The Barrow (83 page)

They all eyed the casket warily. The exposed casket lid had revealed the etched image of a man in robes and wearing a horned mask, his hands clasped before his chest, similar to the body they had found in the treasure-filled burial chamber. The arcane patterns and symbols from the language of Maerberos that were etched around the central image into its black, rusted surface seemed to come alive and move about, like a basket full of glistening snakes.
Or like the images and letters on Annwyn's skin
, thought Stjepan.

“I don't like the looks of that,” muttered Godewyn.

“No, it's . . . they won't harm us,” said Stjepan, squinting hard at the letters. “They're wards . . . wards against detection, so no magic could reveal the whereabouts of the casket. There are no curses here that I can see . . .”

“No curses?” Godewyn asked. He grimaced, and considered the shimmering enchantments for a moment. “All right. If you're wrong . . .”

“Then we'll know very, very quickly,” Stjepan said with a shrug.

The two sides of the casket were held in place by bolts driven through matching nuts that protruded from the sides of the front and back. Godewyn and Stjepan each took up a hammer and steel punch and set themselves at each side of the casket. They readied themselves and set their punches behind the bolts that held the front of the casket in place, looked at each other, and then started hammering. The
clanging
sound of metal on metal started to echo through the room.

All was dark and there was a constant dull roar, like a distant crowd of thousands cheering or a deep waterfall around the river bend. But then came the faint, distorted echo of something sharp and rhythmic to cut through the roar: clang, clang, clang, clang.

Erim's eyes fluttered open. She couldn't figure out what she was looking at, perhaps a rough wall of earth and exposed stone, flickering yellow and orange in lamplight? Her head felt wrapped in wool, she was groggy like she was drunk or hung over and she couldn't remember where she was or how she got there. But she could definitely hear the faint
clang
,
clang
,
clang
of metal striking metal. Something was terribly wrong, and she couldn't figure out what it was. Her body felt strange and far away, almost weightless.

Her vision shifted, and she couldn't figure out what she was seeing. She could barely keep her eyes open. She saw dust-covered brown leather, registered its texture and the rough wear and tear on what she realized was a sleeve.
What am I looking at?
She closed her eyes.

She felt the world and her body shift, and she forced her eyes to open again, and she found herself looking into the dead, staring eyes of Malia, and she came to her full senses with a start.

She was hanging upside down over the strange well they'd found, swaying gently back and forth between the naked, ruined body of the handmaiden and a headless body that she did not recognize at first. Her head swam and her body suddenly screamed in pain, and she bit her lip to stop herself from crying out. Adrenalin shot through her as memory returned.
I fought him. Magic. I was stabbed
.

Fucking Gilgwyr
.

She looked around, trying to calm her suddenly racing heart, trying to get her bearings. She was upside down, a rope tied around her ankles running up to a makeshift pulley driven into the stone ceiling of the chamber. Similar pulleys and ropes held up Malia and the other body, and were tied off on the iron bar set into the rock next to the well. The three of them had been positioned so that the blood that dripped from their various wounds would drip down into the well. She brushed up against Malia's body, and craned her neck briefly to take in the violence that had been visited upon the handmaiden. Her naked body bore bruises and marks and she had been stabbed repeatedly.
A point dagger, similar to my own, something with a sharp tip and thin blade. I'm sorry you came to a terrible end. You shouldn't have been here with us.
She looked with sadness and revulsion at Malia's staring, lifeless eyes and realized with a start that the woman's eyelids had been cut away.

She closed her own eyes, and the world went safely dark for a bit.

When her eyes opened again, she had swung around enough to see the other body next to her without too much difficulty. She worried for a moment that it might be Stjepan, but after studying the clothes she knew it was one of Godewyn's crew, Too Tall, from the cut of his leather jerkin and the bronze studs set in its sleeves. Decapitated with a clean blow, by the looks of it.

