The Barrow (3 page)

As the group started up the hill she was glad to be moving again, stretching her long legs. She saw that a few of Guilford's crew mumbled curses and hobbled about, cramping after being immobile for so long, and she stifled a needless laugh.
No point in making this lot hate you even more
, she chided herself. But as everyone started to get stretched out they picked up speed, conscious now of moving up the hillside in the open, for anyone to see.

She moved quickly, her soft calf boots quiet against the mossy earth. She wore a black cloth doublet with dark bronze studs and brown leather cord trim, fitted tight against her boyish figure, and black flared breeches, puffed in the Eastern style. She was splattered with mud and dirt like everyone else. A pair of point daggers and a wire-hilt cut-and-thrust rapier hung at her side from a black leather baldric, the surface tooled with ornamental squares. Her dark hair was cut short and trim along the sides and back of her head by her ears, but then a bit longer on top and in front, so that wavy locks fell in front of her blue eyes. She wore a black silk neck scarf wrapped tight to hide the smoothness of her throat. Like several other members of Guilford's crew she wore a metal codpiece that poked through a flap in her breeches. Not as large as had become the fashion in the eastern Aurian lands of Dainphalia, where in imitation of their king, knights and courtiers wore steel metal codpieces sculpted into impressive (and in some cases very lifelike) erections. But her codpiece was of some size, nonetheless. As a woman, she would have been considered plain, perhaps even mannish; her eyes were small, and her jaw too square. But as a man, oh, yes; she made a very pretty and attractive young man in the eyes of most who saw her, even if in her case the codpiece turned out to be empty.

Her breathing was hard but measured by the time the group reached the rocky outcroppings near the top of the summit. She looked up at the stone circle above them and slowed, watching Guilford's crew disappear into the earth one by one. The entrance into the earth looked to her like it must have been a natural fissure in the rock at some point. But the carved narrow arch, eight feet in height, that became visible through the split in the rock was clearly made by men. She saw that Guilford's crew was about to leave her behind and sped up, sliding her rapier and one of her point daggers out of their sheaths as she did. She caught up with Gap Tooth and Porter just as they slipped through the entrance, and she barely had time to think before she was through the arch into the darkness.

It took a moment for her eyes to adjust. Gap Tooth had a torch out in one hand and a heavy axe in the other, and that helped a bit, but not much. She could see several torches appearing and disappearing ahead of them as they moved through the earth. In the flickering torchlight she could see that they were in a narrow shaft that appeared to have been carved out of the rock itself, and she felt more than saw the packed earth under her boots. Behind her the entrance was a bright vertical crack in the dark; the wind whistled past the opening, making it sound like someone was whispering behind her, and she suppressed a quick shudder. The group was moving forward and she followed. She saw the torches ahead of her lowering into darkness, and soon she was at the top of a narrow stone stair leading down into the earth. Gap Tooth went ahead and she had to be careful following, as his torch was right below her and it sputtered and coughed smoke and embers into her face if she was too close behind. The stairwell was steep and narrow, and it almost felt like it was more like a ladder made of stone; if there had been defenders below it would have been a tough fight. The ceiling of the stairwell was close enough that she could put her hand against it to help brace her way down.

They hit the bottom of the stairs and found themselves in a small room, a landing of sorts. Arches were set in the four walls, one being the arch they had descended into the room through, and the other three opening onto stone stairs leading downwards. Each arch was set with human skulls along its entire curved length, and each skull was marked on the forehead with an ugly black rune. She didn't know magic, not the way that Stjepan and Harvald did, but she instinctively knew the runes were bad runes. Her left hand, holding the dagger, went to her chest, and she felt for the amulet tucked under her doublet with a couple of spare fingers: a bit of amber with an insect trapped inside it, set in a gold chain and enchanted. It had been a gift from Stjepan, back when she'd first done a job with him. “To ward off black magic and the Evil Eye,” he'd told her. And she'd believed him.

She watched and listened as Stjepan talked with Harvald and Guilford on the other side of the small (and now very packed) room. Everyone was crowded in on each other, trying to stay in the center, trying to stay away from the stairwell openings.
Too close
, she thought.
No room to fight swords here, daggers only.

“. . . No, the spirits here are long gone,” Stjepan was saying as he consulted a map in his hands. “The account we found in the archives said that during the Wars of the Throne Thief an expedition mounted out of Truse had come here, and that a company of priests and magisters led by none other than the knight Sir Olsig had worked a great ritual and driven all the trapped guardian spirits out.”

“The Ghost Killer himself. Trust us, if there were still ghost wardens present here, we'd already be in big trouble by now,” said Harvald. He looked around at the arches, eyeing the skulls that decorated the arches with a kind of wary nonchalance. “Can you imagine the struggle to purify this place? All these skulls . . .”

Guilford shuddered. “Who were they, do you think?” he asked. “Victims of the Nameless Cults? Or adherents, letting themselves be bound here as guardians?”

“Doesn't really matter,” said Harvald with a shrug. “The end result is the same.”

Stjepan moved in front of the archway to the left of the one they had entered from and slipped the folded map back into his stiff square satchel. He pulled out a piece of chalk and marked the side of the arch with an arrow pointing down. “This one, according to the map in the archives,” he said to the group. “I'll go first. Follow the downward arrows, then reverse them if you have to get out.” He gave them all a wry half-grin, and Erim watched as he took a torch and started down the narrow, steep staircase.

