Four new faces at the entrance to the barrow. Bancroft sized them up the way his father had sized up hired hands at harvest — which ones would last the day, which ones would wander off, which ones would break something expensive. The halfling was interesting. Small, careful hands, a crossbow that looked recently oiled, and a leather case of bottles and powders that marked him as an apothecary. The others were what they were: bodies. Warm ones, for now.
“Stay behind us,” Bancroft said. “Shoot at anything that moves and isn’t one of us.”
“What if it’s hard to tell?” the halfling asked.
“Then don’t shoot.”
Anister, the archer, had a steadiness about him that the others lacked. He carried a longbow and wore the expression of a man who had already decided he was coming back out. The other two — Jack and Ghalf — had the look of people who had been told what was down there but thought it was exaggeration. It wasn’t.
The barrow tested the new ones early. Bad air in a low passage — the kind that sat heavy in the lungs like breathing through a wet cloth. Ghalf made it through. The halfling and Jack came out the other side gray-faced and retching, bent double, wiping their mouths with shaking hands. Bancroft remembered his first time. He’d been sick too. The barrow didn’t care about your resolve. It cared about your lungs.
Irulan worked the doors. The first one fought her — stone on stone, ancient hinges that had rusted shut and didn’t care that someone needed them to move. She braced her shoulder against it and pushed until something gave. The second was worse. She lost it on the first try, the stone grinding back into its frame, and had to set herself again, lower this time, legs driving, and force it open with a sound like teeth being pulled.
She didn’t complain. She never complained. She just moved to the next door and waited for it to be difficult.
The zombie was in a side chamber, standing in the dark the way they did — not waiting, not thinking, just present in the way that a stone was present, until something living came close enough to matter.
Bancroft’s blade found it first. The cleansing light along the steel hissed where it touched dead flesh, and the thing flinched — if you could call it flinching, that mechanical recoil of a body that remembered pain without understanding it. Then Irulan was past him, one stroke, and the zombie came apart at the seams. The sound it made was wet and final.
Riyou put an arrow through it from behind while it was still falling. Professional. Unnecessary. But Riyou didn’t leave things to chance, and a zombie that was mostly dead was still partly dangerous.
It tried to hold itself together. Its hands groped at the floor as if the stones could anchor it to the world. They couldn’t.
The room beyond was wrong.
Bancroft knew it before he crossed the threshold — a pressure behind his eyes, a wrongness in the air that had nothing to do with smell and everything to do with what had happened here. He tried to read it. His mind slid off the feeling the way a hand slides off wet stone, finding no purchase, no edge to grip. He knew something terrible had occurred in this place. He could not have said what.
Anister, twenty feet behind them, said: “People died here. Recently.”
The archer was right. There were signs — blood dried to black on the flagstones, a scatter of equipment that had been dropped rather than set down, the particular disorder of a fight that had gone wrong fast. Another party had come through this room. The Monday group, maybe, the ones who ran a different schedule through the same corridors. They had found something here that they couldn’t handle.
Bancroft looked at the blood and thought about the people it had belonged to. He always thought about the people. It was the farmer in him — the part that counted heads at the end of the day and noticed which ones were missing.
They came through the door.
Not shambling, not slow — purposeful, the way living things moved when they wanted something. Undead priests in rotted vestments, their faces wrong in the way that faces got wrong when whatever had animated the flesh had no interest in making it look alive. Huecuva. Bancroft had heard of them but never fought one. They were worse than the stories.
Irulan hit the door. She braced against it with her full weight, boots sliding on the flagstone, arms locked, and for a moment the door held — stone against dead strength — and then it didn’t. The Huecuva pushed and she lost ground, six inches, a foot, the gap widening enough for a clawed hand to reach through. She slammed it back. The hand withdrew. The door held.
“Now would be good,” she said through her teeth.
Bancroft swung the Elvish longsword. The blade connected with the first one through the gap — a hard, clean hit that would have killed anything that was alive. The Huecuva staggered but didn’t fall. Irulan’s blade followed, biting into something that had once been a ribcage. The recruits fired from the back. Anister’s arrows went wide — twice, both times, the shaking in his hands visible even at distance. The halfling apothecary leveled his crossbow and put a bolt through a Huecuva’s skull.
It was the shot of the night. The kind of shot that experienced fighters missed and a man who’d never killed anything made look easy. The bolt punched through bone and the Huecuva dropped.
Driah Plegparg looked at his crossbow as if it had done something surprising. It had.
The halfling apothecary Driah Plegparg fires a crossbow bolt through a Huecuva's skull while Bancroft fights with his glowing longsword and Irulan braces against the door
Riyou’s arrow caught the next one in the shoulder. She followed it with a second shot that found a gap in the vestments and sank deep. The Huecuva kept coming.
They swarmed. Three of them at once, pressing through the gap Irulan couldn’t hold shut, and the room became what the barrow wanted it to become — close, dark, and full of things that wanted to touch you.
One of them touched Bancroft.
Not a claw. Not a strike. A touch — deliberate, almost gentle, the dead hand pressing against his arm where the plate didn’t cover. He felt it immediately. Not pain. Something else. A wrongness spreading through him like ink dropped into clean water, curling outward from the point of contact, finding the channels of his blood and following them inward. His body tried to reject it. He felt his body rise against the invasion the way a wall rises against a flood — and fail. Completely. The sickness took hold as if it had been waiting for permission, deep and certain and familiar.
