7. Crypt #2
Caen arrived moments later from the direction of her tower.
Her leather coat was fastened hastily, her hair pulled back but not neatly.
She looked better than she had last night, which was not the same thing as recovered.
The sharpness had returned to her face, but the cost of the night still clung to her.
The pendant at her throat glowed faintly. A tired ember rather than a flame.
The crypt entrance was built into the courtyard, its heavy stonework older than the keep around it. I recognized the function immediately. This was a tomb.
Stone steps descended from the courtyard into the crypt, steep and narrow and worn smooth by generations of boots.
They disappeared into darkness before they reached the bottom.
Below, the iron-banded door hung inward, half-torn from its hinges.
The oak had splintered around the lock. The iron bands were bent outward.
One hinge had been ripped partly free of the stone.
Whatever had opened it had not used a key. It had driven the door inward with the force of a battering ram.
The body lay at the top of the stairwell.
He was one of the younger garrison men. He lay on his side with one hand still curled near his throat, fingers stiff around nothing.
There was no blood.
That was the first wrong thing. After everything I had seen the night before, I expected blood. A wound. A mess. Some visible evidence of violence the body could explain.
Instead, he looked emptied.
His skin had gone pale and waxen, stretched thin over sharpened cheekbones. His mouth hung slightly open. His eyes had sunk back into their sockets. At his throat were two punctures, small and dark and horribly neat.
The rest of him looked collapsed around the absence of blood. Drained.
There was no chaos. No torn cloth. No broken fingernails from a desperate struggle. Not a drop wasted.
Something had held him still. Something had bent over him in this courtyard, close enough for him to understand exactly what was happening, and then it had fed with patient restraint.
When it finished, it left no mess or evidence of haste.
Only the body and the open crypt.
Caen stepped toward the stairs.
Skip caught her arm before she had taken the third step.
“Do not.”
“I need to know what is below.”
“You need to stay on your feet,” he said.
The words were quiet. That made them more forceful.
Caen looked at him. Then she closed her eyes. Her breathing had gone shallow.
Then the pendant at her throat flickered once and failed to brighten. Her face tightened, and one hand found the stone beside the stairwell.
“I can feel something,” she said.
Every soldier close enough to hear went still.
“What?” Skip asked.
She looked down into the blackness beneath the courtyard.
“Darkness,” she said. “Something that should not be inside consecrated stone.”
“How did one of the vampires get in here?” I asked.
Skip looked at me, and his eyes sharpened with recognition.
“It didn’t get in,” he said. “It was already here.”
The courtyard seemed to narrow around that sentence.
“One of them came over the wall during the attack,” he continued. “To hide for another purpose.”
“In the courtyard?”
“In the fortress,” he said. “Somewhere no one thought to look while every eye was on the breach.”
I looked at the body. The open crypt. The black mouth of the stairwell.
“It waited until the fighting was over.”
“Yes.”
“Until people were tired.”
“Yes.”
“Until the sun was coming up.”
Skip’s gaze remained on the broken door.
“Then it fed,” he said. “And went below.”
“To avoid the daylight.”
“Yes,” Skip said. “And to recover.”
Recover was an ugly word in this context.
It implied that whatever had gone below was not hiding.
It was improving.
Whatever had gone down those stairs had not gone to sleep in any human sense. It had gone into darkness with stolen blood inside it and stone above its head.
Flavia stepped past me. She had a sword in her hand.
“I’ll go,” she said.
“No,” Skip said.
She did not look at him. Her eyes were on the stairs.
“It is in the crypt.”
“I know where it is.”
“It is alone.”
“It has fed.”
“I am not afraid of darkness.”
“You should be.”
That made her look at him.
Skip’s voice did not rise. It did not need to.
“You would be going down a narrow stair into total darkness against an undead beast that drank blood only hours ago. You would not see it until it was already close enough to put fangs into your neck. It would see you. It would smell you. It would hear your breathing before your first foot reached the bottom.”
Flavia’s grip tightened around the sword.
“We cannot leave it there.”
“We cannot send people down to be needlessly killed.”
That silenced her.
A soldier near the crypt raised his voice.
“It’s a desecration,” he said. His voice was thick with anger. “Yravel’s dead are kept there. Honored dead. Commanders. Mages. Men and women who held this line before any of us were born. That beast crawls in like it has the right to sleep among them?”
Skip’s mouth tightened, and his sword hand flexed once before he stilled it.
This was not merely a tactical problem to him. This crypt was not an inconvenient basement beneath a military courtyard. It was memory. It was duty. It was the honored dead who had paid the price of holding this line.
Something undead had gone below to use their resting place as shelter. It was hiding from the sunlight and gathering strength.
Another soldier came across the courtyard at a run. Older. Winded. His face told the story before he spoke.
“High Commander.”
Skip turned.
“Report.”
“Two men are missing from second watch. Tiberius and Dacian. They were last seen before dawn, helping clear the western passage.”
The courtyard went very quiet.
I looked at the crypt entrance.
The body at the top of the stairs had been drained. If two more men were missing—
“Oh,” I said, very softly.
Skip heard me.
So did Caen.
Flavia looked between us. “What?”
I did not want to be the one to say it.
Caen did.
“If the two men are down there with it,” she said, her voice low, “then it does not need to come out to feed.”
Skip’s expression closed.
“How long?” he asked Caen.
Caen looked at the stairwell again. Her pendant gave one faint, inadequate pulse.
“If it has only fed once, perhaps we could contain it.” Her voice was tired, but precise. “If it has two more living bodies below, and if it drains them slowly…”
“It grows stronger,” Skip said.
“Yes.”
“How much stronger?”
Caen did not answer quickly. That was answer enough.
Skip turned to the soldiers around him.
“Ten soldiers on this entrance at all times,” he said. “No fewer. Swords and hook axes. Shields in front. No one goes below. No one stands close enough to be pulled down.”
The soldiers moved before he finished speaking.
“Bring the heaviest stones from the collapsed western storehouse,” he continued. “Block the stairwell from the top. I want weight over the entrance.”
“Yes, High Commander.”
“Place the stones carefully. I want them stable. If it pushes, I want to hear it. If it breaks through, I want warning before it reaches another part of the fortress,” he said sharply.
Another soldier nodded and ran.
Skip pointed toward the walls surrounding the courtyard.
“Twenty archers above. Ten on the east wall, ten on the west. Rotating watches. Drawn bows if the stones move. If it comes out, the arrows will slow it. You blind it. You pin it long enough for the hooks to take the head.”
The words moved through the courtyard with the clean force of command. Men and women repeated orders. Boots struck stone. Someone began shouting for ropes. Someone else called for the quarry sledges.
The first stones arrived then, dragged across the courtyard by four soldiers with ropes looped around them. The sound was terrible—heavy rock scraping over stone, slow and final. They began setting them across the stairwell entrance, one by one, building a crude cap over the darkness below.
I looked at Skip.
He was watching the crypt.
“If it waits,” I said, “it gets stronger.”
“Significantly.”
“If it comes out, it comes out fed.”
“Fed, and faster.”
“And if it has two men down there…”
“It will not waste them.”
The certainty in his voice was worse than speculation.
The garrison moved around the crypt with ropes and stones and bows.
Below us, under the courtyard, something had made a meal of one soldier and taken two more into the dark.
Morvanna's attack had not ended at dawn. It had only gone underground.