Things only got more unfamiliar the farther she went from her room. She'd surely walked longer than the breadth of the whole manor by now with no end to the corridor in sight. Eldergrave was a huge old house, but not this huge. The furnishings grew more threadbare and dusty, the windows filthier, their glass more wavery. The subjects of the wall portraits wore archaic dress, neck ruffs and tight hose and puffy skirts. The only one she recognized was a water-stained painting of Emperor Leonid II, who she was pretty sure had died centuries ago. Still, she saw no sign of anyone else, and though instinct told her to call out she remained silent. For all she knew, that corpse-eater had been the first of many.
Soon she started passing doors. The first she tried was locked. The second was white with frost, the knob so cold it seemed to burn her fingers when she touched it. The third opened onto a scene of horror. The room beyond was a sort of lounge, with couches and love-seats arranged around a central coffee table and fireplace. It seemed a party had been going on, based on the empty bottles and half-eaten food scattered all over-but all the guests were dead. The bodies of men and women lay across the furniture or sprawled on the floor in various states of undress. Great gaping wounds slashed across their throats and bellies, the blood already congealed.
Nikha stared for a few seconds, unable to look away. Her eyes flicked from face to face, and she felt a guilty sense of relief that none of the corpses were someone she recognized. Had the same person that killed Yesika murdered these people as well? Maybe a madman was on the loose. And who were these poor people, anyway? Some of Papa's guests, based on the finery littering the floor. "Mmh!" Nikha growled in frustration, shaking her head. She just didn't have enough information. Being in the dark like this was incredibly irritating. There seemed to be nothing useful in the charnel-room, and no alternate exits either, so she muttered a cursory prayer for the dead, shut the door behind her, and kept going.
Soon after, she rounded a left-hand turn and stepped into a scene from one of her adventure novels. The walls and floor were of dressed stone blocks, now, dark gray and cold. The carpet was coarser, more crudely embroidered, and the windows were narrow slits. It was so disconcerting that she had to turn around and look back and forth. To the left was the modern mansion, to the right the...castle, maybe? Fortress? It was like looking into two different worlds.
She couldn't help pondering this as she walked. Eldergrave Manor was a very old place. The modern house had been built centuries ago, and before that the land had been the site of a castle, built by her ancestor Vanya the Ironheart- whose burial mound gave the later house its name. The Ironheart had built his redoubt over the ruins of an older one originally raised by the Maghtal steppemen. The horde had chosen the site, Matron Fulgin said, because there had been a pagan altar there, old even then, where the heathens had loved nothing more than to sacrifice ill-behaved little girls to their strange and awful gods. Was she in the past, somehow? It seemed impossible, and to be honest it didn't matter anyway. Where or whenever she was, what truly mattered right now was finding Papa.
If this was indeed the past, it was a much more disturbing time than the present. She kept passing doors, though these were of planks held together by iron straps rather than the six-paneled and fancily painted ones she was used to. She opened one and found a butcher's abattoir, full of meat hanging from ceiling hooks. The cuts were massive, and she could not reconcile their shape with any animal she could think of. Whatever they did come from would have to have far too many limbs. The next one revealed a perfectly mundane storeroom, its shelves stocked with dusty jars, and the one after than was jammed rock-solid in its frame. No help.
Nikha walked on for many more minutes. All was quiet but for the creaking of her boots and the faint jingle of her rifle's sling. The silence was putting her on edge, and she found herself jumping at every perceived noise, eyes darting about until she decided she'd heard nothing after all. Once she did actually hear something, a repeated, arrhythmic thumping. Palms sweaty on the wood of her rifle, she crept forward once more, moving in a slight crouch. The sound was coming from around a bend. She paused briefly at the corner and took a deep breath. The Czarp's hammer clicked as she pulled it back, then she swung around the corner, raised the gun, and drew a bead on-
A door. Another door, rattling back and forth against its latch. For a moment she thought something might be behind it, trying to get through. Then she felt a breeze tug at the hem of her skirt and slung her gun. What in the world? She realized air was being sucked under and around the door, so hard that the carpet was flattened by its passage near the bottom gap. She gave the handle an experimental tug and the door didn't budge more than an inch or so. The suction was holding it closed, and maybe she didn't want to find out what caused it anyway. Nikha moved on after giving the door a last suspicious glance and soon after arrived at the bottom of a narrow spiral staircase, lit by archaic gas sconces rather than phlogiston.
