It slithered on the edge of her senses, ghostlike and tenuous, a shifting murmur of syllables just past the limits of her hearing. She strained and strained, turned her head this way and that, but it was too faint to make out.

"Azdaja?" she said. "Is that you? What are you trying to say—I can't hear—"

She took a few more steps toward the yawning darkness. The whisper grew louder. She began to make out words, barely audible against the stifling dark.

"Gods... lead to cruelty... destruction..."

It did not sound like the azdaja. There was too little hissing, for one thing, and the voice was also deeper, colder, like the sharp mountain peaks Jane had seen beyond the fortress of Dalnushka, to the north.

"Hello?" Jane's voice wavered. "Is someone there?"

She spun in place, still trying to identify the source of the sound, and in a moment of inattention, her big toe collided with a rock.

"Ouch!"

"What are you doing?"

It appeared that her absence had not gone as unnoticed as she thought. Drazan stood behind her, eyeing her quizzically, and beyond him stood Yefim, a sword in his hand.

"The azdaja—" Jane said helplessly. "She disappeared down one of the passages. I don't know where she went. And I thought I heard a voice—someone whispering in the darkness—"

Yefim grunted.

Drazan raised an eyebrow. "Take it from me," he said. "You do not want to wander alone here. Dalnushka's caverns tap into deep magical sources. They are older even than Sengilach. Impossible to guess what might be lurking in these caves."

As if on cue, a scaly form slithered up the back of Jane's neck.

"AAHHHH!" said Jane. "Oh my God! Oh my God. Could you please not do that!"

"Overdresssed man issss right." The azdaja glared at her. "Danger lurkssss here. Foolishhh to wander alone."

"Excuse me," said Jane. "I wasn't the one who just fluttered down a dark passage—"

"You do not have fangsss."

"Now that we've woken the dead with our shouting," Drazan cut in, and Jane clamped her mouth shut in chagrin, "I think we should move to the next level."

But when they tried to descend to the lower levels, they found their way blocked. A rock fall had obstructed the staircase they were trying to descend. Drazan, shrugging, led them back up to the catacombs and tried a different staircase. This, too, was blocked by rocks.

"Not good," said Drazan. "If we're to have any hope of repairing the protective spells beneath the catacombs, we need to be able to get to them." He turned to Jane. "Maybe you could send your azdaja searching along some of the other passages?"

"I am no ssssslave to be exsssploited!" the azdaja grumbled.

"We'll get you lots of fresh meat," said Jane. She'd found it was easier to bribe the azdaja than to reason with her. "Don't go too far."

But the azdaja had no more luck than they did. When she returned ten minutes later, it was with news that all obvious routes to the lower levels were blocked off. "There might be more," she hissed. "Other passsagesss the Kanachssky sssorcerersss didn't dare traverssse. But I did not ssssee one."

Disheartened, they returned to report their findings to Olesya and Kir. The other scouting parties had also found no sign of the living, though—like Drazan's group—they had uncovered many corpses of the dead.

"What happened here, I wonder?" said Drazan. "The Kanachskiy shouldn't have abandoned this fortress entirely. Even if they couldn't send soldiers through the pass, they should've at least sent their sorcerers here to hold it."

He frowned, and Jane guessed what he was thinking: how suspicious this was, how this could well be a trap that Kanach had laid to slaughter them.

They made camp uneasily that night, in a large stone temple whose doors opened out onto the battlements overlooking the city. The doors had once been sturdy oak, but they had been blasted through during the battle; they hung half off their hinges, exposing the sunset beyond. The wyverns roosted on the battlements a short distance away. No one wanted to sleep too far away from them. There was a collective horror of what might be lurking in the dark parts of the fortress—of sudok bursting upon them unawares.

Although she was glad to be close to an exit, Jane was not thrilled with their sleeping arrangements. Familiar statues loomed at the end of the temple: Divna, Avdotya, and Sidor. They were good likenesses, almost too good. The sight of Sidor's molten eyes filled Jane with unease.

The azdaja seemed to share her sentiments. "Godssss!" she hissed. "Godsss bring the world to ruin!"

"What does that mean?"

"Nikolay has told me ssstoriess."

"What sort of stories?"

