Bancroft came up the moor road late, a half-hour after the others, because the cobbler in Helix had needed an extra hour to put the new sole on the left boot and Bancroft was not going to dig in a wet boot if he could help it. By the time he came around the long shoulder of the ridge that hid the dig from the road, the others had already finished some short business of their own. He saw it in the trampled grass and in the streak of blood drying on Anister’s pickaxe handle and in the way Clarice was wiping her dagger on a strip of moss. He did not ask. The kind of business that left grass trampled and dagger blades wet was the kind of business he was glad to have missed.
“You’re late,” said Irulan.
“I’m late,” he agreed. He set the pack down. “How far in?”
“Far enough,” said Anister, who was leaning on the pickaxe. “We’ve got the corner of a slab. Maybe four hours and we’re through.”
It was the new entrance they had picked out three days ago – a different barrow from the one the rubble had sealed Riyou behind, on a different shoulder of the moor, marked on Anister’s map as a low mound with a depression in the top where the earth had settled into a roof. They had decided in the Brazen Strumpet, over Bolo’s stew, that they would not spend any more weeks chasing what was on the other side of a wall they could not move. They would dig where the digging had a chance of paying out. The barrow they had picked was small. The slabs at the entrance were shallow. By the look of it, two days of work would put them inside.
“All right,” Bancroft said. He took the sledgehammer off his shoulder. “Whose watch?”
“You’re senior here,” Anister said. “Used to be me when Irulan was gone. Now Irulan’s back and you’re the one with the most sense. Be the senior.”
Bancroft did not feel senior. He felt forty and tired and eager to be useful. But he nodded, and slung the sledgehammer over his shoulder, and said, “Two of us dig. Two of us watch. We rotate every hour and we rotate the watch position too, because the eyes go funny if they look at the same patch of moor for too long.” He looked at the others to see if any of them would correct him. None of them did. Anister gave a small approving nod, the way he did when one of his hounds did a thing right.
The first hour was clean. He dug with Irulan – two shovels working from opposite ends of the trench they had started – and Anister and Clarice took the two corners of the watch with the longbow and the shortbow. The dirt at the top of the mound was soft, settled, full of small white roots, and came out in spadefuls. Underneath the roots was clay. Underneath the clay, after a while, the top corner of one of the slabs.
The second hour was less clean. He was on watch by then – shield up, eyes on the moor – when Anister stopped digging and held up a hand and said quiet, and they all heard it: a faint dry rattling, far off, the kind of sound a pile of bones might make if something walked over it. Bancroft had the longsword half drawn before Anister shook his head.
It was one of the things Bancroft had learned, slowly, in the months since Branding Hill: the moor was full of things going past. Something rattled. Something croaked. Something ran on four legs through wet grass at the edge of the firelight and did not come closer. You learned to hear the difference between coming and going past the way a farmer learned to hear the difference between a sheep with a lamb in trouble and a sheep just complaining. Most of the noises were complaints. The ones that mattered, you learned to feel in your teeth before you heard them with your ears.
By the third hour the entrance was mostly evacuated. Three slabs visible: two side-pieces and the long horizontal stone over the top, the way old barrow doorways were always built. Maybe an hour of dirt left in the mouth of the thing, and then they could go in.
“Four-ten,” Anister said. He had a small brass thing he carried that he could read the time off if he held it level. “Push to five and we’re inside. Stop now and we get back to Helix in the blue hour.”
Bancroft considered it. He considered the rattling that had gone past in the second hour, and the croak from the far side of the ridge, and the fact that whatever was going to come down out of those barrows in the dark was going to come down whether or not they were standing in the doorway when it did.
“We go back,” he said. “We finish in the morning.”
“That’s my vote too,” said Anister, “for what it’s worth.”
“You’re senior, Bancroft,” Irulan said, and there was something in her voice that was almost amused. “It’s worth what you say it’s worth.”
Clarice, who had been turning the pickaxe in her hands like she had not yet decided what relationship she wanted to have with it, said: “Thank god. I was going to fall over.”
