The mine workings themselves sat behind a fence that looked far newer and sturdier than anything else we'd seen in the valley so far, chain link stretched taut between fresh-cut posts, a single gate secured with a lock that Luxy studied for all of about ten seconds before producing a thin metal pick from somewhere inside her sleeve and getting to work on it with the easy, practiced confidence of someone who'd done this exact thing a hundred times before under far worse lighting.
"Two guards on the main gatehouse," Savage murmured, crouched low beside me at the fence line, watching the squat wooden structure that sat just inside the perimeter with a lantern burning low in its single window. "Rotating a patrol along the fence line every quarter hour or so, near as I can tell from watching the last two rounds. Sloppy interval. Whoever's running security up here isn't expecting company."
"Or isn't expecting company that matters," Namey said, quiet, from where he crouched on my other side with the manifest still folded carefully inside his coat, brought along, he'd said, in case matching it against whatever paperwork we found up here turned out to matter more than the risk of carrying it. "Which might be worse. It means Threnody's confidence up here isn't bravado. It's earned."
The lock gave under Luxy's hands with a soft click, and she eased the gate open just far enough for the four of us to slip through single file before easing it shut again behind Aki, who'd folded his wings tight to make himself narrow enough to follow without knocking the fence loud enough to carry.
We kept low, moving along the shadow line thrown by a row of equipment sheds, and Savage's read on the patrol interval held true, a single guard passing along the fence about eight minutes after we'd cleared it, close enough that I could hear him humming something low and off key to himself, entirely unaware of four people and a small wyvern holding perfectly still not twenty feet from his boots.
The main shaft entrance sat further up the slope, a black rectangle cut into the mountainside with heavy timber shoring around its mouth and a rail line running out of it toward a loading platform stacked with crates I recognized the moment moonlight caught their stenciled markings, the same cramped Genesis shorthand Namey had traced across the manifest back in Corvane, MODIFIED CORES, VARIANT SEVEN, LIVE, row after row of it stacked eight crates high and running the full length of the platform.
Namey made a small sound low in his throat, something between a gasp and a curse, and crept forward to press his palm flat against the nearest crate's stenciling like he needed the physical touch of it to fully believe what his eyes had already told him.
"There's more here than the entire manifest listed for every destination combined," he whispered. "This isn't a shipment point. This is the source. Everything we saw routed through Corvane, everything that ended up in Daenia, in Hallowmere, it all started right here, in this exact loading yard."
"Keep it together," Savage murmured, though there wasn't any real reproach in it, more the steady, grounding tone of someone who understood what it cost to keep it together in a moment like this and was trying to extend Namey the same courtesy she'd have wanted extended to herself. "We look, we take what proof we can carry, and we get back out before that patrol comes round again."
We moved along the platform's edge, staying low behind the crate stacks, and it was Luxy who found the side door first, a smaller entrance cut into the mountainside a short distance from the main rail shaft, unmarked except for a small brass plate bolted above the frame that had gone green with age around its edges.
She read it once, silent, and then looked back at me with an expression I didn't like at all.
I moved closer and read it myself.
MARROW CLAIM. SUBLEVEL THREE. ACCESS RESTRICTED.
Something in my chest did a slow, cold turn that had nothing to do with the mountain air.
"That's his name on company signage," I said, quiet, mostly to myself. "Not covered over. Not painted out. Just left there, plain, like whoever's running this place wanted it findable."
"Or wanted you findable, once you finally came looking," Namey said, and I could hear how much he hated saying it even as the words left him.
The door wasn't locked, which told us plainly enough that whoever ran this operation either hadn't anticipated intruders getting this deep, or hadn't cared if they did, and Luxy eased it open onto a narrow stair cut straight down into rock, lit at intervals by small glass-caged lanterns burning a faint grey-white light that didn't quite match any flame I'd seen a lantern produce before.
We went down.
The air changed within the first dozen steps, growing warmer rather than colder the way a mine that deep should have gone, thick with a smell I couldn't place at first and then placed all at once and wished I hadn't, something close to the copper tang of blood mixed with the mineral dust smell of broken rock, underneath both of those a third smell, faint and sweetish, that made my stomach turn before I'd consciously understood why.
The stair let out into a wide chamber cut directly into the mountain's own stone, lit by more of those same glass-caged lanterns, and lined along both walls with rows of what I first mistook, in the poor light, for ordinary mining equipment, before my eyes adjusted properly and I understood what I was actually looking at.
Cages. Rows of them, iron-barred, each one just large enough to hold a single crouched or curled shape, and most of them empty, doors hanging open, straw bedding scattered and gone dark with old stains I didn't examine too closely. Two of them weren't empty.