Of course, that was just me catastrophizing a bit. It should have been obvious to anyone that Amaia could simply bend the bars, but she had to actually walk up to the bars and do so before I realized that we were not impeded in any way.

  I felt rather stupid at that point, but it wasn’t anything I wasn’t used to. The obvious solution right there in front of me, but meanwhile I was contemplating the possibility of melting through the metal or digging around it or some other idiotic scheme.

  She held out one hand, and though it took a little time for the bars to bend enough that we could slip through, she didn’t seem to struggle with it at all. I didn’t have a full understanding of how to gauge other people’s mana capacity, but I guessed that the way she used her magic in battle didn’t exhaust much mana, since it was just pushing metal around to dodge. Bending it like this probably used up much more. But that was just a guess.

  I didn’t say anything to Amaia as I stepped through - I preferred to pretend I hadn’t just been in a near-panic over nothing. One benefit of spending time with someone like her was that if you didn’t feel like talking, it was extremely likely she wouldn’t press the issue, which meant I could delude myself just as naturally as if I were alone - most of the time, at least.

  When we were through, however, I did turn back and peer at the bars for awhile, thinking. Finally, I said, “shouldn’t we close it behind us?”

  “Why?”

  “So that monsters don’t find a back way into Coernet,” I said. “If this really does lead below the river, I have to imagine that’s why they barred it in the first place.”

  Amaia shrugged, and began bending the metal back into position.

  “Although,” I said while she worked. “We could be cutting off Ikhamon, if he somehow survived and eventually tried to follow us.”

  Amaia didn’t stop. It was hard to tell if that was because she didn’t care about Ikhamon, or if it was simply because she hadn’t been told to stop.

  I shrugged. “If he’s alive, I’m sure he’ll figure something out. Could probably freeze his way across the river if he had to.”

  I wondered briefly if there was some way I could do something similar. Boil the entire river until it steamed up and dried out? Impossible. Build some sort of ship? Obviously there were ships that ran on burning fuel, but not only would I have no idea how to make one, but my nails weren’t really fuel, exactly.

  It was actually sort of disheartening to think about, because basically everyone else I had met could have done something. Ikhamon could get across with his ice magic, Amaia could bend the bars down here, Aster or Hoyom or most of the trained townspeople could sail a boat - hell, even Cadoc could probably fashion some sort of raft with his magic - but I was stuck relying on someone else’s power to get me across.

  It was some small solace to imagine Naomi in the situation. She would be completely useless, even worse than me - at least I could defend myself. She’d be able to kill one monster, and then she’d be a goner. It was amazing she’d survived as long as she had.

  Her mother, on the other hand… I imagined the woman stretching out thinner and longer until she had bridged the entire width of the Blood, her hands still touching the monstrous east while her feet touched down on eastern clay.

  Maybe it doesn’t work that way, I thought. But worst case scenario, she could use herself as a sail, like the Cho’l did on the sands.

  And as for Naomi’s dad - what is his magic, anyway?

  Thinking idle thoughts like these, we pressed on further into the tunnel, our way still illuminated by my hastily-constructed torch.

  Eventually we hit a real dead-end. This time, instead of the tunnel emptying out into a hillside, the tunnel simply ended, with a long ladder like the one we’d first seen reaching up towards the total darkness above.

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  I realized that the long ladder may have been another safety measure. Probably too small to climb for most monsters, and anything particularly un-human wouldn’t have the necessary hands or thumbs to get far. They could destroy the ladder, I supposed, but that could always be replaced, and then the monster really wouldn’t be able to ascend. A Kalamuzi could climb it easily enough, but I guessed they hadn’t had those in mind when they designed everything - whenever that was.

  “Nothing to do but to try it,” I said. I was trying to mentally prepare myself for the trap door at the top being closed, but in reality I probably would have gone a little insane at that point if it had been.

  Luckily, after a long climb, the trap door was unlocked. I pushed it up and crawled out, waiting for Amaia to join me as I sat there beside the exit and looked around.

  It was a stone building not dissimilar from the one we’d first entered with Hoyom. There were windows built high into the walls that let in some sunlight, though it was hard to tell what time of day it was just from that. The light illuminated the interior of the building, which was absolutely packed full of wooden crates. There were little walkways that ran haphazardly between the piles, and a little clearing beside the trapdoor, but otherwise every bit of floorspace was occupied, and in some places the crates were stacked high above my head.

  Amaia began to stick her head up and climb out of the hole, but I had already walked away, looking at the boxes. “Do you think these are the stolen goods?” I asked.

  Amaia, when she’d gotten up, walked over and joined me. “No,” she said.

  “Why not? They could be. You have to admit that they could be.”

  She shrugged.

