Page 34 of Unholy Bond
“When the time comes, you’ll know. Until then, keep your heads down and your weapons sharp.”
I tossed a second pouch of gold onto the table. “For loyalty,” I said. “And for getting the hell out of here alive.”
They stood, one by one, the sergeant last. He looked at me, and I saw what I needed. Not hope, not faith, just the grim certainty of a man who’d finally found his excuse to do awful things.
As I left the room, the black crack on the wall seemed wider, the tendrils thicker, the Void’s pulse stronger. I savored the feeling. It was the taste of war, and it was mine.
Chapter 18: Lilith
The catacombs beneath the palace were a rumor in the upper halls. An old joke about the first generation of Hell’s rulers, how they’d built their legacies on a foundation of tunnels and oubliettes that even Lucifer feared to audit.
I found the entrance behind a moldering tapestry of a war no one remembered, through a door disguised as part of the stone. The hinges groaned against the attention, but otherwise the way opened easily. The first steps down were steep, cut for someone taller than any currently living thing. The torch I brought hissed in the damp. Its light caught on the ceiling and ran down the walls like oil. With every pace, the world above receded, voices and ward-alarms and memory giving way to cold and black and the mineral stink of time.
My footsteps echoed a little too loudly for comfort, so I matched my breathing to them, tricking myself into a rhythm that felt like meditation. The old nuns used to call it a vigilance trance.A deliberate, methodical focus, where I became nothing but the sound of my own intent. The Void liked it. Its presence circled my thoughts, not speaking but coiling in, sharpening the edges of sensation.
The tunnel forked twice, each time marked by a sigil carved into the rock. Once a spiral, once a tight triangle. I touched the first with my bare hand, running a finger along the groove. The residue bit back, the stone cold enough to hurt. The black veins inside my skin responded with a tingle, a happy little shudder.
I took the left path, trusting the instinct that had never yet led me into a trap I couldn’t spring back out of.
The second corridor was tighter, the floor sloping until my calves ached. Statues lined the way here. Crudely carved demons, all hunched and grimacing, some with stones jammed into their mouths to mimic the agony of a scream. The torchlight gave their eyes a wet gleam, and for a moment I imagined them breathing. It would have been a mercy. The first one that truly looked at me, I nodded to. The Void purred approval.
The air got colder. With every step, the black veins along the walls grew thicker, less like fractures and more like roots, or arteries gone wild. Some had begun to creep over the statuary, digesting the ancient bodies in a slow, patient embrace. When I touched the next junction, the stone pulsed once under my palm.
The Void spoke then. Not a word, but a pressure in the back of my neck, as if something inside wanted to pull my spine out through the base of my skull and use it to stir the air.
Yes, it said, or something like it. Deeper.
I followed.
The corridor funneled me down to a crawlspace, the ceiling so low I had to duck and shuffle sideways, the torch guttering against the roughness overhead. Here, the veins were everywhere, writhing in silent progress, their black so absolute it drew the torch’s light into a flat, hungry shadow. The old sigils broke up. Here a glyph half-digested by Void, there a cluster of runes rendered unreadable by the crawl of the black. I ran my hand over them as I went, letting the Void taste each one. It did not comment, but the heat inside me rose, buzzing under my breastbone like a nest of hornets.
At a sharp bend, the passage widened abruptly into a chamber. The ceiling vaulted up, spanned by a net of black veins so tangled it looked like the inside of a fossilized lung. The walls bulged with old bone. Femurs and ribs and the curved slats of some lost animal, each one fused into the stone at odd angles. I knelt, setting the torch into a bracket someone had long ago hammered into the wall.
The black veins converged here, a nest at the base of the far wall, encasing what looked like an altar. The altar was a squat block of stone, half-sunk in the floor and slick with condensation. Three deep grooves ran across its surface, and at their intersection a single coin rested, too corroded to bear any image. I brushed the coin away. It rolled to the floor and came to a stop at my bare foot.
I squatted beside it and waited for the Void to make the next move.
The pressure inside me built, slow and warm, a tide of wanting that pooled in my pelvis and trickled up the line of my spine. I let my eyes close, hands braced on my knees, and slowed my breath until it matched the faint, arrhythmic drip of water somewhere in the darkness.
At first, nothing. Then, a whisper, so faint I couldn’t tell if it was the blood in my ears or a thought I hadn’t yet had.
Open.
I opened my eyes. The veins on the wall bulged, then split, leaking a slow ooze of black onto the altar. The liquid ran down the grooves, pooling at the center. My mouth went dry. I reached out, pressed two fingers into the pool, and watched as the black soaked my skin, crawling up my hand in a spiral. The cold burned, but the pain was pure, like the clean cut of a knife on a good day.
Open, said the whisper, louder now.
I took my hand back, touched the black veins on my forearm. They writhed under my touch, responding not just to contact but to intention. The Void liked to be courted.
Fine, I thought. You want more?
I set my palm flat against the altar and focused, letting the pain in my hand radiate up my arm, into my chest, out through every nerve ending. The world narrowed to a pinpoint: my hand, the altar, the black ooze.
The chamber responded. The veins on the wall began to pulse, sending thick drops of Void down the bone, over the stone, into the grooves. The torch behind me dimmed, then flared blue. The pressure in my head spiked, a slap to the base of my skull that drove me to my knees. I gasped, and the taste of the air changed. Metallic, electric, sweet.
The Void surged inside me, and I surrendered, just for a moment, letting the thing run through my veins and into the world.
The effect was instant. The black on my hand extended, shooting filaments out from my fingers, into the grooves, up the wall, until it met the main vein and burrowed deep. The altar trembled. The bones in the walls vibrated, humming a discordant chord I could feel in my teeth.
