Rue and Viru walked for another ten minutes through the waterlines. The descending tunnel they had turned into eventually evened out again. Rue had long lost her sense of direction, which was distressing given her sense of direction in the open wilderness was quite strong. Viru refused to answer any of Rue’s questions, and there was an annoyed tension between the two.

  They eventually reached the end of this specific junction. Waterlines abruptly ended right before they reached it, branched off in different directions of new tunnels. The tunnel they followed did not have a wall, instead opening into a new passage. Or, Rue realized as they drew to it, a room. Viru hopped down first and Rue came after. It was a closet with a yellow-orange light covered in heavy dust, which covered the several crates stacked wall to wall. Not crates. Caskets. Over a dozen of them, along with other supplies her attention skirted briefly over. Rue had her dagger strapped to her hip, but she reached for a hammer anyway, testing the weight of it.

  The hammer was covered in enough dust and grime that it was sticky against her gloves.

  There was a wider array of tools, a stack of books that were rather clean compared to everything else, and an unlit lantern set behind them. What use this room did get seemed sparse. Rue wondered where else the waterlines might lead to

  “We’re in the crypts now,” Viru whispered to Rue. No one was supposed to be around, but it felt appropriate to whisper.

  “Really?” Rue muttered sarcastically. “Couldn’t tell.”

  Viru shot her a withering look. “We’re going to move fast, get what we came for, and get out. Got it? Don’t talk. Just nod.”

  Rue nodded. She wanted to argue, but the claustrophobia felt oppressive to her innate nature.

  “Good girl. Nassen made this easy for us. Every casket we’re looking for is close together. If we split them up it’ll go faster.” She pulled the note from her pocket, muttering as she unfolded it. “Nassen thinks that the law is old enough that they might not be so strict with it, if we do get caught. But we won’t be. Anyway, I want you to look for the casket of…Edkin Howers and Nissa Tyrul. I’ll point you down the right hallway, and you shouldn’t need to go past more than thirty rows to find it.”

  “Are you kidding? If we’re the first to get caught breakin’ this law after decades–”

  “A century and a half,” Viru corrected quickly.

  “Whatever, a century or two, it don’t matter. It’s happening in other places, just not here, I guess. They’d make a big deal of it. We’d be lucky about it, too, I bet. Get quick deaths. One guy in my–”, she hesitated. “...My village, he got caught robbin’ some graves in another village. They didn’t just kill him, see? The local lord beat him with his bare fists. That lord had magic, strength, and liked showin’ it off. Then he made the villagers dig a grave, made all the others watch. The graverobber got tossed into the hole. He was too beaten to try to get out, but he screamed and begged while the lord made them fill the pit with dirt. He couldn’t throw it out faster than they could dump it in. The lord made the man’s wife part of helpin’ fill it in, else she’d get beat and dropped in, too.”

  Viru was taken aback by the story. “Why wouldn’t they just hang the man?”

  Rue scoffed. “They get bored real far south. It ain’t anything like this place.”

  Viru frowned. She looked at the paper in her hands. Rue spoke again before she could find words.

  “How do I know which casket is which?”

  “They’ve got plaques on them with their names.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh?” Viru looked up suspiciously.

  “Can I have that paper?” Rue asked sheepishly.

  . . .

  After getting chewed out by Viru for her illiteracy, the sarka found a solution by tearing off the two names that Rue needed to find, after Rue had assured her that she would be able to match them together well enough. She did murmur the names to herself, staring at them, making an educated guess of which was which off of the letters she felt more confident towards. Rue realized that she had never seen her name written down, and she couldn’t imagine what it might look like.

  When Rue thought of her name, she thought of the small yellow flowers growing from the bushlike plant. It was her namesake, and her mother once told her that it was blooming throughout the field she had given birth in, filling the field from one treeline to another. It was one of the few memories that gave her comfort from her childhood.

  Rue blinked, coming from the memory, finding herself standing in a corridor that she didn’t remember walking to. “Shit,” she muttered, turning to trace her steps back. It all looked the same, so she walked several rows further. It felt as if she should have gotten back to the storage closet they had arrived in, but she saw no trace of it. “This is fine. This is fine.”

  Anxiety coiled in her gut. The woman turned, eyeing the caskets, realizing she hadn’t been looking at the plaques upon them at all. The ceiling of the crypt had space enough above her, enough to accommodate someone of decent height. Much like the waterline tunnels, it was wide and straight hallways, though these had a slight curve to them. The walls looked rougher, built with less precision, and she judged that they seemed much older. Upon each wall, there were carved holes that were large enough to stow wooden caskets away, several inches of raw rock between them. Each hallway section seemed to have five rows of these stacked caskets, making it ten dead bodies per wall, per section.

