Conceptually, the door was part of the larger structure, so Ikfael couldn’t put it in her pocket. Once on the other side, though, all she had to do was raise the bar to “unlock” it, which she did by piling up some stone underneath her and then lifting the bar out of the way. A light tap let me know the door was ready. I carefully slid it open.

The room on the other side appeared to be split into two halves to the left and right, with an armless sofa on each side surrounded by chairs. The cushions were covered with green-dyed leather. None of them looked like they’d recently been used.

Ikfael gestured toward the track of steps in the dust; the trail connected an arched doorway on the right to both of the sitting areas. Another doorway opened to the left, and my view of a passage opposite us was blocked by a curtain of silver beads.

The itch of Heleitia’s mark intensified—drawn to the curtained path—but I preferred to investigate the track in the dust first. The faint odor of undeath came from that direction.

Ikfael climbed up onto my shoulder in preparation.

The corridor went about fifteen yards before it led into a small chapel or temple. The room was dominated by a massive, ten-foot-tall jaguar mask on the opposite wall. It appeared to have been assembled like a puzzle from smaller pieces of jade.

To either side of the jaguar’s face were stands displaying sheets of stiffened paper, each about four yards tall. And high up on the other walls were rows of smaller golden masks—a mixture of human and animal faces staring down at a small circular rug in the room’s center.

I crouched in the passage to let my eyes roam over the room first. The masks were obviously a draw, especially the jaguar, but it was the papers that truly caught my attention. There appeared to be a stack of them on each stand, the writing too small to make out from the corridor.

Then came the faint sound of stone rubbing against stone from the right, and several things happened at once. Inside the chapel, a passage opened that hadn’t been there before; the door had looked like the rest of the wall.

Yuki cast Camouflage on me in case the creature coming through was living and would be fooled by the spell. The odds were low, though, so I cast Dog’s Agility and firmed my grip on my spear. At the same time, Ikfael dropped a handful of javelins out of her pocket and got ready to use them.

A moment later, an older man dressed in a long yellow-and-white robe stepped through. His eyes instantly snapped to where I crouched. For a beat, I was fooled by his appearance—his skin appeared overly taut but still whole—and then the stink of undeath hit.

My Status camera clicked:

> Athkulchut the Unobtrusive (Undead, Dark)

>

> Talents: Peerless Service, Knows What’s Right, Door Guard, Honed, Timing is Everything, Hidden Knife, Banked Rage

The influence hit me like a punch in the face: a push to scurry like a bug and flee from this place in which I didn’t belong. I might’ve too, if I hadn’t already been tested by even-more-powerful influences. Still, I flinched, and that was enough for Athkulchut to close the distance. A shard of obsidian appeared in his hand.

My body moved as it’d been trained to, putting my spear between us. Then, Ikfael’s javelins punched forward, which forced him to pivot around them. A couple caught him in the side, though they only penetrated a couple of inches into his dark body and would’ve fallen out if not for Ikfael keeping control of the stone. She wriggled the javelins to work them in deeper. If nothing else, they got in the way of his right arm.

Athkulchut tossed the knife to his left hand. I stepped back to swing my spear and clear the space for a lunge, but he refused to let the gap open. Instead, I had to switch grips to bat him away. Yuki cast an Iron Heart and a Bear’s Strength, yet our opponent bulled his way through.

His obsidian knife flensed a chunk of muscle from my forearm, leaving the flesh hanging. Blood sprayed for a second or two, until a tendril of water flowed from Ikfael’s pocket. The water wrapped around the wound to close and heal it before the pain could land.

Athkulchut stabbed at her, but she leapt back from my shoulder to hit the ground scurrying. I got in his way to keep him from chasing—got him turned around so that he didn’t see how the javelins that had missed him earlier were now rising in the air behind him.

