The torch sputtered to life as the flame was coaxed, caught, and flared. It gave off a resinous smoke that looked more brown than grey. And it stung the boy’s eyes too. When he took the torch in his hands he had to blink and squint against the smoke. The instruction was clear enough: Caewen would carry nothing past the dark door, and the boy would follow her, with the torch lighting the way. That was all.
The door scraped open far more easily than it ought, given its age and state of corrosion. Blackness lay beyond, and coldness too. A wind came out of the space, as if the cave were itself exhaling after a long time spent in stillness. Caewen nodded to Dapplegrim and Fleat. There was a quiet hiss of breath from the bag where it lay beside the door, but she did not glance at it. Instead, before she passed into the darkness of the entrance she said, nonchalantly, “And as for you, fetch: just try not to murder anyone while I’m gone.”
Dapplegrim’s snort was derisive. “Him? murder me? Not likely. If there’s killing to be done up here… hurrrm…”
“Dapple, hush,” she whispered, then turned to the door.
“Well, goodbye,” said the boy to Dapplegrim and Fleat. “We’ll see you in a bit then.” He followed Caewen’s lead and turned himself to the doorway too. “One hopes.”
The thought of walking unarmed into a place where–at least so claimed the fetch–dead things dwell, sent a chill all through his flesh, right down into the backs of his knees. He found himself trembling and had to work hard to keep the torch steady.
Caewen vanished into the shadows ahead of him, and she said, from he darkness: “Child, light the way please.”
He took one last breath of clean air, and followed, holding the torch as far from his face as he could muster. Its light cast fickle shadows and golden phantoms on smoothly cut walls beyond. Behind them, there was still a great slab of grey light coming through from the day outside, but as they walked farther, down a long, hall of enclosing cold stone, the daylight diminished. And sooner than the boy would have liked, it was only a scratch of light at the far end of a long black tunnel.
They found at the end of the straight corridor, another great door, but this one was chiselled into stone. It looked to the boy’s eye more like a carving of a door than an actual doorway. The air was wetter here, and faint noises of dripping fell around them. At first the boy thought there was rubble around the door, but then he saw the torchlight flash against a whiteness of bone. He saw staring eye-sockets and enamel of teeth shining in the glow. Remnants of bodies were strewn about the entrance, though these were not the remains of humanfolk or anything quite like them. He peered down, more closely at one skull, and saw a snoutlike visage and sharp, tearing teeth. It looked like an animal, though bits and pieces of chain links were rusted onto its ribcage and there was a savage lump of a broken sword at the thing’s side. Caewen picked up a bone, looked at it, and threw it to the ground. Then, she lifted a skull. “Scarle,” she said after a pause, then let the skull roll gently off her hands. It hit the ground and split in two. Ignoring the crash of the skull, she cast her eyes now at the door. “They died here. But there is no sign of a guardian. Who defended the door?” She glanced up at the door. “And the door is open. Something must have stopped them here.”
“What do you mean the door is open?”
She looked at him. There was a shadow in her eyes. And a strange darkness too. Her expression was amused, and perhaps even a little discomforting. He wondered, suddenly, if the shadow-demon had done things to her after all. She seemed much darker and colder, now that they were out of the light. He felt himself wanting to inch away from her.
“It is unlocked,” said Caewen. “It requires only the right token to make the way clear.” She turned to the door now, and laid a hand on it. Then she dragged her fingertips down over the carven surface. “Blood. A splash would do, I think.”
“How do you know–?” asked the boy, and he meant to add more to his question–but she turned to look at him, and the vague cold light in her eyes made him stop.
He looked around instead, shifted where he stood. “There might have been guards here?” he ventured. “They might have carried off their own dead?” It sounded so strange, his voice, echoing in this wet, dark place under the earth. But he pressed on and managed to say, “Or maybe the guards are dead too? Under the pile of bones.”
“Or maybe they are dead and waiting on the other side of the door.” She shrugged. “Well–at any rate–within we must go. If these creatures wanted so badly to go in there, then that is the path.”
He looked around. “But I don’t see any other paths.”
She remained fixated on the door as she said, “There are other doors here. This is the one that I think most promising.”
The boy did involuntarily take a step back then. She was starting to talk in unsettling riddles. He knocked one of the skeletons. It came apart and the bones skittered and clattered on the stone floor. “This all happened a long time ago, didn’t it? The fighting?”
“Years and years ago. The great fortress-city of the fane that once stood here was overrun centuries past. Before the reign of the Sorthe in the north.” She sounded less certain as she spoke: “No doubt the war had a name, and was told about for years afterwards in song and tale–but it is all forgotten now, perhaps except as some small detail in a children’s story at the fireside.” She sighed. “I am no student of elder lore, or leastways, not as much as I ought to be.”
“You know a lot compared to me,” said the boy. “I mean, just… you know. You know a lot of stuff. I don’t know hardly nothing. Not really.”
She looked him. Her tone did not grow any warmer, but the tenseness in her poise was perhaps lessened a touch. “But you’ll learn. You’re learning all the time, and learning is all it takes. A willingness to learn. A desire to. The will to put one’s mind to it. I think you have that, child. You have curiosity and a desire to know more and grow your world. It’s clear enough. Even if you don’t see it, others of us do.” She smiled. “Now, the blood.”
Caewen lunged towards the boy. He yelped and jumped back. But she was only stooping past him. Without seeming to notice his alarm, she took up one of the rusted, broken blades. With a small wince, she sliced the jagged metal across her palm, then dropped the weapon. It clattered, and the echoes made echoes and more echoes in the space. With a murmured word that the boy could not make out, she pressed the bleeding palm into the door.
In a moment, the door, which had appeared to be stone, was not stone at all. It was a solid, well-made door of oak, carven with small decorating etchings and bound in a burnished red-grey metal that the boy did not recognise.
“Was that the sacrifice?” said the boy.
Caewen shook her head. “Just a token of passage.” Then, she said: “Follow me.” There was a hard edge of command to her voice, and the boy imagined again that he could see a warmthless, subtle glow in her eyes.
They stepped around the strewn remains of the boggarts and through the portal beyond.