The dream came with the smell of cold stone and something burning far below the world.
Maximus stood in a hall lit the color of blood. Crimson lanterns hung from chains that rose up and up into a darkness with no ceiling he could see, and at the far end of the hall, on a throne cut from a single block of black glass, sat a woman with hair like spilled moonlight and eyes like a winter sky.
"Maximus," she said.
His name in her mouth sounded like a door opening after three thousand years shut.
He tried to go to her. The floor shifted under his boots — not stone. Something vast, turning over in its sleep far beneath him, breathing slow as mountains —
"You're smiling."
Maximus's eyes snapped open.
A tiny face hovered six inches from his nose, wings buzzing, arms folded tight. "You were smiling in your sleep," Pip said. "It was disgusting. I've watched you smile at breakfast and it was less disturbing than that."
Gray dawn leaked through the pines above their camp. His bedroll was damp with dew. His sword lay across his back where it always lay, and his hand had found the hilt in his sleep without him telling it to.
"I don't smile," he said.
"You absolutely do. You have a whole collection. There's the smug one, the stabby one, and now apparently the dreaming-about-a-girl one."
"I wasn't dreaming about a girl."
"Oh, please." She landed on his shoulder and tugged his earlobe. "You said a name. In your sleep. Out loud. With feeling."
"I did not."
"You said 'Lyra.'" She leaned in close. "Who's Lyra, Max?"
He stood, rolled the bedroll with more force than the job required, and strapped it to his pack. "Nobody."
"Nobody doesn't make you smile like that."
"Drop it, Pip."
"Make me." She crossed her arms. "Is she pretty? She sounded pretty. You only use that voice for pretty people and swords."
He swung his pack onto his shoulders and started walking. The pines thinned ahead of them, and past the last trees the ground simply ended — a wound in the earth a mile across, its sides cut with a switchback stair that dropped down and down into black.
Pip flew up beside his head, keeping pace. "We're really doing this. We're walking into a hole in the world."
"It's called the Underdeep."
"It's called a hole, Max. I can see it. It's a hole."
"You've been underground before."
"Under a hill. For an afternoon. This is different and you know it." She gestured at the dark below with both hands. "There's no sky down there. There's no sun. There's just... ceiling. Forever ceiling."
"Then it's a good thing you can fly. Ceilings are your natural habitat."
"Don't joke about this. I'm a creature of open air. I need wind. I need clouds. I need birds to race." She dropped onto his shoulder, small and suddenly quiet. "Why are we going down here, Max? The real reason. Not the sightseeing lie."
He stopped at the edge of the wound. Far below, past the stair's last visible turn, something glowed faint and blue, like a rumor of light.
"Have I ever steered you wrong?" he said.
"Yes. Constantly. The ditch in Aurelis. The thing with the badger. The other thing with the badger."
"That badger started it."
"Max."
He looked down into the dark for a long moment. Then he started down the stair, and his voice came back up to her, lighter than it had any right to be.
"I heard the mushrooms are exquisite."
The light died by degrees.
First the gray of dawn thinned to nothing. Then the blue rumor below them resolved into ghostcaps — pale fungi the size of cartwheels, growing in clusters along the stair, giving off a cold blue glow. Then even that was behind them, and they walked in a dark so complete Pip's wings made the only sound, until Maximus struck a spark to a hooded lantern and the world shrank to a ten-foot circle of yellow.
Pip hated every step of it.
"It's rude down here," she announced, sometime around the third hour. "The dark is rude. It just sits on you. No manners at all."
"You've been quiet for almost a minute. I was getting worried."
"I'm conserving my outrage." She flopped onto his shoulder. "How much farther?"
"Days."
"Days?"
"Veyloria's at the bottom of the world, Pip. You don't commute."
She was quiet for almost another minute — a personal record — and then: "Is the dream lady down here?"
"No."
"Is she near here?"
"No."
"Then why are we — "
"Pip."
"I'm just saying. You had one dream about one woman and now we're hiking into the planet's basement. That's not a plan, Max. That's a symptom."
He smiled the smug one. "Jealous?"
"I am concerned. There's a difference. Jealousy is when someone prettier shows up. Concern is when my best friend loses his mind."
Best friend. He didn't look at her, but something in his shoulders eased, just slightly.
"How long have we known each other, anyway?" she said suddenly.
"Don't start."