"Sssstupid girl!" The azdaja's tail lashed. "I'm not going to tell you under their very eyessss!"

Jane frowned. "Back at the tent that night, Sidor talked about Eloise... and it got me to thinking... was Nikolay's father—"

"You humansss put sssuch ssstock in lineage!" the azdaja interrupted. "It issss a major failing of your kind. Origin mattersssss little, yet the way you humanssss sssssee it, it issss asssss if one'ssss identity livesssss and diesss with your parentsssss' blood." She fluffed her feathers irritably. "I did not know my mother... sssshe left me and my nessstmatesss before we hatched. It taught usssss independenssse and ssself sssufficiency."

The azdaja wanted nothing more to do with the matter, and no matter how Jane tried to ask her as they set up the tents, she always slithered out of answering the question. Jane might have tried harder, but she was distracted by Kir, who—in his misery—had accidentally assembled his tent upside down, and in the course of helping him, the question slipped her mind completely.

Kir's tent was next to hers, beside a wall festooned with tapestries. After they fixed the tent and Kir had settled in for the night, Jane—still too on edge to sleep—sat by the crackling fire in the center of the temple. She frowned at the line of people stitched on the nearest tapestry, trying to figure out why they looked familiar—until it hit her. They were all wearing clothes from Earth: T-shirts and pants and, in one woman's case, a poodle skirt that looked like it belonged in a '50s era sitcom. Jane shook herself and squinted at the nearest figure, the very last one in the lineup. Her stomach flipped.

It was her.

A stylized version of her, certainly, but now that she was looking for it, she saw the likeness. They had gotten the eyes almost right, and the hair, and the baggy tee-shirt and sweats she had been wearing when she first arrived in Mir.

To her left was Phillip, wearing—Jane almost laughed—his old chemistry-themed pajamas, complete with little oxygen molecules. They had done a good job with the detail, down to the periodic table on his sleeves.

"It is tradition to sew a new tapestry for each avtorka who comes to Dalnushka," said Olesya behind her. Jane jumped. "One way of showing gratitude toward the gods, I suppose."

"It seems like a lot of work," said Jane, tracing the threads that made Phillip's sleeves.

"The priests and priestesses of this temple take it seriously. Took it seriously."

Silence stretched, becoming heavy. Jane's eyes traveled down the line of avtorkas. There were five, not counting her. Phillip, Eloise, two women with East Asian features, and a boy who looked a bit like Kir.

"She passed her godstest," said Olesya, pointing at one of the women Jane didn't recognize. She gestured to the boy who looked like Kir. "He did as well."

Phillip hadn't, though. What had Phllip encountered that caused him to fail? It had been during his third godstest, Jane knew. Her stomach gave an uncomfortable lurch.

Jane's gaze wandered past the very first avtorka, to a larger tapestry depicting battle. It was sewn in a different style than the other tapestries.

"Velos," said Olesya. "The betrayal of Velos and his imprisonment by the gods."

Jane frowned at the tapestry. She had hard stories of the fourth god, Velos, the god the Kanachskiy worshipped. Given how the people of Somita spoke of him, she had expected Velos to be a fanged monster, something hideous, out of myth—but the tapestry makers had portrayed him as a man—golden, like the other gods. In the tapestry, he was chained beneath a mountain, surrounded by three other golden figures, who could only be Sidor, Divna, and Avdotya.

"How did he betray them?" said Jane.

"He tried to steal the Book of Truths. Wrote things in there that shouldn't have been written." Olesya shrugged. "Or so the stories say."

But Jane wasn't listening. Her eyes were drawn to the mark on Velos' forehead; she felt like her entire body had frozen, like it was difficult to breathe.

"Why does he have that mark on his forehead?"

"It's the mark of Velos." Olesya shrugged. "Who knows what it actually means? In Kanach, you can barely go two steps without encountering it." She stared sidelong at Jane. "Are you quite all right, Avtorka?"

"Fine," said Jane.

Long into the night, Jane found herself staring at the mark Sidor had left on her hand. There was no denying it: it was exactly the same as the mark on Velos' forehead.

Why, though? She couldn't make sense of it. If Sidor had worked with Avdotya and Divna to imprison Velos, then shouldn't they be enemies? Unless the legends were wrong. Maybe Velos had not gone to prison, and all four gods were somehow in cahoots.