  Rue had to rub at the plaque to uncover the name beneath grime. She held the torn paper up, comparing, then crouched to give the same treatment to the one underneath it. She went down the hall, comparing each casket to the names. It was exciting at first, but it quickly grew tiresome as she failed to find either of the bodies. She only looked at one side at a time, needing to double back while checking the others, and then walk back again to move to the next section. It was well-lit, surprisingly, which was the only benefit.

  Torches burned down here rather than glass-plated lights, which were common in the city, though Rue had only ever seen them here. None of the torches looked burned down or weaker than the other. She suspected that they were sustained by magic. It had to have been tedious, but less so than constantly replacing torches in this labyrinth. Sound didn’t travel well, which she was grateful for. If anyone was patrolling down here, she hoped her steps wouldn’t alert them.

  Rue made it to the third section before she started to question what Viru had told her. It was supposed to be no more than thirty…Sections? Caskets? She was certain she had gotten past thirty caskets, but thirty sections would take forever. Or had she said rows? Were rows the same as the sections of hallway? Her skin prickled, and she felt cold. There must not have been a heat rune down here. Right as Rue’s concern was starting to crawl from her stomach to her esophagus, she found a plaque that matched the paper. She almost looked over it, just having expected to not find a match after so long.

  Edkin Howers.

  He was on the bottom row. Rue knelt down, setting the paper aside as she used both hands to push the lid of the casket up. It wasn’t fixed by anything, but it was heavy, requiring her to put force behind moving it. It shove aside, just enough dead space between the casket and the back of the carved rock to let it angle back and up. She spoke his name out loud as his corpse came into view, withered and sunken.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “Edkin Howers.”

  Something had been used to preserve it. Rue wasn’t sure if it was an act of magic or if there were other means, and could only assume magic, though she would have expected the body to look more as it did in life. It didn’t matter. Rue wasn’t quite sure what to look for on the body. Viru had been sour enough over discovering that her partner in crime was unable to read that she forgot to tell her what to look for. The scrap of paper had other words on them, beside each name, but they meant nothing to Rue.

  Scanning the body, she saw several things: A tarnished silver necklace with a gem centered upon it, around his neck there was a smaller chain that appeared golden, and around the wrists of his neatly folded hands were several bangles. Rue lit up with satisfaction. There was a thrill to this treasure, already more ample than the meager findings that came from a poor man buried in poor country. The discomfort of her surroundings was forgotten as she began to work the treasures from the body.

  Rue removed her gloves before doing so. Where touch was a discomfort, it was not the same with the deceased. There was a peaceful emptiness that emitted from a corpse, quiet and empty. Though it wasn’t an exact comparison, it reminded her somewhat of the satisfaction of finishing a bottle of liquor or ale off, left with an empty vessel to be held without fear of spilling. She wasn’t the one to ‘empty’ this vessel, this body, of the life it once held, but it was still a comfort. It made no difference for this one to be old and void of heat, to the warm and soft flesh Ferrow had when she had left his body upon his wagon.

  The necklace was removed after a minute of fumbling with the chain to unclasp it, shoved deftly into a pocket. Rue moved onto the bangles, only one of four easy to slip off of the wrists, the others tight against the size of bulging hand bones, even with the skin and fat shrunken. She muttered a curse, awkwardly cranking the arm towards herself as she forced the bangles around in search of a clasp.

  She froze, shouting coming distantly from within the crypt. She drew back from the casket, heart thrumming as she expected someone to turn a corner and come charging. Then shouting came again, sounding far enough that it was certainly not towards her. That left one other obvious possibility.

  Rue prepared to withdraw, but there were still three bangles left on the corpse of Edkin Howers. This was her only chance more than likely. Viru had probably been found.

  Rue’s mind rushed through the possibilities, the consequences. She began to work the bangles again, hearing her pulse in her ears, a constant woosh that collided with her thoughts. The shouting came again. Rue’s fingers fumbled, unfocused, before she remembered the hammer she had brought. It was worth a try.

  Pushing the lid of the casket back as far as it’d go, Rue took the hammer out and drove it down onto the hand. Again. Again. Again. Crack. Smash. Pop. Old bones, marrow long decomposed, crunched under each hit until the hand was left mangled. She stowed the hammer away, and with shaking hands, grasped the casket lid. It took heavier strain to lift it enough to slide back in place, the lid sitting crooked, but it was good enough. How closely could they possibly be looking?

  A louder shout, this one feminine and harsh, made Rue jump while she was trying to slide her gloves back on. She began to run towards the shouting, managing to get one of the gloves on. The other fell from her grasp, hitting the dust-silted ground, her feet taking several strides after to come to a stop. She turned, ready to bounce back for it when Viru yelled out, her voice distinguishably closer. Sound didn’t travel well. Rue was surprised that only a few corridors had brought her so much closer.

