Will Power

SCENE XIX The Halls of the Dead

“The bridge guards bear out your story,” said Sorrail grimly, “but you can’t expect anyone here to believe that you have returned to Phasdreille of your own accord. Look at me when I speak to you!”

He took hold of my chin and yanked it up, slapping me hard as he did so. The guards around me hoisted me roughly into an upright, kneeling position, one of them dragging me by a fistful of hair. My cheek was so swollen with bruising that my left eye was a sightless slit. I looked at Sorrail with my right and gasped an attempt to speak. Blood spattered from my mouth in a fine spray, and a droplet fell on Sorrail’s white linen tunic. He scowled at it and then, almost casually, kicked me hard in the ribs. I collapsed onto the stone floor coughing and spitting blood.

I had no idea how long this had been going on: An hour? Two? I had been picked up by the bridge guard and brought directly to Sorrail who, assisted by his more enthusiastic troops, had beaten me periodically ever since. As I got my breath back and cleared my throat, I wheezed out my story again. “I told you already. I ran from the city and into the forest. I walked into a huge goblin army. Some of them saw me and came after me. I ran. I knew the city guards would take me in as a criminal and, with half a dozen bear-riding goblins on my tail, that seemed the best plan. I also thought that by bringing word of the enemy force, I might make up, at least in part, for my past crimes in the city. That’s all there is to tell.”

I sank to the floor again, coughing, exhausted by my narrative and feeling, more than ever, the ache in my jaw where I had been punched.

“These goblins,” Sorrail demanded, and as he came close to me I could smell his scrubbed body, still fragrant with the soap they made by boiling down goblin fat. “What standard did they bear?”

I thought for a moment. “A white half-moon-a crescent-on a red background.”

Sorrail looked at me, and though his gaze was hard and hateful as before, it held a hint of uncertainty.

“He could have seen that in the last attack on the city,” suggested a burly sergeant, scornfully.

“No,” said Sorrail, distantly. “That device is borne only by the mountain tribes to the north. They have not been seen here for many months, and certainly did not participate in any of our recent engagements. If they were here. .”

His voice trailed off and he stood for a moment in silence. Then he squatted suddenly and spoke directly to my face. “These goblins, the ones riding the brown bears, were they-”

I cut him off, spotting the test. “The bears weren’t brown, they were black. Kind of charcoal but. .”

“Kind of?”

“They looked black but they had, like, a sheen that was bluish and silvery, like steel.”

The guards looked at me, then at each other, then at Sorrail. His eyes burned into mine and he knew that I was speaking the truth. I could not have come up with that kind of detail unless I had seen them.

“And these were the only beasts they had with them?” he prompted.

“Yes. No. There were wolves, too, like the ones that attacked us when you found us in the mountains.”

He hesitated, caught slightly off-guard by this remark and the memories it evoked, perhaps because I had been unable to conceal the bitter amusement in my voice. Then I had taken him as a savior, someone who might keep the hand of evil from my throat. It was a nasty irony, but I think I was able to swallow that back before it showed in my face. As it was, he merely smiled darkly and said, almost comfortingly, “No one here need fear their wolves. They know me by the foul pelts I have flayed from their loathsome fellows, and have learned to avoid me in the mountains, no matter how many of them there are. They will learn to flee me on the battlefield also. But their goblin masters: You did not attempt to speak to them, or?. .”

I gave him a wide-eyed stare. “They’re goblins!” I sighed. “I may not be one of you, but I am also not one of them. Do you think a race that lives by murder and destruction, creatures that despise all things including their own filthy kind, would suffer me to live? I saw them, and I ran. They came after me and they did not want to talk.”

And suddenly, it was over. Sorrail rose, turned, and stalked out of the chamber with his officers at his heels, muttering, “Clean him up,” to the guards left with me.

Cleaning me up was easier said than done. My lip was split, I had a long jagged cut over my right eye, and my left was no more than a thin, dark line across a plum-colored distention. I was fairly sure I had a cracked rib or two (they had kicked me repeatedly and struck me across the back and shoulders with thin but heavy clubs apparently designed for the purpose) and my entire body felt like one great bruise. Every touch of the guards’ sponge set me moaning and squirming like a dying eel, slow and agonized but too resigned to the pain to really fight it. Only when I caught the distinctive rose-petal scent and my mind flooded with images of the factories in the forest and what they did to make their soap and cosmetics did I recoil and insist on them leaving me alone. They went sheepishly, like bullies who had tried to make it up to their victim, failed, and now fear he will report all to his mother.

I crawled toward a couch, dragged myself painfully onto it, and lay there, throbbing. The door opened behind me. Turning toward it proved too painful, so I lay there and waited till my visitor came to me. For a split second I considered the possibility that it was an assassin or that Sorrail had changed his mind and sent some lackey to finish me off, but I did not move. Oddly, and perhaps for the first time in my life, I genuinely did not care. I waited, my good eye closed until I sensed a presence near me. Then I looked.

