The necromancer fled north through the barrow, and the cleric followed.
The cleric had been dizzy since the last fight. He felt as if his head were filled with something thin and wrong, like air that had been breathed too many times. The barrow would occasionally shimmer at the edges of his vision, the walls going soft and then hard again, and he could not tell if it was the blood loss or the dark or just the way this place worked on a man after long enough inside it. His faith felt like a well that someone had drawn from too often. Once, not so long ago, it had answered every prayer. Now it was the barrow, where nothing answered but the dead.
He was a man named Bancroft, and he was the last cleric of Sylvanus — a farmer from a small holding who had walked away from his life because a god told him to. He was a cleric, a knight of a different sort, and he was hunting the necromancer Hendrix. He didn’t know how many corridors he had followed, or how far he had come from the others. He only knew that Hendrix had killed people he was responsible for, and that the pursuit was not optional.
The darkness was a physical weight, pressing against his eyes, making every step a guess. The green light on his shield threw shadows that jumped and swung against the walls, and beyond the light there was nothing — no horizon, no sky, no distance that could be measured by a man looking ahead of himself. Only corridors that bent and narrowed and opened into junctions where all choices looked the same, and the smell of stone and old death, and the faint wet sweetness of things that had been buried and were no longer content to stay that way.
But he didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop.
He pushed harder, stumbling through the passage. Something flickered at the edge of the shield-light — a side room, a huddled shape in dark robes, small and still. He registered it and kept moving. The door ahead was more important. Hendrix was ahead, not behind. Hendrix was always ahead.
He reached the door, hauled it open. A room beyond — pillars, open space, empty. No Hendrix. No footprints in the dust. No sound of retreating boots. Nothing.
He stopped. Leaned against the doorframe because his legs were not entirely reliable. Cast a healing prayer on himself, felt Sylvanus knit the worst of the bruising back together, and in the brief clarity that came with the easing of pain, he understood.
The robed figure in the side room. The one he’d stumbled past without stopping. The one that had been too small and too still and too convenient. That had been Hendrix. Crouching in a fold of the dark, waiting for the relentless man to walk past him, because in a place without horizons that was all you had to do — hold still and let the pursuit go by.
It had almost worked.
Then the light died.
Not a flicker, not a warning — just gone, the green winking out the way a candle does when a door opens somewhere you can’t see. Complete dark.
Somewhere behind him, Irulan swore and struck flint. The spark caught nothing. Her hands were steady enough — Irulan’s hands were always steady — but in the dark, fumbling blind, the torch wouldn’t take. She tried again. The same nothing.
“I’ll hold the doorway,” she said. “If he comes through, I’ll know.”
From the south — from the room where the robed figure had been — a gray bolt streaked through the dark and caught Irulan dead center in the chest. She grunted — hit hard, from a man they’d thought was a cowering prisoner.
“I very much resent being injured for your god’s mission, Bancroft,” she said through her teeth. “This is your fault.”
He couldn’t argue with that.
Bancroft heard the scream. Distant, echoing through stone, the kind of sound that carried because the barrow wanted it to.
Lerwin told the rest of it later, when they found each other again. SeaCrock had woken — barely, hurt, the sword wound still bleeding — and killed the zombie with his last spell. He’d lit a candle, looked for Riyou, found nothing but blood on stone. Then he’d sent Lerwin north to find them.
“Go find the others,” he’d said. “Meet me back here.”
The sapphire skeleton had reformed behind him. The gems pulled them back together — bone finding bone — and SeaCrock hadn’t heard it coming. It hit him once and he went down.
Kolix hadn’t lasted much longer. Lerwin didn’t say what happened to Kolix. The look on his face said enough.
A sapphire-skulled skeleton looms over the fallen dwarf wizard SeaCrock by dying candlelight, Kolix's body visible in shadow
Riyou had her own story. She told it later, in pieces, the way she told things — grudgingly and out of order.
She had woken in total darkness, badly hurt, with something furry near her face. The something was a mongrelman called Flip-Flop, and Flip-Flop had packed her neck wound with moss and what might have been bird dung and was offering her a dead rat as a meal.
