Liv shaped the bottom of the chute to curve up into a bit of a bowl, so that the end of her slide down into darkness was not a wild, uncontrolled and bone-breaking tumble out onto the rock of the cavern floor. Then, she scrambled out of the ice and got her boots under her on solid ground, while the little bat flapped around in circles overhead.

From the tumbled rockfall, and the lack of wooden braces or wagonways, Liv could see that they’d passed beyond the bounds of the mine, and into natural caves. The eruption must have triggered a collapse, and opened the chasm that led down into the depths.

The bat fluttered around the spill of rock, then shifted into Wren once again. By the dim light cast by the veins of mana-stone, the purple streak in her hair blended in with the black, but the frown on her face was obvious. “Look here,” the huntress said, and pointed to a rusty stain on the rocks.

The sound of her own heartbeat roared in Liv’s ears, suddenly overwhelming. She scrambled over the rocks to where the stale air of the cavern was now thick with the metallic scent of spilled blood. It reminded her of dressing a carcass. Was Matthew buried somewhere beneath the rocks, wounded and dying? Was Triss?

Wren was beside her. “Here. You see? Someone’s arm was pinned.” She pointed at a scrap of fabric amidst the stains, and - Liv flinched. What was beyond looked like raw meat and bone. “I think they cut the arm off.”

“Gods,” Liv gasped, and backed away. “Can you tell if it’s a man’s, or a woman’s?”

With a wince, Wren shook her head. “Not without shifting all this rock, and maybe not even then. But that means they survived the collapse, and kept going. It means your friends were still alive when they left this chamber.”

“And it means we have to get them back to the surface,” Liv added, “before anyone bleeds out. They had belts for a tourniquet, at least. Can you tell which way they went?”

“There’s only one route out of this chamber,” Wren said, turning away from the rockfall and pointing into the dimness. “Listen. Can you hear the water?”

The two women made their way through a rough crevasse, squeezing between sharp slabs of rock, as the sound of running water grew louder. Liv wondered how Matthew, in his armor, could ever have fit through the passage: it was so cramped that she found it terrifying, herself. She couldn’t escape the thought that she would get stuck at any moment, unable to proceed forward or to retreat back, doomed to stand alone in the faint light of the mana-stone until she died from thirst or starvation.

When they finally squeezed out onto the bank of an underground river, Liv collapsed, sucking in huge breaths and hugging her knees to her chest. Breathe, she told herself, going back to her first lessons with Master Grenfell like she had so many times before. There was nothing like breathing exercises to calm her again when it felt like she was going to be overwhelmed by panic.

“I think there’s a way across for you,” Wren called over, her voice echoing off the rocks. Liv looked up, and saw the huntress hop onto a rock in the middle of the rushing water. It occurred to her that Wren could simply shift to bat form and fly over - that she could have flown through the crevasse, as well. In truth, she could have abandoned Liv at any time and made her way far more easily. The fact that she didn’t - well, it wasn’t enough for Liv to trust her quite yet, but it did ease her fears somewhat.

“I’ll follow you, then,” Liv said, and clambered back to her feet. “Any sign they came this way? Is there blood?”

“More than I’d expect, actually,” Wren said, turning back to face Liv from her perch in the middle of the river. “With this much, I’d think we’d be finding a corpse. I wonder -”

The water behind Wren exploded outward in a sudden spray, as a massive, pale fish leapt out of the water and closed its mouth around the huntress’ right arm and shoulder. The weight of the thing - it must have been the size of a horse - carried Wren off her feet and down into the pool at the base of the boulder she’d been perching on.

Before the cave-fish could carry Wren away, Liv pressed the second and last button on her wand, snapping her wrist to flick the tip at the fish. Five shards of adamant ice shot forward, ripping through the pale scales and sinking into the fish’s body. It opened its mouth, and Wren vanished, only to reappear an instant later on the fish’s back, sinking her face into its wound.

The massive cave-fish thrashed, and Liv tried not to be sick at the thought of what its blood must taste like. She ran forward, scrambling across wet rocks to get as close to where Wren rode the wounded fish as she could. Would another spell be a waste? Her hand hesitated over her hunting knife, but in the end she didn’t need to pull it. The fish dove back into the river, vanishing into the depths, and left Wren splashing through the water.

Liv reached out a hand, grasped the huntress’ arm, and hauled her up onto the rocky shore, where the two of them collapsed side by side, soaked in cold water and shivering.

“How bad is it?” Wren asked.

Liv got onto her hands and knees and began to feel around Wren’s shoulder, arm and chest. The fish’s teeth - of course the monstrous cave fish had teeth - had punctured Wren’s skin in a dozen places, at least, all of which were obviously bleeding. Liv began chanting the chirurgeon’s charm, to clean the wound, and then used strips of cloth torn from her underskirts to wrap the wound as best she could. She really needed to begin just carrying bandages with her.

“Not as bad as I expected,” Liv said. The wounds had begun to clot even as she was wrapping them.

“That’s because I got a few big gulps of its blood before it dove,” Wren said. “Fresh blood will help me heal.”

