"Beneath the Fronds"

Tom worked in silence.

His fingers found the trapdoor's edge under the leaf-mould — iron-bound, swollen, set into a frame of black timber that had no business being this deep in a jungle that owned no carpenters. He pried. The wood groaned. He froze. Above, the hunter's boots ground a quarter-turn on the rim of the hollow, listening. Tom did not breathe. After a long count of ten, the boots moved on.

The trapdoor came up the rest of the way in his hands like a held breath.

Cool air rose out of the dark, dry and old, smelling of stone and something underneath it that was not earth. Tom lowered himself in first — three rungs of an iron ladder, slick with green — until his bare foot touched a flagged floor. Then he reached up and took Marrow's weight on his shoulders and brought the captain down inch by inch, like a man easing a sleeping child into a bed.

He pulled the trapdoor shut over them. The dark closed.

His eyes adjusted by degrees. There was light, after all — faint, blue, leaking from somewhere ahead through a slot in the wall. By it Tom could see they stood in a low stone passage, vaulted, the flagstones worn smooth as old coin. Carvings along the walls. Letters, perhaps, in no alphabet Tom knew. And at the passage's far end, on a small iron stand, a single candle burning.

Burning. Not guttering, not stumped. Fresh. As if it had been lit, perhaps, an hour ago.

Marrow's hand found Tom's wrist in the gloom. His fingers were colder than they had been on the beach.

"Not a tomb," the captain breathed. "Worse."