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Under a midday sun, the fallen monoliths appeared mellow and heavy with age. They lay in perfect repose, their foundations deeply sunken into the ground. Nurse trundled her load through and among them, poking into this and that crevice until she found sheltered space in the dry heart of the ruin. An overhang formed a grotto where there was both light and shade, an open space for her fire and an enclosed space for probing stone. She dropped the fagot and rested with her palms flat against the wall.
A dread crushing sensation took away her breath. Beneath the surface lay dense cold, and coiled inside it, something reptilian. Perhaps a hibernating wyrm. At her touch, she imagined one malignant eye opening just a crack.
“Oh, you are a vile one,” Nurse said to the beast inside the rock. “I am too small for your attentions. Wait for a king to come along. You are the sort who feeds on war, not on the piddle-paddle of a hedge witch.”
The eye closed.
Nurse closed her own eyes, walked the interior of her covert while moving both hands over gritty, pitted stone. This rock, solid and inert under her fingers, had boiled like soup when the World began. Then it had frozen with a fastness no sun could melt, icy matter so cold it burned, so compressed it groaned. Inside the stones lay spirits. She could feel them, trapped and tangled within. Here was a repository used by the Immortals — combination warehouse, gaol, midden. Here were imprisoned the cursed, the martyred, the unlucky, the lost. Unfortunate mortals, untimely killed. Faeries condemned by magic courts. Celestial gamblers unable to pay their debts.
Nurse’s business was with a petty fellow locked inside, a nasty and untrustworthy daemon. He had given her his name in a dream.