Sendra
They hadn’t even got that far. The fires of the burning encampment—their wall, their cabin, their store—were still visible, a beacon in the night. A beacon to run from, not to. And the soldiers would be spreading out, searching for survivors.
The others—was it only three, still alive and still with him—squatted on their haunches, sat, or in Irkon’s case stayed standing, pacing, as though desperate to keep hold of some illusory momentum.
As though he’d be able to save up all that wandering and just launch himself at the horizon when the soldiers found them.
He was lying down now. Not to get up again, surely. Amazed he’d run this far with a dart hole in him, but the excess of strength that had carried him along was escaping through that gap in his hide now.
“Go,” he said to them. “Take off. I’ll…” He had been about to say, I’ll hold them here, but there was no here, no choke point or bridge a single hero with a sword could hold.
There wasn’t even a them, because the soldiers hadn’t caught up yet.
But he could hardly say, I’ll just lie here and die slowly, and expect that to count as inspiring last words for his followers.
Oh I have led you poorly, my friends. But then this was the history of every bandit gang. Maybe a handful got out of the game with all their digits, went somewhere new, started a fresh life with a false name. Most lived wild, died hard, and died soon.
“Get up,” said Kaille.
“I don’t think I will,” said Sendra. “My feet have come over all brave. They say they won’t run any farther.”
“Where the hell even are we?” Irkon demanded, because he was a brigand but a piss-poor outdoorsman. We’re literally in sight of our camp. Even at night you should know where we are.
“You go. I’ll bury Dimo. He should have a proper grave.
” Utter nonsense. He imagined Kaille enumerating the different axes of the lie.
One, if you can’t run you can’t dig a grave; two, the soldiers would catch you before you’d dug a foot into the earth and I don’t imagine they’d just lend you a spade and sit back to watch; three, if everyone who deserved a proper grave was to get one, we’d be turning the ground for a week.
And that was true enough. Out of his gallant sixty-eight, he had no reason to believe that any more than the four of them had lived.
When Lannesite planned an attack, they didn’t just go off at half-tension.
Amazing any of us got out. Amazing how a nice defensive position can turn into a trap.
We should have had a back door. Except whoever blabbed about their hideout likely wouldn’t have omitted that detail, and so they’d just have found a squad of soldiers with spears and gutbows all ready.
“Get up, Sendra,” Kaille said. Honestly he was impressed nobody had said, Leave him, he’s done for and just taken off. Genuinely flattering. But, as he reckoned he really was done, also useless. Discretion, valour, you know.
“This is the barrow country,” said Blennardt in that clipped accent of hers. “Haunted, not-so?”
Not that people didn’t go into the barrow country, or cross through it, but nobody lived there.
A stretch of moorland warty with oval mounds, too regular and uniform to be natural.
The bones of ancient regents interred within them, some said.
Or the more fanciful notion that this was where the monstrous servants of Lucef Half-Elder had been entombed when the sorcerer-hero had come to the end of his long life.
A few of Sendra’s people had tried digging into some of the mounds, but none had found anything more than dirt, nor had they kept at it long enough to find anything.
There was a stillness and a strangeness to the barrows that put the chills up you.
Sendra reckoned the chills currently getting into him were because of the blood he was losing, and the barrow country could wait its turn.
“Kaille,” he said. “I’m spent. I see my strength loping away there, between the mounds, and I want you to go catch it now.
I’ll wait here till you get back. But if you wait with me, then we’ll all be eating Lannesite hospitality.
Just this once turn coat on me, Kaille. While you’ve a whole hide to save. ”
She sobbed. It tore at something inside him.
Kaille, the broad-shouldered, the knife-woman, the ruthless, was crying over him.
And she was a murderer and a thief, and she’d stood over more than a couple of merchants with a dripping blade when they’d held out on where the valuables were.
And he was the same. So where had these noble sentiments come from, that she’d weep for a wretch like him?
Irkon yelped. From Sendra’s prostrate position, he had the impression of sudden movement, a little distance away where the man had wandered.
Then a beat of silence, in which Sendra turned his head and found Irkon as gone as if he had been snatched away from the world by a demon.
And then weak, furious swearing, slightly muted.
“Hell-now?” Blennardt demanded. She had her gutbow loaded—the fancy one she’d brought with her from wherever it was had exiled her and put out her eye.
Fanciest weapon Sendra ever saw, in the hands of a woman with no depth perception.
Like an omen, honestly, of how the whole venture was headed.
I should have got out the moment she joined with us.
Unfair, to put that on the shoulders of someone who’d only been doing their best, but, if a man was superstitious …
“Found a hole,” Irkon’s voice floated up to them. Because of course he had. If there was a hole to be found, then Irkon was your man for falling in it. And then, sure as rain follows cloud, “Done my ankle.”