It was Renthrette. She stood there looking down on me, her face expressionless. By this I don’t mean impassive: She was clearly thinking, even feeling, a great deal as she looked at me, but exactly what was going on in her head was impossible to discern. I wondered if my assassin had indeed come-it would be ironic if all those poems about a distant beauty who kills her suitor with disdain turned out to be literally true. The idea made me smile, slightly, and the muscles of my face cried out with pain. “Hello, Renthrette,” I whispered, my eyes closed.

“What are you doing here, Will?” she replied. The last time I saw her, this would have been a rhetorical question which meant “get out of here before I use your intestines to string a lute,” but now her tone was not so much hostile as cautiously inquiring.

I opened my eyes. “I ran into the goblins in the forest and ran back here. . ”

“I heard that version,” she said, quickly. “What is really going on?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just what I said.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“No one is asking you to,” I answered, closing my eyes again.

She paused, turned, and, by the sound of her heels on the stone, I judged that she was leaving. The door closed firmly. Then she came back and knelt beside me.

“I don’t believe it,” she repeated. “This has all the marks of a Hawthorne scam and I will not be taken in by it. Why are you here? What is going on? What do you know?”

I was going to ignore her questions, but the last one sounded odd. I looked at her and saw something similarly odd in her face. There was an anxiety there which had been in her voice when she first came in: an anxiety which had replaced the hatred with which she had been brimming when last we met. I hauled myself onto my elbows painfully and looked at her. “What do I know?” I repeated. “What do you mean?”

She hesitated, shot a hasty look at the door, and lowered her face toward mine as if she was going to kiss me. When she spoke, her voice was almost inaudible, and halting, as if she was finding each word, each thought, as she spoke. “I feel that something is not right here. And you feel it, too-no, you know it. Since you left, Garnet and I have been, well, ignored, it seems. Everyone-I mean everyone-seems to have forgotten us. Garnet is happy. He rides against the goblins every day. I am a court lady and I do what they do, though not as well as they do it. Sorrail. . I have barely seen Sorrail since you left, and when we meet at court he treats me exactly as everyone else. But it’s more than that. I think. . there is something more, something much bigger.

“The people here don’t seem real. Different people have told me the same stories, exactly the same, word for word, and no one reacts. I have heard two different people in a group recite the same pieces of poetry and no one comments. It isn’t just politeness; it’s as if they don’t remember. They are like empty shells, going through the same actions day after day. The only thing they show any real passion for is their war against the goblins. I know the goblins are terrible, but their passion. . it doesn’t make sense to me. And when you ask about it, you get the same stories repeated verbatim. Like what they have done to you now: I don’t understand it. For a while, before you left, I thought I did. But that was when I was more like them-when I was becoming one of them.”

She paused, glanced over her shoulder again, and then breathed, “I also feel watched. Kind of like when we were in Harvest. I do not know by who, but there is someone or something here in the city trying to reach me: a mind stretching out to mine. I feel very sure that I do not want it to find me. I. . I fear it may have already found Garnet.”

Not just a pretty face, Renthrette. Still, I wasn’t sure, but then she paused and spoke again.

“Back in the mountains,” she said, “the night this all began, you told a story about a girl whose family was attacked by Empire soldiers. Remember?”

I winced at the recollection and nodded fractionally.

“I think you owe me another story,” she said.

I told her everything. It might not have been wise, and I had been advised against it, but I trusted her-or, at least, I trusted my gut feeling that she wasn’t that good an actress. Anyhow, I found it hard to believe that she had been selected to wheedle the truth out of me, given the terms on which we had parted. No, the very fact that there had been no love lost between us made me take her revelations seriously. There was also a part of me which suspected that an agent of the “fair folk” would not be able to articulate the oddities of their city quite so baldly; they certainly didn’t seem too self-aware when cheerfully recounting by heart the history of some notched goblin-crushing weapon. And if they could identify the inconsistencies in their own tales, I doubted they’d announce them to Renthrette, even as part of some larger ruse.

I have to say that most of these carefully thought out justifications of my actions came to me after I had already confessed all to Renthrette, but I like to think that I had already recognized them intuitively. In fact, it probably had more to do with Renthrette’s earnest face, bent so close to mine that I could feel the breath from her lips on my skin, but why split hairs? In any event, I told her: quickly, in a whisper, and with one eye on the door, but I told her everything.

If it had not done so already, her allegiance switched in a heartbeat. “And they are all alive!” she gasped, joy breaking out all over her. “Lisha and Orgos and Mithos?”

“Yes. But be quiet! Part of the story I told Sorrail is true. There is a large Stehnite force mustering in the forest, but they know they can’t assault the city. They built Phasdreille, after all, and they know that storming the main gate will get them nowhere. The breach in the walls is largely blocked, but it is still their best chance of getting in. Sorrail and the rest of them know this, of course, and will have it heavily defended. The only chance for the Stehnites is to significantly reduce or distract that guard. That, I’m afraid, is the task dumped on me, and because I didn’t want it in the first place, I expect you to help. I know that makes no sense, but people in pain are permitted to abandon logic. If I’m in, you’re in.”

“We can’t do it alone.”

