The Barrow (75 page)

Godewyn, Caider Ross, and Too Tall stood in an archway and held up their lanterns, illuminating a large, long chamber, flanked by a series of alcoves along each stone wall. Four great pillars held up a high, vaulted ceiling. Grave goods lay about at the foot of the walls, including many archaic implements of war: iron spears, and axes, and swords, and painted shields, their leather and wood and iron seemingly well preserved in the dry air of the sealed chamber. In the center of the room was a large bronze statue of ornate detail and great craftsmanship, depicting a demonic-looking four-armed winged creature, armored and armed with four curved swords and with the head and gaping beaked maw of a screaming eagle. In front of the statue on the earthen floor was set a large basin, specked with dark dried liquid and small bones. Human skulls of various sizes were piled around the basin; some were small enough to clearly be the skulls of children.

Godewyn stepped experimentally into the room, and started to thread his way through the urns and weapons. He came to a halt in front of one of the alcoves.

“Hello, beautiful,” he said. His lantern revealed the contents of the alcove: the dried, desiccated remains of a man, presumably a warrior, propped upright in his archaic armor, his gauntleted hands folded over his chest. Caider Ross and Too Tall had not moved from the arched entryway, hesitant to follow Godewyn out of the passage and further into the chamber. As Godewyn walked by the alcoves he could see that each contained the standing corpse of a dead warrior, all armored and posed alike.

“Get moving, let us past . . .” Arduin said as he and Sir Helgi arrived and pushed past Caider Ross and Too Tall into the chamber, but his voice left him and he trailed off into silence as he saw what was in it.

Godewyn soon reached the far end of the chamber and came to stand in front of a large bronze oval plate, almost eight feet high and mortared into a stone archway, engraved with barbaric symbols and swirling, intertwined circular patterns. He scraped at the circular motifs inlaid with gold and smiled. “Hello,
beautiful
!” he said, a quiet smile on his face.

The rest of the group began to slowly and silently enter the room. Every free hand held a bared weapon now. Leigh came to stand in front of the statue and inspected it.

“A shrine to Ishraha, the Rebel Angel,” he said quietly, as almost everyone else in the chamber made a sign to ward off Evil. “The great
Rahabi
general who first dethroned Islik from the Sun Throne of the isle of Illia, and sent Him into exile to wander the world, where He would prove Himself fit to be the Divine King of both Heaven and of Earth with His Ten Great Victories. So I suppose, in a way, that all true Kingsmen actually owe Ishraha a debt of sorts, for if Ishraha had not cast him into exile, Islik would never have risen to become the great God that He is now.”

“Careful, old man,” said Arduin. “That sounds suspiciously like heresy. Ishraha is one of the Forbidden Gods and condemned to rule in Hell, guilty of the great crimes of treason and usurpation against his rightful lord, the Divine King. Always has been and always will be.”

Leigh ignored the Aurian knight. “According to
De Malifir Magicia
, in the lore of the Nameless Cults, Ishraha is amongst other things charged with watching over their dead and being their patron in the Underworld. Stjepan, have you read it?”

“Forgive me, Magister, but . . .” Stjepan started, but Leigh waved his hand.

“Yes, yes. I know, I know,” said Leigh with a sigh. “But the point is clear. Ishraha ruled as the King of Illia for a brief time during the War in Heaven, and so I suppose a shrine to him could have been built then for a seemingly legitimate purpose. But the armor here is not from the Age of Legends, is it?”

“No,” said Stjepan, glancing at the remains of the warriors. “Late transitional armor. Iron cuirasses, mail hauberks, bits and pieces of plate here and there fixed to mail backing, bascinets with mail aventails . . . it's all from the start of our current Age of Iron and Fire, before the adoption of full plate.” He looked back up at the statue of Ishraha. “I think it's settled, then; this barrow was definitely built by the Nameless, sometime in the years after the Black Day Battle, but before the 13th century. And that fits the timeframe of Azharad's death in 1127.”

“Islik's balls, I don't like this . . . why would the map lead us to that other room, rather than here?” asked Erim.

“'Cause your boy got the map wrong,” Godewyn said drily. He turned to his crew. “C'mon, time to bust this open.”

“Gentlemen, some patience,” said Stjepan, but Godewyn, Caider Ross, and Too Tall eagerly took up their crowbars and started working on the mortar that held the bronze plate in place. They managed to crack some small gaps and unhinge it a bit from the archway. They were struggling with the task, however, and Sir Helgi joined them, and the four men strained to move the weight of the great bronze plate. Erim set her lantern down and grabbed up a crowbar from a bag and moved forward to help, but Stjepan grabbed her good arm and shook his head. He indicated with his chin, drawing her attention to the fact that Leigh was finally moving forward and waving his arms, having stopped his inspection of the cult statue to Ishraha.

“
Show us. Show us the World. Open our eyes, show us what is hidden
,” Leigh intoned.

The surface of the bronze plate suddenly swirled with dark designs, foul symbols and barbaric patterns in motion. Stjepan snarled as Leigh leapt back. “Beware! It's cursed!” yelled out Stjepan.

The four men working at the door started to leap back just as they succeeded in moving the huge bronze plate. It slipped out of the archway and fell to one side, revealing the entrance and unleashing a gust of stale, dusty air, and in the dust the symbols and patterns of the curse could be seen weaving around the four men like a swarm of butterflies.

Leigh waved his hands frantically in warding signs. The foul enchantment weaved, probed, shimmered . . . and then settled on Sir Helgi, Caider Ross, and Too Tall. In an instant their skin seemed to be blackening and peeling as though they were on fire, and the three men were screaming at the top of their lungs as they flailed about. Godewyn had fallen to the ground, somehow out of the curse's grasp, and was crawling and rolling to get away from the dust and the screaming men, and Erim blanched and leapt back, stricken, unsure what to do.