For a moment, Athkulchut startled. Ikfael had done something behind me to shock him. I seized the opening and half-handed my spear into his chest. At the same time, the javelins punched into his back, driving him forward. I slipped a foot between his to sweep his leg, and he slammed into the ground, driving the javelins in deeper. The spear followed him down, and I pushed with all my might while also moving to stay out of reach of his knife.

I took a couple of kicks instead, and even with Iron Heart I felt bones in my hips and legs crack. A chunk of stone flew to clump around Athkulchut’s free hand. A couple more locked his feet together like manacles.

My legs wanted to collapse under me, but the Iron Heart and a quick cast of Anesthetic from Yuki allowed me to remain standing—they helped me keep Athkulchut pinned long enough for one of the javelins to splinter and for the splinter to slide deeper into his body and penetrate his core. Darklight streamed from the gaps in Athkulchut’s chest.

I fell back to get out of the way, and my legs finally gave out. From the ground, I saw how the motes collected above his body to form a mournful mask. Then, the Deer God surged out from my belly, his antlers angled for a charge. He burst through the darklight, forcing it to disperse.

The Deer God glanced to the left and right, eyes wary. Motes of the darklight clung to his antlers, but they fizzled away too. Then, when it became clear that no other threats would appear, he disappeared back into my belly. A beat later, Ikfael emerged out of the jaguar mask where she’d hidden herself inside the jade.

We’d not used Spiral Pierce during the fight so the encounter had been a mostly silent affair. We waited a handful of breaths, just in case, but we seemed to be safe for the time being.

“That was dangerous,” I said, propping myself up with a grimace. “The mask could’ve been enchanted or cursed.”

“Yours was the riskier position,” Ikfael replied, her signs brusque. “Now hold still while I make sure these bones are in the right positions.” She brought out her water tablet to examine the work Yuki was doing in my legs to move the broken bones into proper position. It was, unfortunately, an all-too-familiar experience.

Mana check, I thought.

‘We cast only the one spell,’ Yuki replied.

Then another Anesthetic please. The first is almost ready to wear off. A quick stab of pain went through me, but Yuki’s spell cut it off.

Ikfael cast the Healing Water once she was sure the bones were lined up correctly, and I felt grateful we’d been able to take our time with it. There’d been occasions in the past when Ikfael and Yuki had had to patch me up mid-fight.

The pelvis took longer to do, and this time I cast the Anesthetic spell to share the burden. That put us at Yuki down eight mana and me down four. Ikfael should’ve used about sixteen with her mix of healing and scrying spells, which was barely scraping the surface for her. The otter’s mana capacity was greater than both Yuki’s and mine combined.

Afterward, she checked me over thoroughly to make sure nothing else was amiss. Then, with a sigh, she patted my shoulder and smiled. “That was well done. Your sweeps are getting better.”

“The javelins helped disturb his balance. I don’t know if it would’ve worked without them. He was stronger than he looked.”

“The dark frequently are.” Ikfael walked over to his body and used Athkulchut’s own knife to cut open his chest. The muscles parted like an all-night-smoked brisket, the meat falling away from the blade’s edge.

“Huh,” I remarked, helpful as always.

Ikfael looked to me, her eyes shining. She held out the knife for me to examine it more closely.

The obsidian blade was about sixteen inches long and shaped like a bay leaf—tapered to a point, thickening along the length, and then thinning out again at the base again. The walnut haft was wrapped in strips of green leather, with the image of a jaguar branded into the base.

There were no chips whatsoever, and I’d just seen firsthand how profoundly sharp the edges were. I felt like the knife would cut me just looking at it.

“I’d love to put that at the end of a spear,” I said.

“This… this is a weapon that would make the whole expedition worthwhile,” she replied. “There’s a good chance it’s silvered.”