“We won’t have to, supposedly,” I said ruefully. Part of me had hoped she would denounce the plan as foolhardy, in which case I could have abandoned it and still say I’d tried. I should have known better.

“So what’s the plan?” she asked, a flicker of animation coming into her eyes.

I looked at her, sighing pointedly. She misread the gesture as being a symptom of my discomfort, and began pushing pillows under my painfully bruised back. I began talking, hoping to stop her ministrations before she did real damage. “Orgos and a company of Stehnites-the people you call goblins-are making their way to a secret entrance into the city. It is narrow and can only be opened from the inside, but it seems that the ‘fair folk,’ or whatever we’re supposed to call them now-the Arak Drül, I suppose-are unaware of it. We have to let them in. If the king and his ‘fair’ friends do know of the entrance, we will find out very quickly, I would think, but Orgos assures me that all will be well. So that’s that settled.”

“Where is this entrance?”

“There is an abandoned Stehnite necropolis beneath the city-”

“A what?”

“A goblin cemetery. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? A real holiday jaunt. Apparently we are supposed to go there-limp, in my case-and find some tomb which is actually the entrance to a tunnel under and out of the city. Having avoided being seen by the inevitable legions of guards with the aid of some device they seem to have forgotten to pass on to me, we then open the tomb, greet our companions warmly, and destroy the forces of darkness. Or, in this case, light. ‘And be home in time for supper,’ I think the original orders read,” I added dryly. I had already gone through a pretty bleak time with Sorrail and his men, and the plan that the Stehnite chieftains had produced, with Mithos and the others nodding gravely in the wings, now seemed an even bigger death trap than it had at the time.

“Can you stand?” asked Renthrette.

“I suspect so,” I replied miserably, “but I choose not to.”

“Come on. We have work to do.”

She slid the door bolt back and had her hand on the handle when the door exploded inward, throwing her heavily against the wall. I rolled panic-stricken from my couch as a man stepped into the room. He was hooded, but his posture somehow conveyed both strength and agility. It also seemed familiar. When he spoke, all doubt in my mind vanished. The assassin from the alley had caught up with me as he had promised. “Well, Mr. Hawthorne. So nice to see you again. And in the company of the Lady Renthrette, I see. Sorrail will be shocked.”

Renthrette had fallen facedown, but she was turning over quickly and her hand was fumbling for her dagger. He kicked at her wrist, a single, explosive snap that sent the knife skipping across the floor. I made a movement toward him, but he turned easily, ready for me, idly remarking to the prone Renthrette, “How quickly you people change allegiances.”

“And what side would you have us on?” I demanded, stalling.

“No side,” he remarked simply. “I want you dead.”

A bit of a conversation killer, a remark like that, and maybe not just conversation. He passed his right hand across his chest and his fingers flexed oddly, like a magician performing a sleight-of-hand trick. Then he doffed his hood with his left hand, revealing the thin, balding features of Lord Gaspar, and drew his right arm back close to his head.

Part of me wasn’t surprised, not because I had suspected Gaspar of being a highly proficient murderer, but because I hadn’t liked him much. Not much of an insight, I know, but enough to make my next action a tiny bit more efficient. I lunged at him headfirst before the missile could leave his poised hand, crunching into his midriff just below his ribs. He gasped and fell back, but he was surprised more than winded, and his recovery was virtually instantaneous. The guards had, of course, taken my weapons-not that I could fight an assassin on anything like even terms in this condition if I’d had an entire armory to select from. He stepped back from me and I barely stopped myself from falling facedown. Renthrette was gathering herself into a crouch by my side, but he watched her from his place by the door and seemed smugly unconcerned. In his right hand he now brandished a length of fine chain which ended in a cluster of thin spines and razor blades. He was whirling it round faster and faster like a lasso, so that it whined thinly in the air.

“Just a scratch, Mr. Hawthorne,” he smiled, “that’s all it will take. One skill we have perfected since the time of the first goblin wars is the art of poison. This is a distillate from Briesh root. Very fast, very painful.”

He smiled again. His skin seemed to stretch transparent over his skull and his deepset eyes twinkled like polished stones. The pitch of the sound rose as he spun his weapon faster and advanced upon us.

Renthrette and I shrank back. He had raised the chain so that the weapon hummed like a swarm of bees over his head, and now he backed us into the cold stone wall. I spared a glance at Renthrette; she was standing now, straining back to stay out of the range of the poisoned blades that cut the air in front of our faces, but her jaw was set and resolute. For a moment my heart leaped, thinking she had a plan and was on the edge of action, but then I saw the truth: She was steeling herself for death. The realization brought a thin yelp of terror to my lips and she turned quickly to look at me, perhaps hoping to see an idea in my face, a promise that Reliable Will, Hawthorne the Resourceful, had one more trick up his sleeve. I checked my sleeves. Nothing. Gaspar took another step toward us and his mouth buckled into a small and satisfied smile. This time the Pale Claw would have their way.

