door dotted the lot. We zigzagged through the stones until we found a wide space under one that led down a stone ramp.

“What is this?” I asked, tapping the ramp with the sole of my boot.

“A roof,” Hollis told me, and lit a lantern.

I didn’t know what he was talking about until we reached the end of the ramp and faced a drop to the underground street below. Because yeah, apparently we’d climbed down the sloping top of a buried house.Most of the street below us--or the ‘cellar,’ I guessed, even though it had clearly been a street once--was blocked by fallen rock and dirt. But after we clambered down, we U-turned and walked into the house itself, which was pretty clear of rubble. A few torn tapestries decorated the walls and dozens of candle stubs littered the floor around two dingy mattresses.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Hollis looked at the mattresses and said, “So I guess kids are still coming here.”

“Ew,” Tansy said.

“It’s romantic,” he told her. “This is where Maryne and I conceived our first child.”

She trumpeted a soft laugh. “Oh, shut up. You’re gross.”

He chuckled and led us past a fairly nasty latrine to a room half-filled with dirt and rocks. We squeezed beside the rubble--well, they squeezed; there was plenty of room for me--into a space with a dark hole in the ground. Hollis moved his lantern forward and I saw a rope leading downward.

I reached for it, but Tansy insisting on going first. To protect me.

Princess said in my mind.

I almost smiled at the drowsy, dreamy tone in her voice.

she declared, then fell back to sleep.

I kind of wanted to rouse her, to tell her about Erdinand, but there was plenty of time for that. And anyway, I was afraid enough for the both of us.

The rope dropped me into a small square stone room with a single exit. So I went through it and found Tansy in a bigger room, waiting with her sword drawn.

“What’s that for?” I asked.

“Nobody comes down here,” she told me. “There’s no reason to. But if the Sixers are searching for you ... well, maybe we’ll get lucky and run into a few.”

Shadows jumped against the wall when Hollis joined us with his lantern. He didn’t bother drawing his sword, he just led us through what I guessed was the lower floor of the same house and then out onto another underground street. That one wasn’t completely clogged with rubble. It was mostly clogged, through, beneath a ceiling of support beams that must’ve been added soon after it was swallowed by the ground. It was more of a narrow path through an ancient road than an actual ancient road.

“How is this the cellar and not the Old City?” I asked, in the quiet. “It looks like an old city to me.”

“It is,” Hollis told me. “But it’s, well, newer old city than the real Old City. You’ll see later.”

“There’s mana in the Old City,” Tansy told me. “Seeping up from below.”

We walked through the half-buried ruins for ten minutes or so. I kept glancing overhead, at the ceiling braced by thick beams like a mine tunnel. Wondering about cave-ins.

“It’s been safe since I was a calf,” Hollis assured me.

“The locals all know about these places? About the big underground tunnels?”

“Most of us.”

“So some of them must’ve told the Sixers.”

“Some definitely told the Sixers,” Tansy said, with a tusky smile. “The cellars are a great place for an ambush.”

“That’s comforting,” I said.

“There’s so much space down here, they could search for weeks.”

Hollis grunted and crouched through a doorway that opened into looked like an abandoned blacksmith’s shop. A wall had fallen, so we had to climb over the hearth before we emerged from the shop into a maze of alleys. With walls to either side, the space was barely wide enough for Hollis’s shoulders. Still, he led us unerringly to another stairway.

“Okay,” he said, his deep voice flat in the quiet. “The bottom of these stairs is on the border of the cellar and the Old City. So we’ll go down here, but under no circumstances will we go any deeper than this.”

“A pity that we don’t need to,” Tansy said.

Hollis grunted and went down the stairs into what looked like a proper dungeon, like the kind I’d seen in movies. Glistening stone walls, embedded with occasional skystones, stretched in both directions. A high ceiling arched above me and the ground underfoot was smoothed with the passage of thousands of feet. I even spotted a flash of a big-eyed rat. Or maybe rat-lizard, considering that ridged tail.

“What is the Old City?” I asked for what felt like the forth time.

“Old,” Tansy said.

“It’s a city, tightly-packed with buildings, that once rose high above the treetops,” Hollis told me. “Until a catastrophe struck. An ancient magic fused the stone together, according to some scholars. Or softened the ground beneath into quicksand, according to others. Many believe that the city sunk naturally, and over the millennia dirt and trees rose around it. In any case, people built on the ruins and then more people built on those ruins, over and over again, across the generations.”