"I'm serious. Somebody's going to ask, and I want our stories straight."
"Our stories will never be straight and you know it."
"Fine. I'll just improvise." She brightened. "I always improvise beautifully."
The stair ended at a plain of gravel that ran to every horizon the lantern light could find.
No dirt. That was the strangest thing. Up above, the world was soil and roots and worms. Down here the ground was crushed stone, gray and endless — and growing out of it, impossible and pale, were plants. White stalks with translucent leaves. Root-flowers like folded paper. Whole meadows of them, glowing faintly in the dark, drinking light from the ghostcaps instead of the sun.
Pip drifted down and landed on a bloom as tall as she was. It bent under her weight, unconcerned.
"They're pretty," she said, surprised and a little offended, as if the Underdeep had cheated by being beautiful.
"Everything down here eats light instead of sun," Maximus said. "Takes what it can get. Like us."
"That's the saddest thing you've ever said."
"It's practical."
"It's sad and practical. Your two favorite flavors." She flew back to his shoulder. "So. Veyloria. Dark elves. A queen." A pause. "A queen, Max."
"You're doing the voice again."
"I'm asking a question with my voice. Queens don't usually show up in dreams unless — " She gasped so hard she nearly fell off his shoulder. "Oh no. Oh, no. Do you have a destiny? Is this a destiny situation? Because I did not sign up for a destiny. Destinies are how people get turned into statues."
"I don't have a destiny."
"You have a sword older than kingdoms and you don't believe in coincidence. That's two destiny symptoms."
"Walk faster," he said, "and the destiny can't catch us."
They found the toll bridge at what Pip declared was the exact midpoint of nowhere.
It spanned a black river that moved too slowly and shone too little, and at its near end sat a hut, and in front of the hut sat a dark elf with a ledger, a lantern, and the expression of a man who had been bored since before Pip was born — which, depending on which version of her history you asked about, might have been last Tuesday.
"Toll," he said without looking up. "Two coppers a head. Wings count as a head."
"Highway robbery," Pip announced, landing on Maximus's shoulder. "This is a bridge over water. The water was here first. You can't charge for water's bridge."
"The bridge wasn't here first. I built the bridge. Two coppers."
Maximus set down two coppers. The tollkeeper finally looked up — and stopped. His eyes went from Maximus's face to the sword hilt rising past his shoulder, wrapped in old cloth, and his boredom drained away like water through gravel.
"That's a big sword," he said carefully.
"It's a big bridge," Maximus said. "We all have our things."
"Where are you headed?"
"Veyloria."
The tollkeeper's stylus stopped moving. "Veyloria's closed its borders. Nobody goes in. Queen's orders."
"I'm nobody," Maximus said pleasantly. "It'll be fine."
A long silence. The tollkeeper looked at the sword again, then at Maximus's face, then — visibly deciding that some questions cost more than two coppers — waved them through.
They were halfway across the bridge when he called after them: "Hey! Fairy! How long you two been traveling together?"
Pip didn't miss a beat. "We were childhood friends."
The tollkeeper frowned. He looked at the seven-inch fairy. He looked at the six-foot swordsman with the ancient eyes.
"Childhood," he repeated.
"He was a very large child," Pip said.
"She's lying," Maximus said.
"He's modest," Pip said.
They walked on, leaving the tollkeeper staring after them, stylus forgotten.
"Childhood friends," Maximus said, once they were out of earshot. "That's your story?"
"It's a great story. It's got heart. It's got an underdog." She paused. "Well. An under-fairy."
"You were born in a hollow oak and I'm fairly certain I'm older than the concept of childhood."
"Details." She patted his cheek. "The tollkeeper bought it."
"The tollkeeper was afraid of my sword."
"Everyone's afraid of your sword, Max. It's practically your personality."
Past the river, the world changed its mind about what it wanted to be.
The gravel gave way to black glass — obsidian plains, cracked and shining — and the air turned hot. Heat rose off the stone in visible waves. Somewhere below, deeper than the river, something molten breathed, and orange light pulsed up through the cracks like the world had a heartbeat.
"The Cinderfields," Maximus said. "Stay on the path. The ground's thin in places."
"It's hot," Pip complained, fanning herself with both hands. "It's supposed to be cold underground. That's the whole deal. Cold and damp and mysterious. This is just a desert with a ceiling."
