BLOODFANG LED ME up and out of the tunneling worm’s road. It prowled ahead of the light let out by Alain’s fire, but I did not need to see the shadow wolf to follow it. I could feel it like the faintest breeze, like the call of one blood to another, stalking ahead of me. It kept its nose to the ground, finding the path upward and out of the unlit, stinking warrens.

Param was a boneless weight slung over my shoulder. I had stopped only long enough to bandage her wounds. My own I sealed with a little of the radiance I’d absorbed during the fight, and the rest I kept carefully, for I needed the strength it brought to carry the black-robed woman back to the surface. Or, out of the depths, anyway.

I feared what lay ahead. Another Cinderborn. Another like myself. In my wandering, I had not yet encountered such a being. Param had spoken of Harald as the leader of a band of raiders and adventurers, exploring the bowels of Hell in search of… something. What might draw his attention and energy to the children’s forest? What could lead him to abandon Param at that lonely outpost? Clearly, something had gone wrong. Why else would the shambling Faded have wandered across the black sands, seeking to return to Param?

Questions screamed, but I had nothing to silence them. Only a dull fear, and the aching alienation. With Param unconscious, and Bloodfang far ahead, I was alone once again. The quiet smothered me, made each footstep harder than the last.

I tried not to peer up at Alain’s flame. Doing so would ruin what little night vision I possessed, and worse, the memory of that flame and what it represented made the loneliness more acute. It was a shard of my god, a gift that transcended life. A grace undeserved.

One foot after the next. I watched them, gray, almost lifeless, shuffling alone. None of the Faded I had encountered wore boots, or even sandals. Barefoot, we staggered over the dead ground, heedless of the sharp and jagged rocks that lay in our way. One foot after the next, until the flat worm’s road became a staircase. That wasn’t much different. One step after the next.

Up we climbed, with Bloodfang running just ahead of the skirt of light, for what seemed like ages. The stairs were jagged, almost random. The seventh or eighth jagged turn finally brought me out of my haze. I brought my eyes up to the wall, to discover they were mostly natural-seeming rock. But not entirely.

Faces pressed out of the stone, caught between screams and sobs, each a tableau of churning lifelike anguish bared for eternity. Most of them were women, young and old, their features familiar and unfamiliar. Broad brows and slight, high noses and thick, round lips and thin. It seemed like a melange of faces from across the world stuck out of the stone here at odd angles. I wondered what torture they’d earned. Were poisoned by envy, as the deacon had been? No, I thought, realizing that many of the anguished faces had another cast: fury. It was not the anguish of the betrayed, of the hunted, but of the disappointed.

With Param on mone shoulder, and the greatsword Bloodfang on the other, I could not reach out to touch the stone faces. I shuddered at the thought, and yet, the compulsion was there. To perhaps map by touch what my eyes could not make sense of.

The walls themselves seemed naturally formed. This stairway followed a cleft in the bedrock, twisting wherever the stone had separated in some unremembered eon. The steps were carved out of that rock, but without much thought to form. They were uneven, sloping in ways that threatened to spill the careless down their black throat into the warrens below. I moved carefully, leaning against the walls where I had to, and grimly ignoring the feeling of human faces pressing up against me in the stone.

I halted when I sensed Bloodfang stop. The stairs were steep there, and Param was heavy. I was panting by then, and every breath sent an aching gale up from my lungs. I had begun to steadily draw on the radiance to keep myself moving, and the stop was a welcome reprieve.

“What is it?” I asked through gasping breaths.

A door. I peered through the dark, but the winding stairs turned aside, blocking whatever the black wolf had found from view.

“What door? Can it be opened?”

It is sealed, came the wolf’s reply. I tire. Release me. Let me sleep in the iron.

I didn’t like the idea of traveling the halls alone, but the wolf was right. And I couldn’t get closer without releasing Alain’s flame. Walk alone, or in utter darkness. I chose to walk alone.

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Shifting Param to a less painful position, I concentrated on the dim sensation of the wolf’s presence. Like releasing the light, it was like unclasping a fist. One I had forgotten was clenched, surely, but all the same. With a little sigh, the black wolf faded to ash ahead. The sword on my shoulder felt no different, but the spirit had returned to the ur-iron blade that caged it.

“Was there anything on the other side of the door?” I said into the gulf of solitude.