Suddenly the door behind Gaspar opened inward and a sentry armed with towels and sponges stepped in. It took a second for him to react, but his hand went instinctively to his sword. Gaspar swung the chain wildly at the astonished guard, who raised one thoughtless arm to protect himself. A cut opened up along the edge of his wrist and he fell back clutching it. Gaspar turned hurriedly to us again but he was already off balance and Renthrette had moved sideways. Gaspar let out a few more inches of chain and spun the weapon faster. Renthrette sucked her breath in and slid down the wall toward the door. Gaspar paid out more chain and the deadly circle expanded. I wondered if I could time a lunge at him between the passes of the poisoned razors, but I felt the wind of it on my chest, heard it like some lethal mosquito in my ear, and my courage failed me. Renthrette, though, moved again, edging toward the still-open door. Gaspar grimly let out a few more inches of chain. Almost immediately there was a sharp thud and, in the silence that followed, a quavering tone, like the fading end of a bell’s peal. The needles and blades of Gaspar’s weapon had bitten hard into the wood of the open door.

Renthrette dived, rolled, and came up with her dagger. In about the same instant, Gaspar seized a long knife from his tunic and slashed at the air to keep her at bay. I, not realizing that Gaspar’s lethal spinning toy was out of commission, had dropped to the floor with a gasp of panic, which was quickly succeeded by a squawk of pain as I landed awkwardly on my elbow. Gaspar, perceiving this as an indication of attack, wheeled to faced me. As he did so, Renthrette lunged meticulously with her dagger, low and hard, held it for a moment, and then drew it out, bloody. Gaspar stood paralyzed and his eyes showed first shock, then pain, then nothing. He fell heavily forward.

The sentry was already dead. Whatever Gaspar’s other virtues, he hadn’t lied about the speed of his venom.

“Shouldn’t we be moving?” said Renthrette, wiping her knife clean. She was breathing heavier than normal, but otherwise she might have been suggesting that we leave a rather dull party.

“What?” I gasped, hardly able to speak.

“Don’t we have a job to do?” she demanded, her blue eyes transferring from the now-spotless dagger to my face with a hint of impatience.

“Can I have a moment to recover?” I sputtered, irritably. It had been intended as a rhetorical question, but Renthrette had never quite learned to spot them.

“Why?” she demanded. “We aren’t hurt.”

“I am!” I riposted. “Still. And someone just tried to kill us!”

“Tried,” she said, “and failed. So let’s go.”

“Where to?”

“You tell me,” she answered, “it’s your show.”

My show. I considered that, uncertain which was worse: the fact that I was indeed responsible for getting the Stehnites into the city, or the fact that Renthrette considered such an operation, a mission not so much audacious in its daring as suicidal, to be a “show.” Tough call.

“We’d better move quickly,” said Renthrette. “If Gaspar was one of the Pale Claw assassins you mentioned, then who knows who will be after us now.”

“They’ll all be after us once they find his body,” I said, “Pale Claw or not. What was Gaspar?”

“Chief Justice,” said Renthrette, bleakly.

“I thought it was something like that. Whether Sorrail and the king shared his politics seems rather immaterial, don’t you think? I wasn’t especially appreciated to begin with, and with the murder of one of their chief ministers under my belt I think we can rest assured that my popularity has entered a decline. Well, I don’t intend to wait around for them to find us.”

“Good,” said Renthrette. “I was beginning to wonder.”

“Do you have that oil lamp with you?”

“Always,” she said, as if I’d asked her if the sun was strictly a daytime thing.

We considered hiding Gaspar’s body to buy us some time, but we couldn’t conceal both Gaspar and the sentry under the small half-bed, and that was the only piece of furniture in the room. We considered locking them together as if they had killed each other, but they were too heavy, and I doubted it would help. Finally, we did what we did best: we ran.

There had been no point in my bringing either weapon or disguise into the city since the guards would confiscate them, so I was in the intriguing position of being totally recognizable and unable to defend myself. Renthrette may, for the moment, go where she pleased, but my unwelcome and beaten face would certainly excite inquiry. I didn’t know what would be best: to walk brazenly down the palace’s long echoing corridors, to skulk in the shadows, or just to sprint until my lungs exploded.

Renthrette led with a brisk walking pace that looked like she was going somewhere, and I scuttered behind in a kind of jog that looked like nothing of the kind. We passed a sentry getting a dressing down from his corporal for a dirty tunic. As we got clear, Renthrette muttered out of the side of her mouth, “Where are we going?”

“To the wine cellars.”

She almost broke stride and shot me a look that challenged me to say anything about feeling like a drink. Instead, she said, “The fair folk don’t drink wine.”

“I know,” I said, “but the Stehnites did.”

“Stehnites?”

“Goblins.”

“Right. So what do we call the ‘fair folk’?”

“I told you,” I said. “The Arak Drül. That’s what the er. . Stehnites call them. Deadly Dull, might be a good translation.”

“And where are these cellars?”

“Under the kitchen that serves the main banqueting hall.”

“That’s right by the main garrison,” Renthrette exclaimed.

“Yes. Keep walking.”

“It’s where the palace guardhouse is and where the king’s elite troops live.”