"The ceiling's doing its best."
"If your dream lady lives in a volcano, I'm going to be so upset."
"She doesn't live in a volcano."
"How do you know? You've never met her. She was a dream, Max. For all you know she's a volcano person. Some people are volcano people."
"Are they."
"Statistically, some of them must be."
He laughed — a real one, startled out of him — and she looked so pleased with herself that he didn't have the heart to take it back.
They walked through the heat in companionable silence for a while. The obsidian clicked under his boots. Far off, something that might have been a rockfall or might have been something else rumbled and went still.
"Max," Pip said at last, small and uncharacteristically serious. "What was the dream, really?"
He didn't answer right away. The lantern swayed. The orange pulse beat under the glass.
"I don't know," he said finally. "That's the truth, Pip. I woke up and I knew — the way you know a blade's balanced before you swing it — that it wasn't just a dream. Something pulled me. Not a sending. No wizard's hand in it." He shook his head. "It felt older than that. Older than anything I've got a word for."
"Older than you?"
"Don't push it."
"That means yes." She was quiet a moment. "Does it scare you?"
He considered lying. She'd know. She always knew.
"Yes," he said.
"Good," she said firmly. "Fear means your instincts work. My instincts say the tollkeeper overcharged us, and look how right I was." She settled against his neck, tiny and warm. "Whatever it is, we'll stab it."
"That's your solution to everything."
"It's never not worked."
The rain began without warning.
One moment they were crossing black glass in the dark. The next, the lantern light caught silver threads falling all around them — water, dropping from the stone sky, out of the dark above, where heat rising off the Cinderfields met the cold of the deep and wrung itself out of the air.
Pip gasped and launched straight up into it, spinning, wings shedding diamonds.
"Max! Max, it's raining! Underground! It's raining and there's no clouds!"
"I can see that, Pip."
"It's the best thing I've ever seen and I hate it here!" She dove through a curtain of falling water and came up laughing. "Do it again, cave!"
He stood in the stone rain and let it soak through his cloak, through to the dragon-crested armor beneath, and for a moment the weight of three thousand years sat a little lighter on his shoulders. Above them the stalactites wept silver. Around them the ghostcaps glowed blue through the falling water. The whole world was dark and light and water at once.
Where the rain struck the hot glass, it hissed and rose again as steam. Fog came up off the Cinderfields in slow white coils, thickening around them until the ghostcaps were blue moons in the mist and Pip vanished into it laughing, then burst back out trailing white.
"I'm a ghost!" she announced, swooping past his ear. "Fear me!"
"I'm terrified," Maximus said. "Look at me shaking."
"Hey," Pip said, landing on his shoulder, dripping and glowing. "When we find your dream lady — "
"If — "
" — when we find her, I'm taking full credit."
"For what?"
"For emotional support. For morale. For being the reason you didn't turn around at the toll bridge." She wrung out her hair. "I'm basically the hero of this story."
"You're basically a puddle."
"I'm a heroic puddle."
The rain thinned as they climbed, but the fog came with them, clinging to their boots and coiling around their ankles. The black glass gave way to gravel — and the gravel gave way to trees.
Ironwood. A forest of it, dense and black-barked, the trunks hard as forged metal. Pip knocked on one with her knuckles, yelped, and blamed the tree. The canopy swallowed what little glow the ghostcaps gave, and they walked in dark between dark pillars while the fog threaded through the trunks like something alive and curious.
"It's quiet," Pip whispered. "I don't like quiet. Quiet is where ambushes keep their things."
"Then talk," Maximus said. "You know you want to."
"I talk strategically. There's a difference."
Ahead, through the black trunks: a glow. Crimson and gold and blue, flickering between the trees like a promise.
They stepped out of the treeline onto a ridge of dark rock. Maximus shuttered the lantern —
— and Pip forgot to be strategic.
Below them, farther than she could have guessed, spread across the lightless dark like embers scattered on black velvet: lights. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Crimson and gold and blue, in streets and spirals and towers, climbing the walls of a cavern so vast its far side was a rumor.
"Oh," Pip breathed.
"Veyloria," Maximus said.
And nearer — much nearer, moving along the ridge road below them with lanterns of their own — a line of torchlight. Armor glinting. A border patrol, making its rounds.
Maximus smiled the stabby one.
"Follow my lead," he said.
"I hate when you say that," Pip said.