Maybe I should have listened to the witch.

The impenetrable darkness closed around my war club’s silver light from every direction. Myelissi’s kiss couldn’t push the darkness back more than a few feet in any direction, and my hackles were fully erect at the thought of what might be lurking just outside the feeble circle of light. There could be a dragon out there.

Hell, for all I could see there could be a dozen dragons.

I took a deep breath and pushed those paranoid thoughts out of my head. There was more than enough hellish bullshit in the world these days without inventing problems. If a monster jumped out of the darkness, I’d kill the fuck out of it, or it would kill me. Worrying about what might be wouldn’t get me any closer to Amankala.

“Spooky.” A woman’s voice reached me from the darkness.

I’ll admit that made me jump just a little.

I spun to face the voice, my glowing war club held high.

“Sorry,” Aja said with a grin that told me she was definitely not sorry at all. “Thought you could use the backup.”

“You should stay with Ryasina,” I said.

“Yeah, Aja,” Ayo said as she emerged from the gloom. “Stay with her.”

“Damnit, you two!” My raised voice exploded into a chorus of echoes that rebounded from the cavern’s walls in a deafening jumble. When the noise had died down, I scowled and lowered my voice. “Seriously. You’re her familiars. It’s your job to keep her safe.”

“And our mistress sent us in here to keep you safe.” Aja scowled right back at me, eyes narrowed into stern slits. “You’re the last shaman, Kyr. We can’t fix the world without you.”

“I’m only the last shaman until she trains another one.” That was a daily argument between the witch and me. She didn’t want to waste time finding a new initiate to train, and I wanted a replacement on hand in case I got splattered by a monster or murdered by an assassin. “She, on the other hand, can’t be replaced.”

“Theoretically,” Ayo corrected me. “We don’t know that the sacred animals won’t send a new witch if one of the first set gets killed.”

“You’re bound to her. Aren’t you at least a little worried about what might happen if she dies?” Everyone was so concerned about my safety they forgot to look after their own. It was seriously fucking annoying.

“We’ll be fine,” Aja countered. “We existed before we were familiars, and we will still exist after we are no longer familiars. Are we going to talk all day about what bad shit might happen, or are we going to find Amankala?”

I wasn’t sure whether she’d picked that out of my mind from earlier or she was just being impatient.

“Fine,” I relented. “But stay close behind me and don’t fucking touch anything.”

“Okay, okay,” Aja said, hands raised. “Don’t get so huffy.”

“He’s sexy when he’s angry,” Ayo said. “His muscles get all tight and he puffs out his chest.”

“Thank you for noticing,” I said. “Now let’s get through this shit so I can return you safely to your mistress.”

“She’s your mistress now, too,” Aja said with a grin.

“Not the same,” I muttered and led the spirits deeper into the darkness.

Ryasina and I had bonded our cores when we’d cleansed the nexus together, but I wasn’t her familiar. She wasn’t my familiar, either, and she sure as fuck wasn’t my spirit animal. The crimson bear was irreplaceable.

The witch had explained that shamans can connect to beings in different ways, though we’re all limited by the strength of our cores. When I’d been earthbound, I could support an internal connection to my spirit animal and an external connection to one other creature. I’d used my external connection to make Yata my familiar, which had let the rude-ass bird escape from its bondage as a guardian of the now-defunct Cragtooth Deepways station.

My seabound external connection was bonded to the Wave Serpent. That had allowed me to cleanse the nexus and gave me access to the shio stored in her core. There were probably some other gimmicks that came along with tying myself to one of the seven sacred witches, but Ryasina had been too badly wounded to explore it while we were on her island and hadn’t wanted to tamper with our bond while we were on the move. As soon as we got a little free time, we had a lot to learn about each other.

Free time. As if.

“What is that sound?” Aja asked.

“You’re a fucking spirit of the hunt,” I said. Now that she’d mentioned the sound, I heard something, too. “What do your super-keen ears tell you?”

“That I don’t like it,” the crimson-haired spirit said.

“There’s a disturbance in the senjin fields, too,” Ayo said. “A pull.”

The spirits had gotten stronger since I’d bonded with their mistress, and their abilities seemed to become more pronounced by the day. Aja, a hunting spirit, could hear a leaf fall in a forest and smell a mouse fart at a hundred yards if she put her mind to it. Ayo, a spirit of streams, had picked up an interesting attunement to senjin that let her feel the sacred energy that flowed through the dream meridians and permeated the world around us.

“Stay sharp,” I said in a low voice.

The humming sound grew more intense as we moved forward, and the pull Ayo had felt intensified until it felt like a fish hook trying to pull one of my nodes out of my core. Whatever we were approaching had an appetite for sacred energy.

The cavern’s walls narrowed as we ventured farther into its depths. The floor sloped down slightly, and the sound of trickling water was soon loud enough to mask the sinister hum. On the plus side, the nearly impenetrable darkness dissipated after a few more steps, yielding to a curved wall of mirror-smooth blackness that reflected the light from my war club.

