I need your help. Desperation turned his stomach hollow. I cannot do this without your assistance. Do not die, do not die, do not die—
Li Min blew out her match just as the passage began to make itself known again, beating out a warning against the stale air.
Reinforcements. Nicholas clenched his jaw, struggling with the pain in his shoulder, the way it leeched at his strength.
Li Min grunted in the darkness, adjusting Sophia’s weight. “This way.”
From what he’d seen before the light went out, there was nowhere else to go. Nothing to do but hide and hope and pray.
“Must be up in the Basilica by now—”
“—split up, see if we can find a light—”
The voices were thrown between the walls, allowed to volley back and forth, to meet the passage’s calls blow for blow.
“This way!” Li Min’s voice became more urgent.
She struck one last match. Nicholas felt himself balk—first at the sight of the open sarcophagus at the center of the mausoleum, and again as Li Min all but shouldered him toward the stairs that had been hidden beneath its lid and silently urged him down into a darkness deeper than sleep.
The quick steps of the Ironwoods were pounding down like rain, growing in speed and strength. Nicholas couldn’t question it. He had to move.
The sensation of descending into a tomb, into a maze of graves and stones, made him feel as if Death himself had one hand around his throat, his bony fingers bruising. Nicholas stopped, poised at the edge of the steps. What small sliver of light Li Min’s match had provided disappeared as the girl set Sophia down and pulled the lid shut over them.
For the first time in a long, long while—since he’d been a child, since his mother had told him to climb into that cupboard and stay hidden until it was safe to come out—Nicholas felt his throat tighten to the point of choking. His mouth had gone so dry, it felt as if he were breathing ash in and out of his lungs. Every sense was dampened; what innate sense of direction he possessed was stripped away, leaving him with only touch to feel his way down the last of the steps.
“‘Through me you enter into a city of woes,’” he muttered, half-delirious. “‘Through me you enter into eternal pain…through me you enter the population of loss….’”
“‘Abandon all hope, you who enter here,’” Li Min whispered, just above his ear. “Dante. How original.”
Nicholas grunted back, his feet finding flat ground, and his forehead the disastrously low ceiling. His forehead cracked against some sort of stone support, igniting the aches and agony he’d managed to push aside. That was it for him—his body simply ran out of whatever means it had of continuing on. He drooped like a slack sail.
Distantly, he heard Li Min set Sophia down and race back up the steps to pull the cover back over them.
Nicholas fell onto his knees, his strength draining as quickly as the blood from the arrow wound. His limbs shook from the strain of their run, from carrying Sophia’s slight weight for as long as he had, and he fought to stay conscious. Inching forward, even just a foot, felt like a Herculean task. A beast that would not be slaughtered.
And then…there was light. It spilled out from a gas lantern in Li Min’s hands, illuminating the mosaics on the floor and the peeling frescos dancing on the walls around them. She was rummaging through a small bundle of wares in the corner: blankets, pots, a ruthless-looking dagger, and a leather sack of something he hoped was food.
This was her hiding place, her stash—or someone else’s stash that she’d taken advantage of. He watched as Li Min spread the blanket out over the ground, snapping it to shake the dust free.
Nicholas felt himself take his first deep breath in hours.
Li Min drew her lantern closer and unknotted the laces of her hooded cloak to drape over Sophia’s shivering form. She wore an approximation of the longer draped dresses he’d seen on the women of Carthage, her hair braided into a crown around her head. She worked silently, her fingers pressing along a point on Sophia’s neck. Then she leaned forward, an ear to Sophia’s chest.
“Is…is she dead?” Nicholas asked, voice hoarse.
Li Min sat back. Shook her head. “She lives. Barely.”
“I brought—” Nicholas fumbled with the physician’s bag, yanking it over his head and passing it to her. “I brought this—do you know anything of medicine? Of poison?”
She snatched the leather bag and began sorting through its contents, lining up each sachet, small bottle, and pressed herb on the ground beside her. She stopped now and then to sniff one or dab a drop of liquid on her tongue.
“Sit her up,” Li Min commanded at last, seizing one of the small bottles and uncorking it. “Hold her jaw open with care, or else you’ll break it.”
He rolled his stiffening shoulder back, trying to loosen it into use, and felt a trickle of fresh blood race down the curve of his spine. His thoughts took on a flickering quality that set off a clanging bell inside of his skull.
Still, he did as Li Min asked, sitting Sophia’s slack body up and tilting her head back. He used his index finger and thumb to nudge her jaw open wide enough for Li Min to pour whatever was in the bottle down Sophia’s throat. She measured it out, sip by sip, her free hand stroking Sophia’s face sweetly, like a delicate spring rain.
“What—what is that?” he demanded. “Won’t she choke—?”
Sophia had been nothing but deadweight from the moment he’d carried her out of the house in Carthage, but she’d at least had her usual barbed edges and venom. Over the course of ten, fifteen minutes, it had all bled away, leaving nothing but a husk of bones and skin. But now she returned to life, seemingly all at once: retching, gagging, and then casting up her accounts all over him with a wet, putrid splatter. Her eyes remained closed, but he could feel her breathing more steadily now, the puffs of it warming the air between them.