“I’m kind of on a diet,” Riyou said.
Flip-Flop was not offended. He was not offended by anything. He was simply glad to be alive and glad she was alive and wanted very much for them both to remain that way in the dark, where the dead things couldn’t see you.
She asked about light. “Light evil,” Flip-Flop said. “Darkness all around. Can’t hide in light. Can only hide in darkness.”
She asked about her friends. “Dead now,” Flip-Flop said, with the certainty of someone who had seen a lot of people die. “Bad necromancer. Bad him.”
She asked about a way out. Flip-Flop communicated with his people — a warbling sound, like rats talking to rats — and returned. “Skeletons gone. We lead you to exit.”
He took her hand. It felt like a lizard and a raccoon at the same time. She followed the tug through passages she couldn’t see, up stairs she counted by feel, to a door that took her full weight to open. Beyond it, sixty feet of corridor, and at the end — sunlight. Blinding, distant, real.
She walked toward it and did not die.
“How can I thank you, Flip-Flop?” she said at the threshold, but there was no answer. He was already gone.
Riyou the halfling rogue is led through darkness by Flip-Flop the mongrelman toward distant sunlight at the top of stone stairs
Lerwin arrived from the south with the last working torch. Irulan lit hers from his — a moment of warmth and cooperation in a night that had been short on both — and the corridor filled with orange light again.
Bancroft cast Light on his shield. This time Sylvanus answered. The green glow spread across the metal like dawn on water, and he could see again — the corridor, the open pit between them and Hendrix, Irulan bleeding from two hits but standing with the particular stubbornness of a woman who would not sit down until the problem was resolved.
Hendrix was on the far side of the pit. He fired another bolt — gray, precise, the same spell that had hit Irulan twice now. She staggered but kept her feet. She was running out of body to damage.
Then Hendrix held up a gem. Fifty gold pieces, catching the torchlight.
“I will give you this,” he said across the pit, “if you behead that stupid Sylvanus cleric for me. Right now.”
“Not good enough,” Irulan said.
“Cow,” Hendrix said.
“My services come at a higher price than that.”
He fled. Door opening, footsteps fading, and then the particular silence of a man who knows you can’t follow because there’s a ten-foot pit between you and him.
The pit was ten feet wide. Irulan was barely standing — two bolts of necromantic energy and nothing between her and death but stubbornness.
“Bancroft, this is your mission from God,” she said. “If you want to keep going after him, he went through that door. I will not be joining you. Because if I stub my toe, I die.”
She looked at the pit. She looked at Bancroft. She looked at the pit again.
“Fine,” she said, and jumped.
Her boots hit the far edge. She teetered — one awful moment where the outcome balanced on the lip of the stone — and then her weight went forward and she was across, breathing hard, alive.
She dropped the torch. It clattered on the stone and — by whatever grace watches over women who jump pits when they’ve no right to be alive — stayed lit. She pulled her shortbow in the same motion, nocked, drew, and shot down the corridor into the dark where Hendrix was running.
The arrow found him. Not a killing shot by any measure — a glancing hit, barely enough to drop a rat — but Hendrix was already bloodied and it was all he had left. He clutched the shaft in his chest and sank to his knees.
Irulan looked back toward Bancroft’s shield-light. She regarded his holy symbol.
“Sylvanus,” she said. “On behalf of your priest, I was his hands in this matter.”
A pause.
“Can we stop being God at him now? Because we need healing.”
Bancroft felt it — a lightness in his chest, the lifting of a weight he’d carried since the divine mission began. The penalty was gone. Sylvanus was satisfied. A half-orc mercenary with a shortbow had killed the necromancer by torchlight across a pit, and that was enough.
Irulan the half-orc warrior leaps across a dungeon pit, dropping a torch and firing her shortbow at the fleeing necromancer Hendrix, while Bancroft watches from behind with his glowing green shield
Hendrix’s body held a 50-gold-piece gem, a symbol of Nergal etched into his robe, a wicked black dagger, and a belt with severed fingers worked into the leather. Irulan picked up the gem with the corner of her cloak and dropped it into a sack without touching it. She left the rest.