She let her head hang loose, listening. She could hear low voices from nearby, and someone whimpering. It was hard to move, her body felt wooden and unresponsive, but eventually she was able to swing around to stare at the rest of the chamber. A couple of lanterns lit the dark space, and she could see the squire Wilhem Price lying several yards away from the well, stripped down to shirt and knee breeches and bound at hands and feet. He was crying softly.

Her hands had not been tied, only her feet, so her arms dangled beneath her. She had to move slowly at first, moving her shoulders and spine, trying to get her blood to flow and her hands and arms to work again. She craned her neck and looked up her body, at her blood-drenched shirt, and then for her brace of rapier and daggers, but they were missing. She groaned inwardly but immediately looked across Too Tall's body.

A sheathed dagger was still tucked by his left hip.

She took several deep breaths, steeling herself, then reached up with her left hand to grasp the front of Too Tall's jerkin. She tried to swing her right hand up and over to grab for the dagger, but that required her to twist her hanging body up and over to the left, and the moment she twisted pain shot out of her belly and fresh blood soaked her shirt. She gasped and let herself hang, staring down into the blackness of the deep well.

One chance to do this or I'll likely bleed to death soon
, she forced herself to think regardless of if it was true or not, and with a grunt she launched herself back up and over, pulling hard with her left hand on Too Tall's jerkin. Despite the crippling pain in her stomach and bowels, she managed to swing her right hand up and over and her fingers slid around the handle of the dagger and suddenly she was collapsing back to hang upside down, staring at the blade she had ripped from its sheath. It was a nice dagger, a foot of steel, sharply pointed and sharp on both sides, with a rondel hilt, and it made her feel safer to hold it in her hands.

She studied the three ropes that held their bodies to the ceiling, and slipped the dagger between her teeth. By moving her arms and hips she started swinging closer to the ropes. It took a few swings for her to reach them, and she reached out and grabbed the rope that held Too Tall up and pulled herself close to it. She slid her left arm around it a couple of times and then gripped it tight with her left hand, anchoring the rope against her shoulder so that her body was safely anchored over solid ground and not the yawning chasm of the well. She took the dagger from her mouth and then reached through space to cut at the rope that held her aloft.

The effort was making her grow tired, and she could feel fresh blood seeping into her shirt, down her chest, and onto her neck. She sawed the blade of the rondel dagger back and forth into the rope with increasing desperation. Blood and sweat were starting to bead into her eyes and she blinked to be able to see.

And then the rope gave way and her body was suddenly free-falling. She half bounced off the ground and her feet and shins smacked into the lip of the well, and her left arm screamed in pain as the rope wrapped around it anchored her in place and almost wrenched it from its socket with a sudden jolt, and she blacked out.

Master Erim . . . please, wake up.

She opened her eyes.

“Master Erim . . .” whimpered Wilhem Price nearby. “Please, wake up.”

She looked around and was elated to discover that she'd kept a death grip on the dagger; the squire was looking at her now from several paces away, his eyes desperate. She groaned and untangled her left arm from the rope and fell onto her back, which sent a sharp pain through her body. She reached down to her belly, and cried out as her hand came back glistening in her own blood. She writhed on the ground until she could bend her body a bit, she tried to get her legs to work but between her time spent suspended upside-down and the wound to her back and stomach, they were being terribly uncooperative. She pulled her knees toward her with her left hand and then her legs, almost bending herself in half to bring her feet near enough that she could undo the rope that bound her legs. Luckily the knot was one familiar to her and she was free of it shortly, and it slid over the edge of the hole to fall soundlessly into the well. She started to crawl toward Wilhem.

And as she did she could see Gilgwyr step into the room.

No, not now, so close, so close!
she thought in despair.

He smiled down at her with pursed lips as he stepped fully into the lamplight in his foppish best, his black crushed velvet doublet open and exposing a fine silk shirt.