“Yes.”

“We have as much chance of getting out of there alive as we do of walking on water.”

“About that: yes,” I agreed. “And it looks like we’re about to get our feet wet.”

A company of six soldiers and an officer had just rounded the corner and clearly intended to speak to us. “Lady Renthrette,” began the officer, “where are you taking Mr. Hawthorne?”

Renthrette looked at me blankly and opened her mouth like a large carp.

“I was hungry,” I inserted. “After a hard day of getting lumps kicked out of me by your worthy men, one gets a little peckish.”

“So I was taking him to the kitchens,” said Renthrette, throwing the carp back.

“I’m sure something could have been ordered for Mr. Hawthorne in his room,” said the officer.

“I’d just as soon stretch my legs,” I said weakly.

“I mean,” said the officer with a labored earnestness, “that though you are presently our. . guest, you should probably stay in your room until we get express word from Sorrail or one of the other duty officers.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “The moment I’ve eaten, I’ll go right back to my room and stay there.”

“No, sir,” began the officer, “I’m afraid. .”

“Now you listen to me,” I snapped, raising my voice, “I’ve had just about as much of this as I can stand. I came here as a witness to aid your army and was set upon by your thugs. Now all I ask is something to offset my hunger and rebuild the strength your troops knocked out of me.”

“Even so,” said the officer, a little sheepishly, “I really must insist that. .”

“Mr. Hawthorne has a rare blood disorder,” said Renthrette, to everyone’s surprise. “He must eat on the hour, or he is likely to collapse.”

I nearly did. My mouth fell open and I began to burble something, but she kept going:

“His feeding time is long overdue, and the only way to keep him awake is to keep him moving. Come on, William, stir yourself up and down a little.”

I gave her a wide-eyed look. She stared at me and said, “You must keep your blood flowing, William. Keep those legs moving.”

She slapped at my thighs and, in slow disbelief, I began to hop lightly from one foot to the other as she seemed to be suggesting.

“That’s right,” she commended. “A little higher. Now,” she said to the soldiers, “I promise I’ll take him back as soon as he is fed, all right?”

The officer hesitated and glanced awkwardly at his men. I continued to dance about, executing some bizarre form of jig, while trying to look as if this was perfectly normal. I flicked my heels up behind me, now humming to give myself something to cavort to. The soldier watched me for another moment and then nodded silently. We set off immediately down the passage, Renthrette marching swiftly, I reeling off some lunatic country dance.

As soon as we were round the corner I began walking normally. I growled at Renthrette, “And what the hell was that supposed to be?”

“I thought that was rather good,” she remarked, without looking at me. “You know, inventive.” She shot me a sly smile and I frowned at her.

“ ‘His feeding time’?” I muttered. “What am I, some kind of sideshow ape?”

“William Hawthorne in a sideshow?” she remarked archly. “No, you’re strictly a main stage attraction.”

“But still an ape,” I added.

“A pretty smart one,” she said, grudgingly.

“Thanks. Where are these bloody kitchens?” I muttered.

We rounded a corner, chose a door, moved quickly down a narrower passage that ran around a small, cloistered herb garden where the air was cold and fragrant, and passed through an arch into a broad room floored with ceramic tile and dry with the heat of ovens. In one vast hearth a woman was stewing cabbage, and the scent, sour and slightly metallic, hit us like a large animal. Several others went on with their chopping and skinning and whatever else they did in this hellish place to ruin whatever food came near them. No one paid any attention to us at all.

It didn’t take us long to find the cellars. There was a narrow flight of steps down into a bricked arch with a heavy door whose paint was black and flaking. There was no keyhole and the bolt was clumsy and ill-fitting. We opened it and descended.

I had been shown a plan of the palace cellarage, but it was several generations out of date and no one knew exactly what it would look like today. The Stehnites were pretty sure their enemy didn’t know about the secret means of egress from the city, but pretty sure wasn’t absolutely sure, so we would have to be alert for guards, though we hadn’t seen any in the kitchens or the lower chambers so far.

The area below the kitchen had once held an extensive wine store, but the wine had long since been used or thrown away. The Arak Drül did not replenish, I had been assured; they merely consumed. There were a few shelves of salted pork, some bags of white flour, and several barrels of the thin, flavorless yellow beer they made, but otherwise the place seemed empty. There were alcoves and cupboards with shelves, stone cold chests, and a meat locker with hooks, but little of it looked used. You could imagine the place fragrant with cheeses, hanging with sausages, and piled high with bottles of rich and flavorful wines and barrels of hearty ale, but the palace’s new inhabitants apparently ate merely to stay alive. With me, I thought dryly, it was rather the other way round.

Renthrette watched me as I paced around the dank and freezing cellar. “Well?” she said.

“Well what?”

“Where is this passage?”

“I’m looking for it, aren’t I?”

“It looks to me like you’re thinking about food.”

I gave her a shocked look. “You misjudge me,” I lied. “Give me a hand with this. My ape strength seems to be failing me.”