The gleaming barrier also completely sealed the tunnel ahead of us.

“Well, this fucking sucks,” I said. “Any guesses what in the Blood God’s sweaty ballsack we’re dealing with here?”

“It’s not solid,” Ayo said. “But I wouldn’t touch it.”

My spirit sight told me much the same. The barrier was composed entirely of corrupted senjin, laced with cords of crackling rin that looked ready to kill the shit out of anyone or anything that tried to pass through.

A thread of twisted black senjin led away from the barrier, and I followed it with my eyes.

“There’s another tunnel,” I said, pointing toward a narrow opening on the left side of the cavern just before the concave black wall. “Do you sense anything down that way?”

Aja turned her head toward the new tunnel, closed her eyes, and breathed in deeply. She let the breath out, then took another.

“Water,” she said. “It’s fresh, but that’s all I can tell.”

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“No monsters down that way?” I asked.

“Nope,” Aja confirmed. “Seems clear.”

“Good.” I raised my club overhead and followed the thread of power into the tunnel. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

The tunnel was narrow enough that I had to turn sideways to keep from scraping my shoulders on its walls. The ceiling was too low to keep my club above my head, but not so low that I had to duck to keep from scraping my scalp raw. The walls, floor, and ceiling had been polished smooth, though there were no other signs this was man-made. After twenty feet, the passage opened into a round chamber roughly ten feet across.

A pool of water covered the round room’s floor, its surface covered in ripples from the stream that splashed into it. The stream’s source was a narrow hole in the opposite wall, its edges worn into a sloping funnel by years of steady erosion.

The thread of power from the barrier plunged into the center of the pool and dove into its depths. My spirit sight followed the tainted senjin past the reach of my war club’s light, then deeper through a narrow hole at the bottom of the basin to a festering blister of corruption that lurked far below the pool.

“Don’t drink the water,” I cautioned the spirits. “I’m not sure it would hurt you, but I bet you won’t enjoy it.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Aja said. “Now what?”

“The barrier means business,” I said. “It will definitely kill us if we try to pass through it. I’m going to try to disconnect it from its power source.”

“Don’t get yourself killed,” Ayo said. “There’s a great deal of corruption here.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said. “But no promises.”

The spirit was right. There was enough power flowing through the connection between the spring and the barrier to cause serious damage to a careless energy artist. One wrong move and all that poisonous taint would pour into my core and eat me alive.

Fortunately, I had a couple of things working in my favor.

First, I’d already cleansed the corruption from a dream meridian nexus and was well aware of the dangers of this kind of work. Second, I had a pair of spirits standing by who could fuck the corruption right out of me if I screwed up.

I sent a thread of rin energy from my core toward the barrier’s connection to its power source. As my sacred energy drew near to its target, the hum grew louder in my ears and the pull became ever stronger in my core. The barrier consumed a vast amount of energy, and whoever had constructed it had imbued it with the ability to pull as much as it needed from its surroundings.

And those surroundings currently included my exploratory strand of sacred energy.

The barrier reeled in my thread before I could retract it, then yanked violently at my core. Its voracious hunger slurped a node’s worth of rin into its maw before I recovered and put a stop to that silly shit. Images of gnashing teeth and a gaping gullet lined with thrashing tentacles filled my mind as the first glimmers of a connection formed between the barrier and me.

There was no intelligence in the wall of darkness, but it possessed an animalistic awareness that was constantly on the search for more energy. It was hungry, and it wanted more of the energy it had just tasted. Given a chance, this thing would swallow me whole.

“Fat fucking luck, asshole,” I grumbled.

Rather than tamper with the devouring obstacle directly, I turned my attention to its power source. Slowly, inch by inch, I pulled my rin away from the sucking hunger that had snared it and wormed it down, past the pool and deep into the earth.

I’d thought the barrier was a monstrosity, but it was nothing compared to what was hidden down there.

The creature I found beneath the pool was no longer alive, but it was far from dead. It looked like someone had shoved the front half of a bullfrog into the open socket of a lobster’s tail, then glued the mess together with strands of snot. The unholy combination was made all the worse by the patches of blighted corruption that covered the creature’s glistening hide and scabrous carapace. Transparent cysts bulged from the froggy parts of the creature, and fat tadpoles squirmed inside them.

Well, that was fucking gross.

One of the beast’s milky eyes twitched open as its sluggish attention twisted toward me.

“Who dares disturb my slumber?” it mumbled through blubbery lips covered in rotting blisters.

“My apologies, honored beast,” I said. Despite the creature’s horrific appearance, I didn’t sense any malice from it. All I could detect was suffering that had gone on for far, far too long. “I did not mean to disturb you. Sadly, I must ask a boon from you.”

“You may ask, though it is unlikely I will grant it.” The creature shifted its great bulk, revealing the muscle fibers that bound its two halves together. It settled into a more comfortable position and curled the webbed fingers of its hands under its chin.