I heard a roaring in my ears and got lightheaded. I blinked a few times as the words registered. If Ikfael was right, then someone had spent nearly sixty-two-thousand light on the knife. On a weapon carried by a servant—a highly valued one, based on the talents I’d seen, but still…

No. My thoughts stopped. Whoever gifted the knife also spent another sixty-thousand light on the servant himself, since Athkulchut was at least Level 10 as well. He must’ve been really loved to be raised so high. Or prized. Or something to show off. A symbol of his employer’s status?

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Ikfael’s eyes narrowed, a look that promised immense mischief, and a moment later the knife rose to hover in the air. She had experimented before with flint, but the edges were always too easily chipped. She’d had to settle on using harder materials for her stone shields and weapons—granite was her current favorite—but if this truly was a silvered weapon, then it would effectively never break.

“Holy hells” I breathed.

“It bends to my will,” Ikfael said as the knife circled around her. “There’s more obsidian in the haft, so the balance is good.”

That looked right to me too—the weapon didn’t wobble as it flew. “We’re going to have to find a source for obsidian,” I said.

“Oh yes,” Ikfael said. “Knives like this one will be of use even if they’re not enchanted. This sharpness is unparalleled.”

“We probably gave up on flint too easily,” I said. "It’s just… the light was needed elsewhere.”

Ikfael’s eyes followed the knife as it traveled. “Now that is always a truth.”

“Speaking of which…”

I moved to finish the job Ikfael had started. Prying apart the ribs, I dug out a handful of silver nuggets; they weren’t very large but certainly were heavy. My mouth started to fill with saliva.

I couldn’t help the thought: We did the killing; shouldn’t we be the ones to claim the light? And yet, I forced myself to acknowledge, if it hadn’t been for Anya, I wouldn’t have been in the position to get at Athkulchut.

Ikfael took the silverlight from me and brought out the necessary salves to preserve it before storing it all in her pocket. While she did that, I said a short prayer over the body. His ghost appeared to be long gone, so an exorcism wasn’t necessary.

Once those tasks were done, the two of us went to look through the secret door, but it was just a closet. In the center of the floor was a cushion that looked to have been recently used. The material covering it was a gold-dyed leather.

On two of the walls, shelves held a collection of ceramic bottles, the interiors coated with the residues of their former contents. The third wall had hooks embedded for a series of five bronze rods, each about three feet long and half an inch thick. They were notched at the ends, but otherwise unmarked. Neither of us could figure out what they were for, though—there wasn’t an apparent use for them anywhere we looked.

Ikfael eventually shrugged and stored them in her pocket, along with everything else in the closet. Someone somewhere would have a use for some dawn-level bronze rods and would be willing to pay for them.

The mystery of the secret door solved, I lifted Ikfael up so that she could reach the gold masks above us. These ones weren’t embedded into the walls, so she disappeared them one by one. Also into her pocket went the small rug, which left the real prizes for last.

“Look at this.” Ikfael pointed to the jade comprising the jaguar mask.

From a distance they looked like puzzle pieces, but up close I realized each had been shaped into a letter from the Diaksh alphabet. “Strong void lion arrow dare swallow send left clear swim thought lost angle… None of this makes sense. It’s gibberish.”

“And there was nothing inside to explain the mask’s purpose,” Ikfael signed. “Is it a collection of their favorite words, do you think?”

I scratched my head. “A celebration of language? No, that doesn’t match up with anything else we’ve found so far. It’s more likely the words are jumbled to hide their true meaning. Or the message is coded.”

Yuki pulled on my attention, asking me to look at the papers on either side. The material was a pressed bark that had been painted white so that it could be written upon. And what I’d thought were stacks turned out to be accordion folds, essentially creating a book that could be pulled open.

The text was too thick and dense to read in its entirety, but when I skimmed through the sections, it seemed the books told of Baxta the Cunning, also called the Wise, the Conqueror, and the Glorious depending on where you were in his story.