Great, you can keep me company when the others run away. The others, then, being Kaille and Blennardt, fifty percent of his gallant brigands.
“Found a door,” came Irkon’s voice.
Sendra, who’d been very much looking forward to just losing interest in the world and then dying, frowned. “What?” he croaked.
“Door,” Irkon said. “Found a door. Down here.”
That actually got Sendra propped up on his elbows, no matter how much it hurt. It had Blennardt over there and peering down.
“Yes—so,” she reported. “Hole, is. Door, is.”
Maybe I really am dying right now and this is all in my head.
Maybe they did leave me. In which case it couldn’t really hurt to go have a look, given that he’d still actually be lying here dying.
He might as well satisfy his curiosity, if only in his imagination.
“Give me a hand, here,” he said to possibly-not-really-there Kaille.
Her broad shoulders were freed of the deadweight of Dimo, after all.
She might as well do something useful with them.
She got him over to the hole, which was as advertised.
About four feet across, and Sendra could see where the turf had just given way beneath Irkon’s weight.
It went down about ten feet, which made it amazing that Irkon had just “done his ankle,” honestly.
A shaft, in fact; square sectioned. And he could see the pale matting of plant roots writhing out of the top foot of soil, but below was oddly smooth for earth.
Not to mention oddly still a hole, and not just collapsed in on itself.
Blennardt shinned down without a word. One eye, but her people could see well in the dark, whatever foreign place she came from. A moment later, her voice came out of the hole, “Door, is. Metal, is.” And then, “Yaik mas!” which was some oath in her own language. And then, “Open, is.”
Sendra met Kaille’s gaze. Neither of them needed to say, They’re not going to be looking for us down a hole. They’re not going to be looking for us through a magic door. The other thing neither of them said was, You’d have to be really stupid, to go into a magic door below the barrows.
But what was also not being said was, If you find a magic door below the barrows … you go in, right? Just to see what’s there.
Dark, down there. Enough moonlight from down the hole that Blennardt claimed she could see, still.
Nobody else could, much. The door had, apparently, been shiny enough for Irkon to make it out, but it was gone into a slot in the wall, now.
The wall that was of earth, but earth bonded together some way that Sendra could barely scratch with his nails.
He could feel the slot, though, and it was definitely edged in metal. And there was a space beyond.
“Let me go first,” he said. “If there are traps…” And then found that his strength was just about sufficient to let him lean against the wall, so he nobly went first draped over Kaille’s shoulder.
First into the dark, but it was Irkon who limped off and touched something.
There was a loud crackle, and a yelp, and then light.
Not bright light, but a slow dawn here beneath the earth.
A glimmer of flat silver from fist-sized bulges on the walls, like protuberant eyes.
A smell of burning. Sendra was fully ready to see Irkon’s charred corpse ahead of them, because there must really have been a trap.
Instead the man was sucking at burned fingers.
The light waxed, and gleamed off the bodies of monsters.
He saw rounded, shiny carapaces. Jointed legs curled in upon themselves.
Heads that were not even heads, but more like hands made of swords and hammers and torture-tools.
Round blank eyes of glass. A half-dozen monsters, curled massively in death.
“The servants of Lucef Half-Elder,” said Kaille softly.
And she was not under any circumstances a superstitious woman, but that was the legend about this place, so what was anybody supposed to think?
And the thing about old stories was that they weren’t true, obviously.
They were there to teach you important things about how to live and how the world was.
Except, apparently, how the world was, here and now, was a repository for dead monsters.
After a while he began to laugh. A quiet snickering that turned into a whooping, despairing howl that wrenched dreadfully at his wound.
“All the time!” he got out. “This was here all the time! We robbed! We killed! We brought the soldiers down on us! And if we’d known this was here we could just have dug it up like honest people and made a bloody fortune! ”
“We were never honest people,” said Kaille. And true, they’d only been out here, each of them, because their lives had already fallen off the narrow course. But even so.
“All right, all right.” He was fighting for breath, fighting against the shooting pains that fighting for breath brought.
“We could have … brought them to life! Become warlord-magicians. Defeated armies. Killed every bloody soldier they sent us.” Another shuddering laugh.
Because that was one more story. The malcontent who finds the monsters and persuades them to do his bidding.
The old stories of Ulmoth Sorcerer from a century back.
Something groaned, in the half-light of the chamber. A slow, heavy metal sound. None of the dead monsters so much as shivered, but abruptly nothing was funny.
Then something did move, out at the edge of the weird, dead light. Stepped out into view, and Sendra’s breath caught. They were going to die, now.
Or else they were saved.