She didn't like not being able to see around the central pillar, but the space was too small for her rifle. Instead she drew her father's old war-knife. Despite its name, the weapon was almost long enough to call a shortsword. It had a basket hilt and a straight, single-edged blade that tapered to a wicked point. Papa had carried it with him on the charge that made him a hero, and later he'd entrusted it to her. It was her second-most valued possession after the rifle. She wondered, for a moment, what it said about her that both were weapons, but shook the thought out of her head. She didn't have time.
Nikha didn't have nearly as much practice with a blade as she did with her gun. She'd read a couple of fighting manuals, though, and Papa had shown her a few tricks too. She kept the blade in a middle guard as she climbed, tip out and ready to strike around around the stair's curve. After a few turns, though, she was confronted by nothing but another accursed door. This one opened easily onto an immense space made all of ill-fitted boards, dust swirling languidly in the sunlight that leaked between them. Was it the right way, though? The stairs kept going up, after all. Suppose I have to check. Nikha shut the door to get it out of her way and kept ascending.
Three more turns upward, and there was another one. Behind it was another great wooden room. Hmm. She still hadn't reached the top. She pulled the door closed and kept going. Another three turns, another door, another identical room. Nikha narrowed her eyes at it, frowning. Fool me once... This time, she pulled a spent case from her belt- she always held onto them so they could be reused- and tossed it into the dim, cavernous space. It rolled a bit before catching in a seam. Then, it was up and up and up, three more turns. She tugged open the door she'd known would be there. Lo and behold, the shell lay just where she'd tossed it. Somehow this stupid staircase was taking her in circles.
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She went through the door and was about to close it when an idea struck her. If going up always took her to the same place, what about going down? The thought made her nervous. She imagined being stuck on an endless staircase, climbing down forever and ever until she starved...no, she wasn't going to tempt fate just to satisfy a bit of curiosity. She shoved the door shut and advanced, picking up the case on the way. This place was much more open than the corridors she'd been moving through, with walls she could barely make out and a ceiling forty or more feet up. The floor was packed dirt and the walls rough-cut planks. Sunlight streamed in through the gaps, leaving the place dim but warm. Nikha was hardly surprised anymore. From some strange version of the Eldergrave she knew, to a castle, to a...warehouse, maybe? At any other time she'd be wide-eyed with wonder, eager to explore. But for now? She had to make sure Papa was safe. Mama, too. Nothing else was as important.
This room was shaped like a square, it seemed. At first she couldn't even make out the far wall but it quickly grew clearer. As she got nearer the center, a strange shape hulked out of the dimness. She went for her gun-but let go when she realized what it was. There in the middle of the room stood a concert harp of gray wood, accompanied by a stubby, rough-cut bench. Nikha gave one of the strings a pluck, yelped and jerked back when it snapped. "Ow..." she murmured, rubbing her stung finger. "What is this doing here?" She honestly had no clue. Maybe if you played the right melody, a secret door would open- there'd been something like that in one of her adventure books. She had no idea what that tune might be, though, and the thing seemed in disrepair anyway. She ran a hand down the graceful curve of its neck before moving on.
At the opposite end of the great room was a narrow, splintery door. It came open after a few good yanks, revealing yet another hallway. It looked a lot like the room she was leaving, but its floor was wooden as well. No light shone in between the planks, either. The splintery boards of the floor creaked and clicked beneath her boots. Crude nails and knots in the wood did their best to trip her up. The hall was unlit, and though she left the door open she soon ran out of light. She stopped for a moment to get out her lamp. Just as she set her rucksack down, she heard a noise and froze. Scritch scritch. There it was again. It sounded like a rat, somewhere in the darkness beyond the planks. She shuddered. Once one had burrowed inside the walls of a sitting room and gotten itself stuck. The thing had made that same noise for days. Scritch scratch scritch, over and over again until it had finally died.
