The Barrow (84 page)

One of the
Ghúl
opened its serrated teeth and bit down into the exposed calf of Wilhem's leg and began to chew. Wilhem Price screamed and thrashed about but the Ghúl had a strong grip on him and there were more of them now. A second one leaned in and began eating his foot. He looked toward Erim with desperate eyes. Suddenly her mind flashed on Isham Wall back at the tree, what seemed like ages ago but couldn't have been more than a few days, and her heart sank and she knew what to do.

She reached up, pulled the dagger from her teeth and plunged it into Wilhem's neck. His eyes went wide and glassy with surprise as blood jetted out from the puncture through-and-through.

Erim yanked the dagger out and the spray increased, and she turned and pulled herself out of the entrance hole, sobbing and cursing, as the sounds of feeding rose behind her and Gilgwyr laughed in delight.

The three-biered antechamber beyond the tunneled hole was lit by lanterns and torches. Annwyn's robe was on the floor. The nude woman herself crouched tightly over the body on the center bier in a lewd squat, whispering to herself. Leigh stood near her, admiring her naked form and the map images and words that played across her skin. She took a bracelet from the body on the bier and slid it on her wrist. “Oh, yes, you will make an excellent bride for Azharad,” Leigh said.

Annwyn turned and looked at Erim with a strange smile on her face, watching as she crawled along the ground. “We have much in common, you and I. You yearn to be seen for who you are, to be yourself, and me, well I . . .” Annwyn said to her. “Well. I'm not myself, as our dear Stjepan likes to say.” Annwyn paused again and contemplated Erim for a moment, as Erim, sobbing, kept crawling for the exit. “He sees you, doesn't he?” she asked with surprising earnestness. “But he doesn't see me. Not yet.”

“They haven't eaten for a long time. They'll be very slow,” Leigh called out to Erim. “You might even make it.”

Annwyn and Leigh watched as Erim began clawing the dirt even harder, pulling herself into the passageway out of the chamber. Leigh started to laugh in delight at her predicament.

“King in Heaven! Sss . . . Stjepan . . . Stjepan . . . Help me . . . Stjepan . . .” Erim started to cry out, her voice rising into the corridor and becoming a scream.
“Help me!”

The
clang
of hammers working steel punches against iron bolts rang through the room. Arduin stood perched at the lip of the hole, half turned to the entrance but looking down at the labor below him, where they had half the bolts freed. Suddenly he went tense and turned his head quickly, looking toward the entrance archway with a frown.

“Quiet!” he hissed.

Down in the pit, Stjepan, Godewyn, and Caider Ross stopped their hammering and froze in crouches, looking up at him in surprise, and the room fell into a long silence.

Finally Godewyn stirred. “What? What?” he hissed in a loud whisper.

“Did you hear something?” Arduin called down to them.

Stjepan and Godewyn glanced at their tools, then up at Arduin.

“You really think we can hear anything over all this hammering?” asked Godewyn, incredulous.

Arduin relaxed and turned back to them. “Sorry, I thought I heard something,” he said with a shrug. And the men in the pit went back to work.

Erim pulled herself along, crawling through the dirt. Behind her there was silence. Ahead of her she could hear the rhythmic
clang
of metal-on-metal, clearer now than before. Her tears had dried up, there was nothing left in her to come out. There was virtually no light, but up ahead she could see the lantern that she had set down in the passageway before being attacked, and beyond it something glimmering on the ground. Soon she reached the lamp and she stopped, using the light to quickly check her wounds. The self-inflicted wound on her left leg was still bleeding and the leg was rapidly becoming numb, so she cut off a sleeve from her shirt and used it to tie around the wound. She grimaced, and slipped off the rest of her shirt, and tied it tight about her waist to try and cover the entrance and exit of the through-and-through stab wound into her belly.

Behind her, back from where she had come, she started to hear a faint scratching in the hallway that sounded like nails slowly moving along the floor or the wall. She ignored it, and turned and concentrated on the glimmers along the ground beyond the lamp, her rapier and dagger lying where she must have dropped them after being stabbed. She started crawling again, grabbing her rapier with her right hand as she passed it.