Between us we shifted a large-but empty and partly rotten-cabinet. One of its doors flapped open as we lifted it, twisting its corroded hinges till it was barely hanging on. Setting the piece of furniture down we found a large hatchway where it had stood. This was latched but not locked, and it opened upward with a long, high-pitched creak. Renthrette lit her lamp and the cellar flared with leaping orange tongues before settling down to an amber glow.

“It’s just a stone cistern for cold storage,” Renthrette whispered, beginning to lose patience. It had, after all, been minutes since she’d killed anything.

I climbed in and looked around, stretching to take the lamp from her. By its light, a rusted iron grill shone dully in the corner of the floor. The shaft beneath it looked like a drain of some sort, but it was quite dry.

“I think this is it,” I said.

“You think?” said Renthrette, dropping easily in through the hatch and peering at the grate.

“See any other possibilities?”

“Not here.”

“Then this must be it.”

The grill was held in place by heavy nails driven into a timber frame. We hadn’t brought tools, so I squatted down beside it, wondering how we were going to move it and smelling the cold, damp air that drifted out of the shaft. Renthrette nudged me aside and planted her boot squarely in the center of the grate. She pushed and it bent noticeably, scattering red flakes of iron into the hole beneath. Leaning on my shoulder she stomped at it twice more, until I hushed her, sure that someone would be attracted to the noise. We waited, holding our breath and looking at each other. Then, without warning, she did it again, and this time her foot went straight through.

Two bars of the thin metal had snapped clean out, and several more had buckled enough that they could be bent out of the way. Renthrette went first and I lowered myself awkwardly into the shaft after her, her hands closing about my waist, drawing me down toward her in ways far less erotic than they sound.

“Drop,” she said. “It’s only a couple of feet.”

I did so and she braced me against the impact embarrassingly.

“I’m fine,” I spluttered. “You don’t have to heave me around like a child, you know.”

“I was just trying to help,” she said, affronted.

“Don’t. Now where the hell are we?”

We were in a passage. The shaft we had just dropped through had been alarmingly narrow and I had had visions of crawling, as we had done through the cistern drain at the Falcon’s Nest. But this was quite different. Once in the tunnel proper, we were able to walk upright and side by side. The lamp showed the same carved buttresses and gargoyle ornaments that we had seen elsewhere in the city, but here you could see the goblin heads that had been smashed elsewhere. The ancient kings or tribe leaders of Stehnmarch stood proud, though strange to our eyes, and noble. Renthrette lifted the lamp and gazed at them.

“So it’s true,” she said, her voice hushed. “They were here first. The ‘fair folk,’ Sorrail. . It’s all been a lie.”

“I hate to say I told you so but. .”

“No, you don’t,” said Renthrette. “You love it. And to be precise you never told me so at all.”

“I implied it,” I said. “I was skeptical.”

“You always are.”

“Thank you,” I said, smiling and bowing slightly as if she had paid me the highest compliment. Renthrette was moving off down the passage, however, staring at everything except me, and didn’t notice.

The passage was straight and there were no doors or corridors leading off it, so we made rapid progress in what felt like a slow turning and descending spiral. The flint underfoot seemed newly cut and showed little sign of wear, but patches of dark moss clung to all the surfaces and water dropped from the arched ceiling in places and coursed in rivulets down the walls. It seemed to be getting colder as we progressed, and in minutes I was catching sight of tiny icicles gleaming in the lamplight like quartz.

Then came a staircase, broad and steep, and at its foot, a round chamber, with relief carvings on its walls showing the Stehnites laying out their dead. There was a single door leading out of this chamber and I stopped Renthrette before she opened it.

She gave me an impatiently inquiring look.

“Did you look at the carvings?” I said.

“No. This is hardly the time for artistic appreciation.”

“They’re funeral engravings,” I said.

“So?”

“This is a burial chamber.”

“I thought you said this was an escape route from the city,” she said.

“That was its secondary function, yes, but it was also where they brought the bodies of their rulers and dignitaries.”

“So?” she parroted.

“So we are about to enter an underground graveyard, a mausoleum. I thought you should know.”

“You said,” she said, unmoved, and in truth I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say. I suppose I thought we should somehow feel a sense of respect for those who had died, but since we had recently been doing our best to kill their successors, that didn’t make a lot of sense. Maybe I wanted her to feel guilty like me.

She pressed the handle until it clicked dully, then she pulled the heavy door, its timbers dragging, wide open. Inside, though the tunnel was about the same size as the one we’d just come through, it seemed tighter, more restricted. The air had a dusty staleness that you could smell through the damp, and where the walls had formerly been plain, they were now lined with doors, each no more than a few feet square and set at waist height. They were made of some hard, reddish lumber designed to resist decay, though few had after all these centuries. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of them, and where the portal timbers had crumbled or been eaten away by worms, you could see the black, arched hollows where the corpses lay.

