Mistral went through with Abe behind him, me in the middle, and Rhys and Doyle following. Frost came last. But before I passed thorugh the doorway, Abe stopped, and Mistral's voice came urgent from inside the dead gardens, "Back, go back!"
Doyle said, "We cannot stay here in the black hallway." Rhys was pressed against my back, Abe pressed against my front. We were frozen between the two captains of the guards, each trying to get us moving in the opposite direction.
"We cannot have two captains, Mistral," Frost said. "Without a single leader we are indecisive and endangered."
"What is wrong?" I asked.
There was a sound from down the hallway - a heavy, slithering sound that froze my heart in my chest. I was afraid I recognized it. No, I had to be wrong. Then a second sound came: a high chittering sound - one that could be mistaken for birds, but wasn't.
"Oh, Goddess," I whispered.
"Forward, Mistral, now, or we are lost," Doyle said.
"It is not our garden beyond the door," Mistral said.
The high-pitched bird-like sounds were coming closer, outpacing the heavy slithering weight. The sluagh, the nightmares of the Unseelie Court and a kingdom in their own right, moved fast but the nightflyers always moved faster than the rest of the sluagh. We were inside the sluagh's hollow hill; somehow we had crossed to their sithen. If they found us here...we might survive, or not.
"Do sluagh wait on the other side of the door?" Doyle asked Mistral urgently.
"No," Mistral called back.
"Then go, now!" Doyle ordered.
Abe stumbled forward as if Mistral had moved suddenly out of the way. We came through the door in a rush with Doyle pushing from behind. He was like some kind of elemental force at our backs. It put us in a heap on the ground. I couldn't see anything but white flesh, and I felt the muscled weight of them all around me.
"Where are we?" Frost asked.
Rhys moved, drawing me to my feet with him. Doyle, Mistral, and Frost were all on alert, weapons out, searching for something to fight. The door had vanished, leaving us on the shore of a dark lake.
Lake may have been too strong a word. The depression was dry except for a slimy skim of water at the very bottom. Bones littered the floor of the dying lake, and the shore where we stood. The bones shone dully in the dim light that fell from the stone ceiling, as if the moon had been rubbed into the rock. All around the shore, the stone walls of the cavern rose steeply up into the gloom, surrounded only by a narrow ledge before a steep drop-off into the lake bed.
"Call the door again, Meredith," Doyle said, his dark face still searching the dead land.
"Yes, and be more specific about our destination this time," Mistral said.
Abe was still on the ground. I heard a sharp intake of breath, and glanced over at him. His hand was black and shiny in the dim light. "What are these bones that they could cut sidhe flesh?"
Doyle answered him. "They are the bones of the most magical of the sluagh. Things so fantastical that when the sluagh began to fade in power, there was not enough magic to sustain their lives."
I clung to Rhys and whispered, "We're in the sluagh's dead gardens."
"Yes. Call the door, now." Doyle glanced at me, then back to the dim landscape.
Rhys had one arm around me, the other hand full of his gun. "Do it, Merry."
"I need a door to the Unseelie sithen." On the far side of the dead lake, the door appeared.
"Well, that's inconvenient," Rhys whispered wryly, but he tucked me closer against his body.
"There is room to walk the edge, if we are careful," Mistral said. "We can make our way between the cavern walls and the lake bed, if we pick our way carefully around the bones."
"Be very careful," Abe said. He was on his feet now, but his left hand and arm were coated with blood. He still held the horn cup in his right hand, though nothing else - he'd left all his weapons behind in the bedroom. Mistral had dressed and rearmed. Frost was as armed as he had begun the night. Doyle had only what he had been able to grab - no clothes limited how much you could carry.
"Frost, bind Abeloec's wound," said Doyle. "Then we will start for the door."
"It is not that bad, Darkness," Abe said.
"This is a place of power for the sluagh, not for us," Doyle said. "I would not take the chance that you bleed to death for want of a bandage."
Frost didn't argue, but went to the other man with a strip of cloth torn from his own shirt. He began to bind Abe's hand.
"Why does everything hurt more sober?" Abe asked.
"Things feel better sober, too," Rhys said.
I looked up at him. "You say that like you know that for certain. I've never seen you drunk."
"I spent most of the fifteen hundreds as drunk as my constitution would let me get. You've seen Abe working hard at it - we don't stay drunk long - but I tried. Goddess knows, I tried."
"Why then? Why that century?"
"Why not?" he asked, making a joke of it, but that was what Rhys did when he was hiding something. Frost's arrogance, Doyle's blankness, Rhys's humor: different ways to hide.
"His wound will need a healer," Frost said, "but I have done what I can."
"Very well," said Doyle, and he began to lead the way around the edge of the lake, toward the soft, gold shine of the door that had come because I called it. Why had it appeared all the way across the lake? Why not beside us, like the last two times? But then, why had it come at all? Why was the sluagh's sithen, as well as the Unseelie sithen, obeying my wishes?