The road to the witch runs downward first. The mountain is entered through a wound in its flank — and it does not return all who go in.
The Enduring Lesser Lights left Ulmira’s Step and went down before they would go up. To face the witch Ygva with empty hands would cost them dearly, and it was in the trapped dark below that she had once found her own branch; so they would win their leverage there, or the Blessed Branch itself, before they ever met her. Sylvie came reluctantly, and shared only what she must: that the witch drew on the Umbra, and that she would want a price. She raised her wards, investing hope into a shimmer of armor over each of them, and gave Heyou the scarf she had knitted, and promised him socks. Three of the town came down with them — Mellon the human ranger and his snow leopard Yuki; Savel, a giant sorcerer who had delved at Mellon’s side before; and Sarru, who left the Sacred Pyre to guard them. The way was no clean tunnel but a crevasse between two peaks, opened when a rockfall shifted, and Mellon’s directions kept changing under him.
They took the switchback steps down as the pyre-light failed behind them. On the walls were reliefs of the departed gods — Tlellic of the long night and the hunt, Kreth of false visions and the moon — carved by hands long gone. Draz found a dark slick trailing along the stone and tasted it: kerosene, acrid, oily. Heyou knew it from the forge-fires of Salthewn — the secretion of an ooze, and it burned. The passage was laced with fuel, and they were carrying torches into it.
An arrow came out of the height and passed Jamal’s ear, and the ambush was sprung. A brute came with it — a goblinoid near ten feet tall, swollen and warped by the Umbra, a cudgel like a tree limb in its fist — and its first blow took Jamal full. Heyou slipped to its blind side and opened it, and the ichor that spilled caught, and fire ran up the stairs. Overhead an ooze swelled and burst; Draz’s arrow found it first, and in the same breath he threw Sylvie clear of the blast. A goblin came at her back and drove a blade into her, and Draz turned and cut it down.
They broke the brute between them — Savel’s gauntleted fists landing the last blow — and in falling it hurled a boulder that battered Draz and Sarru and Sylvie together. It should have been the end of it. It was not. The thing dragged itself upright again, lit from within by a cold Umbra glow, and had to be killed a second time: Draz’s shaft, and then Jamal and Heyou breaking its head past any mending. On its chest were three marks — not cut like the gods above, but branded into the flesh, made to compel or to feed it — and they had burned bright just before it rose. Sylvie knew the sort of power for what it was: the same that stands against the sacred pyres, and against her. Heyou cut the branded hide away to carry, and keep, and study.
Uneasy, Sylvie turned a card. It came up the High Priestess, reversed — the truth held out of reach, the hand forced to act on half of what it needed to know — and she told them plainly that to go on would end in ruin. Then the goblins brought the roof down ahead of them, and the way forward was sealed in stone. Mellon, distraught, ran at the rubble — and did not strike it. He passed through the solid rock as though it were smoke, and was gone to the far side, past reach, past call. Yuki could not follow. She cried and scraped at the fresh fall where he had been. Draz remembered then the glass he had picked from Mellon’s chest and back at the fire in town — how some of the shards had gone the wrong way, drawn into him — and how he had thought it only his own fumbling.
Draz and Heyou climbed toward a goblin ledge through rattling shale and a rhythm of arrows; Draz took wounds to shoulder and thigh before Heyou drew him back and eased the worst of them. From the height they read the work below. Red sconces set at intervals. Half a dozen goblins or more, hammering iron into the stone, stringing lines, raising a corridor built for killing — all of it turned toward a steady pale glow perhaps a mile deeper in. They would not walk into a thing made for their deaths. Instead they would feign a leaving, loud, back up the stairs, and leave Draz hidden behind — to fall on the goblins when they came out to collect the brute’s corpse.
Behind them, a way sealed and a man passed into stone. Ahead, the goblins keeping their killing-corridor, framed by a strange golden light. Mellon was gone where none could follow; it was all the others could do to rest and hide, and wait for an opportune moment.