-Broadcast-
Perona's scream woke Moria.
Specifically, it woke him from a depth of sleep that did not accommodate waking gracefully. He lurched upright, the three beds that had been doing collective structural duty beneath him gave up simultaneously, and he hit the floor in a configuration of splintered wood that expressed, in physical terms, the situation's general indignity.
"Who's there—who!"
Nobody was there. That was the problem.
Perona pointed at the empty table. Moria looked at the table, then at the room, then at Perona, and arrived at the assessment that the stone was gone and it was daylight and the situation required payment for the beds rather than investigation.
"Nobody came in," he said, with the certainty of a man who had spent the night in a doorway-sized body. "I would have noticed."
"I know nobody came in," Perona said. "That's the part that's strange."
Moria's opinion of the strange was calibrated to a different scale. He had built a ship-sized zombie fortress. He had reanimated the corpse of a legendary swordsman from Wano Country for entertainment purposes. A rock that moved on its own occupied a modest position in his personal hierarchy of unsettling phenomena.
"We're leaving anyway," he said. "Let's go find a tomb."
The innkeeper was waiting for them in the corridor.
She materialized at the corner with the quality of someone who had been there longer than seemed strictly necessary—standing in the dim early light with her lantern already extinguished, the one eye doing its patient work of observation. The smell reached them before she spoke.
"Leave quickly," she said. "Nothing happened to you here. Go."
Moria paid for the beds without ceremony—the math was straightforward—and they went.
Behind the closed door of the room they'd vacated, the old woman stood still.
Her mouth was moving, but the voice that came out was not hers. Male, deep, carrying the specific quality of something that had been confined and had not yet decided whether to remain so.
"The flesh of those two was different. Dozens of times stronger than the islanders. I wanted—"
The woman's body shuddered. Her hands pressed flat against the wall. Under her skirt, something moved independently—two shapes pushing against the fabric, then sliding free: tentacles, green-scaled, leaving trails of viscous liquid as they explored the floorboards with the purposeful quality of things that had their own interests.
She tried to pull them back. They didn't respond.
The room smelled of something it hadn't smelled of the previous night.
Whatever arrangement existed between the woman and the thing she was hosting, it was not going well.
The jungle began at the town's edge and did not waste time becoming serious about itself.
No paths had been cut and none appeared. Moria addressed this in his characteristic manner—walking through obstacles rather than around them—and the trees in his path registered their objection through the sounds of things that were not designed to yield yielding anyway. Perona followed in the clearance he created, her expression the expression of someone who had agreed to come on this expedition and was maintaining that agreement through the specific discipline of not commenting.
The trees were old. Not just old in the sense of large—old in the way of accumulation, the way centuries of growth produce a quality of weight that has nothing to do with mass. The canopy closed overhead at a height that made the sky hypothetical.
Moria noted the age of the trees and made his professional assessment. Old jungle, undisturbed for a very long time, on an island that did not welcome visitors, on a course that had been recommended by someone with specific knowledge of its contents.
There was something under this island. The only question was where.
He began digging.
The method was not elegant—fists, repetition, the specific persistence of a large man who had decided that a problem would yield to sufficient application of force. Perona found shade and watched with the detached interest of someone observing a process she was not going to assist with.
First pit: bedrock. Nothing.
Second pit: an underground water seep. Nothing useful.
Third pit: animal bones, old and dry, belonging to something large that had apparently died here some time ago and been forgotten by everyone.
Perona yawned.
Moria dug.
By midday, the clearing had acquired the quality of a small catastrophic geological event—twenty excavations of varying depth, uprooted vegetation, soil everywhere. Moria's hands were filthy and his breathing had taken on the specific rhythm of sustained work rather than exertion. He had not stopped. The belief that the twenty-first hole would differ from the previous twenty was the kind of belief that persisted not through evidence but through the arithmetic of having already invested in nineteen.
The twentieth pit produced the sound.
Not a sound from him—a sound from below. The hollow register of a fist connecting with something that was not solid earth. The next two punches confirmed it: below the layer of packed soil and root, the ground gave way into nothing. He widened the opening, and the darkness below breathed out the cold specific air of enclosed space that had been closed for a very long time.
The outline of the passage became clear as he cleared the edges.
Stone. Deliberate. Cut rather than natural.
"Perona," he called.
She had already left her shade and was crossing the ruined clearing toward him, one hand over her nose against the exhalation of old air, her other hand brushing dirt from her skirt.
She looked down into the passage.
"That's a tomb," she said.
"Yes," Moria agreed, with satisfaction.