They went back in the morning because no one could think of anything else to do.
Bancroft was the one who wouldn’t let it go. Anister had said, at breakfast, in the flat voice he used when he was trying to be kind, that there wasn’t anything to go back for. She’s behind a wall we can’t move, Bancroft. She’s been behind it all night. Whatever’s happened has happened. And Bancroft had looked at his bowl of porridge and said, then at least we owe her the work of trying. Which was the kind of sentence that ended conversations rather than winning them, and so by the time the sun was properly up they were on the moor road again, Anister with a pickaxe over one shoulder, Bancroft with a sledgehammer across his own, and a new hireling walking behind them with a torch in either hand.
Irulan was not with them. She had ridden south two days ago on some errand of her own that she had not volunteered the details of – a letter from somewhere, a name Bancroft did not recognize, the kind of private business a half-orc who had been wandering a long time had a right to keep to herself – and she had said she would be back when she was back. Bancroft missed her more than he had expected to.
The new hireling was Lulldun. He had been loitering at the Grey Company offices the night before, looking for a posting, and had been willing – for a silver a day and a share of any gold they found – to carry torches into a hole in the ground for people he’d just met. He was maybe nineteen. He had a nose that had been broken once and set poorly. He said yes sir to Bancroft and yes sir to Anister and didn’t say much else.
Grig was not with them either. Grig had made his decision the morning after the Outriders – a short conversation at the door of the Brazen Strumpet, eyes on the ground, the kind of conversation where the word sorry does most of the work – and had taken the silver he’d earned and walked off down the high street toward whatever came next for a man who had learned he was not built for this. Bancroft had not begrudged him.
Two men and a boy, then. Two men and a boy walking out to a crypt to dig for a body they would not find.
They took Lulldun down into D28. The crypt was exactly as they had left it. The broken throne. The scattered skeleton. The corpse the Outriders had gutted on their way out. And at the back, behind where the throne had been, the long slow wall of rubble – floor to ceiling, wall to wall – that had closed behind Riyou the day before. Bancroft put his hand on it. The stone was the same cold it had been yesterday. Nothing had changed.
“All right,” Anister said. He spat in his palms and lifted the pickaxe. “Let’s start.”
They had been digging for half an hour when the zombies came down the stairs.
Anister saw them first and said a word Bancroft did not reproach him for. Bancroft put the sledgehammer down and reached for the holy symbol on his chest. Lulldun dropped one of his torches and did not pick it back up.
Bancroft did what clerics did. He held the holy symbol up and said: Sylvanus, turn these abominations from our path. Let us protect the small one. Let her live and grow, the way growing things grow.
Bancroft the cleric stands at the head of a ruined crypt staircase with his holy symbol raised, a torrent of green divine fire pouring from it and consuming five shambling zombies, Anister watching from behind with his bow
The smell was awful. Bancroft would not have been able to describe it to anyone who had not smelled it.
One of them was small.
He saw it in the moment before the fire took her – it, he told himself, he insisted, it, because the alternative was a thing he could not carry – a figure that came only to a man’s waist, shuffling near the back of the group, the hair wrong and the clothes wrong and the face already too far gone to read. He looked away before the fire finished. He did not want to see. He did not want to know. He told himself the barrow was full of the reanimated dead of every size and shape, which was true, and that many of them were the bones of children buried long before Riyou had been born, which was also true, and that the small one could have been any of those things, which was possibly true. And he put the holy symbol back inside his cloak and did not look at Anister and did not look at the place on the floor where the ash still smoldered.
Anister was the one who said, eventually: “Loot?”
“Look if you want,” Bancroft said, and his voice came out steadier than he expected. “I don’t think there’s anything left to look at.”
There wasn’t. The fire had been thorough. The five zombies had become five handfuls of grey powder, already drifting in the air currents of the crypt, and whatever rags or knives they had carried were not in any condition to carry anything now. Anister toed one pile and grunted and came back. He did not mention the small one. Bancroft was grateful for that.
The elf walked down the stairs about two hours later.
Bancroft had gotten used to looking up every ten minutes – old habit from the moor, where you looked up whenever you weren’t actively using your hands, because that was how you didn’t die – and the third or fourth time he looked up, there was a woman on the steps where there hadn’t been one before. She came down the way cats came down, one stair at a time, without hurry, without any particular attempt to make her presence known.