As she crawled across the threshold into the first chamber of the inner barrow, she could hear the clanging sound much more clearly coming from the archway to the north, where she would find Stjepan and Arduin and the rest of them.

She didn't hesitate. She turned to the east and started crawling up the mosaic stone passage leading to the entrance chamber to the barrow and the exit beyond.

Stjepan and Godewyn stepped back, tossing aside their hammers, as Caider Ross knocked out the final bolt. They circled the upright casket and Caider exchanged his hammer for a crowbar. He slid it into a slight space that had opened up between two of the protruding nuts. They all exchanged wary glances and then prepared to pull the casket lid forward and off.

They started to put some muscle into the effort, and there was a
crack
as the iron lid unsealed from the standing base of the casket. As they started to ease the lid forward, a wave of stench hit them from inside the iron casket and they began coughing and retching.

“King of Heaven!” Godewyn gasped, and he and Caider Ross leapt back, covering their mouths and noses with their hands; Stjepan struggled to hold the iron casket lid up by himself, but he couldn't, it was too heavy and the stench compelled him to stumble back, and as the lid spun and fell onto the side of the pit, front side up, a wall of dead maggots coated in black filth cascaded out of the open casket, filling the bottom of the pit and splashing up onto the men in the pit as they leapt back.

“Careful! What in the world—” Arduin started to ask, but he trailed off and grimaced as the smell reached him.

Inside the casket stood a headless corpse, dressed in decaying finery, its hands clasped as if in prayer. Long robe, fringed collar, jeweled chain of office around its neck; everything in the casket was coated in a lustrous black filth, like unrefined oil, and dead maggots were embedded in the muck.

Godewyn, Caider Ross, and Stjepan stood still, their boots ankle-deep in dead maggots, staring at the inside of the casket with fear and anticipation as the stench dissipated. They each held a shovel or a crowbar or a mattock now, snatched up from the ground and readied as though they were weapons.

“It's him, isn't it? It's him. It's Azharad,” said Godewyn in a whisper.

“It's him,” Stjepan replied grimly.

Godewyn grimaced. “Where's his fucking head?” he asked.

Arduin called down from the lip of the pit. “Where's the
sword
?”

The men in the pit moved forward, gingerly stepping on the dead worms beneath them, and looked closer.

There was no sword upon the body, or in the casket, that they could see.

“Shit,” said Stjepan.

Erim pulled herself out of the passage to the inner barrow, pain and effort and determination on her face. She began pulling herself up the stone floor of the passageway out.

Stjepan warily inspected the insides of the casket, poking about with the adze edge of his mattock. Godewyn, and Caider Ross pressed in behind him and looked over his shoulders, craning their necks.

“It's . . . it's not here! It's just a headless body,” Stjepan finally called out. “That's all that's in the casket.”

Arduin gaped down at him, incredulous. “What? Is . . . is it really Azharad?” he asked.

“Yes. Yes, it must be,” Stjepan said. He put a gloved hand to his head, staring at the insides of the casket.

“Of course it's him, you idiot!” shouted Godewyn. “But where's the fucking sword? What in the Six Hells are we doing here? We lost how many men for this? I do not fucking believe this horseshit!” Godewyn continued to rant and rave, pacing back and forth in the black muck at the base of the pit and filling the air with foul curses, his face turning beet red. Caider started to slowly back away from Godewyn.

“I don't understand. What's going on? Why is there no sword here?” Arduin called out, trying to be heard above Godewyn's shouting.

“I don't know . . . unless there's more to the map,” Stjepan said.
Annwyn. She wanted to get in here. Why? Why did she have to be in here?
he wondered to himself. He looked up. “Lord Arduin, we must go back to camp and find your sister.”

Stjepan stood and started to climb out of the pit, but behind him Godewyn's ranting had reached a fever pitch. “. . . and that's the last time I listen to some witch-born Athairi bastard!” Godewyn shouted. And he grabbed up his shovel and swung the flat of its blade into the back of Stjepan's head, and Stjepan spun around almost completely and went down with a thud, coming to a stop with his head against the lid of the casket where it rested on the sloped earth of the side of the pit.