“Bancroft, you don’t need his head or anything, do you?”
He didn’t. Sylvanus didn’t work that way.
They left the body where it fell, in a room of pillars that had no other purpose. Somewhere far off, the sound of booted feet — many of them, moving south — and the clatter of skeletons following. The mongrelmen, maybe, drawing the dead away. A kindness from people who lived in the dark and knew how to move through it.
Bancroft jumped the pit. He cleared it without thinking, which was good, because if he’d thought about it he might have thought about Irulan doing it half-dead and felt something complicated.
He healed her first. Sylvanus answered — warm, generous, the prayer working the way it should. Color returned to her face. She moved like a person instead of a wound.
They found SeaCrock at the bottom of the southern corridor. Irulan turned him over. Bancroft knew before he knelt — had known from the stillness of it, the particular heaviness of a body that isn’t holding itself up anymore.
He tried to bring him back. Prayed. Shook him. Nothing worked. SeaCrock Hufferpants — three scars from three brushes with death, and one final encounter that no prayer could fix. Gone in the dark.
Bancroft said the words you say. They were not enough. They never were.
Lerwin was alive but hurt. Bancroft offered healing, which meant offering Sylvanus, which meant explaining to a man-at-arms who worshiped St. Yig that there was another option.
“I grew up on a farmstead,” Bancroft said. “Sylvanus helps the plants grow. The green things. The things in the woods.”
Lerwin looked at him with the expression of a man considering a new idea for the first time in years. “I used to tend farmlands,” he said. “When I was young.”
He took the healing. It was the strongest Bancroft had managed all night — the prayer rolling out like it had been waiting for someone who would appreciate it. Lerwin stood straighter.
“A man of God,” he said. “I don’t recognize that symbol. But it seems good.”
They collected what they could. Kolix’s dagger and flint and steel. Tarsil’s longsword. Gallo’s body, which had been fed upon. They put Lerwin under SeaCrock’s weight and moved south to the exit, where Irulan worked the mechanism with a dagger — the chisel was gone, but a blade fit well enough — and the door ground open.
Sunlight.
Riyou was sitting in it. Bloodied, scarred, a poultice of moss and something worse plastered to her neck, squinting at the sky like she’d never seen it before.
“You’re alive,” Bancroft said.
“I’m alive,” she said. “Can I get help?”
He healed her. Dug deeper than he’d dug all night, reached for whatever Sylvanus had left to give. The wound on her neck closed partway. Not much. Enough.
“You all were helpful,” he said. “You stood by me. One of you got the final blow in, at great risk to yourselves.”
Irulan said nothing. She was looking at the swamp and thinking about the walk home.
The swamp tried to finish what the barrow started.
They were halfway back to Helix — bruised, slow, carrying a dead dwarf — when Bancroft felt the wrong kind of attention. Eyes in the ferns. Movement that tracked them. Four shapes resolved out of the undergrowth: human, or something that had been human once. Filed teeth, matted fur clothing, hair like rope. Wild eyes that didn’t blink.
They did not look interested in conversation.
Four feral humans with filed teeth and matted furs emerge from swamp undergrowth to ambush the wounded party of Bancroft, Irulan, and Riyou
“Evade?” Riyou said.
“Evade,” Irulan said.
They threw copper on the ground — sixty-eight pieces between them, the universal language of desperation — and ran. It didn’t work. The feral things didn’t care about copper. They cared about meat.
The first one reached Irulan, who had readied her sword. She killed it mid-stride — one clean cut, the kind of swing you make when you’ve been practicing since you could hold a blade. It split open and she didn’t look at it.
Riyou’s arrow went wide. Bancroft tried to raise a shield of faith and felt the prayer bounce back empty. Not tonight. Again.
Then the second one got behind Irulan. Filed teeth, angled for the neck — the same neck that already had a zombie bite healing on one side and a magic missile burn on the other. A savage bite, deep into the muscle. She staggered but didn’t go down, because Irulan didn’t go down, she just got angrier, and she killed the one that bit her with the return stroke.
Bancroft took the third. The elvish longsword found something vital and the thing collapsed in the ankle-deep water.
The fourth — the last — went for Lerwin.