She was an elf. Not the street-elf kind that Bancroft saw in Helix, hungry around the markets. The other kind. Tall – taller than him – with hair cut to a blunt shoulder-length bob, dark as a wet crow, and the long face and almond eyes and graceful fingers that Bancroft had learned to associate with the elves who had names longer than the songs about them. She wore leather armor over something that had been expensive before it had been made practical. A slender short bow rode on her shoulder. A dagger hung in a sheath at the small of her back. She carried a pickaxe in her left hand between thumb and forefinger, the way a woman carries a dead mouse to the door.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I am looking for Bancroft Eddowes and Anister Thamaren. I was told at the Brazen Strumpet that you might be in need of another hand.”
“Forgive me,” she said. “It is how my people greet each other. You may call me Clarice.”
“Clarice what,” Anister said, from the rubble.
“Clarice de Castillagero.”
“Of course it is,” Anister said, and turned back to the rubble, and did not appear to hold it against her.
Her story, such as she volunteered it, was simple and probably half true. An elven noble, younger daughter of a house Bancroft had not heard of and so did not press about, new to Helix, looking for a purse and an education. She had heard at the Brazen Strumpet that a small party working out of that inn had lost a member the day before and might be short-handed. Bolo the innkeeper had written her a note of recommendation, which she handed to Bancroft, and which was in Bolo’s awful handwriting and said, this one seems fine, she paid for her room, she stole the pen I am writing this with.
Bancroft laughed for the first time that day. It surprised him.
“You’ll want a share,” Bancroft said.
“Of what I earn,” said Clarice. “Nothing more.”
“That’s the right answer,” Anister said, without looking up from the rubble.
Clarice nodded, slow and courtly, and then looked at the pickaxe in her hand with genuine sorrow and said: “I suppose I should make myself useful.”
She swung it. She was not good at it. She was better than Bancroft had expected, and worse than any of them except Lulldun, and she took the pickaxe in the way that nobles took pickaxes, which was with a small private look that said I will remember this later, when I tell the story of how I was ever brought so low.
Bancroft liked her. He hadn’t meant to. But he did.
The toads came about two hours after the elf did.
“Move,” Anister said, already moving himself, already dropping the pickaxe and pulling the longbow off his back in one motion. Bancroft dropped his own pickaxe and drew the elvish longsword, and saw the first toad, and the light around its belly, and the way the tongue came out of its mouth so fast the air made a sound.
By the time he got himself upright again and turned, Lulldun was a lump inside the second toad, and the second toad was chewing, and the torches Lulldun had been carrying were on the floor, one still burning and one guttering.
“The torch,” Anister said, urgent, because Anister was a dwarf and a dwarf thought about light before he thought about most other things. “Somebody get the torch.”
The guttering one went out before anyone could get it. The other one kept burning, flickering on the floor, throwing the shadows of the two toads on the wall in huge moving shapes.
Don’t think about Lulldun, Bancroft told himself, because there was nothing he could do for Lulldun, and there was still the first toad in front of him.
Clarice, from her hiding place behind the broken throne, did not attack. Bancroft could see the calculation on her face: if she shot again, the toads would notice her, and if the toads noticed her, she had four hit points and a leather jerkin and a short bow that was not good at piercing toad hide. She stayed still. It was the right call. Bancroft knew it was the right call. He also knew that watching a thief make the right call while a friend bled was one of the more specifically infuriating experiences a cleric could have.
The toads were suddenly visible. All of them. Every wart, every fold, every strand of Lulldun still showing through the belly of the second one.
“Now, Anister,” Bancroft gasped. “Now.”
Lulldun spilled out of it when Anister cut the belly open with his hand axe. There was nothing to be done for Lulldun. There was, in fact, barely enough of Lulldun to tell anyone he had been Lulldun. Anister found the dagger the boy had been wearing at his hip and the two torches, one of which had burned in the fight, one of which was still whole and dry. He put them in his own pack. He said, to no one in particular: “He didn’t last long, did he.”
“No,” Bancroft said.
Sylvanus, Bancroft thought, and his hand went to the holy symbol before his mind caught up, there’s a boy in this toad. He had a mother. Would you look for her and tell her. He knew it was not the kind of prayer the forest god would answer. He said it anyway.
No gold. No gems. No anything. Two giant toads and five burned zombies and one dead hireling, and the total weight of treasure pulled out of the morning was a dagger and a torch.
Two enormous green giant toads fight the party in the crypt, one with its tongue wrapped around Bancroft's leg while he braces his sword in its jaws, the other swallowing the hireling Lulldun, Anister firing a longbow from cover and Clarice hiding behind the broken throne with her short bow
They dug the rest of the day.
It was ugly, slow work. The rocks in the rubble fall were not the kind of rocks you could roll out of the way – they were the kind that had to be broken with a sledgehammer into smaller rocks and then carried, one by one, back out through the crypt and up the stone stairs and out onto the moor, where they piled them into a low berm to keep the spill out of the entrance. Anister did most of the breaking. Bancroft did most of the carrying. Clarice, who had the lightest frame and the cleanest hands, took the watch at the foot of the stairs and traded off on the pickaxe when one of them needed to sit down.
