“A few hundred years, perhaps,” Arric said, stumbling a little over the words. “There are—well, there are several different date formats, and it’s hard to tell—”
“We stopped patrolling the outer paths a few weeks ago,” Seth said, looking up at Lana. “You told me last night about what you saw from the air.”
“On my way out into the Fog? Not much,” she said, looking nonplussed. “I could barely make out that waystation we stayed at through the Fog—”
“Exactly,” Seth said. “When we stopped the patrols, the Fog rolled incloser. And if the Fog is what’s been disappearing people—”
“Then the tunnels might have something to do with it.” For a moment, Lana looked like she might be about to kiss him, but she turned to Arric instead. “Right. Where’s the nearest entrance to these tunnels? It’s time we went exploring.”
Dragons could move quickly when they wanted to, Seth was learning… or perhaps the dragons were learning that from the wolves? Either way, it wasn’t more than an hour before a small delegation was inching carefully along a long, narrow tunnel, deeper in the earth than Seth had ever been before. His wolf was anxious, magic prickling uneasily along his limbs… a sensation that wasn’t helped by the knowledge that there had been fatal cave-ins down here before. The tunnel ahead looked reasonably safe, though the air was thick and the silence seemed to press heavily down on them like a weight.
But as they kept walking, Seth felt a curious sensation begin in the soles of his feet. At first, he was sure he was imagining it, until he saw Elza walking a few paces ahead, a slightly puzzled frown on her face. Seth lengthened his stride automatically, let his eyes slide shut… and for a moment, it was as though he was surrounded by trees. His eyes shot open, to see only the tunnel, lit by flickering torchlight.
Elza was looking back at him, her eyes wide—and he knew without a word that she could feel it, too. These tunnels, however old they were, had been built for the same reason as the ancestral trails above them. Lana was walking in the middle of the group, holding the torch high to light their way, and he quickly filled her in on what he’d noticed, what his wolf was telling him. Her eyes widened, and she nodded—and it wasn’t long before the rest of the shifters agreed that they, too, could feel something odd as they walked.
“Then what does it mean that they’ve been abandoned for so long?” Lana asked, her eyes worried. “Could this be why people have been disappearing?”
“We know the Fog has been thicker over the last few generations,” Seth said. “I wonder if the abandonment of the tunnels coincides with when that started?”
“We’ll find out,” Elza promised. They’d left half the group in the library—there were dozens of threads of research that had been picked up, and Lana had been reluctant to throw all of their eggs into one basket, as promising as the tunnels had seemed. “Arric and I are getting pretty good at cross-referencing our respective histories.”
“But what about the disappearances?” Lana looked troubled. “They started less than a year ago, right? If the tunnels have been abandoned for centuries, why did the Fog only start taking people then?”
“Hold up!” That was Acantha’s voice—the Captain had insisted on leading the group, in case there was danger ahead. Seth and Lana made their way to the front of the group as it halted, but there was no danger ahead of them. There was nothing at all ahead of them, in fact.
“Cave-in,” Acantha said, kicking at one of the pieces of jagged rock that had rolled away from the collapsed tunnel. “No way forward here. We’ll find another way around.”
“No,” Seth said, and he heard Elza murmur a disagreement at the same time. The dragons looked at them curiously. “Part of the duties of a patrol is to keep the trail clear,” he explained. “Fallen trees, rocks, and branches—we don’t move on without clearing the way. It’s part of it.”
Acantha gnawed on her lip, scanning the tunnel around them. “It’ll take a crew of dragons,” she said finally. “Slice the stone up, cart it out—it’ll be slow work if we want to do it safely. No way of telling how deep the collapse is, either. Can we spare the manpower?”
“We have to,” Lana said firmly. “I’ll join the crews myself if I have to.”
As the group prepared to turn back, Seth dropped into a crouch by the stones, not sure if his eyes were playing tricks on him. “Wait,” he murmured, reaching down to brush his fingertips along a gap between the stones. “Is that—”
Lana hissed something under her breath. He’d heard it before, and he was reasonably sure it was a profanity in the other language she spoke. “Fog.”
“What?” Acantha frowned. “We’re underground. How could—” But sure enough, as Seth pushed gently on the stone, more of the thick, gray Fog poured from between the cracks. The group moved back uneasily, and Seth followed, trying not to remember Conrad’s silent scream as that gray Fog had enveloped him.
The trip back from the point of the cave-in seemed a lot shorter than the trip there—it wasn’t long before they were gathered around a table in the library again, filling the rest of the group in on what they’d learned. Arric had made another copy of the tunnel map in the meantime, decorated with thick black crosses that he explained represented the cave-ins that they knew about.
“The one you discovered today is new,” Arric said, tapping on the most recent addition to the network of crosses. “Can’t have been there longer than six months.”
“That proves it,” Lana said firmly, her jaw set. “The deterioration of the tunnels has caused the Fog to encroach. We need teams working around the clock to excavate them—and then we need patrols in place, like the wolves—”
But then Acantha stepped forward. Seth felt a ripple of surprise go through him—the woman had been silent since they’d turned back from the cave-in. For the first time since he’d met her, Seth could see real fear on Acantha’s face. “The mountain protects us from the Fog,” she murmured, almost like a prayer. “My grandfather was one of the first builders. My mother told me what he always said—the mountain protects.”
“All the more reason to get to work quickly,” Lana said. But Acantha was shaking her head.
“No,” she snapped. “It’s too dangerous. If the Fog has breached the mountain, we’re lost. We can’t send dragons down there. Not without risking losing them like we lost the Prince.”
“This is the best way we have of turning back the Fog,” Lana said impatiently. “We’ll take every precaution, but—”
“I swore an oath to keep the subjects of the realm safe,” Acantha said, folding her arms over her chest. “I cannot in good conscience let you send them down there to their deaths.”
“Then I’ll do it myself,” Lana said, her eyes flashing.
“Time for a meal break, I think,” Seth said, stepping between the women and hoping he’d diffused the confrontation in time. But as Acantha strode out of the library without a word, he could already hear half a dozen arguments breaking out among the shifter task force.