Thawn dipped his chin towards the abyss and led on his followers in silence. The screech of lasers and the shriek of Alika were deadened beneath ground, and Thawn was unsettled by the thought he was walking beneath a thousand future graves. They would surely put flowers or sticks in the ground to mark this place.

He walked with his hands outstretched over the ridges of tubular tree root that escorted them to a fork some way ahead.

‘Should we not go back?’ Esther said eventually.

‘Good luck climbing out in a hurry,’ came Asher’s voice.

Thawn shushed them. A breeze hustled through the tunnel from one of the lanes and he thought he saw a vague lightness from where it came. With a wave, he dragged them on, pausing every so often to check he hadn’t sleep-walked past a side-alley or obscure crevice. The leaves growing from the roof of the tunnel became denser, matted in a criss-cross of stems, falling in their path like a curtain.

At a second fork, Thawn made to follow the same lightness. Then the walls of root tremored and Thawn withdrew his arm to his holster, scanned the way with a robotic eye. Limp shadows emanated from down the way in the light of their torches. Then a wail.

They came single-file. Eyes white and vacant. Arms slung at their sides as if stuffed. Half a dozen of them. Thawn holstered his weapon and plucked a blade from his leg, slashing the pale bodies with firm blows. As if in wayward dance, they collapsed to the ground. Thawn glanced his torch down on their corpses.

‘Cloven,’ he said.

Esther looked around uncertainly. ‘How’d they get down here?’

Turning back, Thawn shrugged and indicated they keep on their path. ‘Go figure. Just watch out, there might be more.’

‘Have you ever?’ Labban said at Ulypses. ‘Ya know?’

‘Cleaved a man’s soul from his body?’ the witch hissed.

Labban swallowed grimly. ‘Yeah.’

‘No.’ She said it sort of bitterly and Thawn’s interest was piqued. ‘You might think it’s easier to raise a man’s corpse, than it is to forgo death,’ she posed. ‘No. Necromancy is a darker magick. I never learned how.’

‘Are there many who can?’

‘None I know. It’s an art kept from us and self-study is prohibited.’

Thawn tilted his head back at them. ‘What’s the point in that?’

‘Imagine if all mages could raise the dead at will. Your kind would not see the sun again, young flower.’ Ulypses smiled cruelly.

‘Our kind?’ Asher said in scorn.

‘Mortals.’

‘Are you not so?’

Ulypses growled, and her fists glowed momentarily. ‘Alas, you are more than mortal, Ashtersen. We are less than undead.’ She looked down at her hands. ‘I don’t think I was ever quite alive.’

‘Isn’t there something you can do, with your power I mean?’

‘Knowledge beyond me. Like cleaving, only a few mages know how, the First Matrons. There’s one, Trillunda. The Sign call her Darksage. She’s the one who raises your cloven. I said before, magick is a messy art. Few appreciate the practiced hand it takes to master.’

Their silence took her at her word, and they kept walking onwards. Thawn peered this way and that in hopes of an opening, but none was forthcoming. He imagined they had to be under the machines’ trenches now if their line hadn’t already collapsed. The noise from above was as silent as their company.

At a juncture someway down, Thawn heard the scurry of organised footsteps down one of the pathways. Instinct told him it wasn’t cloven; their steps were laboured. Icks, thought Thawn. He flapped his arm to press his squad up against the walls and they watched as a flock of them canter up ahead. Every few steps the tunnels scythed in two, then four, a branching network of pathways sprawling below the Castle. Thawn mapped each in his head, counting his footsteps under breath to cling to his bearings. The arrow of the wind, the diffuse glow that demarked some tunnels and not others. They were guiding landmarks in the maze. A pilgrim who remembers exactly where he has been may never be lost, for he can always retrace his steps, Jaho said.

Thawn had them track the Icks from a great distance. His ears were immersed in the dull patter of their steps on the dirt. They forked left twice, then a right, then the passage opened up into a wide corridor. The root’s arch above them flattened and the curtain of leafed vines thinned, cut untidily at their stalks as if someone had hacked away at them. With a clack, their torches blinked into darkness, and they followed at a distance.

At worst, they might provide a way above ground, Thawn thought. But instinct told him to be cautious. Icks tended to be distrusting, at least his encounter at the campfire the night before had told him as much.

By the time they got there, the others were gone. Errant shots rang through the tunnels every now and then.

‘Have to assume there’s machines down here,’ Thawn growled. ‘Watch your backs.’ The squad replied with stiff nods as they filtered into a cavern of sorts at the end of the wide tunnel. The twisted root system weaved in and out of the walls which were lit by a string of lanterns running the perimeter. Sacks and crates or something or other were piled up on one side and empty containers on the other, each marked by a string of digits: for a flight manifest.

