26

The lantern gave off enough light for Lyra to see a few feet ahead and not much more. Where the fissure and the cavern they had just left looked natural, made by the shifting of the earth, this tunnel had clearly been made by human hands. The walls were rough stone, with visible chips and divots where tools had chipped away at them, and the floor was only somewhat smoother. Each step sent a stab of pain through her side, but she felt a sort of hysterical determination to carry on. She hadn't wanted to get involved in any of this in the first place, but now that she had, she couldn't just leave Galin to rot down here.

Her steps faltered when the flickering light of the lantern revealed a dark splatter of something on the tunnel floor. Blood.

"It's not his," Kel said from behind her. "It's old. It must belong to the man who the boy sacrificed to the god."

Right. Dalton's brother. Unease made her throat close up. She didn't want to see a corpse, but she hadn't wanted to enter the dark tunnel either, and she'd already done that. At least she knew what she was going to find down here. She started moving forward again.

The blood splatters grew thicker until they turned into a steady smear. She wondered if it was the god who had dragged the body through the tunnel, or if Galin and Bria had done it on their own.

Thankfully, the tunnel was only about a hundred yards long, with a steady but shallow decline. Even that relatively short distance was enough to have lost all natural light from the fissure in the hillside. Without the light from the lantern, the tunnel would have been pitch black.

The tunnel ended abruptly and opened up into a cavern, larger than the one they were in before. She felt exposed as she stepped out of the close walls of the tunnel and into the dark expanse. The lantern's dim light spread out around her in a flickering pool, but it was to the center of the room that her eyes were drawn first.

They had found Dalton's brother. He was a large man, with hairy arms and a short leather apron reminiscent of one she had seen a blacksmith wearing at a fair back home, but the deep gash across his throat was what held her gaze. His dull, clouded eyes stared blankly up at the dark ceiling, and his lips were drawn back in a silent scream. He was laying on a stone slab that was stained dark with old blood. How many other sacrifices had been made here, in this old shrine to a nameless god? She didn't move until she heard Kel say, "Priestess?" from behind her.

"Sorry," she whispered hoarsely. "I've never seen a dead person before."

"Someone will bury him later. Right now, it is the living who deserve our attention. That is, if you still wish to save the boy."

"Of course I do. Where – oh."

She raised the lantern and saw Galin, huddled in a corner of the cavern as far away from them as he could get. Despite the fact that he was the entire reason they were down here, she only gave him a glance before focusing on the bones.

The back part of the cavern was littered with old, dry bones. All of the skulls she saw belonged to animals, but some were broken and crumbled beyond recognition. As she turned, she saw that the bones lined the cavern all the way around, leaving a clear space in the middle where the stone slab was. Set at even distances around the edge of the cavern were four rusted metal braziers, filled with something dark – charcoal, probably, from the last time they had been lit. The walls…

The walls were covered in art.

She didn't know if it was paint or blood, though for it to have remained legible after all these years, she thought it was probably the former. The images reminded her a little of the old cave drawings from home. They depicted the lupine god, unmistakable even though the art style was simple, and the smaller figures humans. Most of the scenes showed the god and humans hunting deer and large cattle and something that might have been a giant sloth, but at the very back of the cavern, centered between two of the braziers, was an image that stood out.

An eye looked down from the sky, humongous compared to the stick figures that were taking shelter in the cave beneath it. The figures huddled in terror, unmistakable despite the lack of detail, while the lupine god stood over them, shielding them from the eye in the sky. Everything outside of the cave was painted red, as if it was covered in blood.

"Do you see the god, priestess?"

She jumped at Kel's voice. "N-"

Before she could get the word out, the god was there, standing in front of her as if it had always been there. She could see through it to the lanterns light flickering on the wall behind it, and its wounds were still leaking globules of light.

"Treachery," it snarled. "I curse you, priestess –"

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"It's standing three feet in front of me, slightly to the right," she said quickly, stumbling over the words in her rush to get them out.

Kel moved past her like a striking snake, swinging his sword through the space the god was standing in. It howled as the relic left another bright slash through it, and with a flash of light that briefly illuminated the entire cavern, it vanished. Lyra blinked, her eyes dazed from the flash.

"Is it gone?"

"It has been slain," Kel said. "But the gods never truly die. If people begin to worship it again or a large enough sacrifice is made, it will return. Thankfully, it was weak for a blood god, or we would both be dead by now. Convince the boy to come with us if you still wish to do so. We should leave."

She waited for a moment, but the god didn't come back. Maybe it was just in her imagination, but she thought the cavern felt… lesser, somehow. It was just a hole in the ground with some bones and paintings in it.

And a slowly rotting corpse. Yeah, getting out of here was the right idea.

