HTWBB Chapter 4

It was an ancient artifact—from an era when the craftsmen who could build it and the mages with power enough to animate it had both ceased to exist.

In ordinary times it was indistinguishable from the natural landscape. But let a specific condition be violated, and it would pursue only the one who had violated it with relentless single-mindedness. Even during the age when magic flourished, these had been made primarily for defense and protection.

Which meant that this diligent tomb guardian awakening and moving was not because of Rietta.

Someone else had satisfied the condition.

A heavy exhale came from the direction where the voice had been moments before. Rietta shifted her gaze to what appeared to be the golem's shoulder. A familiar hem of robe billowed out wide, and a hand gripping a short-blade rose high.

She gathered her remaining magic into her legs in one motion and launched herself off the ground. A moment before the blade would have buried itself in the golem's body. She extended her arm without delay and caught the man by the back of his collar.

"You—!"

He turned by reflex, his body going still with surprise.

"Be quiet."

She ignored whatever he had been about to say, tightened her grip, and threw him down toward the inner edge of the forest. He landed without effort. His hood, unable to match the momentum, slid back off his shoulders—and dark hair settled softly as it found stillness.

The golem turned the mass of stone that served as its face, moving with the unhurried deliberateness of something that has never needed to hurry. Rietta dropped to the ground in front of the man a breath later and immediately grabbed his collar, pulling him level with her.

He came without resistance.

"…What are you doing?"

"Don't open your mouth yet."

He closed it. Something seemed to read as wrong—the golem resumed its movement, made a slow survey of the nearby area, and then began to withdraw, gradually, back toward the center.

She confirmed sufficient distance had opened between them and released his collar.

"If you don't know anything, stay still."

"What don't I know?"

"The rules of a place a golem guards."

"There were rules."

Rietta stepped back one pace and looked him over at that unremarkable answer.

She had suspected from the jaw visible below the hood—the man was exactly as striking as she had anticipated.

Lips the right degree of full and red, a nose that ran straight and clean—these might have tipped into the excessively delicate if not for the brows that cut sharply outward and a jaw line distinct enough to balance the whole of it completely.

Eyes with a keen angle held her directly. Striking was not enough. He was startlingly handsome.

When their eyes met, he pulled only the corner of his mouth upward—making something that approximated a smile. It had the same shape as what she had seen at the inn.

"We meet again."

Rietta let out a quiet breath.

"You don't seem to have a gift for smiling."

"That is the first time anyone has said that."

He considered for a moment, and the outer corners of his eyes curved, just slightly.

"Is this better?"

She saw no reason to return an answer. She moved to another question.

"You heard from the beginning?"

"From the inn?"

"Yes."

"From the part about Mount Tarun, if that's what you're asking."

Rietta considered.

The fact that he had overheard their conversation was not itself a serious problem. Any ordinary person, or even a capable treasure hunter, would have been wandering lost from the willow tree at the midpoint.

But the man in front of her had not only passed through the illusion barrier—he had set foot on the aerial tomb as well.

And from the way he had been in the process of attacking the golem, he had not arrived exhausted. He had not spent much power getting here.

"This is a problem."

Rietta said it half to herself. The same objective was obvious, and whether he was mage or swordsman, he had real potential to become an obstruction.

She was gauging how to handle him when he raised both arms, palms out—yielding.

"Let's cooperate."

"Cooperate?"

"We go to the location of the necklace together, and whoever reaches it first takes it."

"Why would I agree to that?"

He smiled—and his violet eyes went half-concealed behind it. A more natural smile this time than before.

"Because I don't know how to avoid that inconvenient golem, and you don't know what the inside of the tomb looks like—so two is better than one."

She did not trust him at all. Whatever dangers waited inside were unknown to both of them equally.

The way he spoke—omitting a detail or two to make the other party fill in the rest with their own guesses—had completely dissolved any trust that might otherwise have developed. In fact, his formal speech had done that from the start. It sat on him like ill-fitting clothes. Wrong in a way that was difficult to name.

He was a man who had never, in his life, looked at anything from below. The formal speech might have fit him if he were pressing down from above. It did not fit this. Rietta gave him the affirmative answer anyway.

"…I suppose so."

The heavy rhythmic sound had already ceased. The golem had returned fully to its position.

If the man in front of her woke the golem again—the golem that had only just managed to settle back to sleep—getting into the tomb would become a distant prospect.

More than that—she had spent too much to be in any state for a confrontation with him right now.

She had arrived at a conclusion quickly. Rietta extended her hand.

"Rietta. And you?"

He took the offered hand as if he had been waiting for it.

"Please call me Abel."

Rietta looked at the square structures placed throughout the beautiful flower garden.

The stones—white and cleanly cut—were scattered at irregular intervals with no evident system. The placement felt slightly at odds with the evident care that had gone into everything else here.

"How did you get in?"

"The forest encircling this place, you mean?"

"Yes. There was no path."

"If there's no path, you make one."

The answer matched what she had expected. She nodded.

He had clearly forced his way through by a completely different method than hers—and in doing so, had almost certainly left damage. Not only plants. Perhaps animals as well.

Having broken something before stepping into the flowers, the golem had had no choice but to wake.

Abel murmured, low: "That was the problem."

"Don't touch anything else."

He looked down at his feet. The shallower forest where he stood now, and one step forward—a flower garden where every scent mixed together. The two zones were as clearly separated as if someone had drawn a boundary between them: the soil itself was different, and so were the weeds growing from it.

Not something you would notice without looking carefully. He was studying a rose that moved in the windless air when he spoke.