They got back to Helix in the blue hour, the way they had the day after Riyou. Bolo fed them stew and did not ask. The fire in the common room was low. Clarice – who had become, in the few days since she had introduced herself, the kind of presence around the table that Bancroft had not realized he had been missing – went to the bar to ask after Myrta the seamstress, and came back saying that Myrta was making something and the sisters would not say what, which made Clarice smile in a private way that Bancroft did not pry into.
He did not go up to the room until late. He sat at the booth by the window and watched the dark come down outside, and he thought about Riyou, and he thought about the wall, and he thought about how the wall had been still and quiet for ten days now, which was about as long as he could remember not visiting it. Sylvanus, he said, in the inside of his head, I am sorry I have not come back. I am going to be busy tomorrow. I will come when I can. He did not know if the forest god heard prayers from inside an inn. He said it anyway.
In the morning they walked back out under a high pale sky. The dig was as they had left it. The slabs were still half buried. The trench they had cut was already starting to fill with windblown dirt around the edges – a thing that did not surprise Bancroft, because that was what trenches in soft ground always did – and they spent the first half-hour just clearing what the night had put back. Anister whistled while he worked. Irulan did not. Clarice held the watch and seemed grateful for the change of duty.
It was during the second hour of digging that the toad came.
The first thing Bancroft knew of it was the splash. He had been digging. He had been listening to the spadefuls coming out of the trench, and to Anister and Clarice who were supposed to be on watch and should have called it a hundred yards out, and the next sound he heard was a heavy flump of something the size of a calf landing in shallow water, and the smaller wet rustling of a great deal of small splashing afterward.
He turned. He brought the elvish longsword half out of the sheath before he had even seen what made the sound.
What had made the sound was a toad.
It was huge. It was six feet from broad green nose to wet green hindquarter, and it was that broad again across the back, and it had jumped clean past the watch and into one of the holes the party had dug. Bancroft had not, until that moment, given any thought to those holes. They were wide, and shallow, and they had been filling overnight with the brown swampy water that the moor produced any time you cut into it. He had assumed the water was only annoying. He had not noticed – because none of them had been looking, because they were watching the moor and not the ground – that the bottom of the dig had become, at some point in the previous twelve hours, the home of an absolutely staggering number of tadpoles.
The toad was sitting in the middle of them. The tadpoles were swimming around it, and clambering up its sides, and latching to its skin in small fat black clusters. The toad was making a low satisfied wet noise, the kind of noise a thing makes when it has finally arrived where it had meant to be all along.
It was, Bancroft realized, the same kind of toad that had eaten Lulldun the day after Riyou had been sealed in. He had spent three nights since not sleeping well. The smell of toad-mouth came back to him in a wave – sour, vegetable, warm. He brought the rest of the elvish longsword out of the sheath.
“Wait,” Anister said, beside him – already, somehow, with the longbow off his back, but not drawn. He was crouched, the way he crouched when he was watching a deer come into a clearing, his eyes on the toad and not on Bancroft. “Look at it. It’s not looking at us. It’s looking at the babies.”
Bancroft looked. The toad was, in fact, not looking at any of them. Its huge gold eyes, set high in the wet skull, were tracking the small motions of the tadpoles around its flanks with a patient, almost tender attention that Bancroft would not have thought a toad capable of.
“Tadpoles,” Clarice said quietly, from where she had crept along the trench-wall to look. The note in her voice was the small pleased surprise that came over her any time a thing she had not expected turned out to be kinder than she had assumed. “Hundreds. Look at them.”
It was true. The hole the toad had jumped into was thick with them. The toad was not looking at the party. The toad had come a long way, very deliberately, to the place where its children were waiting.
Anister put the longbow down. He took two small slow steps forward – the way a man stepped when he was approaching a horse he did not yet know – and he made a low rumbling sound of his own in the back of his throat, the kind of sound Bancroft had heard him make at hounds and at half-broken mules and at the kinds of animals that did not need words to understand intentions.