Three feet.
The rubble went on for – no one knew how far. Ten feet. Fifty. Whatever length of passage Riyou had squeezed through had been made into a solid brick of broken rock, and the three feet they had cut through had been the easy part.
“Days,” Anister said. “Maybe a week. More than a week if we don’t bring more hands. And we don’t have more hands.”
“We could hire more,” Bancroft said, without conviction.
“At what a day? Two silver each? For a week? For no treasure at the other end?”
He did not answer, because there was no answer. Anister sat down on another stone and drank from a skin and handed it to Clarice, and Clarice drank and handed it back. Bancroft sat down too. He looked at the three-foot hole and at the rubble behind it and at the dark on the other side where the lantern light did not reach and he thought: there is nothing in there for us. There is nothing on the other side of this rock that we can carry out. Not her body. Not her dagger. Not her whistle. Not the scar on her arm. Not a single thing that any of us could put in a pack and bring back to Helix and bury under a stone with her name on it.
“Has there been any sign,” he said finally, aloud, because he could not keep it in, “of – of anything. On the other side. Any noise. Any movement. Anything at all.”
“No,” Anister said. “None all day.”
Clarice, who had not known Riyou, said nothing, and was right to say nothing.
Bancroft let his head rest against the stone behind him and closed his eyes.
All right, he thought. I tried, Sylvanus. I came back. I turned the dead off her. I made the hole three feet bigger. I prayed for the boy in the toad. I did what I could do. And it wasn’t enough. And it was never going to be enough.
“We should head back,” he said. “Before dark.”
They got back to Helix in the blue hour. Clarice walked in the middle of the line, quiet, matching the pace of the short-legged members of the party without any apparent effort. Anister brought up the rear with the mules. They saw nothing on the moor road except a pair of distant figures at the top of a ridge who did not come closer, and by the time the torches of Helix’s outer wall came into view, Bancroft could not remember what color the sky had been an hour ago.
The Brazen Strumpet was warm. The Brazen Strumpet was always warm. Bolo fed them stew that had been stew for three days and was, by now, more of a concept than a meal, and Anister paid for it with one of the silver coins he had left, and they sat in the booth by the window and did not talk for a long time.
Bancroft, Anister, and the new elven thief Clarice sit around a booth at the Brazen Strumpet at evening, firelight on dark wood, an empty halfling-sized gap left at the table where Riyou used to sit
“I could ask around,” Anister said finally. “Rumors. A gold a head. Something might turn up.”
“Go ahead.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I gave him the gold. I’m not a barbarian.”
“We have twenty rumors in this town,” Clarice said, conversational. “In my experience of towns, twenty is, in fact, a rather large number. Bardstown had seven. Helix is practically cosmopolitan.”
Bancroft laughed again. Two laughs in one day. It was unseasonable.
They talked, quietly, about what to do next. Clarice was in favor of turning around and going back to the Barrow Maze proper – the main entrance, the one the Outriders had not yet gutted, the one they had been meaning to try for weeks. Anister agreed. A week of rubble-breaking for no treasure, he said, was not an adventurer’s plan. It was a stonemason’s plan.
Bancroft did not commit. He looked at his bowl of stew and let the silence do its work.
“The rubble isn’t moving,” he said eventually. “And she isn’t coming back through it. And if she were – if by some chance she were still down there and she were going to come through – she would take longer than we have to wait here eating Bolo’s stew. So. We leave the hole. We go back when we have better tools, or more hands, or a reason. And in the meantime we do what the rest of you are paid to do.”
“Barrow Maze,” Anister said.
“Barrow Maze. When Irulan is back.”
Clarice raised her cup of watered wine. “To new holes in the ground.”
“To new holes in the ground,” Anister said.
They drank. Bolo, from behind the bar, rang the bell for closing.
Bancroft went up the stairs to the room and sat on the edge of the bed and took off his boots and did not pray, for once, because he did not know what he would have said. He laid the elvish longsword across his knees and looked at his hands – the new calluses on the palms, the smear of toad blood that had dried into the creases of the knuckles, the small spot on the thumb where the pickaxe handle had rubbed a blister and the blister had broken – and thought: I am learning a new set of calluses for a new kind of work, and I am not the man I was when I left Branding Hill, and Riyou is not coming back through a wall of rocks, and Sylvanus does not reach into places where the forest cannot follow, and tomorrow I am going to put my boots back on and walk into a hole in the ground.
It was enough of a thought to sleep on. It had to be.