"Stay back," she told Kel as she turned toward Galin. "He's already terrified enough. I'm going to talk to him."

She approached Galin with caution. He was sobbing quietly, and she thought it was Yarra's voice coming from his mouth, but she wasn't sure. She crouched a few feet away from him and set the lantern down between them.

"It's just me," she said gently. "Lyra, the priestess. Kel isn't going to hurt you, I promise. What happened before was just a misunderstanding. We're here to help you."

"Go away."

Yep, that was definitely Yarra's voice. "Yarra, can I talk to Galin? The god from your village offered to help him, but I need to tell him what will happen."

She waited, and after a second, Galin's body shuddered. When he looked up at her, she was certain it was him looking at her through his eyes, not his little sister.

She wasn't sure if he knew what was going on when Yarra was in control, so she said, "You're safe. Kel promises not to hurt you. He told me that there are consequences for what you did, though. Killing that man."

"He killed Yarra," Galen said, glaring past her at the body on the floor. "A man who does that sort of thing to little girls deserves to die."

"Well, I can't say I disagree, but it sounds like it doesn't matter what you or I think. Pretend I don't know anything. What happens to someone who commits a sin?"

He blinked up at her, then recited, "A minor sin can be cleansed through worship and services to the gods. A great sin cannot be cleansed other than through the Sacrament of Cleansing. But that means you have to die. I don't want to die! Can't he just leave me be? I'll hide down here until God's Day is over and then I'll leave. No one in Lokokami will ever have to see me again."

"Well, that's one option," she said. "But this place is creepy as shit. I talked to the god in your village before I came here, Saofoth, and they asked me to bring you to their temple. They said that if you devoted yourself to them, they would protect you from the Great God. I know I'm supposed to be some sort of expert on these things because I'm a priestess, but I'm going to be completely honest with you — I have no idea what that means. But it sounds like a better option than straight-up dying or hiding out in this cave alone for the next couple of weeks, then going on the run. At least this way, you'd be able to stay with your family. Your mother and father are both worried about you."

"They're going to hate me."

"No, they won't. They just want you to come home." Just like her own father, who had probably realized she was missing by now. He was her emergency contact at both her jobs. She swallowed against the stab of guilt that shot through her. It wasn't her fault she had gone missing, and she was doing everything she could to get back.

"What about Yarra? I asked the god to give me a boon, but it feels more like a curse. No one is going to want me in the village."

"Well, if Saofoth is protecting you, no one else is going to bother you, right? This god is gone, but I don't think it was going to take Yarra's soul back anyway, not without another sacrifice. I know this isn't how you wanted it to go, and I can't even begin to imagine how messed up it is having someone else's soul inside of you, but you're probably just going to have to deal with it for now. I'm not going to lie, you messed up pretty badly, and your life is going to suck for a while, but I'd imagine it will suck a lot less if you come back with us and let your family and Saofoth help you."

She let him think. His eyes had a dim, faraway look that she'd never seen in such a young person before. Lyra was beginning to realize just how privileged her life had been. She was twenty-six years old, and she hadn't suffered even a fraction as much as this boy half her age had.

Finally, he nodded.

"That means you'll come with us?"

"I'll go with you. I trust you, priestess, and I just want everything to go back to normal."

"Good." She grabbed her lantern and rose to her feet, grimacing as her side throbbed with agony. Holding a hand out to help him up, she said, "Let's get out of here."

It took Lyra longer to make her way out of the tunnel than it had for her to descend into it. Everything hurt, and now that all of the immediate danger was out of the way, her sore muscles were making themselves known with a vengeance. Before getting thrown around by a god, she had spent all day walking, and all day yesterday too.

Despite her assurance that Kel wasn't going to cut off his head, Galen was still frightened of him, and Kel kept giving him a disapproving, narrow-eyed look, thin-lipped look. As long as they didn't try to kill each other, Lyra was too exhausted to care. She just wanted to get back to the village and sit down.

When they reached the mouth of the tunnel and entered the cavern that led to the fissure and outside, Kel grabbed both of their packs and she blew out the lantern before handing it over to him. He took the lead as they walked through the fissure, with her in the middle and Galin trailing in the back. She couldn't blame him for dragging his feet. She doubted he was looking forward to facing the consequences for everything that had happened here.

"Galin!"

Bria was the first one to rush forward when they stepped out into the fading daylight. She collided with him hard enough to make him stumble back and wrapped her arms around him in a bear hug. "You're alive! Thank you, priestess. I knew you would get him out."

Then Perra approached and pulled her son into another hug, and Galen's uncle joined them. Lyra knew she had been told his name, but she couldn't remember it right now, and she was too tired to care.

Maybe she would feel like she had accomplished something later. Right now, she just wanted everything to stop hurting.