The drip turns into a trickle. The trickle into a sound that has opinions about leaving. The tunnel leans upward as if it finally remembered the sky is a place.
Hollow takes point, a faint rattle of bone that manages to be quieter than my breath. Marrow moves like a thesis on manners at my knee. The leash is tight enough to hum and loose enough to let me breathe.
We hit trouble in the sort of place trouble likes: a narrowing, then a bulge of rock, then a pocket where shadows pretend to be furniture. Hollow veers and clacks once, the bird's version of a cough. Marrow lifts his skull and points like a weather vane.
I smell fur and damp and the sweet rot that says, with confidence, that something ate here and then stayed to see who else might visit.
Two creepers peel out of the dark at the edge of the torchlight. Behind them, not a boar this time, but a long-backed thing with too many joints and a low opinion of the concept of standing still. Its skin is the color of dirty snow and patterned with scars that look like maps of towns no one visits twice.
I don't wait. Waiting is for speeches.
"Marrow, left. Hollow, above." Rotate, don't overlap. Heel doesn't need to be said if you spent the last few hours saying it enough that it learned the shape of the word.
Anchor breath. The current sits where I put it. Not a flood. A glass of water placed on a table that will not be bumped.
The first creeper rushes my voice. I don't give it a voice to hit. I slide on the outside line, let its whiskers taste the wrong air, and use the sabre like a polite argument: one clear point through the hinge, then we both move on with our lives. More or less.
The second tries Marrow. Marrow is ready. He hits it from the side like a lesson and keeps moving so claws don't find purchase in him. He does not bite and he does not worry the kill. He is a hound who listens when told that dinner is someone else's business.
The long-backed thing comes in twisting, joints arguing with the possibility of physics. It tries for my legs with a sweep that would put a man on his back and then on his way to an unflattering epitaph. I answer with the current only when heel touches stone and with hands that have learned the rhythm of a dozen arts instead of pretending there is only one true way to fall down.
The blade doesn't cut plates; it cuts seams. I find the seam. I put the edge there. Hollow clacks once and jabs down, a beak finding the soft part between plates. It isn't much; it doesn't have to be. The long thing flinches; that is my entry. Hip turn, knee ride on a hinge, sabre to the seam that has given up on being loyal. Ugly business. Honest result.
Silence lurks again, then gives up. I breathe. Marrow sits because he has learned the word. Hollow hovers because it has learned that floors are for other people.
The leash does something strange. It stops feeling like a wire. It starts feeling like a rope that someone stopped laughing at and started taking seriously.
The Compass clears its throat in my head, which is a neat trick for a rectangular idea.
"Seating," it says, pleased with itself and trying not to be smug. "The current has decided it likes where you put it. You may maintain a pair without fuzz if you continue to rotate orders like you aren't trying to conduct two orchestras with one stick."
"Seating," I repeat.
"Please do not order cushions," it says gravely. "This is a metaphor."
I test it. "Hollow, scout." The bird goes, riding a draft I cannot feel. "Marrow, heel." The hound is at my knee before the second syllable finishes. No fuzz. No lick of panic at the back of my teeth. No sense of juggling knives with my eyes closed.
"How far does the rope go," I ask.
"It goes as far as you make it," the Compass says. "But if you try to be a hero about it, I will cough loudly and make you feel judged."
"Noted."
The tunnel widens. The trickle is a stripe of water on stone now, silver in the torchlight. Old survey chalk argues with fresher scratches that say someone wanted out more than they wanted to leave messages for people who came after.
We walk. I do not think about what waits outside because that is a job for men who can afford to be surprised. I think about breath and step and the way the current behaves when asked to sit and when told to get off the furniture. I think about Lila's laugh and decide, again, to stop using it as an anchor in a sea it can't be in. I think about the twin I haven't faced yet and decide, again, not to write answers for a test I haven't seen.
Hollow clacks twice and swings back. The draft is a proper wind now, not a rumor. The ceiling climbs in a hurry. The cave smells less like old coins and more like morning.
"Exit ahead," the Compass says, in the tone of someone announcing the last stop on a train that did not catch fire. "Would you like a handkerchief to dab your brow theatrically?"
"I'll save the theatrics for when it matters," I say.
"Admirable," it says. "Do remember you are very handsome when you don't die."
The last stretch is the kind that makes heroes trip: loose rock, a tilt that encourages ankles to have opinions, a glare of daylight that convinces eyes to stop doing their jobs. Anchor breath. The rope hums the way ropes hum when they hold. Marrow stays where I put him because he has learned that word and because he is made of my stubbornness. Hollow rides the bright like it always belonged there.
The fissure opens to a lip of stone. Beyond it, pale sky like a coin, air that smells like something other than inside, and the far-off noise that only happens where people are.
I step onto it. The light bites after too much cave. I let it. I blink until the world stops pretending to be a sketch.
Marrow sits, elegant as a museum. Hollow perches on a shard of rock and clacks once as if taking attendance.
The Compass, genteel: "For the record, this exit was achieved with two undead, minimal property damage, and no toe casualties. I would give this performance four and a half stars. The deduction is for the boar."
"Boar deserved it," I say.
"It absolutely did," it says.
I stand there for exactly the amount of time it takes to realize I am not dead and then one breath more to enjoy it.
Then, because life does not wait for men who like tidy endings, voices drift up the path.
I smile, just a little, because I have two on a thread, more bones in a sack, and a plan to live properly whether anyone else likes it or not.
We step into daylight.