"Was it because I stepped on the flowers?"

"Yes."

Rietta was not given to generous explanation. Abel had nonetheless, from a handful of cues, parsed the situation with precision: the tomb had registered him as a pest through his prior damage, and the flowers had served as the trigger.

She glanced at him, then pointed to the refined-cut stones she had been examining.

"Step on the stones and go to the tomb entrance. Nothing else."

"And if I don't?"

"Do you know a way to stop the golem?"

Abel said nothing.

Destruction would have been her answer too, if destruction were the answer. The clean solution would have been to wait a day or two for her magic to recover and then erase it without trace before going in.

There was, of course, a more intricate but less destructive way through. It simply wasn't available to Rietta as she currently was.

Abel, having understood the rest on his own again, nodded.

"Just the stones, then."

"Can you manage it?"

"Easily."

Rietta added: "You'll need to carry me."

"…What do you mean?"

She lifted her own hair and held it up.

Patchy, as expected—from the parts she could see. More than half the color had shifted, and toward the back only scattered threads of original color would still be visible.

They had spoken at close range at the inn. That he had not noticed anything off was strange.

He had said nothing, though. She found that easier. There was no way to freely disclose something like magic depletion to someone like this.

"Do you object?"

"I don't find it appealing."

"Say so honestly if you can't do it."

"I didn't say I couldn't."

Abel looked her over for a moment, then raised both arms as if to catch her—then turned, and lowered himself slightly, offering his back instead. He had moved to offer an embrace and then, in the end, corrected. Rietta had stiffened her expression without knowing it. She let it go.

She climbed onto his back without delay.

The body concealed beneath the robe was larger and more solid than it looked.

"Going."

Abel said it quietly and launched upward.

The motion was weightless—as though carrying her were irrelevant to the equation. The gaps between the stones, which had looked manageable from below, were in fact wide. None of it registered as a problem.

Each time he descended and rose again, the tomb came closer in substantial increments.

Rietta realized he was using the absolute minimum of effort. He had used no magic at all.

"Abel."

At her voice, he turned his head slightly toward her.

"Why are you looking for the necklace?"

The landscape that had been rushing past came to a stop.

They had arrived quickly.

She climbed down from his back without waiting for an answer and moved directly toward the entrance.

Up close, the imperial tomb was far more imposing.

Rietta took one step toward the uniquely black door set at the precise center of the white stone structure—the only one of its kind in the building.

The door, firmly closed with no lock visible, carried a strange weight of presence. Abel, arriving a beat behind her, examined it carefully.

"Do we go in?"

Fzzt!

He had reached for it without thinking—and recoiled, stepping back. The skin that had touched the handle went red, then began to bleed. He had pulled away in an instant, but for how brief the contact was, the blood was considerable. When he shook it off, his palm revealed a wound with ragged, torn edges.

"Did you use magic?"

"I did nothing."

Abel murmured something that expressed his lack of comprehension and looked the door over. His face showed no expectation of this at all.

There was nothing visibly different about the door or the wall around it—no sign of any magic on the surface. Rietta hadn't registered anything either.

With nothing externally visible, there was the possibility of some apparatus concealed inside. She placed her hand on the same spot his had touched and pressed.

Even if she lost the use of one arm, getting the door open was the better outcome.

The assessment landed better than that.

A heavy rattle, and the door gave. There had been slight resistance—but that was weight, nothing more. Nothing like whatever had rejected Abel.

Rietta pulled the door fully open.

"Did you do something?"

"Nothing."

A look of bafflement came at her.

She said nothing, and walked inside, and stepped to the side. Abel confirmed the thick door and the dark interior, then moved forward.

And stopped—abruptly, just before crossing the threshold.

He pulled one corner of his mouth into a slight angle.

"It seems you weren't planning to let me in."

Rietta shook her head.

"There is no mechanism for that."

"Is it not the same line as the golem attacking?"

"No."

The golem's mechanism had already been applied—there was no reason to layer a duplicate. And from what she had just verified, there was nothing bound to the door or the walls.

But whatever had made sparks fly when Abel touched the handle—and whatever was now blocking him from entering—read less like magic and more like sacred energy resisting something in the nature of——

The thought had been building itself without her directing it. She stopped it.

She stepped straight back outside.

She looked at Abel, who was watching her with evident confusion. He was more than a head taller, so she needed to take a step back to take in the whole of him.

"What is it?"

"Wait."

Rietta recalled what she and Melian had exchanged at the inn. The boy had described Abel—after only one sighting—as other in kind.

Nymphs were a people close to the natural order of things. Even as a half-blood, ability flowing in inherited blood does not disappear—it weakens, but it remains. Her eyes came alight with a sharp blue.

"This place may not only look like a shrine."

Whether it was a true shrine or not, what was beyond question was that something faintly resembling sacred energy was moving through this space.

Rietta knew this was her chance. This man—who was going to be a headache, clearly—was the better problem to leave behind and go in alone. Entering by herself would resolve most of what remained.

But her feet would not move toward that.

It was not loyalty. It was not sentiment.

She didn't know what the interior held. And if the magic at work here turned out to be more complex than it appeared, what remained of her power would not be enough for any real response.

Her magic would recover fully after a day or two of rest, of course—but Melian was waiting below the mountain. She reached her conclusion quickly.

"Don't find this unpleasant. Just listen."

"I'll hear it first and decide."

"I'm going to cover you with my magic."

Abel's brow came together immediately.

"That's unpleasant."

"Bear it."