“I need you to withhold your power from the barrier that drains you,” I said. “My companions and I must pass.”

“What you ask is beyond my power to grant,” the creature said. “The barrier and I were created to feed one another. While it exists, so do I, and while I persist, it stands fast.”

I examined the creature’s bond to the barrier more closely. It was telling the truth. The beast and the black wall weren’t so much connected as they were part of the same entity. The bond was laced with a ridiculous number of scripts I couldn’t begin to unravel. Some revolved around aspects of life, while others were potent talismans that attracted energy, and still others seemed too dangerous to look at for any length of time. There was a chance I could sever the connection between the beast and the wall, but there was no telling what would happen if I did.

The scripts contained in their bond might lash out, killing me instantly. Or the whole thing could explode and bring the cavern down around our ears.

I let the frogstrosity return to its slumber and focused all my attention on the barrier itself. It had a core, though it lacked any nodes. It didn’t store energy but used it as fast as it pulled it in. The more sacred senjin that was available, the more powerful the barrier became. And when there was less sacred energy, the barrier would grow weaker.

The Wall of Sanctity formation technique could have starved the barrier of senjin and let us all waltz right through the passage it had sealed off if only I could get pylons on its opposite side. Since that was out of the question, though, I needed another plan.

I studied the barrier’s core until I found what I was looking for. The barrier had an internal connection to its power source, but it also had an external connection that was currently vacant. I also had an empty connection point.

Bonding with the barrier would invite that monster into my core, which didn’t sound like it would be much fun. Fortunately, it would only be temporary because bonding with a scripted construct wasn’t the same as tying the knot with a spirit or living creature. I could break the connection whenever I wanted, though that would cause me to lose control of the barrier.

And that brought me to a much more serious problem. My worries must have shown on my face because Aja cleared her throat to get my attention.

“Shaman shit giving you grief?” she asked with an impish grin.

“Plenty.” I raked my fingers through my dark hair and let out a deep sigh. “The only way I can get around this barrier is to bond with it.”

“That should only be a temporary connection,” Ayo chimed in. “You can just detach from it after we finish our business in Amankala and head back to your territory.”

“No, we can’t.” I scowled at the darkness, which mocked me with its silence. “I’d planned to use that connection to bond with the Lapis Scarab and cleanse the dream meridian nexus. And that’s a permanent tie that I can’t break.”

“Shit.” Aja bit her lip. “You’d lose control of the barrier before we could leave. We’ll be trapped inside.”

“Exactly.” My fingers tightened around my war club’s haft until the knuckles popped. “We can’t turn back now, though. Let me get this stupid barrier out of the way. We can decide what to do after that when we reach the nexus. Maybe I can cleanse it with just Ryasina’s help.”

“Be careful,” Aja cautioned.

“You’re here to protect me if anything goes wrong,” I said with a grin. “So protect me.”

“I’m sure we will come up with something,” Aja said, licking her lips. “It has been a couple of days.”

I’d healed the spirits’ cores when I cleansed the nexus and bonded with the witch, but that hadn’t stopped us from enjoying our sexcapades since. We were still able to fill our nodes with purified sacred energy after a rousing session of bumping uglies, and the experience was as enjoyable as ever. We just hadn’t had much alone time since we started our little trip to Amankala.

“Glad you haven’t forgotten about me,” I said. “Here we go.”

Before I could change my mind, I sent a tendril of rin into the barrier. There was a strange, panicky moment when it felt like I was falling, deeper and deeper into a bottomless hole with gnashing teeth lining its sides.

And then I was inside the barrier, its core a throbbing wall of raw power around me. With a thought, I reached out and welded a connection between us. There was no resistance to my efforts; whoever had constructed this damned thing must have been long dead. The barrier shuddered as our bond snapped into place, and for a moment its alien need for power threatened to drain me dry.

“That’s enough of that shit. Settle the fuck down,” I snarled at the barrier.

Its animal instincts bowed up at the leash I’d placed around its throat. All it had known since it was created was hunger and the endless need to feed.

Too bad for it I wasn’t interested in satisfying its hunger. I concentrated on our bond, forcing the damned thing to calm down and stop trying to eat me. Its resistance faded, slowly, until it finally rolled over and showed me its belly like a beaten dog.

“That’s right, I’m the fucking boss.” I let out a deep, relieved breath. “Now play nice, and open wide.”

The glossy black barrier vanished, revealing a passage. Just a few yards ahead of where I stood, the cavern opened into a wide valley. A curved wall of smooth blue stone ran from the ridgeline on my left to the one on my right, cutting across the valley’s width. Behind that barrier, towering structures rose toward a sky filled with constellations I didn’t recognize. A pair of moons hung over the ancient city of Amankala, one blue, one yellow, like mismatched eyes in a black velvet face.

“Why are there two moons?” Ayo asked, her voice tight with nervous energy.

“Wow,” Aja said. “That’s fucked up.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You could say that.”

This trip had suddenly gotten a lot weirder.