The toad watched him. Anister did not stop. He raised one hand, very slow, and gestured at the far end of the dig – at a hole the party had cut on the first day, deep, wide, already half full of the same brown water – and he made the rumbling sound again.
The toad did something Bancroft would not have believed if he had not seen it. It heaved itself, with a great slow sloshing, up and out of the entrance hole, leaving a wide wet smear of mud across the slabs they had spent two days uncovering, and it lumbered past the party at a dignified slow waddle, and it slid – with the same heavy slow grace it had used to arrive – into the far hole. The tadpoles in the entrance hole, which had clearly chosen the wrong neighborhood, made what passed for a small black migration after it. The toad sank in the new hole almost to the eyes. It exhaled, long and satisfied. It was, again, in the place where it meant to be.
It was, Bancroft realized, nothing but a tired animal that had wanted a soak in a hole the four of them had dug for it without knowing they were digging it. He put the longsword away. He felt – foolishly, he thought, but he felt it – a small hot prick of shame. Sylvanus, I would have killed it. It only wanted the water.
A giant green toad sits in a brown swamp-water hole at the dig site, surrounded by black tadpoles, while Anister, Bancroft, Irulan and Clarice stand at a respectful distance and watch
“Forest god,” Anister said quietly, beside him, like he had heard the prayer. “Sometimes the moor takes care of itself.”
Bancroft did not say anything. He went back to the trench. He picked up the sledgehammer. He thought: that is the right answer. The moor is full of things that are just trying to get to their pool. Some of them eat boys. Some of them only want the tadpoles. The trick is knowing which.
The trick, it turned out, was knowing which, and they had not been knowing for very long when the second thing came.
“Five,” Anister hissed, low, from the trench-corner where he had crouched without Bancroft seeing him crouch. “Five of them. Skeletons. Coming across, north-east, two with bows. Hide.”
Bancroft heard the word hide and looked at his own plate mail and at Irulan’s plate mail and felt his heart do the small unhappy hop that it did when a thing was a problem and he was the one wearing the answer.
“We can’t,” Irulan said, beside him. She had heard it too. “Not in this. Not in time.”
“We can’t,” Bancroft agreed. He looked at Anister, who had already gone effectively invisible behind the corner of the trench. He looked at Clarice, who was already low and already sliding behind the broken throne of dirt the dig had thrown up, and was already gone too. Of course they can. It was the lightly armored ones who could choose.
“Then we make them come to us,” Anister whispered. “They don’t know we’re here yet.”
He was wrong about that. They knew. The skeletons came on across the moor with their dry corroded heads already turning, and the first thing they did, when the angle was right, was look – at the dig, at the men in plate standing by the dig, at the shining porcelain plate of Bancroft Barleychaser, who in his entire farming life had never once stopped to consider how visible he was – and then they did the thing that mattered, which was that they kept coming.
There were five of them. Two with the rotted shortbows, three with the corroded shortswords. They had come across the moor at the slow steady walk of the dead, jaws not entirely attached, eyes empty in a way that ought to have been blind and was not, and they had been heading toward the toad before they had been heading anywhere – because the toad was the closest big thing, and because the dead, Bancroft would learn, did not have the kind of mind that asked which.
They saw the toad first. They saw, a beat later, two men in shining plate at the toad’s elbow. And they came open in their walking, the way a flight of crows comes open and lets some of them peel off in a different direction.
Two stayed on for the toad. One came on for Irulan. The two archers nocked their rotted shortbows and started looking for a clean shot.
Five skeletal undead approach across the moor toward the dig, two carrying rotted shortbows and three with corroded shortswords. Bancroft and Irulan in plate stand exposed near the trench; the giant toad rears up out of its tadpole hole nearby; Anister and Clarice are off-screen in cover.
