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This is the fortieth chapter of Wealthgiver, an alternate history serial romance about nationalism and cave-Thracians. For the back-of-the-book description and an index of chapters, click here. For the beginning, click here. For the previous chapter, click here.
Nikolai was not just inside the entrance.
If he had been, Andrei would be back by now.
Of course Nikolai would have built up resistance to the Honey of Bacchus. Of course, regaining consciousness in the terror and the smoke, he would crawl deeper into the mountain.
Kori paced back and forth, staring into the crack in the Earth.
Heavy indeed were the Wealthgiver's gifts. In this case, Kori couldn't even understand the offer.
Andrei already had his queen and a kingdom to put her in. All he had to gain from his mad dash into the smoking Depths was the life of his most vicious enemy. All he had to lose was everything. Was Andrei a Fool? A Christian drunk on mercy?
Then I'm one too, because all I want to do is follow him.
"My Maiden, Dragomir has barricaded himself and several other notables within his house."
"Tell him we have his daughter." Kori went back to pacing.
The smoke rose from the entrance like a rope. She felt as if she could grab hold of it and pull herself up into the sky. They told her the fires were all extinguished, but what could Kori believe?
Kori watched that darkness. It wasn't even midsummer yet. Everything was out of season. And if she did descend, what would she find but the ruin of her home? And her murdered husband.
What is this? Fear of the dark.
Kori clicked her tongue, and shapes around her took on temporary solidity. Zülfü stood silently nearby, and Murad with his out-held flask of tea. Other soldiers and priests watched her, wise enough not to offer her advice.
She knew what they would say, in any case. The rational thing to do was obvious: wait. Go down to Peshtera, come back tomorrow or the next day and fish the two dead bodies out of the Depths. Or let the Mountain stay as it was, a rotting monument to a blind, self-devouring cult. "Remember the Good," she would tell her child, "so that you never grow up to be like them."
She wondered how the Sacred Depths could ever be made safe again. No, that was Nikolai's way of thinking. Better to think of these Depths as they were and find a use for them.
Air sighed from the Earth and a breeze brushed like a cool cloth over her forehead.
Kori forced her hands back down from her mouth. Her heart ached as if the jaws of a trap had closed half way around it. Andrei grew ever further from her. She thought of him down there, searching in the airless blackness for Nikolai. And even worse, finding him.
The breath of the Mountain rose. Ashy wind gusted out of the Depths like tobacco smoke from a chuckling mouth.
Don't think of it as a trap, Seeress.
"Think of it as another test," Kori answered.
"My Mistress?" asked Zülfü. "What did you say?"
Kori lifted her chin. "Murad, Zülfü, do you have your daggers with you?"
Both men grunted. Might as well ask them if they had their underwear.
"Give them to me. And make sure the intake fans are working at full power."
Murad recovered first. "My Mistress, that equipment is all inside the Mountain."
"Then you had both better follow me down there," a smile tugged her lips. "Don't worry, I won't look back at you."
***
Nikolai saw.
His head pounded. Every breath burned like inhaled brandy. The way-signs were out of reach up the walls, and his fingertips were so numb he could barely feel the floor. He saw in the dark. Not listening for echoes, but in the way more true than light.
Nets of color whirled with every blink of his useless outer eyes. And with the inner, with the eye buried in the center of his brain, Nikolai saw through all the infinite Depths of the Earth.
There was a stair. There a wall. A door. Mere sound could not penetrate the door, nor could light. But darkness—ah, darkness! The darkness knew itself. Beyond the door lay a room complete with furniture. Nikolai knew the divan and bed were there. The bookshelf. Not broken at all. Not shoved into a barricade, but still whole and unruined, loaded with its treasured books.
Tears slicked the stone under his cheek. Finally! Nikolai had learned to see in the manner of his brother priests, the real Good.
If he bent his neck back and bared his throat, Nikolai could look up at all the cells and corridors of the Holy Mountain. Those pools, those shafts and air ducts, the canals that kept the impure away from the pure. Below, if he pressed his burning brow to the cool, cool stone, Nikolai could discern the storage halls, the greater pools with their throbbing arteries of thermal water. Gold glimmered down there. Diamonds shone as stars, and slow fire oozed. And below that…
The Good believed that the depths of the Earth were infinite. Seeing with darkness, Nikolai knew that this was true. He did not peer through the center of a sphere and out the other side. There was no center, only endless, sacred Depths.
Nikolai moaned with the relief of it. It was all true! True, after all. Death was an illusion. The Underworld was real, and its lovely, laughing Maiden. But if the Maiden was real…
Nikolai's head twitched up. Who watched him? He peered through walls and into a room of spinning bronze. Bed and divan glimmered purple-green. Bed and divan, redeemed bookcase, and a man.