Once the bandages were tied, Liv helped Wren back to her feet. The hunter slung her bow across her back and drew a hunting knife in her good arm, and they took turns leaping from rock to rock across the underground river. From there, they followed a low passage, through which they had to duck, further down.

Halfway through was the first real sign of Matthew and Triss they’d had since the rockfall: a slaughtered beetle, grown to enormous size, its back encrusted with growths of mana stone. The entire corpse was desiccated, as if every drop of blood or moisture had been drained from it.

Liv breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s Matthew’s magic,” she said. “That means they came this way, and he’s still alive.”

“I wish he’d left a bit of blood for me,” Wren complained. “But yes, that’s a good sign.”

“Can you use both mana and blood?” Liv asked, keeping her voice low, as they scooted past the withered carcass.

Wren shook her head. “My people were never given Tamiris’ gift, like yours were. Raktia empowered us with her blood magic, instead. One of the upsides is that we’re nearly immune to mana-sickness, but we also have a harder time sensing it in the air. It takes a lot of mana in an area before I can feel anything.”

“It’s getting brighter up ahead,” Liv pointed out. The low passage must have opened, not much farther along, because she could see distant veins of mana-stone, all around the edges of a great space. The veins looked richer here than in any of the chambers that had been mined above them. A horrible smell came from the cavern.

“Shh!” a woman’s voice came out of the dim tunnel, and Liv jerked away when a hand wrapped around her arm. Wren had her knife out before Liv recognized Triss’ bruised and dusty face. Next to her, leaning against the rock and breathing shallowly, was Matthew. His eyes were closed, and a leather belt had been buckled tight around his left arm just above the elbow. Everything below the tourniquet was missing.

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“Triss!” Liv exclaimed, and at the sound something stirred in the great chamber beyond. From the sound of it, something very big indeed. “Triss,” she repeated, lowering her voice so that it would barely be audible. “Are you alright?”

“Not really,” the swordswoman said. Her eyes looked strange - the dark part was so large as to almost completely swallow the color around the edges. When Triss spoke, Liv smelled vomit on her breath, and wrinkled her nose at the stink. “Hit my head when the tunnel collapsed. Still dizzy, things won’t seem to stop spinning. But we need to get Matthew back to the surface. We had to-”

When Liv saw that she was struggling with the words, she interrupted. “We saw. You did what you had to do, Triss. You’re both alive. What’s in the chamber beyond?”

“A bat,” Wren murmured, from where she’d craned her neck out to the end of the tunnel. “I recognize the smell of guano.”

“So that’s what that stink is,” Liv said. “Good news, Triss, it wasn’t just you.” She grinned, but the older woman didn’t seem to hear the joke. “Can you fight?”

“I’m good for at least one more,” Beatrice said, but Liv thought that she sounded very, very tired. “But I don’t know what I can do against that thing. Have you got a glimpse of it yet, Liv? That’s why we stopped here.”

Liv looked over to Wren.

“It’s big,” the huntress said. “Very big.”

“It’s a stone bat, they all are,” Liv said. “What, like a wagon?”

Wren shook her head. “More like a house.”

With a scowl, Liv scooted forward on her belly, to the very edge of the cavern, so that she could get a look for herself. The entire chamber was at least the size of the courtyard at Castle Whitehill, and she’d guess more than three stories tall. The floor was covered in droppings, while the walls shone blue-gold, the density of the mana so strong that visible wisps floated up off the rock into the air. Liv stretched her hand out, and was actually able to feel the richness of the mana in the chamber.

“I don’t think that’s still the shoals,” she murmured, and Wren shook her head.

“If I can feel it, we’ve reached the border of the depths,” she agreed.

That was bad - so far as Liv had ever heard from Master Grenfell, the previous culling team had never gone this deep. Her father had told her multiple times how her aunt and namesake had died in the depths of the Tomb of Celris - though, Liv reminded herself, that was also a more powerful and dangerous rift than this one, on the whole. Surely the depths of Bald Peak wouldn’t be that bad.

A tributary of the underground river, more the size of a stream, ran through the floor of the cavern at an angle, and that must have been what the massive stone-bat drank to stay alive. It was too large to roost upside down, hanging from the ceiling of the cave: instead, it simply leaned against one wall, wings wrapped around its head in slumber. There were two crevices leading out, beyond the one that they’d found Matthew and Triss in.

The crevice on the left seemed, from what little Liv could see, to descend deeper into the mountain, while the one on the right angled up. That, she guessed, would be the one they needed to take to get back to the shoals, and find their way out again.

Neither exit was large enough for the slumbering behemoth to fit through. It must have eventually become too bloated on dense mana to get out of its roost, and been trapped. She tried to imagine what it must eat, and scanned the floor. There were bones, in between the stalagmites, and even pieces of armor, ancient and rusted.

“I wonder if the smaller bats bring it food,” she mused. Then, she scooted backward further into the low crevice, where Liv and Wren huddled together with Matthew and Triss.

“Wake up, love,” Triss murmured, shaking Matthew gently. He blinked, and stirred.

“Is it time to move on?” he asked.