Starting as a young lad, Baxta traveled south from his home near Xenkaltutcha to make his fortune, eventually ending up in Budi-ei, where he fooled a wealthy merchant into taking payment for a magic knife using ceramic beads instead of real cacao beans. Thereupon, Baxta joined an expedition into the jungles even farther south and fought a series of deadly beasts, which resulted in him growing in levels at a rapid pace.

The ferocity of the wildness could not be underestimated, however, and Baxta’s trials drove him to death’s precipice. And he would have perished—the last survivor of his expedition—if not for a fated encounter with a spirit of the land. With her help, he was able to kill a being of great power and won for himself enough light and treasures to return to Budi-ei like a king.

People were drawn to him and his bravery. They followed him north back to Xenkaltutcha to establish a new town, wherein he demonstrated the wisdom of a sage, the generosity of a father, the… yada yada, I skipped ahead.

Interestingly, the text mentioned a heaven-defying treasure, but all the references were oblique.

Hmm… there was a betrayal, new allies found, and then more betrayals. Only his own strength could be trusted. His was the direction all must follow, for only he knew best. Blah blah, the aggrandizement continued on and on.

I continued to skim until… “According to this, Baxteiyel was supposed to be his crowning achievement. The place from which he would shed the influences of Budi-ei and Xenkaltutcha to grow a new empire that would last for eternity.”

Ikfael snorted. “The spirits of the land proved him wrong. He may have driven the giant serpents underground, but eventually lost anyway.”

“I wish I knew what happened to the city,” I said.

“If the spirits want to punish a people, they will,” Ikfael replied, her signs sharp. “In Voorhei, all the water became poison. Here, with the whole of the land turned against him? It must’ve been terrible.”

Her eyes had remained clear as she’d spoken. Our Ikfael wasn’t letting the memories of what had happened to her as a result of Voorhei’s curse get in her way anymore. My heart swelled to see her so. Inside me, Yuki mirrored the emotion.

Ikfael pointed to a section of script. “Look, the construction of the city is described. They named this pyramid Despair, for it would inspire despair in the hearts of their enemies. Baxta’s most-powerful weapon was placed here, attended by his most powerful warriors, in a specially created chamber at the top.”

I grunted. “Back through that beaded curtain, no doubt.”

“Our zasha’s mark guides us,” Ikfael signed.

“But we don’t go there unthinking,” I replied. “We’re not like Baxta’s followers, who believed only he knew the way.”

Ikfael frowned, yet she saw that my words weren’t a complaint about Heleitia—I was just making a point.

“We’ve each made our own judgements,” she signed, “based on the potential benefits to us and to our loved ones. The decisions we’ve made were thoughtful and intentional. They do not compromise our Paths to Perfection.”

“If there were moments when trust was required,” I said, “it was for a good reason.”

“A truth,” Ikfael replied.

“And the person being trusted could be trusted,” I said, looking her in the eyes. “I place my trust in you.”

“I will be worthy of it, I promise, and so will our zasha.”

Yuki’s qi blipped in surprise, unrelated to the conversation.

What happened? I thought. Is something wrong?

No, no, we don’t want to interrupt this moment.

“What is Yuki saying?” Ikfael asked.

“They noticed something.” I followed the trail of their qi. They’d been examining the text through my eyes—something about the jade mask’s letters. “That’s interesting… they have notches in them, and they’re too regular to be stray marks.”

Yuki’s thoughts tinged with a hint of frustration, but it might have been because the meaning behind the notches wasn’t obvious.

Sighing, Yuki brought the memory of the Testament of Hunger to my mind’s eye. The text on both sides of the wall—the public and the secret—had been the same, except the secret version used the same notched letters.

A feeling of anticipation rose up—like stumbling upon an important clue when playing a game. That was when Ikfael brought out the bronze rods from her pocket; she pointed out how the designs at the ends were more complicated than they needed to be, dotted almost like braille.

The five rods, I thought, then aloud said, “One for each temple in the Arc of Knowledge. It’s all one code.”

