Chapter 11: The Pit

Greywall Fortress sat on the shoulder of the mountain.

We reached its outer wall before dawn, climbing the old drainage channel that Ilsabet remembered from the Duke's building plans.

The water was ice cold and up to our knees.

At the top of the channel there was an iron grate, rusted through at one corner.

I bent the bars apart with my hands.

They went, and I stood there staring at my own palms.

"Don't think about it," Ilsabet whispered. "Just move."

We came up inside a store room full of barrels.

The corridor beyond was lit by torches and empty.

The guards had gone somewhere else, all of them, and I knew why.

The song was loud enough to rattle my teeth.

It rose from below, from the heart of the mountain, and every stone in the fortress seemed to hum with it.

We followed the sound down a spiral stair.

Ilsabet went first with her iron rod lit.

After a hundred steps, the air grew warm.

After two hundred, it smelled of smoke and old blood.

At the bottom, a huge iron door stood open.

Beyond it was a cavern so big I could not see the roof.

A ledge of black stone ran around the edge, and below it was the Pit, a pool of darkness a hundred feet across.

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