The following morning dawned dreary and overcast. A thick fog whispered through the valley below, and condensation dusted the stone walls of the fortress. Olesya sent the strongest mages to start clearing the boulders blocking the fortress' lower levels. "Fixing the ancient protections on Dalnushka is our highest priority," she told them. "We need to be prepared for another sudok attack."

The others—Jane included—were assigned to the far less glorious task of sorting through the dead and bringing them to the ramparts for burning.

Jane had had her share of unpleasant experiences since arriving in Somita. She'd been imprisoned for a crime she hadn't committed, manipulated by a sorcerer with an ego the size of Jupiter, and forced to walk barefoot on glass shards. She had stabbed an attacker in the neck, and she had watched a friend fall to his death from his wyvern.

And yet, none of her experiences had quite prepared her for the glorious task of cataloguing and disposing of dead bodies.

The cool mountain air had slowed the corpses' decay, but they had rotted long enough to take on a ripe aroma. They bubbled with gaseous blisters, and their putrefying abdominal contents dribbled and splashed as the Riders tried to levitate them.

Kir's face was green, his fists clenched so tight his hands looked like snow. He had insisted on helping despite Drazan's protests, and he'd half-begged, half-ordered Drazan to give him the same duties as any other Rider.

Jane wondered if he now regretted this.

Drazan was forcibly cheerful as they hauled the corpses toward the bonfire in Dalnushka's center. "Inessa and Alexei, get the ones in the Great Hall. Yefim and Prince Kir, start tackling the bodies on the battlements. We'll do this in stages."

"What should I do?" said Jane.

"Take this." Drazan handed Jane what looked like a small stone jewelry box with dozens of pockets for earrings. Jane rolled it bemusedly in her hands, as Drazan levitated the nearest corpses, four particularly large, dead fellows in suits of magically-reinforced armor.

"It's a magical imprint recorder," Drazan explained. "You conjure up an image of the dead person, and send it into the box. Each image gets recorded in one of the stone pockets. Instant preserved image of the dead, to be removed and identified later. Here, let me show you—"

Drazan lowered the corpses, which landed with a dull squelch upon the battlements. Effortlessly, he conjured an illusory replica of the nearest corpse—a sickly fellow with a purple face and dangling viscera. The illusion was so lifelike, Jane took a step backward before remembering illusions couldn't actually drip on her. Drazan shrank the image and sent it wafting toward the box, where the tiny replica took up residence in the first slot in the imprint recorder. Then he levitated the corpse onto the funeral pyre.

"Your turn," he said.

It was exhausting work. Drazan had made magical imprint recording look easy. It wasn't. Jane was still struggling with illusion-casting, and her first batch of magical replicas looked more like lemurs than corpses. Half of them spluttered and faded before reaching the recording box. After the sixth botched attempt, Drazan took over management of the recorder, while Jane joined Kir and Yefim in levitating bodies out of the halls. This was easier, but no less disgusting, and the lack of personal protective gear made Jane's stomach churn.

Many of the corpses were mangled beyond recognition, their faces eaten through by sudok. A part of Jane was grateful for this. It was easier to stay detached when dealing with bodies or arms... Her stomach lurched whenever they recovered a body with an intact face, and she almost threw up when Yefim came walking out of the passages carrying a bundle that had once been a baby.

Kir was in an even worse state than Jane. His hands shook, and his face was ashen with horror. After he dropped one of the bodies, which exploded on the tile, sending waves of putrescence across their boots, Jane brought them both back to the temple to get changed.

"They're dead," he whispered, his face wet with tears. "All of them, even the children."

Jane felt his forehead; it was cool. Still, his pallor concerned her. "You need rest," she said. "Just—close your eyes for a little while and try to sleep. You don't look like you slept at all last night."

She regretted his absence almost immediately. Their task was harder with one less pair of hands, and there seemed no end of bodies. Just when Jane thought they must have found them all, Alexei or Yefim would locate more bodies for them to catalogue and burn. Some of the bodies were deep inside the fortress. The halls seethed with shadows of the dead, blood and bodies; they were no place for the living. Each step Jane took within the halls set her hackles rising, and the thought of a sudok stealth attack made her palms slick with fear. Many of the magical lights lining the stone corridors had broken with the sudok's attack. The shoddy lighting, abundance of bodies, and terror that any minute a sudok might leap from behind one of the blood-streaked walls was enough to make the most stalwart of Riders wary

"Well," said Drazan soberly, just when Jane was beginning to think she would scream if they had to venture into the fortress one more time. "I think that's enough for one day. We can save the rest for tomorrow. How many so far?"