Her whispers grew more urgent now. Once long ago this had been a place of great power, until the book-men had come from their tower on the Plain of Stones and rendered this sacred place silent with violence and the curses of their false Divine King. Long years it had taken the Faithful to restore the temples and shrines, and her chest swelled with pride to think of what had been accomplished; but with that pride came despair, as well. If only she'd had a few more years, or had known how to bind the guardian ghosts. The Nameless at Dyre Callum had promised to teach her the ritual, but always they delayed, and raised the price, and now it was too late. And so she whispered what she knew, and called for His help.

Downward they'd gone, hitting on three landing rooms like the first one above them, and on each landing Stjepan had picked out and marked an archway down; after the first one on the left, he picked out three on the right. Some of the landings had other stairs going up rather than just the one they entered through. Erim started to have an inkling that the whole hill must have been honeycombed with stairs and rooms going up and down. By the fourth landing, she could feel the weight of the earth around and above them, all those narrow steps winding back up through the dark, and she could feel the panic starting to eat in the back of her throat. The air here was totally still,
dead
. She could see it in the wide eyes and sweating brows of the other men as well. The descent had started to take its toll on them.

“Two hundred and six,” she heard old Jon Pastle whisper.

“What?” hissed Porter.

“Two hundred and six steps, so far,” old Jon whispered back. “I counted 'em.”

“Aye, I was counting too,” said Llew the Stew. “Thought it was two hundred and four, meself, but close enough.”

“Fuck me,” someone moaned, but she couldn't tell who it was.

Erim had never been good with numbers bigger than she could count on fingers and toes, thus ten times ten she could handle up to a hundred; so the idea of being two hundred and six steps below the earth was only slightly more scary than the idea of counting that high. Men who knew the lore of numbers, like Stjepan and Harvald, and could count and do additions in their heads, always impressed her; but then, Stjepan and Harvald were practically magicians. Llew the Stew used to be a steward, hence his name, so it made sense that he could do numbers; but she was a bit surprised that old Jon Pastle could count in his head like that. Then again, he probably didn't become
old
Jon Pastle without learning a few tricks. She wished she'd been smart enough to even think of counting the steps, though she wasn't sure what good it did them.

Luckily this landing seemed different than the others. Instead of opening onto more staircases up and down, the archways opened onto straight level passages lined with stone slabs. Stjepan picked one, marked it, and slipped through it, followed quickly by the rest of them. Erim found herself last again, though being rearguard had now taken on a different tenor. Behind her stretched the inky blackness of empty tunnels and stairs up and down through the earth, and the darkness was starting to fill her with fear. She hurried to keep up with Gap Tooth and his sputtering torch as their short column moved through into a wider antechamber, with pillars carved out of rock and black arches opening into who knew what, and then a turn and out into a short passageway again. She was starting to get worried that if she panicked she wouldn't know how to get out, that she'd forget to look for the markings and take a wrong turn. Or if the torches all went out; how would they even see the chalk marks?

Suddenly they slowed, and she almost ran right into Gap Tooth's back. She wasn't sure what was happening ahead, but the entire group was moving with caution, backs crouched, weapons and shields up. Instinctively she did the same, adopting a fighting crouch, dagger and rapier ready, side-stepping her way forward. The moment she did she found herself calming, the familiar pose triggering a steady breath.
Ah, right, that's what training's for
, she thought to herself. It was an odd feeling—fear and excitement coursing through her, preparing her body for a fight or for flight, and yet at the same time the calm of her training settling in, centering her, making her feel safe and certain.
I know what to do
, she thought
. I'll just kill whatever comes in front of me.

And then she was moving in behind Gap Tooth into a large underground chamber, and she straightened and let out a long slow breath of relief and wonder as she walked forward. The torchlight from the others spread out with them throughout the room, lighting its high walls and ceiling with flickering hues of red and black and orange and illuminating other archways opening out in its walls to other dark chambers. Several great columns flanked the central aisle of the chamber, carved with obscene images and strange, barbaric letters that she couldn't read, and there were frescoes of some kind on the soot-darkened walls. But at that moment it wouldn't have mattered, because she couldn't take her eyes off the great bronze idol that grinned at them from the other side of the chamber.

Twenty feet tall it must have been, depicting the seated body of some demonic creature, the top of its head and horns almost reaching the ceiling. It cradled a massive brazier in its cross-legged lap with its hands, and there was a wide stone altar set before it. She brushed her hair out of her eyes so she could see it better, and wondered for a moment how they'd even gotten the massive idol into the chamber; perhaps the bronze had been poured and fired right there? Or perhaps some foul sorcery had moved it through the earth? She stared at its face, at a wide flat nose, a grinning mouth of serrated teeth, two great spiraling horns jutting out and up from its forehead. Beneath heavy brows flickered two sources of reflected light: its eyes were great red gemstones easily the size of her head. Her eyes trailed down and she saw that the creature's nipples were two large spikes jutting out from its chest, and that behind the brazier its long thin phalli emerged from its lap like a thick curved spear. Given the broadness of the idol—it was probably twenty feet wide at its base—the thinness of the phalli struck her as almost comical; but the bronze phalli had to be almost eight feet long, curving upward at an angle over the brazier to a sharp, barbed head. She swallowed hard and blinked.