The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

Let's just skip to the part of today's Headless Over Heels where Seth gets out of the choke tunnel.

He lay on his back in the still, stale air of the crypt for a moment (or what had better be the crypt, because Seth was not about to fucking do that again). Then he sat up, slipped the grate back into place as best he could with raw, scratched fingers, and clicked his flashlight on again.

He was in an oblong chamber, its contours determined long ago by pre-Emergence builders according to some logic of geological tide. Three exits he could see, if he didn’t count the choke tunnel, which he refused to. Two tunnels into the dark, one door—a thin sheet of metal, really, with hinges spike-hammered into the much older structure around it. That looked promising, and he was pleased at how quiet the hinges were after the creaking grate.

Geometric shadows shortened and lengthened again as he passed the gridded catacomb slots along the walls. Loculi, these were called. He’d heard the word in the smoke-addled stories of a tomb robber who’d owed Rohan. Alcoves for the dead. He kept expecting to see some moldering ossuary or leering skull. None presented itself. Hannah had told no lies about the extent of the place’s hollowing.

Seth came to another t-junction and again picked the side with a door and was rewarded with a cylindrical room, the floor of which was etched with a familiar circle. The place had been swept not long ago—piles of dust and pebbles at the edges—but one stone still sat in the circle’s center.

Seth picked it up and rubbed his thumb across the Fox on its underside.

Handle it.

“I don’t know if you’re listening,” he whispered. “But I’m in. Found the stone. There has to be an exit. I’ll find that, too, and let you in.” His fingers tightened. “Please be listening.”

He crept from the circle chamber and across the junction to the road not taken, and then a left, and then another, searching for more of those doors and doing his best to commit his passage to memory.

The next door he found not by sight but by smell. The kind of miasmatic odor that old physikers believed carried diseases right through the nostrils. How twisted-around had Seth’s life become at the hands of the Verdugo, that now he moved toward that smell, rather than away?

It led him to a larger chamber than any he’d seen on his way, built around a thick central column studded with upright sconces where, once upon a time, the dead must have slept standing. Concave scoops in the stone suggested skulls burrowing out from their seatings. What must it have sounded like, Seth wondered, that tsunami of bone breaking free; that thought’s grotesqueness was quickly dwarfed by the sodden canvas bags that lay in the outer wall’s loculi. And the stench. It was eye-watering in here. The kind of smell a rotting head makes, with any luck. He resolved to be about his business and then go on his way.

On the other side of the column sat a cluster of barrels, deposited against the wall like a massive insect’s clutch of eggs. Seth opened one, and was struck first by the smell, which he could not identify but which screamed wrong!!! in his mind with such force that he knew, instinctually, it was something dead that had been dead for a long time. The barrel was half-full of something. Some foul coagulation laying over a chunky, half liquid layer of…

Entrails, Seth realized. And blood. Organs and effluvia shedding gallons of monochrome grotesquerie. Those lumpen black-stained sacks stuffed into the stone shelves.

Those were unlit corpses. He had stumbled into an abattoir.

He threw up, then, but only a little, and he dragged the barrel on top of the stain to cover it, so that was fine. He steadied himself, forced the dancing spotlight in his shivering hand to stillness, and continued to cast it across the chamber. He ignored the screaming questions in the back of his brain. All this unlit blood. In the sewers. In the water system. What was this? What plot had he stumbled into?

It wasn’t all body bags in this storage room. On the far wall there was a shelf of stockpiled miscellany. Stacked bricks and trowels, a rack of rifles, a dented popmite spawnbarrel. And there, in a cleared-out spot as if given prized position:

A slack-jawed, gray-skinned, yellow-haired head. In worse shape than he remembered, its nose halfway crumbled away. But that was the head. The same one he’d stolen from Annalise’s trunk.

Seth’s mouth went dry. He drew a deep breath through his nose, and the queasy tinge the rank air sent through him was overpowered by triumph.

He raised the stone to his lips. “I fucking found it.” The excitement bumped his whisper into a near-voice. His lips were turned up of their own accord. “Shitting saints. I’ve got your head.”

He tucked the head under his arm. The uneven bumps of its dead face pressed into his side, but this was such a minor horror compared to the rest of the room that he barely registered it. “I’m coming back,” he whispered. “Can’t take that tunnel again, especially with this thing, but I—”

He froze. Around the corner there was a green, pulsing glow.

“Not alone,” he breathed. “Someone’s turned on the wall lamps. I—”

You’ll handle it.

“I’ll handle it,” he whispered, and slipped the stone into his pocket. He tied the head to his belt loop by its stringy hair. Inch by hissing inch he slid his cutlass from its sheath.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...-handle-it