“Doesn’t look all that ruined to me,” I said, peering around. “I mean, sure there’s no sunlight but it’s stable and stuff, right? Why not use all this space?”

“Well, we’ve more than enough space above ground. But also, people didn’t just abandon the tunnels. Not at first. They used the highest ones ... until the monsters came. They climbed up from the deepest cracks and crevices where they spawned. Now the descendants of those long-ago monsters make their home here.”

“The island floats,” Tansy reminded me. “On an ocean of mana. So the idea is that deep, deep, deep underground the bottom of the island meets the deepest sea.”

“With the most concentrated mana,” Hollis said.

Tansy wrinkled her trunk. “But the monsters this close to the surface aren’t so bad.”

“Bad enough,” Hollis said.

“How about kobolds?” I asked.

He grunted. “Kobolds are territorial, sneaky, and they’ve got the benefit of numbers. And there are wraiths and redworms and the rest.”

“Speaking of which,” Tansy said, as we approached a juncture.

“What?” I asked.

She pointed straight ahead. “That’s where we’re going. Toward the bottleneck that leads into Gallows Square. So when we come back this way, do not turn here. Head straight across, back the way we came.”

I looked to the left branch of the junction, and saw a tunnel collapse twenty or thirty feet away. Then I turned to the right and didn’t see much of anything. “The Old City is to the right?”

“It’s so neat! C’mon, I’ll show you.”

“Tansy,” Hollis said, warningly.

“We won’t go in! We’ll just show him, so he doesn’t get curious himself.”

“Yeah, he’s the curious one,” Hollis rumbled, but he turned to the right.

The tunnel curved almost immediately, and a minute after that an iron gate stretched from wall to wall. A rusted iron gate with posts missing, leaving gaps wide enough for an ollie.

“That’s not going to stop anyone,” I said.

“It’s a warning, not a barrier,” Hollis told me. “Look through.”

So I put my hands on the bars and peered into the darkness. I heard the squeaking of big-eyed rats and the chitter of teeth. When my eyes adjusted from the lantern light, I realized I was standing at the top of a steep slope, not quite vertical but pretty close. An almost-cliff heading deeper underground. Deeper and into what looked like a white marble building. Except the stone glowed faintly, as if chips of sunstone were embedded inside.

“The Old City,” Hollis said.

“It’s all white?”

“In this area. Nobody really knows anymore. We don’t explore, we don’t map. Very few who try ever return, and even they--”

An eerie howl sounded from below us. A strange, inhuman call that rose and trembled and faded

“Well I’ve seen enough,” I said, reflexively calling my hatchets into my hand. “Now show me Gallows Square.”

Tansy squinted at me, like she was disappointed I didn’t want to explore the scary howling depths, but Hollis just nodded and started back. That time we turned right at the junction--directly across from how we’d arrived. We only walked for another fifty yards before we reached a collapsed archway. The sides of the arch were visible, but the center was packed with stone rubble and fallen bricks.

“Gallows Square is through there,” Hollis told me.

“That’s the bottleneck?” I asked, stepping closer. “The cave-in?”

“Mm,” he said.

I listened, and didn’t hear anything. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected. I put my palm against the fallen bricks, then turned my forearm to smoke.

Tansy made a happy noise at the sight and said, “That is so horrible.”

My smoky forearm wafted through the cracks between bricks. But this wasn’t just a single fallen archway. The blockage continued for farther than I could stretch my vaporous arm. Fifteen or twenty feet, judging by the light I glimpsed through my fingertips.

“Where’s the square once I reach the other side of this?” I asked, drawing my arm back to myself.

“Two flights upward,” Hollis told me. “Two or three. You’ll emerge in the bottom of a stairwell in a building that faces the gallows.”

“Are there people in there?”

“Vendors, mostly, according to Chetty. But they don’t hang around inside. They store their carts and goods here overnight.”

“They’re not going to hang Erdinand, though,” Tansy told me. “They don’t do that anymore, even though it’s called ‘Gallows.’ I just realized you might be expecting that. But they’ll probably put him to the axe. That or suffocation. You can’t really hang crachen anyway.”

“Thanks for clarifying,” I said.

She lowered her head. “Oh, sorry.”

“No, no! I meant that. I did think they’d hang him and I need to know ... “ I took a breath. “I need to know everything. Okay. I’m going through.”

“Keep your head down,” Hollis told me. “This is just reconnaissance.”

I nodded. “Will do.”