He carried a pair of javelins. A sickle hung at his waist and a crescent-shaped shield was slung across his shoulders. His triple-folded cloak fell to his calves, and on his head he wore the fox-hide cap that symbolizes freedom.
But there was no one in the mountain! The Good were all dead.
Yes, they were. And there stood another of the dead. A third knelt in the antechamber under the crack. His back was to the Depths and he wept, cradling a guitar his arms. Another pool contained a woman, naked and glowing with beauty on her three-legged stool. Priests tossed intruders onto upraised spears. Other shades stood in the refectory, the corridors, clustered like amphorae in the storage rooms, whispering.
Did they look at him? No. No, the dead had eyes only for their Master. These were the Many, and he was their Host.
"Give. Giver of Wealth," Nikolai wept and the echoes throbbed in his ears. "Guide me!" None of the images they painted made any sense. That round blankness ahead was a door, surely. Not a mouth. Not a mouth!
"Earth protect me." The prayer did not soothe. "May Madness not take me. May light not bl. Blind." Nikolai's voice seemed to bounce off moving surfaces, as if he crawled not through a cave, but a swallowing throat, a beating heart, a length of intestine.
"Where have you gone?" Nikolai squeezed his eyes shut, but that did nothing to stop the echoes. "What must I do?" Doors closed as he approached. Screaming warriors drove their chariots through him.
Nikolai hauled himself to his feet, leaning on a wall shaggy with bestial fur.
"Tell me!" he shouted, and cringed from the terrors his voice illuminated. Madness had infested the Depths.
"Nikolai?"
He spun around. The corridor tipped and counter-rotated as if hanging from a thread. "An echo," Nikolai told himself. "Not a bat."
"Nikolai!"
"Not a bat!" he shouted back.
"Where are you? Keep talking. Devil take this smoke."
Nikolai passed his fingers over his mouth. "It is not me speaking," he told the dead. "It is someone else."
Still, they did not look at him. Still they watched their Master.
"How the hell did you even get all the way down here?" came the voice. "Stay put, man. I'm coming for you."
"No." Nikolai shook his head, and his stomach heaved. "No!" He ran. Ran from Death! Bouncing off of walls, stumbling down stairways. He battered a door, pushed aside a curtain. The smell of sulfur suffused the air and jaws gaped to allow him in. The floor ahead melted into the rippling surface of a cup of poisoned tea.
Nikolai splashed, floundering in the hot liquid, howling for help.
"Stay put, I say, and he runs straight into the nearest pool."
Something about that voice. Its impatience. Its weary resignation, as if its owner could expect nothing better from such an inveterate failure as Nikolai Igorevich.
"Nikolai, I'm coming for you."
Fear. This was fear! Nikolai stood in the pool, breath heaving. He would not be afraid. He raged! Nikolai's vision was red, and the squirming echoes were finally blotted out by a high whistle in his ears. The pain in his head and fingers burned away.
Nikolai whirled and screamed back the way he had come. "Go to hell, you arrogant son of a bitch."
"Go to hell, he tells me, as if I'm not already stumbling through the bowels of a burning mountain chasing after a murderer."
"Murder!" Nikolai spat. He put out his hands, but found no wall. Into what pool had Nikolai stumbled? He'd been poisoned. Poisoned by his brothers. "Who are you to lecture me about murder? After what I did for you. After all I've done!"
A bitter scoff from the swarming abyss. "Order you to gun down our own people, did I, Nikolai?"
"You didn't have to say it. You showed me." Nikolai shook his purple-glowing fists. "I had to. I had to!"
"Alright. You had to. Just calm down, man."
A splash. He was close. Nikolai could see him, not with eyes or ears, but with the darkness. Now that all of his inner perception was turned outward, now that Nikolai could recognize the signs, it was clear who stood before him.
Hades was shorter than Nikolai would have expected. More heavily built. But his expression was cold. His mouth a grim pit. Spring water gushed from under his feet and gold fell from his corpse-black fingers.
"Echo," he said, "echo. It's alright, Kolya, I got you."
Nikolai struck out with the reflexes born of years of harsh training. His blow connected in the darkness, and a nose broke against his knuckles.
"Ow! Bastard!"
Nikolai saw! Now that mask had cracked! The mask had cracked and ichor oozed. Beneath the gold there throbbed rivers, icy, black and hidden. There was the truth that men would paper over with their dreams and light. Frail rafts indeed to bear mortals upon the dark waters of the truth.
But Nikolai knew better. He laughed again, but this time with relief. He wept with it, because here was his chance to redeem himself. What would a few murders matter if Nikolai could be the one to kill Death?
Nikolai's face stretched as he reached to his hip, where his dagger hung.
Next: Chapter 44: The Sacred Depths (8/7/2025)