  I decided on one of the crates near me, where it was alone on the floor with nothing else stacked on top of it. The top of the crate seemed to be nailed in place.

  “Now just to figure out how to open these,” I said, mostly to myself. “I suppose I could bash it open with my drows. If that doesn’t work, I could burn it, but then I’d have to be careful not to light up the whole place, and the herbs inside would probably-“

  I stopped talking when I saw one of the nails lift up off of the box, sliding cleaning out of its hole to rest floating in the air before dropping and clattering off the box and onto the floor. I turned to see Amaia with her hand outstretched.

  “You’re actually pretty handy, you know that?” I said. “Screw being a bodyguard, you ever consider being a carpenter?”

  She said that she hadn’t, but the expression on her face dimly suggested that she was now considering it.

  I watched as she removed the other nails as well. I can’t believe I ever doubted letting her join Cadoc and I, I thought. She’s proven to be probably the most useful person among us. And with this, she’s basically a portable toolbox. Well, a toolbox you have to keep fed, kind of like how a horse is a car you have to keep fed. Or something. But she doesn't talk much more than a horse or a toolbox.

  My mind was all over the place, and I wondered if it was some lingering effect of the mushrooms. I decided to assume that it was, since it allowed me to pretend that it wasn’t my fault that I hadn’t realized Amaia could bend the metal bars before.

  I hope I don’t have permanent brain damage, though, I thought. I’ve heard of people on Earth taking LSD or ayahuasca and suddenly becoming schizophrenic. Proponents of those drugs said that the cases were people who were already predisposed to schizophrenia, but how would you know if you were predisposed to that or not?

  Dimen-X won’t care, though, if they’re anything like other medical companies. Those pharma ads have only gotten crazier over the years. When they list the side effects at the end, half of the commercials just straight-up say that it “may cause death.”

  When Amaia was done we lifted the top off of the crate. Inside I had hoped to find those herbs - instead, it was filled with stacks of some sort of gray leather.

  “Huh,” I said, lifting one of the pelts - is pelt the right word? “That’s disappointing. Do you think they’re all filled with these?”

  Instead of answering, Amaia simply un-nailed another crate. This one we found to be full of shoes - women’s shoes. They looked fancy, but I wasn’t the best judge.

  “What the hell?” I stared at the shoes. “Why?”

  The third box was full of canteens - which we were pleasantly surprised to find were full of water. The fourth held some sort of dried biscuits that didn’t seem to have anything wrong with them, so we broke for a quick meal.

  That done, we decided it was better to figure out where we were rather than search the dozens - maybe hundreds - of crates in the place. We could always come back, and we were burning daylight. So we made for the door.

  It was not at all surprising that the door was locked. The door was made of thick stone, but the lock was metal, so it gave us little trouble.

  I couldn’t see the river. That was the first thing I noticed when we exited. Instead, trees in every direction, some dead, others evergreens like pines - and, to my dismay, covered in a light dusting of snow. Not enough on the ground to make walking through it any more difficult, but enough to remind me of how cold it was getting, and to render the forest we found ourselves in a mostly white affair.

  Around the building itself was nothing in particular. There was no road leading to it, no signage anywhere on it, nothing. It was just a unassuming square building, completely uninteresting if not for the fact that it had been plopped down in the middle of nowhere. Surrounded by the thin layer of snow, it looked misplaced. Like someone had dropped the building in the snow by accident and would soon be back for it.

  Our underground walk must not have taken too long, because the sun was hardly past midday. That gave me hope, because it meant we couldn’t actually be too far from town. If it took the morning to get as far as we had, there was no reason we couldn’t get to town before sundown.

  I told Amaia we had better just start walking, and she agreed. We both, at the same time, gave our opinion of which way the river must be, pointing - and we, on that front, did not agree. But it was close, the same general direction, so we split the difference and stated walking.

  Thin and wispy flakes of snow drifted down between the branches of the trees as we walked. It would have been kind of pretty, if I wasn’t so cold and tired. I decided to shop for warmer clothes when we got back to Coernet. I didn’t think I would freeze to death on the way, but if it got any colder it wasn’t impossible.

  The forest was utterly quiet. No birds, no distant animal calls, only the sounds of our footfalls pressing into the snowy ground, crunching in places where little bits of ice had formed.

  There were insect noises though, faintly. It was like the song of a cricket, except I thought that they only did that at night. It was probably only some bug like a cricket, one that didn’t exist on Earth.

  You never really hear crickets in the winter, though, I thought absently. I guess it’s too cold. Actually, yeah, isn’t that a thing? It’s too cold for bugs in the winter. That’s why you don’t have to worry about flies or mosquitoes and such.

  But then, why do I hear a cricket?