Lerwin went down and did not get up.
Bancroft stood over the body of the man he’d healed twenty minutes ago, the man who’d listened about Sylvanus and found something in it, the man who’d carried SeaCrock’s body without being asked. He tried the healing prayer one more time. Sylvanus did not answer.
The future of Sylvanus’s first convert sank into the swamp with everything else.
Bancroft said the rites. Ten minutes, the Sylvanus way — returning the body to the earth that grew it, the swamp that would take it apart and make something green from the pieces. It was the right thing. It felt like nothing.
While he prayed, something rose from the water behind him.
Riyou saw it first. Whatever instinct she had — the cult-trained paranoia, the halfling’s sense for when things were about to go wrong — fired before anyone else’s. She screamed, which was not dignified but was effective.
The thing was humanoid. Swamp-rotted, moss-covered, bony fingers reaching for the living with the patience of something that had been waiting in the water for a very long time. Not a ghost — no cold, no translucence. Something that had died in the swamp and refused to stay down.
It clawed at Bancroft. The plate armor earned its weight — the fingers scraped across steel and found nothing.
Riyou ran. Irulan ran. Bancroft ran. They failed to lose it on the first try — the thing was slow but tireless, tracking them through the ferns with the relentless certainty of the dead. On the second attempt, they cut around stones and trees and put enough distance between themselves and it that the tracking broke.
It was still out there somewhere. Searching.
They got back to Helix looking like people who had been through something that words wouldn’t cover. Riyou was bloodied and limping. Irulan was holding her neck. Bancroft was carrying a dead dwarf and the memory of a dead henchman and the knowledge that the swamp held at least one thing that wanted to eat him.
They drank.
Twenty-five gold apiece at the Brazen Strumpet, which bought a day and a night of the kind of oblivion that adventurers paid for because the alternative was sitting quiet with what they’d seen.
Bancroft heard too much talk about St. Yig. The local god, the town god, the one everyone worshiped because everyone else did. He’d been quiet about Sylvanus — had always been quiet — but the ale stripped the quiet off and left the farmer underneath, the one who’d walked away from everything comfortable because a god told him to. He started a fight. Not a good fight. The kind where tables break and someone gets thrown and the authorities show up.
Seven gold in fines. Banned from the Strumpet for a couple of weeks. He’d apparently goosed one of the barmaids, which he didn’t remember, and which was unlike him, and which he chose to believe was slander.
Irulan woke up two days later in a room that wasn’t hers, clutching a greatsword she’d never seen before. She did not take it. She walked back to her own room and said nothing to anyone.
Riyou arm-wrestled some rough men with filed ambitions and lost badly enough to wrench something. Her strength would be three less for the next few days — the kind of injury that happened when you were a halfling who said yes to the wrong dare.
Mazzah had the potion identified. The dull gray liquid was Detect Thoughts — useful, dangerous, the kind of thing that made Bancroft’s skin crawl because of who wanted it and why.
The gems were clean. No magic. Just money.
And then Mazzah turned to the real business, which was Riyou and the tablet she carried in the tattoos on her skin. He wanted that information the way a man in a desert wants water — not casually, not as a preference, but as a necessity that crowded out everything else.
“You will see the error of your ways,” Mazzah said to Riyou, wagging his finger. “And then I will get the information from you, and together we could do good in this world.”
“Prove it,” Riyou said.
“There’s nothing to prove, my dear. I am not an adventurer. Away with you.”
After she left, Mazzah leaned close to Bancroft and whispered. There would be extra gold, he said, if Bancroft could bring back her body. After she died. Because the information couldn’t die with her. Because the tattoos held something singular, something that could be read from flesh whether the flesh was breathing or not.
Bancroft said: “I talk to her every day.”
“Yes,” Mazzah said. “But convince her otherwise.”
Across the room, Irulan caught the tone if not the words. She would ask about it later. Bancroft would have to decide how much to tell her.
Five people entered the barrow that night. Three came out. The necromancer was dead. The mission was complete. And the wizard in the tower wanted Bancroft to think about what happened to Riyou’s body when Riyou was done with it.
It had been that kind of night.