Page 9 of Orc’s Hex

“Yes.” He keeps his eyes forward. “Not recently. Not voluntarily.”

She doesn’t push it. Behind them, Varek makes a sound that might be breath and might be commentary.

The catacomb entrance is a door in the lower keep that’s never had a lock because the architecture is disincentive enough—the corridor beyond narrows and descends at a grade that isn’t quite steep enough to call dangerous and is precisely steep enough to make you feel it in your knees. He watches Ziva read the grade, tilt her head, and step through without hesitation.

She goes first.

He follows. Varek’s torch comes in behind him.

The upper catacombs smell of cold stone and centuries of sealed air. Sealed crypt doors line both sides. He knows most of the names carved in those faces. Some of them he knew alive.

Ziva trails her hand along the wall as she walks. Not for balance—reading. Each small shift in her expression maps what the stone is telling her. When the dressed stone gives way to smoothed natural rock, she slows. When the carvings change style, she slows again. When the temperature drops past what depth alone would cause, she stops entirely.

The junction. The corridor angles sharply down into the older section. The walls here are different. Older. Smoothed by something other than tools.

“It changes here.” She looks at the walls, then the grade of descent. “The construction stops. Whatever is below this point was here before anyone built anything above it.”

“Yes.”

She looks at him.

“Have you been down there.”

Varek’s torch shifts. The shadows move.

“Once,” Drazhul says. “When I was forty. Before I understood what I was dealing with.”

He stops there. She doesn’t push it. But she’s reading him the same way she reads the walls.

He doesn’t tell her what the chamber did to him. He doesn’t tell her it took three years for the sound of it to stop. He doesn’t tell her any of this and he doesn’t examine why.

They don’t go lower today. She reads the upper catacombs—walls, sealed doors, the deepening curse pressure as they descend—and maps it all into her head without writing anything down.

Varek watches with the expression of a man who was right about something and is angry he was right.

She catches it. Of course she does.

“You don’t trust witches.” She doesn’t look up from the wall she’s reading.

“I’ve got reasons.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“Don’t mean I’m wrong.”

She turns. Studies him the way she studied the relief maps—quick and total. “No. You’re not wrong. I’d be suspicious of me too, coming in here with a clanlord’s open door and a problem no one else has solved.” She turns back to the wall. “Being suspicious doesn’t mean you’re right about what I am. It means you’re paying attention. Keep paying attention.”

Varek looks at Drazhul.

Drazhul looks at the ceiling.

“I hate her,” Varek says, very quietly.

“No you don’t.”

They surface from the catacombs as the hold’s mid-morning sounds filter back in—shift change, the forge quarter starting work, Garrok’s voice carrying from the training yard three floors up. Drazhul has always liked this hour. The sound of the hold working.

In the corridor outside the catacomb door, Ziva stops and turns to face him.