The place smelled of death. Not death like in a butcher’s shop, all caked blood and internal organs, or the stench of decay like a rat left out in the sun, but ancient and forgotten like the world the people buried here had inhabited. It smelled of age and all the time that had gone by since their passing. Some of the bodies had monuments carved into their sepulchers and the corridor around them swelled into a kind of vault, others were marked only by a line of indecipherable script. We inched along the passage, Renthrette, for all her earlier casualness, slowing as if awed by a sense of dread or sadness. And around us, stacked and arrayed in their decayed finery, lay the dead.

The tunnel ended abruptly in a tight spiral staircase that wound upward.

“We must have missed it,” I said, suddenly afraid for reasons I couldn’t say. I began to bustle about in the low and shifting lamplight, scanning the various tombs with growing alarm. “It must be here,” I muttered into the stillness. “We must have passed it.”

“What are we looking for?” said Renthrette, calm and quiet.

“A mausoleum with a figure of a warrior carved into a pillar: life-size. Tough to miss, you’d think.”

“We’ve seen a lot of tombs.”

“But have we seen that tomb?” I hissed, my patience beginning to strain. The place-the silent and forgotten passage with its corpses arranged rank upon rank-was beginning to get to me.

“How would I know?” she returned.

“Brilliant,” I remarked. “So we’re stuck here.”

“If worse comes to worst we’ll go back the way we came,” Renthrette answered with a reasonableness that sounded labored. It was getting to her, too, however much she pretended otherwise.

“What if we can’t?” I barked. It suddenly seemed more likely that we would be locked in, that we would be entombed here forever. The idea chilled me to the bone.

“We have to get out,” said Renthrette, urgent.

“We can’t,” I replied, suddenly quite sure. “We’re going to be walled up with the dead. We’ll never get out. . ”

“Stop it, Will,” said Renthrette, slapping her hands over her ears. “Don’t say that. There’s something trying to stop us, distracting us. The dead are confusing us.”

For a moment I thought she was right, but then it hit me.

“No,” I said, suddenly clear and moving away from her. “It’s not the dead. But something is trying to stop us. We must keep looking.”

“Why must you?” said a voice.

I turned hurriedly and found myself looking at Garnet. He was coming down the corridor toward us, armed for battle. Renthrette ran to meet him.

“Garnet! Thank God,” she cried. “We have to let Lisha and the others in. I’ll explain it all later.”

“I already know,” he said, smiling. “I have spoken to them and they sent me to you. Come back this way.”

He started to move back the way we had come, and Renthrette took a step toward him.

“No!” I shouted. “Renthrette, wait. That’s not your brother.”

She shot him a quick look and then called back to me, half laughing as she did so. “Of course it is. Who else could it be?”

“Look at him closely,” I answered, walking quickly toward them. “Make sure.”

She glanced at him, but only for a second. “Of course it’s him,” she said.

“Come,” he said, extending his hand to her.

“No!” I bellowed, breaking into a run.

She took his offered hand and he began to draw her back and up. She moved with him, easily, and as she turned from me, I had the distinct impression that she had forgotten my presence utterly. I called after them, but they did not turn or answer. I ran and, rounding a corner, saw where a black hollow had appeared in the rock wall: a tomb door, gaping open. Only yards from it, Garnet and Renthrette paced arm in arm. The oil lamp lay shattered and sputtering on the ground and Renthrette’s posture seemed limp, as if she were drunk.

The tomb they now stood before was little more than a vertical coffin carved into the rock. To my horror, Garnet slid his back against the wall and into the recess, drawing Renthrette after him. I shouted and flung myself at them. Garnet’s free hand caught my wrist, but now I saw it for what it was: a fleshless, bony claw.

It began to pull me in.

I tried to tear it away but some greater strength was guiding it, giving power to its dusty, fleshless bones, and in moments we were all three pulled in a horrible embrace into the tomb. The corpse which had taken on Garnet’s form released Renthrette, whose eyes were cloudy and sightless, and used that free hand to reach for the stone slab which was the sarcophagus lid. I kicked and flailed as best I could but the skeleton hand now had me firmly by the shoulder and its grip was like a vise. Renthrette was muttering to herself like one on the edge of sleep, and the door, the great stone slab that would entomb us, was shutting out the light. I stopped fighting, knowing that since Renthrette’s illusion was giving the thing power, only she could stop it.

I called her name. “Look at him, Renthrette!” I cried. “Look at your brother.”

Her eyelids flickered and opened for a second. They rested on the skull beside her face and she smiled.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Garnet. Now rest.”

“No,” I shouted, as the tomb door inched further across the opening, “it isn’t him. He’s different.”

“No,” she murmured, her eyes still shut. “No.”

“How did he find us?” I tried, desperate now. “How did he know we were here? He says he spoke to Lisha: Where? When? How could he have found them and why would he have gone looking? He didn’t know they were here. Lisha is outside the city and couldn’t have come to him. He must be lying. Renthrette, it’s not your brother. Look.”

Her eyelids rippled again and confusion crossed her forehead as the last of the lamplight was closed out of the tomb. In the last second before the darkness took us, her eyes opened all the way; she saw the hollow eye sockets, yellow and gnawed by rats; and she screamed.