  It could have been me caught, instead.

  “Get your hands off of me! Let me go!” Followed by a cat-like yowl.

  A gruff voice responded, this one unable to be made out. Rue left the glove, her steps suddenly much more careful as she twisted around, creeping closer to the commotion.

  Her instincts screamed to just escape now, leave the woman behind, and take her treasures far away. On the other hand, she knew that if Viru did get out somehow, the blame of abandonment would be cast by the entire group.

  Making it to a new branch of tunnel, it became evident that the sounds of the struggle were around it. Rue peeked around the corner, finding a robed man loomed over Viru. His back was to Rue, and she couldn’t tell much about him apart from the walking stick he was utilizing as a weapon.

  “How did you get down here, vermin?” His deep voice rumbled, rageful.

  Viru was struggling to stay on her feet. Her hood and facewrap had fallen down, and blood trickled in a steady, wet stream of red down her fur, disappearing beneath her clothing. She wobbled in place, a long dagger in her grasp that Rue hadn’t known was in her possession to begin with, no visible sheath on her body. She did not answer the man, but gaze found Rue peaking around the corner, staring at her, before it went back to the man.

  He was doubtlessly the cryptkeeper. Nassen had seemed confident that they wouldn’t be bothered while down here for several reasons, but whatever chance they had of that failing had been strong enough to leave them here. The stillness between them was tense, the man seeming hesitant enough about the sharp weapon to keep him from lunging forward. Red stains at his feet, though not large, were probably why.

  “You will answer!”

  The tension broke and the man lashed out with the lower half of his staff, swinging it upwards at the woman. Viru jumped backwards, losing her footing immediately as one of her feet failed to obey with grace, sending her careening back onto the ground. Her dagger cut wildly into the air, hitting nothing. The staff smashed down on her, striking upon her hand. Viru shouted incoherently, dropping the dagger.

  “Rue!” She gasped.

  Rue froze, anger flooding through her as Viru gave her away.

  “Hm?” The man asked, puzzled. It struck him a moment after that Viru was calling out to someone, and he turned his head to look behind himself.

  It was just in time to see the blur of Rue, right behind him, swinging the hammer at his head.

  It struck his temple square on, a cry tearing from the man as he staggered back, dropping the staff. He didn’t go down, but in his moment of disorientation, Rue struck the hammer again, hitting lower this time, beside his eye. There was a sickening crunch, and this time he fell backwards, landing on his back with a pained scream.

  “Shut him up!” Viru hissed out from the ground, rolling with a sharp yelp. She curled in on herself, readying herself to take another blow if her partner failed.

  The man started, sitting up, one large hand covering his face, already swelling and bruising, a thin trickle of blood rushing from where skin split on impact. “I’ll tear your–” He started in a bellow, and never finished, as Rue followed through with a strike solidly upon his nose. His words devolved to a gurgled cry, blood gushing from the crumpled cartilage.

  “RAHH!” Rue loosed a scream as both hands, one gloved and one bare, came to grip the handle and drive down again, right over the damaged nose. It caved, the groundskeeper jolting, her gurgling choking to near silence briefly.

  “AAH!” Another scream, this one raw and strangled, followed into the next swing. There was a squelch this time, more prominent than the sound of crunching, and the hammer didn’t glance off of face this time. It was embedded into the epicenter of his face, sticking out like a flagpole.

  The man went slack in slow motion, already having been half-frozen, then toppled to his side in a heap. Rue released the handle of the hammer, letting it follow in his collapse. Blood pooled beneath his disfigured face, the head of the hammer buried deeply enough that it couldn’t be seen. Rue stared, finding herself concerned that whoever found this man might think that he had a wooden stake jabbed into his face.

  “He’s dead?” Viru asked, having made it to a sitting up position. Her voice sounded shaky. When Rue looked at her, her silver eyes were locked onto her former assailant. There was a lot of blood stuck to the side of her face now. She looked shaken, though Rue couldn’t tell if it was from her own injuries, or from watching what just happened.

  “He’s dead,” Rue answered. She was surprised to hear her voice trembling. Noticing that brought in a wash of other sensations suddenly realized. She, too, was shaking. Her hands wouldn’t stay still. My glove is still on the ground, she thought to herself. Her heart was racing. It was too cold down here. She wanted the open sky back. How deep were they? Rue turned, and began to trace her steps back.

  “Where are you going?!” Viru cried out, grunting as she forced herself to her feet, though it didn’t last. She fell back to her knees, whimpering in pain.

  “I dropped my glove,” Rue mumbled, too quiet for Viru to hear.