‘Inspect these,’ Thawn ordered. He shifted to one of the sacks, unbinding the top. Thoughtlessly, he plunged a hand inside to see an herb of some sort, shredded into fibres. He poked at another sack, and another. All the same.

Asher cupped his hands around a mound of the stuff. ‘The hell?’

Thawn ignored him, clicking his helmet and the bowl of glass folded back into itself around his neck. He snapped one of the leaves growing from the roots of the walls, tasted it then spat. The same with the shredded herb. His tongued rolled across his lips in thought.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Patents are mining that shit.’

‘We’re fighting over a bag of weeds?’ chided Esther.

Thawn shrugged. ‘Not our job to know or to ask.’

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He felt their stares tighten over him. ‘What you thinking, Skipper?’ Labban said.

‘If it’s so valuable, how come the lot of them just left this here. Icks and all. It’s of value to someone. Why leave it? Look around, machines were in the middle of packing up.’

Asher responded with a puzzled look. ‘Icks came and chased them out, no?’

‘But why leave it here. There must be a bigger stockpile than this somewhere else, no? We keep following.’ He said it sternly, pointed his torch and the way ahead on the other side of the clearing.

‘Should we not, you know?’ Asher’s helmet dipped towards the sack.

‘We don’t know what we saw,’ Thawn said blankly. ‘It’s not our job. What you think will happen if we walk out of here with that stuff? We all go skimming.’ Their shoulders tightened. ‘Exactly. So, keep following.’

The trudge of Icks’ footsteps ahead of them grew in Thawn’s ears again, the sharp exchange of their firearms ricocheted down the tunnels. He traced a glove over scorch marks where the bolts had singed the walls of the tunnel. The passageway was smouldered by the glaze of fumes.

Thawn broke them into a jog, ordered them to display their arms. Ulypses waved a hand and their view flickered behind the haze of her protections. The shaft opened up and down at its end, into a cave extending a way into the darkness where the ground fell away from them.

More obtuse spot lamps were suspended like lanterns. Exposed catwalks zig-zagged down into the cavern, with unguarded drops down into a bed of herb, sacks piled higher than people. Thawn spied a ladder on the opposite side leading up into what he guessed were the castle grounds.

They ducked beside a spire of rock and watched as glossy machines scurried, loaded sacks into crates under pain of death. They were guarded on all sides by comrades, firing pot shots off at the Icks. Clad in leather garb, they mounted a railing at the catwalk as it tapered around the edge of the cave from where Thawn and the others stood.

‘What do we do, Skip?’ Labban asked.

Esther cut across him. ‘We go back.’

‘No?’

‘Yes,’ she growled in whisper. ‘This is not our fight. We aren’t meant to be here. We should get back to the fields.’

‘And let those men and women die?’

‘If that’s what it takes, yes. We’re at war. And we win the war by doing our jobs.’

‘And if they die?’ Labban said across the whir of their guns.

‘They die. We should go back to the fields.’

Asher spoke up. ‘You swallowed your Priestern’s words, Est?’

Her neck snapped towards him. ‘Sorry for paying attention.’

‘Skip?’ Labban repeated.

Thawn was caught for a moment. He watched the micro-battle play out. Every few seconds a body tumbled on either side. Jaho’s words grated in his mind, like metal cogs crunching on each other but they felt irrelevant now. The choice was his alone, he supposed. Who was to say those troops weren’t worthy of his salvation and that he was unworthy of giving it? War wasn’t a textbook after all. They would do it his way, and if they were disciplined, well, it was his own fault.

‘Skip!’ Labban said a third time.

‘We go anti-clockwise round the catwalk, get behind the enemy then take them out, simple as. We’ll use the ladder on the far side to get back to the surface.’

Esther scoffed.

‘And what about the… merchandise whatever it is?’ Asher said.

‘We leave it exactly as it is,’ said Thawn. ‘We know nothing about that.’ Thawn nodded sternly at each of them, indicated they display their arms. He stood, shuffled along the edge of the catwalk, careful to make sure they didn’t catch the eye of the machines below. He locked eyes with an Ick on the opposite side of the cave. It said nothing, glaring like it hated it was begging this creature for help. But Thawn would help all the same. They lined up overlooking the enemy and held their weapons steady.

‘On my mark,’ Thawn said with a raised arm.

But before he could drop it, there was a terrible crunch, and the boards of the catwalk gave way. It snapped at their centre and Thawn felt himself tumble. He threw a hand, clutched the shards of splintered wood. Esther looked down at him, arm outstretched. She hoisted him up, but their advantage was broken. A faction of the machines had turned, weapons outstretched.

Their shots shook the cavern and the catwalk collapsed from its mountings.

