I woke with my face in water.
It was shallow, cold, and already inside my coat. My head rang. My ribs ached. For a moment I didn't remember where I was, only that the dark was heavy and the air smelled of salt and old stone. Then the memory hit: the crypt, the floor cracking, the long fall.
I pushed up too fast. The world swayed. Water dripped from my sleeves as I got my feet under me. The mechanical candle lay a few steps away, still burning, its flame low and blue. I grabbed it.
"Father?"
The word came out small. Above, broken stone. No answer. The hole was too high, its edges jagged. No way back.
I turned, candle raised.
The space was a low cavern, half-flooded. Water covered the floor. Old coffins and chunks of stone broke the surface. The walls glistened. And near a fallen pillar, a man's body slumped against the rock.
I crossed to him slowly. Grey coat. Torn. The flesh had gone too pale, too wrong, but I didn't look long. His left arm wore a brass bracer.
I knelt. The bracer wasn't Church work. Too many fine springs, too many careful lines. Near the hinge, a mark had been scratched into the metal: a circle, and sharp little lines around it, almost worn away.
I pulled the buckles loose. My hands were shaking. When the bracer came free, I strapped it onto my left arm. The last buckle clicked.
Then the goat-thing came.
I heard it before I saw it. A wet scrape behind me. I spun. It was ten feet away, low in the water. The bullet wound in its shoulder still leaked black. One front leg bent wrong. It stared at me, and then it charged.
I didn't think. My thumb found the catch.
The Vowkeeper fired with a sharp pneumatic hiss. A small harpoon shot out and hit the thing high in the chest. Wire unspooled. I grabbed it, pulled hard, and the goat-thing went down in a splash. I dragged it to the pillar, looped the wire around the stone, and yanked it tight.
It screamed. It thrashed. The wire held.
I stood back, breathing hard. I had no gun. No reload. The thing was pinned, but not dead.
That was when I heard the girl.
She was already there, pressed against the far wall like she'd grown out of the stone. Small. Barefoot. Wet nightdress. Hair stuck to her face. Her eyes moved from me to the goat-thing and then back.
"Are you from the house of..." I stopped. My voice was too loud in the black.
"Who are you, mister?" she whispered.
"I've come to save you."
It sounded stupid. I meant it.
She lifted a finger to her lips.
"Sst... don't be too loud."
I nodded. I didn't know why. But I did.
"Why?" I whispered.
She looked toward the goat-thing. It was still struggling, but quieter now, as if it had begun to listen too. Then she looked back at me.
"Because they come when you're loud."
I swallowed. "Your father..." I started.
She shook her head, small and quick. "He won't come here."
"Why?"
"He's scared of the singing."
I didn't know what to say to that. I wanted to tell her he was looking for her. I wanted to say she wasn't alone. But down here, with the wire dripping and the water still settling, it felt like a lie.
"I want to go home," she said.
Her voice was so low I almost felt it more than heard it. It wasn't a plea. It was just a fact.
"We will," I said. "We'll find a way up."
She looked past me into the dark.
"There's a path behind the stones," she said. "It goes up a little. But we have to be quiet."
I nodded. She started walking, close to the wall. I followed with the candle.
We had gone no more than ten steps when the goat-thing screamed.
It was not the broken animal sound from before. It was higher, wrong, and it cut off fast. I turned in time to see the thing yanked backward. The wire snapped slack. The water behind it rose in a smooth black swell, and then it closed over the goat-thing's hind legs, its belly, its chest.
It did not thrash. It did not splash.
It went under.
The water rolled once. Then still.
Ellora had stopped. She didn't look back.
"Don't stop," she whispered.
I couldn't move.
"Don't stop, mister."
I turned. The candle shook in my hand. I followed her.
Behind us, far below the water and stone, the singing began again. Low. Many voices. Like a choir learning to wait.
---
The passage behind the stones was narrower than I had thought.
I walked with one shoulder against the rock, the candle held low. The flame had shrunk to a blue-white tongue no bigger than my thumb, and it did not so much light the way as make the dark around it worse. Ellora moved ahead of me, small and barefoot, her nightdress brushing the stone. The water had dropped to a thin skin underfoot, then to damp rock, and now it was gone altogether.
She didn't speak. I didn't ask her to.
