23
The air inside the tunnel had been growing steadily warmer as they trudged along, their path always angling down as they travelled deeper into the mountain fortress. Pankesh, she had called it. The heart of the world. Higgs could believe it. In his peripheral vision, the walls themselves seemed to pulse with life as they walked on, travelling down this wide vein in the rock.
He wiped the sweat from his eyebrows, flicking drops of salt water away and rubbing his wet fingers together, the thought once again striking him that he was alive. He was human. He was back in the world, somehow.
They’d had no more encounters with their pursuers, no more snatches of weld song drifting up the tunnel like a breath to warn them of the coming Incarnate. They seemed to have lost them, left them far b