“Ah, dearest Erim,” he said conversationally. “Do forgive me, I quite thought I'd killed you.” He eyed the dagger in her hand and gave her a wide berth as he walked toward the pit, and she took the moment to continue dragging herself with her hands and elbows toward Wilhem. Gilgwyr inspected the ropes and grunted. “Oh, well done, well done. Stjepan was quite right to pick you out from the street trash of Therapoli as a protégé, the little diamond in the rough.”

Gilgwyr looked down into the well, and smiled. He turned back to look at her. She had reached Wilhem and was half crawling, half pulling herself along and up onto his body. Her legs seemed to be finally able to respond to her commands, and they kicked out against the ground behind her. “It's really been terribly amusing, you know, watching him groom you to be one of us, when you have no idea who any of us actually are,” Gilgwyr said.

“I know who you are now, Nameless,” she hissed back at him as she draped herself over Wilhem Price and started to cut at the knots tying the squire's hands behind his back.

“That's the spirit,” said Gilgwyr with a laugh. “That's the spirit. But I'm the easy one to figure out. It's Stjepan you have to worry about,” he said with a sigh. “This is actually for the best, you know. They do so hate to eat dead meat. They much prefer warm, living flesh with the blood still flowing. And now there's two of you to feed them, instead of just the one.”

Wilhem Price's eyes went wide and his face went ashen, and in a hopeless panic he started weeping and babbling and began to struggle under Erim's efforts to cut his bonds. “Keep still!” she hissed as his babbling grew to a wail and she looked back over her shoulder and froze and Wilhem Price froze beneath her.

A hand and half a forearm had appeared from within the well behind a smiling Gilgwyr. An unnaturally pale, gnarled hand, barely skin and bones, with long, sharp, filthy-looking nails, sticking straight up out of the well, stock still.

Then the hand swayed a moment as though feeling the air in the chamber before it dropped to probe the lip of the well. As she watched with held breath, other hands started to emerge from within the hole to probe the edge.

Some part of her mind was screaming for her to begin moving, and she blinked, and she turned back and started working at the ropes that bound Wilhem's hands together. She tried to use the dagger to pry the knot open but this knot seemed harder to undo than her own had been. She cursed and pulled herself over the weeping squire and once she was on the other side of him she slid her dagger in between her teeth and started trying to pull him along the ground with her hands, but with her wounds it was difficult to pull him away. He did his best to work his way along the ground with his arms and legs bounds, but a cold chill was settling on her spine; she knew they weren't moving fast enough.

She could see back to the well now, and Gilgwyr standing silhouetted proud and handsome against the flickering lamplight. A creature started to hoist itself out of the well behind him. Its head appeared first, a head that bore some resemblance to a man, but with only a few straggly strands of white hair, and pale blue-white skin, and white eyes, and a missing gap where its nose used to be. Its thin lips skinned back to reveal a mouth of sharp teeth, and a black tongue flickered out to taste the air.

Then a second climbed out, and a third. Thin, pale things like walking cadavers, moving slowly and disjointedly in a half-crouch, climbing up out of the well, tasting the air. And more of them coming.

Hathaz-Ghúl
, she thought.
Corpse-eaters.
And she wished that she was dead.

A couple of the
Ghúl
reached out and grasped hold of the body of Malia, pulling it toward them and away from being directly over the hole in the earth. They huddled around her suspended body, sniffing at her flesh and her blood, and began to chew on her arms and face. Several more of the
Ghúl
began sniffing at the hanging body of Too Tall, and at Gilgwyr as well, but Gilgwyr made a warding sign in the air and waved his hand toward Erim and Wilhem Price as though inviting the
Ghúl
to have their pick. The corpse-eaters sniffed and tasted the air, and several slowly clambered toward Wilhem Price with agonizing slowness as he and Erim struggled to get away from them. Cold, clawing hands finally reached out to take hold of his legs, and they started pulling him away from Erim. She screamed in anger and frustration around the dagger clenched in her teeth, for she could not match their uncanny strength and she felt him being pulled from her grasp.