The air had changed. It was colder here, and it smelled less of the sea and more of something closed in, like wet cloth left too long in a chest. My throat ached from breathing through my mouth. The Vowkeeper sat heavy on my left arm, the wire still slack from the fight with the goat-thing. I had no way to reload it. I did not know if it would fire again.
The path bent, and then it split.
Two openings, both black. The first climbed, narrow and dry, its floor rough with broken stone. The second sloped down, wider, and at its bottom I could see the faint shine of standing water.
Ellora stopped. She looked up at me, then pointed to the climbing path.
"That way," she whispered.
I started toward it, then heard my name.
"Caleb."
I stopped. My whole body went tight.
It was Edmund's voice. Not a guess, not a memory. It was his voice, clear and close, coming from the lower passage.
"Caleb. I'm here."
The sound of it hit me in the chest. I turned, the candle flame bending with me, and I took one step toward the slope before I knew I had done it.
Ellora's hand closed around my wrist.
Her grip was small, cold, and stronger than it should have been. I looked down. She shook her head once, lips pressed tight.
"That's not him," she whispered.
I didn't ask how she knew. I wasn't sure I wanted to.
The voice came again, softer now.
"Caleb."
It sounded exactly like him. That was the worst part. Not rough, not distorted. Just tired, the way Edmund sounded after the hunts, when there was no gin left and too much dark behind his eyes.
I wanted to answer. I wanted to go down. The urge sat in my legs like a physical pull, and for a second I understood why men walked into the water. It wasn't because they believed a lie. It was because the voice sounded like the only warm thing left in the world.
Ellora's grip tightened.
"Come," she said.
She pulled me toward the climbing path. I followed.
The voice called again from behind, and this time it did not sound like Edmund. It sounded like two men, then three, the words folding into each other.
"Caleb. Caleb. Come down."
I didn't look back.
The climbing path took us into a stone throat. The walls closed in until I had to turn sideways. Ellora moved through it without slowing. I felt the rock scrape my back, then my chest. My coat caught and tore. The candle flame bent away from my face, and for one long moment I couldn't see anything, only the rough sound of our breathing and the distant murmur of the voices below.
The passage opened.
The air moved again, colder, carrying a smell I didn't have a name for. Wet stone, yes. But also something sweet, like old tallow, and something beneath it, the stale breath of many bodies in one room.
Ellora stepped to the side and waited for me.
The room ahead was the size of a small chapel. The floor was uneven, strewn with broken coffin wood and long strings of black moss that hung from the ceiling like wet hair. The candle barely cut through the dark. At the far side, where the wall should have been, the stone did not end.
It moved.
I stopped breathing.
At first I thought it was a trick of the flame. But no. The far wall was not rock. It was a mass of bodies, pressed together so tightly that I couldn't tell where one ended and another began. Grey flesh, glistening, arms and legs and hollow chests woven into one another like the roots of an old tree. The whole thing rose from floor to shadow, breathing in long, slow waves.
And it was singing.
Not a choir. One sound, made by many mouths at once. Dozens of lips, open and closing, all shaping the same long note. The sound came from inside them, not from air alone, and it filled the room without echoing, as if the stone had swallowed every other sound there had ever been.
I saw a hand. Then another. A row of pale shoulders, a face turned half into the chest of another. Mouths open, wide, empty. They sang, and the note did not rise or fall. It waited.
Ellora closed her eyes.
She didn't scream. She didn't run. She only stood very still, her face calm in the way of a child who has already seen the worst thing and learned to keep her eyes shut against it.
I wanted to move. My legs didn't.
Then the singing stopped.
Every mouth closed at once. The silence that followed wasn't empty. It was thick, like water filling my ears.
The mass shifted.
One head, near the top of the heap, turned toward us.
It was slow, not like a living thing, but like something old and heavy adjusting itself in sleep. The face was pale and smooth, mouth closed, eyes missing. It didn't need eyes. It had already found us.
Ellora opened her eyes.
"Don't move," she whispered.
The head tilted. A low sound came from it, not a word, not a note. More like a throat clearing after a long silence.
Then the mouths opened again.
The song resumed, soft now, no longer a wall of sound but a small, patient humming. It sounded almost gentle.
It sounded like it was welcoming us.
I looked at Ellora. She looked back at me. There were no tears on her face, but her hand found mine, cold and small, and squeezed once.
"Don't move," she said again.
We stood there, the candle flame leaning away from the mass as if it, too, wanted to be somewhere else.
And the choir sang on, waiting.