The toad knew before the rest of them did. Bancroft saw it – afterward, when he could put it together – as a low thrumming vibration that came up out of the toad’s whole body, low and dry and felt rather than heard, the kind of sound a great log made when it began to roll. The toad was not happy. The skeletons did not care. The dead, again, did not have the kind of mind that asked which.
He did the only thing he could think to do that did not involve standing still. He took the sling off his belt – because the longsword was for closing, and the things he most wanted dead were forty yards away with bows – and he stepped sideways across the dig until he was shoulder to shoulder with Irulan, and he wound the sling, and he loosed at the farther of the two archers. The stone went a yard wide and bonked off a stone slab and skipped into the moor grass.
“That,” he said, of his own throw, “was awful.”
“Try again later,” Irulan said. She was already dropping the shovel and reaching for the shield slung on her back.
From Anister’s corner came a small dry curse and the sound of a wax stopper coming out of a small green-glass vial. Bancroft did not see it. He had seen it before, on the bad day in the crypt with the toads. Foe Bane. The herbalist’s skill – a brewed-down something Anister had been perfecting in the back room of the Strumpet, that worked the way certain rare poisons worked, and that you used the way you used a poison: you chose your enemy when you opened the bottle.
A second curse came after the first. Bancroft knew that one too. Failed it. Then another curse, sharper, and a small clinking sound that Bancroft had learned to recognize as the sound a man made when he was burning a thing he had been saving for later.
The third sound, after that, was the small triumphant grunt Anister made when an attempt that had failed once finally took. Bancroft heard him sniff – the faint hard sniff a man made when he was breathing in a thing the wind would not blow away easily – and then, low, the word that mattered: “Skeletons.”
It was a thing Bancroft had never quite understood. Anister had told him, once, in a booth at the Strumpet, that the lighting-up was just the eye seeing what the brewer had taught it to see – trust the work, brother, it’s only herbs – and Bancroft had nodded and not pressed. He did not need to understand the herbs. He only needed to know they worked, and that they worked on the things that walked at sundown.
“They’re lit up,” Anister said, very quietly, almost to himself, from his corner. “Every one of them. I can see them.”
From behind the broken throne of dirt where she had hidden, Clarice took a shot, and Bancroft heard the shot a half-second before he heard her muttering – now, no, now, no, now – the small private sound of a thief threading a needle that did not want to be threaded. The arrow took longer to come out than an arrow should have. When it came out, it took the melee skeleton coming for Irulan – the orange one, the one closest – in the side of the breastbone, and the skeleton staggered and lost half a step.
It was not, Bancroft would learn afterward, a free shot. She had taken something for it. Some piece of luck or speed or the day’s good order. Whatever it was, it had cost her her place in the line: she would be last from now on, behind everyone, all day, until the next day or the next fight. Bancroft saw the small wince she gave when she paid for it. He did not yet know what she had paid.
The skeletons closed.
The melee one came at Bancroft, swung, missed – the corroded blade went past the breastplate and rang off a stone – and stayed planted to swing again. An arrow from Pink went past Bancroft’s helm and stuck in the dig pile behind him. Another arrow from Purple came in low at Irulan and Irulan, in the same gesture she had used to settle the shield in front of her, took the hit dead in the middle of the boss with a sound like a bell falling on a stone, and the shield itself broke – split clean down the front, like a clay pot dropped on a hearth – and Irulan, who had paid for it with the breaking of a thing she had carried for two years, was unhurt.
Behind it all, the toad. The toad came up out of its hole with a slow heavy thrash, and it came at the nearest melee skeleton – blue, Bancroft would say later – and its mouth closed on the skeleton’s leg below the hip, and there was the dry crack of bone and the wetter sound of bone going into something soft and not coming back out. Blue, unbothered by the fact that it was now also being eaten, swung the shortsword at the toad and put a long ugly cut across the broad green back. The toad bellowed – a deep wet sound, half rage and half complaint – and bit harder.
“It’s fighting with us,” Bancroft said, half disbelieving.
