Alie fished the ring from her pocket. It buzzed against her skin. She picked over chunks of obsidian to the glowing plants and lifted the ring, expecting nothing.
A thin beam of light, like the tail of a shooting star, pointing to the middle of the rubble.
She glanced over her shoulder. Lilia had stopped her search, eyes narrowed at the ring. Alie jerked her chin to the beam of light. “I’d look there.”
Lilia did. And it only took a moment to find the shard. She reached out to touch it and hissed, snatching her hand back. “Damn. That hurts like every hell.”
Alie made her way over, cautiously bending down to the shard. Her hands buzzed, so much worse than touching the ring, but she gritted her teeth and closed her fingers on its edges.
Pain, scouring, like she’d been lit on fire. Alie’s mouth opened, but all that came out was a harsh breath.
Then the pain was over, a half heartbeat of agony. It still made her hands numb, but Alie could lift it now. She hauled the piece up from the ground.
It was pale, seamed in gold. On the edge, a carved sun, a perfect match to the Arceneaux crown.
“How did it do that?” Lilia breathed.
“Something about magic, I’m sure.” Alie tucked the ring back into her pocket. “The stone is Mount-mined. I guess things from the Golden Mount call to each other.”
“And it doesn’t hurt you to touch.” Lilia shook her head. “A fail-safe, I supposed. So only gods can handle the pieces.”
Something about that itched in the back of Alie’s mind.
Above their heads, the cavern shuddered.
Lilia glanced up. “Did you hear that?”
Another shudder, dust clouding the air in the light from their torch.
Apollius had built the tomb, had put the Fount piece here. Had never wanted the Fount put back together again.
It made sense for Him to build in a defense mechanism.
Rocks pattered to the floor like rain, small enough not to cause undue injury, but large and sharp enough to hurt. One landed on Alie’s arm, blooming a bruise. In the dark where their light didn’t reach, the echoing sounds of grinding, falling, imminent collapse.
“Shit,” Lilia hissed.
Alie’s hand shot up, her fingers gathering in air. The iridescent lines flowed into her and then back out, weaving themselves into a shield over her and Lilia’s heads. A rock, larger than the others so far, fell from the ceiling and bounced off. Alie winced. “We should run, probably.”
As if her words tipped the scale, the ceiling of the cathedral crashed down.
This was no gentle warning, giving them time to escape—this was a full-measure assault, the magic woven into this place goingafter them like hunting dogs with the taste of blood. Stones twice as big as Alie crashed to the ground, bouncing from her shield—she kept from screaming, but only just, the impact reverberating through her outstretched arm. She and Lilia sprinted toward the mouth of the tunnel she had already cleared, tripping over bones.
And the collapsing didn’t stop once they got free of the cathedral, of that first tunnel. The phosphorescence of the plant life slowly faded as Alie’s fingers shook with the pressure of her air-woven shield. The Fount piece burned in her other hand, her fingers numb, the half of her concentration not spent on the shield focused completely on not dropping the stupid stone that was currently bringing the earth down on their heads.
“It’ll collapse the whole damn catacombs!” Lilia shouted next to her, still barely audible over the screech of rock.
A light up ahead, after a churn of time that seemed both longer and shorter than the hours it had taken to hike down here. The hole in the derelict house, the place they’d entered. Alie had never run so fast in her life.
She pelted through the hole, Lilia at her back. They didn’t stop, running through the house and out the door, into the street.
Shuddering, the groaning of old wood and old stone. The house’s collapse was slow, not like the immediate destruction of the caverns below. And it was quiet, almost, as if the house’s ghost was half given up already. The row houses were all crooked now, the foundations slipped from their moorings as the tunnel beneath them collapsed. They’d surely been unstable before, when the first tunnel Alie cleared had gone down. Now that the entire path up from Nyxara’s tomb was rubble, the consequences were finally visible. A few people came out of the houses, frowning, trying to figure out what had happened. Alie pulled her hood over her head and turned away.
“So much for secrecy,” Lilia said.
Alie hid the stone shard in the pocket of her cloak. It was toobig to fit without bulging. As soon as her hand let it go, feeling started coming back to her fingers in painful waves. “No one pays attention to the houses out here,” she said, hating that it was true, hating that she was using that to her advantage. “And most of them have been unstable for years. No one should immediately put together that it has anything to do with the tunnels.”
“But they will eventually.”