"Three hundred twenty-three of ours, and fifteen Kanachskiy sorcerers."

"That's it? How many do we have left?"

"Two hundred more dead," said Yefim, "by my estimate."

"No one's seen any sign of survivors?"

"Liveliest thing here is crows."

"Damn them!" Drazan muttered. "There should be many more. They must have taken prisoners."

Jane exchanged a glance with Alexei. "Couldn't the people hiding in the caves have just—made for the forest or the mountains after the sudok left, or something?"

"Could they have? Yes. Is it likely? Stick with the Riders a few years, and you'll find that the most optimistic case is never the right one. A good rule of thumb is to think of the least optimistic scenario, and then multiply it by five." Drazan frowned into the imprint recorder. "We've not found a single body of a Somitan battle mage yet. Each mage is granted a magical signature to make identification easy. There were at least twelve battle mages stationed at Dalnushka, and we're halfway done cataloguing. We should have found at least one by now."

Jane turned this piece of information over in her head. "I'm not sure I..."

"I don't get it either. Every time I think on it too much I start to get a migraine."

An unpleasant thought struck her. "Necromancy isn't a thing here, is it? Zombies, dead bodies brought back to life?"

Drazan snorted. "If it is, I haven't seen it. I've heard of souls becoming trapped in this world, but never a body brought back from the dead." He wiped sweat from his brow. "Help me out with this Kanachskiy sorcerer—he's bloody massive..."

After hours of cataloguing bodies, Jane had had enough. She hiked up to the topmost of Dalnushka's walls and stared out across the ruins of the city. The sun was setting, and the towering mountains to the west cast jagged shadows over the fortress.

She stared at the twin peaks to the west of the fortress. In the dying light, they glowed with unearthly beauty. One face of the left mountain was missing. The valley between them was bathed in shadow, but Jane could make out the outline of jagged rocks.

"That's Parshin's Pass," said Olesya from behind her.

Jane jumped.

"The remains of it anyway." Olesya took a swig from her flask and set it down. "The pass itself doesn't exist anymore. Along with many brave men and women."

She stared out over the ruins.

Jane racked her brain, trying to remember what Kir had told her. "There was... some sort of great battle here a long time ago... wasn't there?"

"No battle is great," said Olesya. "There are only the ones you win and the ones you lose and the ones where no one is victorious at all. And the ones where your family members die, and the ones where your family members live, but you lose dear friends instead."

Her voice was bitter.

"My younger sister Vitalya and I grew up here," she said. "For many years this was our home, before we moved to Sengilach." She jerked her chin. "She's buried under that mountain. Caught by the rocks when Nikolay brought the mountain down."

Jane swallowed. "I'm so sorry, Olesya."

"It was eight years ago." In the dying light, she looked older than her thirty years, old and sad and worn. "The famed Battle of Parshin's Pass, the last battle fought before the old truce was struck. My sister should not have been fighting at all. She was too young. Just like half the squadron here. Look at Alexei and Inessa – barely more than children."

Chills swept across Jane's arms. Olesya met her gaze, her eyes grim.

"We needed a miracle back then, but your brother didn't deliver. Will you be the one to provide us with a miracle now, Avtorka of Somita?"

~*~

When Jane finally dozed off that night, it was in fits and starts. Her dreams were filled with blood and death and maggots. She was fighting sudok in the castle, running from claws like Swiss army knives and teeth the size of daggers. She was sorting through corpses with Drazan and the decaying corpse was moving, rising to standing, fixating its decaying eyes on her and reaching toward her with putrid flesh. She was running, running from the corpses and the decay, only to crash into a warm body, which caught her. Casimir! she cried, Thank goodness, I thought you were dead—and then, before her eyes, maggots began to crawl out of Casimir's mouth, his cheeks, the hollow at his neck, and she screamed and ran for safety—