The tension in the cave left in approximately the same order as the cold did: gradually, as the fire went up and something began to smell good.
Aria produced ingredients from somewhere in the cave's depths that she was not forthcoming about, frozen meat cut into thick slabs, root vegetables, stock that had clearly been simmering already before they arrived. She moved efficiently and without commentary, ears still upright but no longer quite so alarmed-looking. Within twenty minutes there was a pot of hot broth on the fire large enough for five, and within thirty minutes the cave smelled significantly better than a volcanic mountain range had any right to.
She served everyone without asking who wanted what.
"This is good," Liam said, genuinely.
He meant it. Nothing like Menchi's output, which occupied a different category entirely, but Shizuku had already said it: better than Menchi's apprentice, and Machi was hardly unskilled. Whatever else Aria was, she could cook in difficult conditions with limited ingredients, which was a set of skills that took real practice.
Aoi ate fast and with focus. Akane ate the carrots first. Shizuku worked through the broth methodically.
"So," Aoi said, wiping her mouth, "if you knew someone recommended by Netero was coming, why did you spend two days trying to stop us from arriving?"
Aria's ears went slightly sideways, the specific orientation of someone who has been caught in something reasonable. "My mother-in-law mentioned that the old man Netero was sending a friend. I expected one person. An older person." She glanced at Liam. "I didn't expect four, and I certainly didn't expect..." She gestured at the general situation.
"You expected an old man," Liam said.
"Everything Netero knows is old."
Fair point, he privately conceded. The man spent time with people who'd been alive so long they'd looped back around to interesting again.
"Your mother-in-law," Liam said. "Netero's old friend. She lives here?"
"She's been here for years. She practices and she thinks and she doesn't like being disturbed. Even old man Netero gets hit when he comes at the wrong time." Aria said this without particular drama, as if getting hit by a reclusive master who had declined all social engagements was a natural and expected consequence of visiting. "You'll need to time it properly."
"Lead us to her."
Aria opened her mouth to ask something. Then she felt her legs carry her toward the cave wall on their own, and she looked down at them with the alarmed expression of someone whose body had just sent her a memo they hadn't written.
"What," she said.
She dissolved anyway. No physical entry point, no transition, just Aria and then the absence of Aria, the cave feeling marginally roomier.
The Star Mark had her location. Liam already knew the direction. He gestured to Shizuku, and they left the cave with Akane and Aoi behind them.
It took most of the remaining daylight.
The route went in patterns that suggested Aria was trying to lose them at intervals, which suggested the Star Mark's passive location-sense was less precise than she'd hoped. She cut across ice fields, went under rock, surfaced in the desert zone briefly before pulling back. Liam followed the sense of her like following a thread, always the general direction, never the exact path.
They came around the flank of the mountain's largest peak as the light was going orange and amber, and the smell arrived before the view did.
Sulfur, hot and thick, the kind of smell that coated the back of your throat and made you instinctively recalculate your proximity to things that were on fire. The temperature went up ten degrees over the course of two hundred meters. Then the rock dropped away and the crater opened.
It was, to put it conservatively, a large volcano.
The magma below was the red-orange of something that had been hot for geological timescales and intended to remain hot for several more. It filled the crater bowl in a slow, viscous ocean, and at the center of that ocean, protruding from the magma at an angle that suggested the rest of it was significantly deeper, was a skull.
Aoi stood at the crater rim and looked at it without speaking for several seconds.
The skull was the size of a neighborhood. One eye socket was large enough to park a building in. The bone that showed above the magma surface was white-gray, old and dense, with the specific quality of something that had been sitting in extreme heat for long enough to calcify twice over. From both sides of the cranium, curving upward and outward, rose a forest of horns, enormous and close-packed, each one broader at the base than a house.
"What," Aoi said, "is that."
Aria had surfaced at the crater rim somewhere to their left, pulled there by the Star Mark. She looked put-upon. "It was here when my mother-in-law arrived. She said it's from the Dark Continent."
On top of the skull, in the center of the dome, was a human figure. Tiny at this distance. Standing.
Shizuku went still in the way Shizuku went still when her aura was working at maximum sensitivity.
The figure in the distance didn't move. Didn't appear to look up. Didn't do anything that would indicate she was aware of five people standing at the crater rim.
The pressure arrived with no warning.
It came from every direction simultaneously: front, back, above, below, both sides, like being inside a room where all the walls had decided to have an opinion about you. Not hostile, exactly. Not an attack. More like being turned into an X-ray subject by someone who found the concept of privacy mildly amusing. Liam felt his body respond before his mind caught up with it, aura hardening across every surface, Ken coming up reflexively, his posture shifting into the compact geometry of someone who had been measured and found that they had no intention of being found wanting.
The pressure went away.
To his left, Aoi was being held upright by Akane, whose face had gone the flat white of someone using all available concentration to remain standing. Aoi was pale. Her breathing was careful.
"Stay here," Liam said. He looked at Shizuku. She nodded.
They flew across the magma on a current of wind, landed at the skull's edge, and walked toward the center.
The skull's surface was warm underfoot and perfectly smooth, worn down by years of heat and whatever else had been sitting on it. The bone had taken on the faint orange tinge of long magma exposure. Linnie's back was to them when they got close enough to see her clearly.
She was old. Short, compact, with the kind of deep-set wrinkles that come from decades of outdoor work in all weathers. Her hair was white and pinned back. She was dressed in plain, practical clothes that showed evidence of considerable use.
"Excuse me," Liam called, from what he judged to be a respectful distance. "Is the creature under us from the Dark Continent?"
Linnie didn't turn around immediately. She looked at the magma for a moment longer, as if finishing a thought.
"When Netero and I reached the Dark Continent," she said, "and we saw the things that live there, the first thing in his head and mine were completely different thoughts."
She turned.
Her eyes did the thing her aura had done at the crater rim, that quality of comprehensive assessment, as if Liam and Shizuku had been taken apart into their component pieces and catalogued. It was not aggressive. It was the professional reflex of someone who had spent a lifetime determining what things were made of before deciding what to do with them.
Liam met it without adjusting his expression.
"Netero thought: there's nothing worth fighting here," Linnie said. "The scale made it uninteresting to him. No sport in it." A brief pause. "I thought: how does something this large become a meal? I have been thinking about it since we came back."
Shizuku said: "Have you found an answer?"
"The honest answer," Linnie said, "is that the question has no solution. An ingredient the size of a mountain requires an eater the size of a mountain. There is no such eater. The question is therefore meaningless."
"It isn't," Liam said.
Linnie looked at him.
"If you can cook an ingredient the size of a mountain," Liam said, "then you become the eater the size of a mountain. The question answers itself."
Silence. The magma moved slowly in the crater below. One of the distant horns cracked slightly in the heat, a sound like a branch breaking.
Linnie regarded him for another long moment. Then she said, flatly and without elaboration:
"Rest tonight. We leave in the morning."
She turned back to the magma.
Liam looked at Shizuku. She looked at him. Neither of them asked the obvious question, which was: leave for where, and what exactly had Netero pointed them toward, because it apparently wasn't Linnie herself.
They walked back to the crater rim.
By the time they found a flat enough surface to camp, the stars over Freier Mountain had come out, cold and numerous above the smoke from the crater below. Liam sat down and felt the Moon Mark on his ring flicker: the small, specific sensation of an incoming communication request.
Someone in the Ten wanted to talk.