The stairs ended and Hiroshi stepped up into the room and stopped.
It took a mont for his eyes to adjust. The light in here was different from the tunnels below. Dimr but spread out. Coming from sowhere he couldn’t imdiately identify. Like the room itself was producing it sohow. A faint reddish glow that had no obvious source and sat low against the floor.
Then his eyes adjusted fully and he wished they hadn’t.
The ceiling first. That was what hit him first. Things hanging from it. Goblins. Dozens of them strung up by their feet from iron hooks driven deep into the stone above. Arranged in rows. Every row even. Every body spaced the sa distance from the next one. So were recent enough that they still moved slightly with the air. So were old enough that they were mostly bone. All of them had been opened in the sa way. The sa cuts in the sa places. Like whoever did this was following instructions.
Hiroshi stood at the top of the stairs and made himself look at it properly.
The woman guard ca up behind him and went still. He heard her breath catch once and then she controlled it.
Baros ca up last and made a sound low in his throat and stepped back against the wall.
The walls themselves were covered. Every surface. Markings cut deep into the stone and filled with sothing dark that had dried a long ti ago. Marking wasn’t random. These were deliberate. Geotric. Circles layered inside larger circles with lines connecting specific points between them. Shapes that repeated in exact intervals around the entire room. Whoever made these had known what they were doing.
Hiroshi moved his eyes to the center of the room.
A stone table. Low and flat and black with age and use. Around it on the floor the markings were at their densest. Radiating outward from it like ripples from a stone dropped in water. At the four cardinal points around the table there were iron bowls on stands, empty now, but stained dark on the inside.
He had seen sothing like this before.
In a book in the Church archive that he had read while in recovery. A docuntation of sites found in the northern territories. Old sites. Pre-kingdom sites. Places where sothing had been practiced before the Church of light had spread far enough to stop it.
Sacrificial sites. Built and used to feed power upward. Not to any god that had a na anyone said out loud anymore. Sothing that predated the current age by long enough that most people had decided it wasn’t real because it was easier that way.
The goblins weren’t just living here.
They were being used here. Harvested here. Whatever was running this operation wasn’t keeping goblins as allies or as servants. It was keeping them as livestock. Running them through this room in numbers and taking sothing from them and feeding it into whatever these markings were built to channel.
The scale of it hit him next. How many bodies were on that ceiling. How long it would have taken to put that many up there. This wasn’t recent. This had been going on for a long ti. Underneath the city. Underneath people’s feet. Running continuously for long enough that the stone table had been stained that deep and the markings on the walls had been worn smooth at the edges from air moving past them repeatedly.
Soone had built an engine down here.
He didn’t know what it was producing. He didn’t know who was running it. But the man in the long coat collecting gold from the treasury suddenly made a different kind of sense. Not just soone doing business with goblins. Soone managing a supply chain. Keeping the operation funded and supplied and hidden.
Hiroshi felt sothing cold move through him that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room.
"We need to go," he said. His voice ca out quiet. "Now. Don’t touch anything."
He started moving toward the far side of the room. There was a passage opening on the other side. He kept his eyes on it and moved between the hanging bodies without letting himself think about what he was moving between.
The woman guard followed close behind him.
Baros pushed off the wall and ca after her. He was keeping his eyes down and moving fast. His breathing was audible.
Hiroshi reached the center of the room and passed the stone table without looking at it directly. He caught it in the edge of his vision and that was enough. He kept his focus on the passage ahead.
They were three quarters of the way across when he noticed the silence.
The kind that happened when sothing that had been making noise stopped making it. He hadn’t consciously registered any sound before but now that it was gone he understood there had been sothing. A low presence at the edge of hearing. And now it wasn’t there.
He slowed.
The woman guard noticed and slowed with him.
Hiroshi looked at the passage opening ahead. He looked at the walls to either side. The markings looked the sa. He looked up at the ceiling between the hanging bodies.
Nothing.
He kept moving. Slower now. Hand tight on the sword.
They reached the passage opening and Hiroshi stopped just before it and listened.
Silence from inside it too.
He took one step into the passage.
Sothing dropped from above.
Not from the passage ceiling. From the ceiling of the ritual room directly behind them. A shape. Fast and small and hitting the ground.
Then another. And another.
Hiroshi spun around.
They were coming down from the ceiling. From between the hanging bodies. Dropping silently and landing and straightening up. Small like goblins but not goblins. Scaled. Long limbed. With flat wide eyes that caught the reddish glow of the room and threw it back. Kobolds. Four of them already on the ground and more dropping.
They were completely silent which was the worst thing about them.
The first one moved before Hiroshi could react.
It crossed the distance to Baros in less than a second and hit him low and fast and Baros went down hard with a grunt and the thing was on top of him and then the woman guard was moving toward it and Hiroshi was moving and the room was suddenly full of motion and the reddish light was everywhere and Baros was on the ground and not moving and...
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