Thawn and Esther surged one way; Ulypses and Labban the other, split by the hole in the middle. Thawn held his arm back, fired off loose shots at the machines. They reached a metal platform where the ladder reached up to the fields. When Thawn looked back, he realised their mistake.

Asher shouted from below, struck from the catwalk where it had sheared in two. He roared, swarmed by machines like mindless Cloven. His weapon discharged towards the ceiling and rock showered them. A stray shard punctured Asher by the head, and his domed helmet splintered. Thawn stepped forward, squinted down his sights and popped shots at the machines. One-by-one, they relented.

Asher looked up, tugging the rock from between his eyes and stared thankfully at Thawn through the hole in his visor. Thawn nodded in reply.

Then came a yell and Thawn spied the Ick with whom he had locked eyes. It hurled a grenade at the enemy, landed by Asher’s feet. The moment was an age. Before he could move a leg, the floor of the cave ignited.

Fire strangled them, sacks of herb combusting like Argan fireworks. Thawn reached a hand down to the inferno as if he were shaking hands with the Devil itself. But in vain. The boy Asher was swollen in a bed of flame. Instinct told Thawn to dive feet first into hell, but Esther hauled him back before gravity took its hold.

‘He’s gone,’ she whispered. ‘We don’t need this too.’

He stared hard at Asher; screams silent. Any thoughts escaped Thawn. His training had buried all guilt far within himself. But he knew as Esther did. This was his fault. They should have turned and climbed out the second the ground gave way. And this was all he could think. Regret.

As clear as anything, he saw a thousand paths they might have taken, all laid out in rows before him, each an incremental variation on the last. Even as the body twirled in a helix of flame, Thawn was confounded by these other histories. His visor was not so blighted. He could surely dive in and save him. The sensation was only tingling. But for what? A body?

No. Pilgrims were a calculating kind. Pragmatists.

‘Filters on,’ Thawn said darkly as the fumes of herb caught in the updraft of heat. He looked across at Labban and Ulypses who had stood silently on the other side of the void. The witch’s eyes were glazed and Thawn wondered if she felt any of it. ‘Go back,’ he said. ‘Go back and over the fields. We’ll have to go up,’ and he dipped his head towards the ladder.

But his attention caught elsewhere. The Icks across from them scrambled at the walls, hands like claws. They intoned in inhuman tones. A stratum of wails and screeches. It was almost laughter. The whites of their eyes were cast in a dim red, but it wasn’t fire. They scampered the rim of the cavern like a pack of rats. Wisps of red smoke chased them on all sides, and they fell back as it caught in their throats.

They were possessed of an otherworldliness. Absent of themselves. Thawn watched them falter and flee. His stillness was destructive. They tripped past each other in angry panic.

Then, they turned on each other. Piggy fingers gouged at colleagues with indiscriminate rage. The tallest pushed the smallest into the dying fire. One kicked back to the wall and swept its arms with perverse glee, as if he were a child in snowfall. One-by-one, they fell from the ledge, pushed and pulled. Thawn saw the will to hurt in them. Violence was a thirst they couldn’t quench. It was a look he knew from long ago.

When the procedures failed, they called it a Harrowing. The children of Winter that came back tortured shadows of themselves. Empty entirely. They had the same look. It had never left Thawn.

This was why they didn’t get to know what the machines were mining. The herb, whatever it was, was a drug of sorts. The kind that cleaved men. Thawn looked down a final time where Asher had come to rest and said a word to the old gods in thanks; the fire had spared Asher a fate worse than death.

‘You say nothing about what we saw down here. For the best no one’s here to rat on us,’ he intoned to Labban and Ulypses who were unmoved at the other side of the void. ‘Now, go.’ They beat their retreat and Thawn nodded at Esther, gestured for her to lead up.

‘You okay, Skip?’ she said. ‘Be fine if it made you feel…’

‘I don’t feel anything,’ he said in half-truth. ‘But you were right. We should have gone back straight away.’

‘What good’d that do now, Skipper? What’s done is done. You stock it and learn from it.’

Thawn hummed. ‘I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t more curious about what was going on here,’ he continued.

‘You said it’s not our job.’

‘It ain’t, but isn’t a sin to be curious, you know.’

Esther sighed. ‘Just, let’s not lose focus here. We can theorise after. You know the trouble we can get in just for talking about this shit.’

‘Don’t you find it weird, because clearly those poor bastards didn’t have a clue what that was either. And I’m guessing they were meant to be down here.’

Esther’s voice tripped over her tongue. ‘I’d really rather we weren’t talking about this.’

But Thawn couldn’t agree, and his mind circled on the incendiary herb. ‘You’re right,’ he lied. ‘Let’s just climb.’