“Hey there,” Liv said, doing her best to smile. “Looks like you got yourself into a bit of trouble again.”

"Liv!” Matthew grinned with what looked like genuine relief. “We were worried about you. Is Emma alive? And who’s this?”

“Left her back down at camp,” Liv said. “After we dragged a surviving miner down. We dealt with the flocking bats, but we couldn’t find you after. This is Wren. She helped me find you.” There would be time to go into the complications involved after everyone was safe, she decided.

“It was my fault,” Triss admitted. “I stumbled on a loose rock, and stirred them up. When they all came at me at once, the only thing I could do was press myself against the wall of the tunnel, and hope they passed me.”

“I pushed forward, trying to get to her,” Matthew said. “And then there was nothing to do but to try to get behind them. Once we did, the floor went out from under us, and my arm was pinned. Triss was right next to me, but I couldn’t even get her to wake up at first, and when she did-”

“We can deal with all that later,” Liv decided. “We need to get you both past that bat, and heading up again. Once we reach the encampment, Mistress Trafford will put you both to rights.”

“I thought,” Matthew said, “that if I could get close enough to it, without waking it up, I might be able to kill it with Ters.”

“That’s one option,” Liv said, thinking things through. She slipped the cord of her flask off, pulled the cork, and passed it to Matthew. “Venison broth, infused with mana. Both of you should have some.” He nodded, drank three big gulps, then passed it to Triss, who looked at it for a moment before shaking herself and taking a sip.

Liv had seen head wounds before, when old Master Cushing took her around the Lower Banks to help him work, and to get practical knowledge of injuries. Whatever happened, she didn’t trust the idea of letting Triss sleep - at least not until she was in the hands of a chirurgeon. Sometimes people who’d taken a blow to the head didn’t wake up again.

Nor did she trust anyone she was with to fight the monster in the next chamber. It was large enough to crush any one of them, of course, but between Matthew’s blood loss, Triss’ muddle-headed dizziness, and Wren’s puncture wounds, none of the three were in good condition for a fight.

“Can you change shape?” Liv asked Wren. “And can you fly, if you do?”

“I’d need a taste of blood, at least,” the huntress admitted.

“Blood?” Matthew asked, frowning.

“It’s a kind of magic,” Liv said. “Don’t worry about it right now. If I cut the bat, with a sword or something, and brought it back to you?”

“There’s a simpler way,” Matthew said, and raised the stump of his arm. Below the tourniquet, the ragged wound glistened wetly in the blue light of the mana-stone veins.

“You’d let me?” Wren asked.

“If it will get us out of here?” Matthew nodded. Wren ducked forward, took Matthew’s upper arm in her hands, leaned down and flicked her tongue out. Matthew shivered, gritting his teeth against the pain, and Triss turned away, retching.

“That’s disgusting,” the swordswoman said, in between coughs.

“Alright,” Wren said, eventually, straightening back up and releasing Matthew’s arm. “That should be enough.”

“Here’s the plan then,” Liv said. “Wren, you’re going to get into bat form, and lead the two of them back up and out of the mine. You get them down the mountain to Mistress Trafford. Since you’re the least wounded, I’m going to remind you - there’s a ward around the encampment. Use a branch or a sword or something to break the circle before either of them crosses it.”

“What are you going to be doing?” Matthew asked.

“I’m going to distract the monster,” Liv said. “Don’t go until I have its attention, but once I do, run as fast as you can. Follow the bat, Wren’ll find you a way.”

“This bat,” Wren said, “and no other.” She shifted right in front of them, through her glistening, intermediate stage where she seemed to collapse into nothing but blood, and then back out until her wings were spread. She perched on Liv’s shoulder for a moment, squealed, and then hopped over onto Matthew.

“No stone growths, see?” Liv pointed to Wren’s back and shoulders. “And she’s normal sized. She can’t talk, but she can see in the dark better than you.”

“Do you trust her?” Matthew asked.

“Not entirely,” Liv said. “Not yet. But she could have left me behind at least twice by now, and she hasn’t. I’d say that counts for something. Not until I have its attention, do you understand?” Matthew nodded, but Triss was motionless, so Liv reached out, took her by the shoulder, and gave her a shake.

“What?” Triss asked.

“You run with Matthew,” Liv said. “Follow the bat. Got it?” Triss flinched, and nodded.

Liv flexed her fingers around the bone wand in her hand, and crept forward into the great cavern. Her boots echoed off the rock walls of the vast chamber, no matter how carefully she stepped. Once she was out of the low crevasse, she could stand again, and that was a comfort. She rolled her shoulders and shook her neck out, and kept her wand raised.

Past the stalagmites Liv stepped, through bones older than her, weaving between rusted pieces of armor and broken swords to either side.

When she came to the center of the chamber, she stopped, took a deep breath, and felt Cel wake at the back of her mind. It was a familiar feeling, and despite the terrible danger of what she was about to do, Liv smiled.

“Celent Svec Belim,” she intoned, and with the beginning of her chant, bulbs of ice began to sprout around the floor of the cavern.

The great bat stirred in the dim light.