Curses and Will Chapter 31: Chapter 4: Into the Mouth of It

Read chapter 31 of Curses and Will by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Annya took the news better than I expected, which is to say she looked at me with the particular expression she reserved for moments when she'd already decided something was going to happen and had chosen acceptance over argument. "We're going in tonight," she said. Not a question. "Tonight," I confirmed. "Rael knows the layout. He's had three months to map it. We get in, find the circle, break it, and get out before whatever's waiting on the other side realizes what's happening." She was quiet a moment, fingers moving thoughtfully along the edge of her cloak. "And if it realizes anyway." "Then we deal with that too." She nodded, slow, and looked across at Rael, who sat at the far end of the table with the careful stillness I was already starting to recognize as simply how he existed in a room. She studied him for a long moment, reading whatever she could off a face that didn't give away much. "You loved this village," she said finally. "Before all of this." Something crossed his expression briefly, softer than anything he'd shown me the night before. "I loved what I thought it was going to be," he said. "Which might not be the same thing." Annya held his gaze a moment longer, then nodded again, smaller this time, like she'd confirmed something she'd suspected from the beginning. She turned back to me. "What do you need me to do." We waited until the second hour past midnight, when even the light in the manor's upper window had finally gone dark. The village settled into its deepest quiet, the kind that arrives when even the things holding their breath finally give in to exhaustion. Rael led us through the back streets, keeping close to walls and fence lines, his footsteps making no sound I could detect even knowing where he was. I moved as quietly as I could manage, Annya a half step behind me, her shadows keeping the worst of the moonlight from catching us in the open. The manor's rear entrance was a service door, heavy wood reinforced with iron bands, locked from the inside. Rael produced a thin tool from somewhere inside his cloak and had it open in under a minute, no noise, no visible effort. "You've done this before," I murmured. "Several times," he said, and pushed the door inward. The inside of the manor carried the stale, heavy smell of a place that had been lived in too deliberately, like every surface had been arranged rather than used. Lamp brackets on the walls held unlit candles, the wax perfectly even and unmelted, decorative rather than functional. The furniture in the entry passage was expensive, chosen to project something, power maybe, or the idea of permanence. Rael moved ahead without hesitation, navigating by memory, taking us down a corridor and then down a staircase that descended into a basement considerably larger than the building above it suggested should exist. Then I felt it. The pressure hit me before we'd reached the bottom step, pressing flat against the inside of my skull like something pushing back from the other side of a membrane. Not Gavren's presence, he was dead. Something older than him, something that had been here longer than his arrangement with it and intended to remain here longer still. Whatever he'd made his contract with was still waiting to collect. I slowed on the stairs without meaning to, one hand finding the wall. "You feel it," Rael said quietly, not looking back. "Yes." "It gets worse the closer you get to the circle. Stay focused on something specific. A name, a face, something that belongs to you rather than to it. It'll try to crowd those things out." I thought of Annya's smile in the dandelion field, the one I couldn't quite picture the face behind anymore, the one that surfaced sometimes in the place between waking and sleeping. I held onto the shape of it as we descended. The basement opened into a wide chamber, the ceiling low and arched, the floor cleared of everything except what sat at the center of it. A circle, etched deep into the stone, lines running in patt