He knew what it was. The Church of St. Ygg had cured him of disease before. Rat bites, the last time. He knew what it cost. He knew what it felt like to walk into that church with empty pockets and ask for something only gold could buy.
Sixty gold pieces. He could already feel the weight of them leaving his purse.
Bancroft recoils in horror as an undead Huecuva priest in rotted purple vestments touches his arm, dark corruption spreading visibly from the contact
He called on Sylvanus.
It was the prayer that had worked before — the one that pushed the dead back, that made them flinch and retreat, that reminded them they had no right to walk. He raised his hand and spoke the name and felt the prayer go out into the dark and come back empty.
He tried again. Harder this time, reaching deeper into whatever well the faith drew from, the well that had once been full and now returned nothing but echoes. Sylvanus was not here. Sylvanus was somewhere else, tending green things in a place where the dead stayed where you put them.
The Huecuva didn’t care about failed prayers. They kept coming. Disease touches rained down on the party — hands reaching, pressing, finding skin. The recruits fired from the back. Anister’s arrows hit nothing. Driah’s bolt went wide. Ghalf’s sling stone sailed past everything and struck a wall.
Then the Huecuva reached the back line.
It happened fast. Three of the four went down — Jack, Ghalf, the halfling who had made the shot of the night — in the way that untested fighters went down, which was quickly and without the kind of resistance that experience taught you. The barrow ate the new ones first. It always ate the new ones first.
Anister survived. He’d been further back, and he’d been moving, and he’d learned in the space of three minutes what most fighters took months to understand: stay out of reach and keep shooting.
The light went out.
Not Bancroft’s shield — someone else’s torch, kicked over in the press of bodies, and suddenly half the room was darkness and the other half was the thin green glow of Sylvanus on steel, which wasn’t enough. Not enough to see. Not enough to fight by. Not enough to tell the living from the dead in a room where the dead outnumbered the living and looked enough like them to matter.
Bancroft called for light. The first prayer failed — the words leaving his mouth and dissolving in the dark like smoke. The second one caught. Green light bloomed on his shield and the room came back, and what it showed was worse than the darkness: Huecuva everywhere, the recruits down, Riyou dodging a claw that caught her shoulder and spun her sideways.
She twisted free. The halfling apothecary’s body was at her feet and she stepped over it without looking down because looking down was how you died.
Irulan’s blade found a Huecuva and opened it from collar to hip. The thing kept moving for two more steps and then fell.
The fight went on longer than any fight should. Rounds bled together. Bancroft lost track of time the way you lost track of time in the barrow — completely, helplessly, the minutes becoming a single sustained moment of violence and fear.
Riyou took hits. She dodged when she could and absorbed what she couldn’t, her small body twisting between claws that reached for her like branches in a wind. Anister fired from the back and hit nothing. His hands were steady but his targets moved wrong — the dead didn’t flinch where the living flinched, didn’t lean where the living leaned, and his arrows passed through spaces where bodies should have been.
Irulan carried it.
She had always carried it — the fights that lasted too long, the ones where Bancroft’s prayers failed and Riyou’s arrows ran short and the hirelings died. Irulan was the reason they came home. Her longsword found the Huecuva again and again, each stroke doing the kind of damage that mattered, the kind that made dead things stay dead. The blade rising and falling with the mechanical precision of a woman who had decided this fight was over and was now implementing that decision.
The last Huecuva fell and did not get up.
The room was quiet. The kind of quiet that followed violence — not peaceful, just empty, the air still ringing with things that had already stopped.
They left the death room with nothing. No treasure, no relics, no gems pried from the walls. The room had taken three of their four recruits and given back only the knowledge that it could be survived, which was not the kind of knowledge you could spend.
Back in Helix, Bancroft walked to the Church of St. Ygg.
He knew the way. He had been here before — after the rat bites, after the infection that had nearly killed him, after every time the barrow put something in his blood that Sylvanus couldn’t or wouldn’t clean out. The priests received him with the expression of men who saw a lot of wounded adventurers and had stopped being moved by it. They had a cure. The cure cost sixty gold pieces.
It was nearly everything he had.
He paid it. A farmer understood debts. You paid what the seed cost or you didn’t plant. You paid what the healer charged or you died slow. There was no middle ground and no negotiation and no amount of righteous poverty that changed what things cost.
The disease left him like water draining from a cracked jug — not all at once, but steadily, the wrongness thinning and fading until his blood felt like his own again. He stood in the nave of St. Ygg’s church with empty pockets and clean veins and thought about the tree.
The priests of Ygg worshiped a god who had been crucified on one. Nailed to living wood and left there to suffer, and they had built their faith around the suffering — the nails, the weight, the dying. They had not, as far as Bancroft could tell, given much thought to what the tree had done. The tree had held him. The tree had grown around him. The tree had done what trees did, which was endure, which was support, which was the green patient work of something rooted and alive.
Sylvanus would understand the tree. Sylvanus might even understand the god who’d hung on it.
There was common ground between a god of growing things and a god who’d died on one. If neither side screwed it up. If the priests stopped counting coins long enough to notice what was growing in their own story. If Bancroft stopped getting bitten by things that required their help.
He walked out into the daylight. Broke. Alive. The halfling’s crossbow bolt still rattling around in his memory — that perfect, impossible shot from a man who hadn’t survived long enough to make another one.
The barrow took his health, his prayers, his hired hands, and his savings, and gave back nothing but another day alive.
Some days that was enough.
Bancroft in battered plate armor pays coins to robed priests at the altar of St. Ygg, a great wooden tree dominating the wall behind them in candlelight