“It’s fighting for its hole,” Anister said, from his corner, dry. “We just happen to be in the same direction.”
“I’ll take it.”
The toad, by then, had made its decision.
“Run,” Bancroft said, under his breath, “you stupid wonderful thing.”
He did not have long to mourn the toad. The two remaining skeletons – the ones the toad had been wrestling with – looked around for the next nearest thing, and the skeletons did not pursue the toad, and so the next nearest thing was Clarice, and Bancroft, and the ones with no shields up. They split. One came at Clarice. One came at him.
Clarice the elven thief examines the long shallow tear across her bodice with an outraged sour expression, her dagger held in her other hand, ash and broken bones at her feet.
The other one came at him.
He got the longsword up too late. The skeleton’s stroke came in low and hard and it should have gone in under the breastplate’s bottom edge, into the meat of his hip, and Bancroft – in a half-second that seemed at the time like all the time in the world – twisted his shoulder and brought his hip back and the blade went across the plate instead of under it, with a noise like a hammer hitting a dropped pail. The shock of it went up his arm and into his teeth. But the edge did not find skin. Not this time. Sylvanus, he thought, and his voice in the inside of his head was the voice of a man who has just discovered that he is going to live another minute, you do me a kindness sometimes. Thank you.
Clarice was on her skeleton already. She had crouched the way a noblewoman crouched when she had decided to forget she was a noblewoman, which was very low indeed, and she came up under the skeleton’s hip-bone with the dagger and drove it in and up and the skeleton’s knee bent the wrong way and the skeleton fell.
“If I’d known that was your favorite bodice,” the skeleton said – it did not, of course, it could not speak, the dead did not speak, this was Anister doing the voice from his cover, deadpan – “I would not have attacked you, my dear.”
“It is my ONLY bodice,” Clarice snarled, “you JACKASS.”
Bancroft laughed. It came out of him without permission. He was bleeding – a little, from the scrape – and he was on his feet and he had a longsword in his hand and there were two skeletons left and one was on the ground and one was looking at him, and he was laughing.
It was, he realized, the right time.
He took the holy symbol off his chest. He held it up in the afternoon light. He said, in the plain voice he had used the day he turned the zombies in the crypt:
Sylvanus. Be gone.
Bancroft the cleric stands in front of an open trench with his holy symbol of Sylvanus raised, green divine light pouring from it, two skeletal figures recoiling — one dissolving into ash, the other turning to flee
The other one – the one that had come at Bancroft, the one whose blade had skipped across his plate – did not dissolve. It got up off its feet at a kind of tilted angle that nothing alive could have managed, and it looked at the holy symbol in Bancroft’s hand, and it turned, and it ran. It ran the way bad things ran in the daylight when they were no longer welcome. It went over the lip of the trench and into the moor grass and it was, very quickly, gone.
Don’t come back, Bancroft thought. Don’t ever come back.
He held the holy symbol up for another second. Then he put it down. His hands, when they were no longer holding the holy symbol, were shaking a little. They had not done that in the crypt, the first time. He decided not to think about why.
Clarice, on the ground, was stabbing the ash where the blue skeleton had been. She was doing it methodically, with an expression of concentrated outrage, as though she were trying to make sure the idea of the skeleton was also dead.
“Clarice,” Anister said gently, “it’s done.”
“It RUINED,” Clarice said, “my BODICE.”
“I know. We’ll get you a new one.”
“Myrta,” Clarice said, “is going to kill me.”
“Myrta is going to be delighted to make you another,” Anister said, and then – because he could never quite leave a thing alone, for which Bancroft was both fond of him and frequently sorry – he added: “And while she’s at it, dear, I could use a lady-in-waiting myself, if you know any.”
There was a silence. Bancroft looked at Anister. Bancroft looked at Clarice. He recognized, in the way Clarice’s shoulders went very still, the same kind of stillness he had once seen in a barn cat that had decided it was about to be a barn cat that committed murder.
