The Barrow (81 page)

Too Tall stepped in the chamber next and started working on lighting yet another extra lantern, followed by Leigh, Annwyn, and Wilhem Price, also bearing a lamplight.

Erim moved to lead them out through the exit passage but Annwyn's voice stopped her. “Please,” said Annwyn. “Before we go, we must find Malia.”

Erim felt a pang of guilt but shook her head. “My Lady, it's dangerous down here,” she said. “We don't know where Gilgwyr is, and he may have killed two of us already . . . and it's also very easy to get lost.”

“Please,” said Annwyn, stepping closer. “She is like a sister to me. If she is in danger, we must at least try.” Annwyn implored Erim with clear blue, dead eyes.

Erim blinked once, nervously, and glanced at Too Tall; Garrett shrugged in response. Erim debated silently with herself for a moment. Leigh watched quietly and patiently as she made up her mind.

“Very well, my Lady,” Erim said. She indicated the archway that led to the shrine of Ishraha. “Let's try this way first.” She turned to Too Tall. “Let's change the order. Can you take rear? We'll need something sharp at each end now.”

The short man nodded. “Sure, no point in having Gilgwyr come up behind us.”

Erim grunted her thanks and led the way out. Wilhem Price followed, holding a lantern up to light their way. Annwyn and Leigh followed, and Too Tall was last. He stopped for a moment, lifting his lantern to scan the room and listen to the sounds of the barrow, and heard nothing.

Stjepan, Godewyn, and Caider Ross were working in a rough circle by multiple lamplight, shoveling cold, hard dirt from the center of the high-domed chamber and trying to be careful not to hit each other or each other's shovels. After a few minutes of hesitant experimentation they'd found a decent rhythm. Many minutes later they'd managed to dig a couple of feet into the ground in the center of the chamber and were slowly expanding the hole. They were tossing the displaced earth away from the center as far as they could, but every now and then one of them would stop digging in the hole to shift a mound of dirt a bit further away.

Arduin stood by the entrance to the chamber, one eye on what they were doing, one eye on the pillared chamber beyond the archway, his war sword cradled in the crook of his couter. Caider stepped out of the hole, breathing heavily, and sopped his brow with his gloved hand and his shirt; grimacing, Arduin picked up a water skin from a satchel and handed it to him.

“Thanks, milord,” said Caider with a grin that showed off a couple of teeth missing from brawls and fistfights, and he took a swig.

Arduin grimaced. “Don't mention it,” he said sourly.

They stood within the treasure-filled burial chamber. Erim watched with a bit of confusion and curiosity as Annwyn walked around the bier, looking at the body and sword intently, attended by her brother's squire. Too Tall lounged in the entrance, watching and listening back into the entry passageway.

Leigh also studied the body as Annwyn did, but whereas her gaze held some element of fascination or curiosity, he could only look at the body and sword with an expression of sour, bitter disappointment.

“My Lady? Can we go now?” asked Erim gently.

Annwyn gave a small smile. “Forgive me,” she said. “I've never seen anything quite like this. And you say you don't know if this is actually the great wizard Azharad?”

Erim shrugged and shook her head. “Book's still out on that one,” she said.

Annwyn nodded, and looked around the chamber. “Well, Malia is clearly not here,” she said. “Please lead on to wherever you think best to search next.”

Too Tall grunted and headed out of the room.

Stjepan and Caider Ross were now about three feet under the dirt floor in the center of the chamber, the upper halves of their bodies visible above the uneven lip of the expanding hole. The speed of their digging had slowed the deeper they got and as they were forced to dig outward as well as downward to give themselves room to maneuver.

Arduin still stood sentry by the entrance archway. Godewyn rested on his haunches on the opposite side of the chamber, his back pressed against the wall, drinking from a canteen. His gaze wandered the corbelled ceiling, idly wondering how much the gems and gold inlays would be worth if he could figure out a way to get up there and pry them loose; only the first tier of corbels was in easy reach. The frames of the corbels almost passed for square, recessed doors, and the thought suddenly occurred to him that perhaps one of them was just that.

“You sure it said dig, Black-Heart?” said Godewyn, his eyes narrowing as he stared at the ceiling.

Suddenly, there was a sharp metal
clang
.

Standing with surprise, Godewyn rose and came opposite of Arduin as he also walked over to look down into the hole. Stjepan and Caider Ross were half bent, staring at each other; Caider moved his shovel and it clanged again. Stjepan tested the same spot, with the same sound.

“Metal for sure,” whispered Caider, and he dropped down to his knees and cleared a bit of dirt with his hands.

Black, rusted iron looked up at them.

Too Tall led them back into the inner barrow's first antechamber, and paused beside the southerly exit while the rest of the group filed in after him.

“What's down there?” Annwyn asked.

“You'll see,” Too Tall said with a shrug.

He took lead as they entered the passage. Leigh and Annwyn and Wilhem Price followed, and then Erim.

She'd gotten maybe twenty paces down the passage when she thought she heard a faint sound behind her. A
scritch
or a
scratch
.

Erim stopped and turned around while the others continued to follow Too Tall down the passage, taking the noise they were making with them. As the passage grew quiet, the sound repeated itself, and Erim slowly slid one of her point daggers out into her left hand to join the rapier in her right, and silently she slipped back up the passage toward the antechamber.

Stjepan stood outside the expanding hole this time, his shirt drenched in sweat. He guzzled water from a canteen. Godewyn and Caider Ross were the ones down in the pit now. They were using picks and mattocks and the thinner shovels to break up the dirt and packed earth, and then switching to the wider shovels to fling the dirt out of the pit where Stjepan was then clearing it to the sides of the chamber. The pit was four, almost five feet deep, and they had exposed the top of what appeared to be a rounded casket made of black iron, buried upright in the ground. Strange swirling designs and markings in Maerberos similar to the ones on the map were etched into its surface, and one exposed side of it was etched with what appeared to be the start of an image of a man wearing a horned mask.

“Queen of Heaven help me,” gasped Stjepan, after drinking his fill. He looked down at the two feet of casket that they had exposed. “If that's what we think it is, we'll have to dig . . . what, probably at least nine feet down to get it out. This could take the rest of the night still.”

“Been a while since you had to do a real man's work, eh, cartographer?” called out Godewyn as he swung a pick into the earth.

Stjepan snorted and spat to the side. “And what would you know about a real man's work? You're a robber and a pimp,” he said.

Godewyn paused in his digging and shrugged.

“That's a real man's work,” he said.

Carefully and stealthily, Erim entered the antechamber of the inner barrow, blades at the ready. The lanterns she and Godewyn had left spiked to the walls still guttered and lit the chamber in flickering shadows. But there was no one else there.

She slid softly in a half-crouch from one end of the chamber to the other, studying the tracks on the ground and listening at each of the arched exits.

Nothing
, she thought.

She straightened, shaking her head. She stood silently for a long minute, relaxed, her blades ready, just listening.

Fuck, still nothing
, she thought.

She sheathed her point dagger and slid Godewyn's lantern off its spike on the wall. She turned and headed back into the southerly passage.

Twenty paces down the passage, Erim heard the sound behind her again, back from where she had just come. She turned, almost angry, setting the lantern down and slipping her dagger back into her left hand and lifting bared steel points at the ready again.