Now that I was paying attention, I noticed how Yuki’s thoughts raced at the back of my mind. They’d been looking for patterns in the code, yet nothing was emerging. Now that their efforts were out in the open, they tapped into my knowledge of ciphers, but all I had was the basic stuff I’d picked up through games and working on a couple of war documentaries.

“Has your Yuki understood the words’ hidden meaning?” Ikfael asked.

I shook my head. “No, it’s proving elusive. Likely we’re missing a key of some kind. Or maybe even multiple keys.”

“This is how one creates secrets,” Ikfael signed. “By breaking the knowledge apart, so that no one knows the whole. They willfully withhold the information from the World Spirit, refusing to share it with others.

“I hadn’t even known that was possible,” I said.

“Some secrets, the world is better off not knowing,” Ikfael said.

Thinking about the weapons of mass destruction from my previous life, I could only agree.

###

When Yuki couldn’t figure out the code after fifteen minutes, Ikfael stored away the materials we’d collected, and we left the chapel.

Fifteen minutes might not sound long, but the uekisheile was a genius. They were either going get it right away, or the problem was gnarly enough they’d need much more time than we could afford at the moment.

The other open doorway led to an entirely separate living complex with its own kitchen, four large bedroom suites, a set of smaller rooms for servants, and multiple latrines. None of the rooms were occupied; all of them were furnished, including the servants’.

Ikfael refused to part with the stone and water she kept in her pocket—that was war material—but anything else that wasn’t of sentimental value got unloaded to make room for the enchanted furnishings.

It was funny to see all the food piling up, though I noticed she kept my doughnuts, as well as the nutritious sap from the spider ants. Our Ikfael had a sweet tooth, she did. Everything else was discarded.

Coins, art, jewelry, and magic items were all easy yeses to bring with us. A pot that heated on its own? Sign me up for that. And Ikfael and I agreed there was no way we’d sell it off. We also grabbed the rest of the cookware and cutlery, thinking that these smaller items would take up less space, be more useful, and/or be easier to sell.

We also emptied all the closets, including what looked like several sets of ceremonial regalia. The feathers, the furs, the beading, the gold and silver threads—it was all taak to our eyes.

All the bedding with came us, as well as two of the beds themselves. We also jammed as many chairs into her pocket as would fit. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough room for the beautifully carved dining table, even after she ditched the benches from earlier. The chandeliers also no longer fit, although we did pry the candle stones loose.

As near as I could tell, Ikfael’s pocket was about the size of a mid-size mover’s truck. It was such an amazing talent; I was so jealous, and grateful too. This level of looting wouldn’t have been possible without it. Partway through the process, I’d giggled at the sight of an entire bed disappearing into her chest.

Ideally, we’d come back for the stuff left behind, but just in case we operated under the assumption this was our one and only shot.

###

Standing before the curtained doorway, I paused to sign, “You know, we could turn back now. Even splitting the loot with the rest of the expedition, we’d be ridiculously wealthy for a long, long time.”

“And we’d forfeit the exchange with my zasha,” Ikfael signed.

I nodded. “There’d be that, but it is the safer choice.”

“I’ve told you before, safety isn’t what I seek,” she answered. “Not anymore.”

The Deer God tightened around my gut—there was something ahead that also held his interest. He’d been waiting patiently to get there. Heleitia’s mark also urged me onward; her goal was within reach.

I did my best to ignore the weight of history pressing down on me. The delay from dithering with the loot was over; it was time to get to work, even though my hunters’ senses screamed of the danger nearby. My instincts told me to retreat and come back with the full lodge supporting me.

Except Ikfael and I were the only ones who could resist the soul corrosion. We were the only ones chosen to be here.

I parted the curtain to see the landing of a stairwell leading up. As we went through, Ikfael grabbed the lines of silver beads to store them in her pocket. Heleitia’s divinations may have been pushing us forward, but we took the path on our own terms.