Clarice stood up. She walked, calmly, across the trampled grass. She made an excellent fist for a noblewoman. And she punched Anister in the side of the face with a wind-up that started, Bancroft would later swear, somewhere in her left hip.
Anister, who had seen it coming – because Anister always saw it coming – did not raise a shield. He did not duck. He did the dwarvish thing of standing very still and accepting the blow with the dignity of a man who had earned it. The blow landed. He gave a small grunt. Then – with the same kind of slowness he used when he was reaching for an arrow – he reached out and gave Clarice a slow open-handed slap on the side of the head that was less a slap than a punctuation mark.
Clarice, having received it, sat down. Anister sat down too. They did not look at each other for a while.
Irulan, who had been watching this entire proceeding from where she was leaning on the shortbow at the edge of the trench, said: “Are we done?”
“We are done,” Bancroft said.
“Good. We are ten minutes from being inside this thing.”
He was right about the ten minutes, and Bancroft made him take the time anyway. He went around to each of them and looked at them. Clarice had a long shallow line across her ribs that had stopped bleeding on its own and would scar. Anister had a red mark on the side of his face from Clarice’s fist. Irulan was untouched. Bancroft himself had the scrape from the skeleton’s blade – a long shiny mark across the breastplate, the metal slightly bent, the leather underneath unbroken. Nothing they could not walk home with.
He did not pray over any of them, because none of them needed it. He sat down, instead, on a stone, and looked at the trench, and at the slab they were ten minutes from breaking through, and at the small pool out beyond the trench where the water was – he checked, he looked, he had to know – still moving in the small busy way that meant tadpoles. The toad was not in it. The toad had not come back. He hoped the toad was somewhere else, in some other pool, with some other tadpoles. He hoped the arrow had come out clean.
Sylvanus, he thought, if you can see him, give him a soft place to soak.
He did not say it aloud. He never said this kind of thing aloud, because he could imagine perfectly well how Anister would tease him about it, and Anister had earned the right to tease him about most things but not the right to tease him about a frog.
“Tomorrow?” he said.
“Tomorrow,” Anister said.
Clarice, who had pulled the torn edges of her bodice together with one hand and was holding them there with what dignity she could find, said: “Tomorrow. And on the way back to town we are stopping at Myrta’s, and she is going to look at this and she is going to cry, and I am going to feel very good about it.”
“That seems fair,” Bancroft said.
They walked back to Helix in the long late afternoon light. Anister walked at the back. Irulan walked in the middle, the way she did when she wanted to think. Clarice walked at the front holding her bodice together, with the kind of straight-backed offended posture that was, Bancroft thought, almost certainly the way her mother had taught her to walk. He brought up the rear with the sledgehammer.
The sky behind them was the color of a bruise that had been there a few days. The sky in front of them was clear.
He thought: one more day. One more morning. We finish this hole, and we go inside, and whatever is there is there.
He thought: I hope the toad makes it.
He thought: I do not know how to be senior. But I think today I did not do badly.
The lights of Helix came up out of the dark a long while later, and Bolo had stew, and the stew was, as ever, more of a concept than a meal, and they ate it without a great deal of conversation. Clarice went up to her room and did not come down again. Anister went out to the stable to see to the mules. Irulan and Bancroft sat in the booth by the window and did not talk much.
After a while, Irulan said: “You did all right today.”
“I felt out of my depth.”
“You were out of your depth. You did all right anyway. That’s most of being senior.”
Bancroft did not know what to say to that. He nodded. He looked into his stew.
Outside, on the Helix high street, somebody was laughing at somebody else’s joke, and somebody else was singing the kind of bad song that drunks sang at this hour, and the town was, in its small ordinary way, going on.
He thought of the pool with the tadpoles in it, out on the dark moor, and he hoped it was still alright.
Then he went up to the room and took his boots off and slept, and dreamed – briefly, peacefully – of a frog bigger than any frog had ever been, sliding very slowly into a pool of water that was full of the small busy shapes of its children, and not minding the dry men at all.