Bloodfang didn’t answer. I sighed and traversed the last set of stairs until I could make out the door in its frame myself. It was built of slatted wood, in an arch of square-set stones. The cut in the rock that formed the stairs must have reached its natural terminus here, I thought, and whoever had built above had sealed it off. But not permanently. Perhaps someone had wanted access to the worm’s road.

Or, perhaps, to the faces that lined the stairs.

I leaned the greatsword up against the wall, taking care that it didn’t slide down into the dark. Then I set my free hand against the dry, splintering wood of the door, and pushed. It held firm, but the wood was hardly solid. The boards flexed under my pressure, creaking with protest.

I leaned my forehead on the door for a moment to muster my strength. The radiance in my blood was a living warmth, and now I pulled at it it, sensing as one might their own heartbeat, counting the pulses, drawing it to the forefront. The radiance responded, and with a sudden surge I braced my legs and drove the hell of my hand into the wooden door in an open-handed strike. I heard a sharp, satisfying crack as the wood began to give way. I delivered another blow, and then another, and the door collapsed before me. Doing it took more out of me than I would have liked, and I braced myself on the square arch as I stepped through the debris.

The ball of Alain’s flame drifted after me, shining like sunlight into the dark cavern.

A dozen pale faces clenched their eyes shut against the light and turned away from me, cowering up against the walls, writhing like maggots to escape. They were wore scraps of filthy cloth, if anything, and we so gaunt I thought they might be skeletons. Gaunt hands clawed at the wall, tearing fingernails and leaving faint streaks of radiant blood as they moaned and groveled. Yet none of htem could flee, for they wore chains on their ankles, binding them together, and to the wall. There was no escape.

A dungeon, I realized. I’d come into some maniac’s dungeon. Around me, the dark chain web jingled and scraped against the stone floor, and the moaning of the wretches was growing louder as their panic rose.

I knelt and lowered Param to the ground gently. She was breathing shallowly, her face tight with pain I could not know.

“Be quiet!” I hissed, keeping my voice low. A set of stairs led up to the floor above us opposite the dungeon. I did not know what, or who, was up there. Nor did I want to know, yet.

One of the figures closest to me peered at me, squinting through the light. He had a large, untamed beard that stuck out in all directions. It spilled down onto his pale white chest. “You come to drink our blood?” His words were funny, strained, as if he had not spoken in a very long time.

“Are you the Flock?” I answered.

“No,” said the man. The others were beginning to quiet now, turning to listen. They were unwashed, smeared in soot and ash. Men and women, and children too. All of them dead-looking, like me, gray and lifeless, but moving yet. It was their eyes that marked them out; unlike the Faded, these had life yet in their eyes: the surefire mark of radiance. “They say the Wolf comes in the dark to have his communion.”

“I am no blood-drinker,” I said. I examined the chain closest to me. Hard, fat pig iron. Nothing I could break on my own.

“Then what are you?” asked the gray-faced man. Now I saw how many of them were missing pieces. Hands, arms. Noses and ears. Something, or someone, had been cutting these poor souls away piece by piece.

“I am Cinderborn,” I said. At this, they gasped, and one of the women wailed, curling the boy she held close to her bosom. I winced. There was no hiding that sound from whatever lurked above. The bearded man turned to give an admonishing word to the woman, but it was too late.

Hard-soled boots clattered on the wooden beams overhed. Two sets at least.

“Blind Beor!” I swore. I looked around, but there was no time, nor place, to hide. It was a square room, with at least two dozen captives chained to the wall. I could retreat down the hole again, but not with Param. And in her black robes, they would not mistake her as anything but an intruder.

My eyes were adjusted to the light, but that was no advantage. A hatch opened in the floor above, and yellow torchlight spilled down the steps. The men above would not be adjusted to the dark, either. I let Alain’s flame go, and the whole basement went dark, except for that golden glow.

“What in Tibor’s name are you sorry lot up to?” snarled a thick, piggish voice. “You’d best not be rutting!”

The boots clambered down the steps heavily, and I caught sight of a fat man in a tarnished coat of mail. He had a cudgel slung about his waist, and his belly drooped low over the front of his belt. It looked wrong, though, as if his entrails, not the smooth curve of a gut, were hidden behind his stained red tabard. In his hand, he held a torch. In the other, a simple cup.

He raised the torch and squinted into the shadow. Pale, frightened faces turned away from his ugly scrutiny. “Answer me now, or I’ll take one of you upstairs!”