She heard it a few more times as she retrieved the lantern. It was the same sort a miner might carry, made of brass and iron and thick, tough glass. She stuck a fresh cell of phlogiston into its base and turned the valve. The arc lit immediately, giving off a blue-white light that was cold but still comforting. Nikha quickly slung her pack back on and got moving, accompanied by a few more scratching noises.
She walked quickly. The tunnel-she began thinking of it that way, though she had no evidence-was claustrophobic and pitch black. The bright arc of her lamp lit up the boards but left the spaces between even darker. Her eyes darted about constantly. She kept her hearing strained for unusual noises, but the incessant creaks and snaps of the floor blotted out everything but her breathing. The tunnel itself bent and wound without apparent reason, sometimes even sloping up or down. There were no side doors, and she probably wouldn't have wasted time on them if there were. Every minute or so she raised the lantern to her face and checked that the sight glass was still full of brightly swirling phlogiston. It was, of course. A fresh cell was good for an hour or so of light. Nikha checked anyway. She refused to be caught trying to change cells in the dark.
After fifteen minutes or so, she noticed the boards all around were looking rougher, more splintered, almost chewed-up. A few were cracked or even missing, revealing an exterior darkness her lantern did nothing to dispel. She stopped and listened. It was quiet...so quiet...but she heard it. Scritchitchitchitchitch, a low susurration like sandpaper on wood. She frowned nervously and increased her pace again. The walls grew worse and worse, boards hanging and sagging. Soon she was stepping around black holes in the floor, the scratching was growing louder and louder, and-
Something hard hit her shoulder. She stopped on a relatively solid plank, glanced over, and froze. Stark against the white cloth of her blouse was a glossy black worm longer than her hand. Its chitinous segments made it look like a string of obsidian gravel. One end lifted up, thrashed about for a second, then darted for her collar. She made a shocked "Yeep!" sound and snatched at it with her free hand. She just barely caught hold of it, yanked it away, and immediately smashed it against the wall with force born of terror and disgust, uncaring of how she scraped her palm. The impact made the rickety walls shake, and she heard a few clacks as things landed on the floor. Nikha looked up, already knowing what she'd see. Above her the ceiling was at least as patchy as the floor, and the gaps glittered with a solid mass of worms.
She allowed herself a single, quiet whimper of fear. Then she ran.
It was hard going, the visibility bad, the footing worse. The scratching of the worms grew louder and louder until it seemed like she was inside a log being sawed in half. She had to keep an eye on the floor, sometimes jumping from plank to plank instead of actually running, bouncing off the walls to keep her balance. Once a particularly rotten board collapsed as she pushed off it, almost sending her into the black. She scrabbled forward on three limbs until she regained her footing, the lantern clunking against the floor.
Twists and turns, ups and downs, endless convolutions. The air in the tunnel felt close and warm, and her breath wheezed hard out of her chest, competing with the worm-noise in her ears. A few more dropped onto her head and she swept them out of her hair without thinking. She began to despair of ever escaping, but then she saw it. A light, the same bright blue arc-light as her lamp. She pushed herself faster. Soon Nikha realized that the light was coming from a sconce, and below that sconce was a door. She came up to it so quickly she nearly smashed it down, fumbled with the knob, got it open- the light nearly blinded her- went through, and slammed it behind her.
Nikha had just enough presence of mind to make sure the door was latched before slumping against it, trying to catch her breath. Her legs burned and her face ran with sweat. She made the circle of the Annoumenos over her chest and huffed out a prayer. "Protofozon mey yev'kherisht." My thanks, O First Light. She felt a tapping coming from the toe of one boot, and looked down to see a half-crushed obsidian worm clinging to it, waving around. She let out a disgusted snarl, kicked it off and ground it thoroughly to paste with the heel of her boot. Belatedly, she realized that the noise of the worms had stopped as soon as the door shut. Whatever. On today's scale of strangeness, that barely rated a mention. Still breathing hard, she raised her head to take a look around.