Leigh stepped forward and began shouting in old Éduinan.
“Mennas darris, los elissa! Giss more, cell darris, menn darris!”
he cried, and he flung a spray of white powder into the air over the three struggling men. Everywhere the white powder came into contact with the symbols and patterns of the enchantment there seemed to be a spark and fizzle as if a lit match were being submerged into water, and the air grew heavy with the wispy tendrils of white smoke.

Caider and Too Tall regained their footing and leapt back from the archway, gasping and breathing heavily. Their skin looked burned in some spots, while in other places the burns were slowly fading back to normal.

But Sir Helgi wasn't moving. He looked cooked in his armor.

Erim turned away from the grisly sight while Stjepan held a hand over his mouth. Arduin, his face ashen, stumbled to his knees next to Sir Helgi's body as Leigh came over to see if there was anything he could do; but there wasn't.

Leigh put his hand on the pauldron of Arduin's armor. “Sorry about your lad,” he said in a grandfatherly tone.

Arduin stood and turned. The look on his face was enough to make Leigh remove his hand. He stepped forward, towering over the enchanter, and Leigh backed up several feet. It appeared to be all that Arduin could do not to just catch Leigh by the throat, lift the enchanter up off the ground and drive him bodily back against the wall.

“He was a knight of my household, had fought beside me and saved my life in battle, and had served my family well since the day he was old enough to swear the oath. He was a man of honor, something that you and the rest of this lot obviously know nothing about, and you would do well to never speak of him again in my presence,” Arduin said through gritted teeth, his eyes ablaze with rage and fury.

And then a cold blankness fell over Arduin's features as he turned back to look down on the smoldering body of his knight, as though he was willing the anger and heat to leave him. “But he knew the risks. We all do,” Arduin said quietly, his jaw set and his nostrils flaring.

Leigh gave a half-bow behind Arduin's back, but he sneered at the Aurian lord through narrowed eyes. He looked like he was about to laugh, but luckily Arduin did not see his expression. Stjepan frowned at him.

“Aye,” said Godewyn. “Well said, your Lordship. Right! Follow me, then!” Godewyn started into the dark hole revealed by the bronze plate door, followed a bit more slowly by Caider Ross and Too Tall, each bearing lanterns, and then slowly the others afterwards.

Stjepan was the last of them in the chamber and he rummaged through one of the equipment bags that had been set down and removed a woven blanket. He knelt by the body of Sir Helgi and reached in to close the man's open, lifeless eyes, one of which looked like it had been boiled into white puss, and Stjepan winced as he slid its lid shut. He placed the blanket over the body of Sir Helgi and stepped back.

Stjepan turned and looked back the way they came.

He frowned. “Gilgwyr?” he called out.

Gilgwyr was still standing in the middle of the empty, round, high-domed chamber, his arms still extended out to opposite walls, mumbling to himself.
I do not understand, o gods, I do not understand at all. My dreams have been so beautiful, and we have followed the signs you have laid before us, and we are here, and yet somehow nothing is right. It isn't beautiful, it isn't the way you have been showing me, it's all wrong. I have done something to offend you. I have failed you in some way. Please let me atone for my wrongs. Please let me right the insult that I have done you, so that everything may be as you have shown me in my beautiful dreams. Tell me what I should do. Tell me what offering I can make.

He did not see the ghostly figure, hooded, horn-masked, standing behind him in the flickering shadows against the wall, watching him.

Erim reappeared from through the dark opening behind the great bronze plate, and grabbed Stjepan by the shoulder.

“Come on, they're already through to the next chamber!” she said to him.

Reluctantly Stjepan nodded and then followed her through the archway. They found themselves in a narrow passage like so many others that they had seen in the barrow. The walls were decorated with bas-relief carvings and mosaics inlaid in the stone, a series of scenes depicting the terrible wonders worked by a horn-masked magician. They could hear Godewyn and Caider and Too Tall cheering in the distance, and picked up their pace a bit.

Within moments they emerged into a long chamber of rough-hewn stone walls and a low, corbel-arched ceiling. Deep arched crevices were set in the sides of the chamber, and both the crevices and the perimeter of the packed earth floor of the chamber were lined with urns and chests filled with coins, artifacts, and small statues and figurines, all glistening in the lamplight with gold and silver and copper and sparkling gems; laughing, Godewyn, Caider Ross and Too Tall were sifting the treasure with their hands, picking up whole handfuls of coins to let them rain from their fingers. Leigh was slowly moving deeper into the chamber, his eyes darting this way and that, taking it all in.

“Now
this
is what I call grave-robbing!” Godewyn crowed.

“Here, Gilgwyr isn't with us . . .” Stjepan started to say, and then he trailed off as he saw what was in the middle of the room.

Arduin stood stock still at the foot of a long waist-high bier of rock and stone, staring down at the body that lay upon it. The body was dressed in a long, black robe, its dried and desiccated hands clasped over its chest as though in prayer; a long, pointed bronze mask, with a pair of gazelle horns spiraling up from its forehead lay upon the body's face and head. The mask's eyeholes had an evil, slanted cast to them, and opened onto blackness. Ornate circular patterns swirled and wove their way along the edges of the mask and were echoed in gold thread patterns embroidered into the body's robe. The robe had a collar of tufted horse hair, surrounding the head like a black fan, and a chain of gold and bronze discs inlaid with silver symbols was slipped over the collar and around the body's neck, almost like a noble's chain of office.