In that instant the grip which seized me broke, the finger bones shattered, and the tomb door quavered and fell slowly into the passageway, crashing full length and breaking upon the flint floor with a deafening roar that seemed to resound through the earth. I staggered out after it, gasping the air, and Renthrette followed, shrieking and brushing at the torn limb which had encircled her. The rest of the corpse seemed to stand for a second and then tumbled in pieces, many of the bones turning to powder before they hit the ground.

Renthrette sank back against the opposite wall, the back of her hand pressed to her mouth and her eyes fixed on the empty tomb. She was wheezing, rather than sobbing.

“It’s all right,” I said. “It wasn’t him.”

For a while she said nothing, so I sat down beside her and slipped my arm around her shoulders. I had, after all, seen this little trick before. She didn’t rebuff me, or react at all, for that matter. She just sat there, breathing heavily and biting into the back of her wrist till the print of her teeth showed bone white.

“What was it doing?” she asked.

There were lots of possible answers to this, some of which I preferred not to consider, so I kept it simple. “Trying to stop us.”

“Why?”

“We’re about to fulfill a prophecy,” I said. “But we’d better be quick. If he, whatever that thing in the library is, has sensed us here, he’ll be sending troops. We have to find that passage.”

I helped her up. She could have rested a while longer, but I dared not risk it. We moved back down the passage to where the largest tombs were. The lamp oil was still burning in a pool on the floor, but we couldn’t carry it with us and visibility at the far end was almost nil.

“This is impossible,” I said. “How could we have missed it?”

“What’s that?” said Renthrette.

I followed her gaze steeply upward and my heart stopped. High above the other tombs was a figure, armored and crouching, ready to pounce. I took a step back, but the warrior didn’t move and, now that I got a second look at it, it seemed unlikely that it would.

“That’s it!” I said. “That’s the statue. Let me give you a lift.”

I locked my hands and she stepped into them wordlessly, using them as a stirrup to hoist herself up. Then she grasped the masonry and hauled herself the rest of the way.

“Are you up?” I said. “All right. Now, take hold of his spear, above his hand. Got it? Now, pull it toward you.”

For a moment nothing happened, then the spear seemed to break off and snap forward. But it didn’t fall, and as it moved, something heavy behind the wall disengaged. Renthrette jumped back hastily as the entire section of wall lurched back a few inches and then dropped vertically into the earth with a great rush of dust and a thunderous rumble. Behind where it had stood there was first darkness, then a lean, gray Stehnite face under a steel helm. It was Toth.

“You have proved many people wrong today, Mr. Hawthorne,” he said, as soon as he had leaped down. “I am glad, and grateful.”

Renthrette stared at him. I thought I saw her hand stray toward her sword.

“Renthrette,” I said, “this is Toth, a Stehnite chieftain.”

“Enchanted,” he said.

Renthrette returned his half bow with a kind of stunned nod, but there was no time to dwell on courtesies. Others were appearing at the hole in the wall and dropping cautiously into the passage. Among them were Orgos and Lisha. Renthrette came to herself instantly, embracing them heartily and with real joy.

“Quick!” I said. “They know we’re here. They’ll try to shut us in.”

“They will try,” said Toth, darkly, “but now that I have set foot in the city of our fathers, I will not leave it.”

At this utterance, many of those gathered in the passage made sounds of assent, but a glance up at where the statue had been told me that there were not many of them. About three dozen Stehnites and a pair of sleek gray wolves had come in through the passage. The rest would lay siege to the walls with Mithos and the other chiefs. I doubted it could possibly be enough.

Orgos, taller than almost everyone else there by a hand, conferred with Toth, and the unit began to move quickly back the way we had come, their weapons drawn. For a second I found myself face to face with one of the wolves and I saw thought, or perhaps even recollection, in its yellow eyes. It was a huge, pale beast, its fur gleaming like brushed steel and with a white blaze on its throat. As I looked at it I knew I had seen it before, long ago in that mountain cave where we had met Sorrail, and that it also remembered. The wolf held me in its gaze, and I, overcome by a rush of guilty regret for a lot of things, swallowed hard and held my breath. It watched, considering, then moved off, following the others. I blinked the memory away as best I could.

We hurried through the monuments and sepulchers, past the open tomb which had so nearly been my last resting place, and into the circular chamber near the steep staircase. There we stuttered to a halt. Orgos, at the front of the line, had raised his palm in a call for silence. No one moved.

Over the sound of my heart I heard a sloshing sound, like barrels of ale being drawn up from the cellar, followed by a harsh splitting thud, like an axe biting lumber. An acrid scent drifted down the stairs. With it, trickling black down the steps and collecting in pools at our feet, came the oil.

A dozen of the Stehnites realized the same thing in the instant that I did and began shouting in their own language and jostling backward. We moved as a unit, panicked and erratic as the flames started rushing down the steps toward us, bluish for a second, then red. A young Stehnite who had strayed to the front of the column found himself suddenly engulfed in the blaze. He came running toward us, screaming, but I suppose the shock was too intense, for he fell suddenly, and was lost in the fire. The heat followed a moment later. It filled the passage like a wall, and our attack broke against it like water on stone.