The temple antechamber was a hole in the floor with stairs cut into one wall, and the smell coming up out of it told her, before her eyes adjusted, what was waiting at the bottom.
Harrison stopped two steps in. The whip on his belt swung once and went still against his thigh. He stared down into the dark and breathed out long and flat.
"No," he said.
Mei Lin drew alongside him and looked over the lip. The chamber below was wide and dry, lit by whatever sunlight could find its way down the stairs, which was not much. The floor moved. She let her eyes settle and the floor sorted itself into snakes. Sand-coloured, palm-thick, doing their slow rope-trick across the stone like they owned it.
"Ah," she said.
"You see them."
"I see them."
"I cannot overstate how much I do not want to do this."
"I have noticed."
He looked at her sideways from under the brim. "Tell me you have something for snakes."
"Snakes are on the easier end."
"You're enjoyin' this."
"A little." She slid her shield off her back onto her arm. "Stay on the stairs. I'll clear you a strip."
She went down four steps and stopped where the staircase widened. The closest knot of snakes lifted its many heads and tasted the air for her.
She gave them lightning.
A bolt off her fingertips into the nearest pile, a second one stepping sideways to a knot a body-length over. The smell of cooked rope rose up. The strip of floor in front of the stairs went still.
"Bolts," Harrison said, two steps further down than he had been a minute ago. "You called bolts. On snakes."
"Easier than men. Closer to the ground. The storm barely has to bend."
"Sure. Easy." His voice was a half-note too light. He drew the long blade off his hip. "Leave any for me?"
"Whole room."
She planted her searing totem at the bottom of the staircase. It caught on its second breath and started spitting small darts of fire at anything inside its reach. Harrison came after her along the wall with the blade low, took a head off something that had got too close to his boot, and said a word into the dark she did not know in Common and was confident was not a compliment.
"Talk to me, Sykepleier," he said. "Talk over them."
"There's a passage on the far wall. The middle's the worst of it."
"Lovely."
"I'll take the middle."
She walked into the middle.
The magma totem went down in the centre of the chamber and she stepped back behind her shield as it worked. Heat went out from it in a wide low ring. The snakes inside remembered they were made of meat. The ones outside she took with a chain, one bolt that found three bodies and put them down in the order it had found them.
The room thinned.
She did not call the sky. The sky was a long way up and on the wrong side of a stone roof, and the voltage in her ribs ran low and close.
Harrison arrived at the far wall a beat behind her, breathing through his teeth. He looked at the floor between them. The floor was, mostly, floor again.
"Mist," he said.
"Harrison."
"I owe you a beer."
"You owe me a barrel."
"Fair."
He shouldered the passage door open and they went through it together. The desert sun was on her face again before she had finished counting her totems back. He stopped a pace into the daylight, bent at the waist with his hands on his knees, and laughed once, short and surprised.
"I really do hate snakes," he said, to his boots.
"I gathered."
"A barrel. With my name on the tab."
She knocked the dust off her shield against her thigh and grinned at the back of his hat.
"I'll hold you to it, Mr Jones."
— Mist