There is a thing every farm child learns before he learns his letters, and it is this: you do not dress a carcass near the house. You take it off a ways, downwind, and you bury the offal deep, because blood carries. A gut-pile left in the yard brings the crows by noon and the foxes by dark and, if you are unlucky and the season is bad, something bigger the night after that. Bancroft learned it hauling a slaughtered hog across the barnyard with his father when he was seven, and he learned it well enough that he never once, in all his years, needed to be told twice.

He spent the whole of this night in a place built like a yard full of gut-piles, bleeding, and every wound the party took rang a bell that something in the dark could hear.

They took two days first to be men again. Clarisse had come back to the tavern the night before out of her mind with grief, torn up and matted with cobwebs, having spent a stretch of dark hours certain the rest of them were dead. She drank and she bathed and she slept it off, and in the morning she was herself again, which is to say sharp-tongued and vain and worth having. The wizard did not stay -- he looked in, saw a full party, and made himself scarce, the way his kind do.¹ So it was the four of them: Bancroft, and Irulan who is the best blade among them, and Anister with his bow and his little vials of foul-tasting cures, and Clarisse with her daggers and her fine manners. Anister spent a half day braiding up a rope ladder out of forty feet of good rope, so they would not have to ride the block and tackle down the shaft one soul at a time the way they had the week before.² A storm came through and hailed on the roof and passed. There is a blood moon due next week; the almanac-minded among them made note of it, the way farmers note a hard frost coming, without knowing yet what it will cost.

Then they went down. The ladder held. They hung it off the pillar at the top of the shaft, knotted it fast, and climbed down into ground they had walked before, and Bancroft lit his lantern and they argued a while about which way to go, the way they always do.

The zombies came before they settled it.

These were not the shambling kind. They were fast -- red-tinged eyes, a quick hunting gait, the look of a thing that means to run you down rather than wait for you to blunder into reach. Bancroft has seen the dead move slow his whole career and it had lulled him. These moved like something starving. Clarisse got the door open and put a dagger into the first one before it knew she was there,³ and it went on coming anyway, straight past Irulan, past the others, for Bancroft. They wanted him in particular. They wanted his blood, and one of them reached him and laid his forearm open with a claw, and that was where the night turned strange.

It should have been a small wound. He had taken worse from a nail. But it would not close. It bled and kept bleeding, past the point a cut like that has any business bleeding, and something about the flow was wrong -- too free, too eager, as if his own blood had gone traitor and wanted out. Anister took it for poison and pressed one of his cures on it, and the cure did nothing, because it was not poison and it was not disease.⁴ It was something the maze itself had put in the wound, some hunger that lived in this place and got into a man when the dead marked him. Bancroft had to close it the god's way in the end, laid his own hand on it and called the healing down, and only then did it seal. He marked that, and did not like it. A wound that will not clot is a wound that keeps ringing the bell.

He called on Silvanus to drive the two of them off, and got the usual half a loaf: one broke and fled, cringing at the door, and the other only came on harder, hungry for him.⁵ So they killed it the plain way. Bancroft put the elven longsword through it clean -- twice the blade came up true, the second time as good a stroke as he has ever thrown⁶ -- and Clarisse's daggers found the other when its nerve failed, and then it was quiet and they could look at what the things had been eating.

It was a man. Had been. A halfling, by the size of him, poor as a fencepost, in rags with no pack and nothing on him worth the taking. He had two flasks of oil on him, both burst -- Bancroft could read it plain enough. The little fellow had been running in the dark, had tried to strike a light and fumbled it, spilled his oil and lost his flame, and something had run him down in the blind. His belly was opened where they had fed. Bancroft has stood over enough bodies now that he does not flinch from them, but he does look, every time, and he does try to read how a man came to his end, because it seems to him the least you can do for a stranger is to know what killed him. This one was killed by the dark and a dropped match. He said the words over him and they moved on.⁷

The stick man

Behind the next door there was a growling, low and wet, and Irulan -- meaning well, meaning to be friendly to a thing she thought she knew -- called out loud into the dark that it was only them, only friends passing through. You do not raise your voice in the Barrowmaze. Every corridor of it is a throat, and a shout goes down all of them at once, and everything with an ear turns toward it.⁸ She knew it the second it was out of her mouth.

But the thing behind the door was not what came for the shout. The thing behind the door was a survivor.

It opened the door a crack -- just a crack -- and put out a hand too thin to be a living man's hand, and looked at them with two red pinpricks where a face should be, and it knew them. It was one of the mongrel-folk, the last of a band the party had crossed before and, for once, had helped rather than hurt -- healed some of them, driven off what was hunting them, sent them on their way. That had been a whole group. This was one. The rest were dead or scattered, it told them in its broken way, killed off or driven away, and it had stayed behind alone because there was nowhere left to go. Leathery wings in the dark now, it said. Bad things. Not safe. It did not ask them for anything. It only wanted to know if it was them, the ones who had been kind the one time, and when it saw that it was, it seemed to take some small comfort in that and then it shut the door.

Bancroft has thought about that more than he thought about any of the dead they put down. He is not soft about monsters; a thing that would eat him gets no tears from him. But there is a difference between a monster and a creature, and the difference is whether it is alone and afraid and remembers a kindness. That one did. They wished it luck -- what else was there -- and left it to its dark, and Bancroft carried the small useless weight of it the rest of the night. You cannot save everything down here. Most nights you cannot save much of anything. But it costs nothing to have been the party that was kind the one time, and it turns out that is worth something even to a thing with red pins for eyes.

Bad blood

After that it was the bats.

The first of them were almost a mercy, in that they taught the party what the things were before the real swarm came. Stingbats, the size of a small dog, four wings and a needle for a mouth, and they do not bite so much as plunge in and drink.⁹ One got into Clarisse's neck and hung there swelling while she swore at it, and they cut it loose and killed the couple of them and one turned tail and fled -- the clever one, the one that would go and tell the others there was blood down here. Bancroft should have thought harder about what that meant. He was busy being glad it was only a couple.

There was a spiked pit in the way of where they wanted to go, an old trap someone had already cut the mechanism out of, so that it hung open all the time like a mouth. Anister spent the better part of a half hour down on his knees in the dark fixing it -- not disarming it, they'd all learned better than to try and fill a pit with skeletons and rubble the slow way, but re-setting the ruined thing into a closed position they could trust their weight to.¹⁰ It wobbled when they crossed it but it held. All the while they were crossing, the dice of the world kept coming up kind -- roll after roll for the wandering things that might have found them, and every one of them came up empty. Clarisse joked that the dark gods loved her tonight. Bancroft did not say what he was thinking, which was that a night that generous early tends to send the bill late.

South of the pit the ground was new to them, and the first thing they found was a warning. A big room, high-ceilinged, and on the east wall somebody long dead had scratched words into the stone: Make no sound, they will seek you out. To the south of it stood a great statue, a stone figure with one arm broken off clean at the elbow, the hand gone.¹¹ Anister took it for a gargoyle and would not go near it. That was the whole of the counsel that room offered -- a dead man's warning to keep quiet, and a broken statue watching the door -- and the party, being the party, set to searching the place from corner to corner, which takes time, which rings the bell.

They came down out of the ceiling.

Four of them this time, and they had the drop on the party clean -- everyone looking at the floor for secret doors, nobody looking up, and the first anyone knew of it was the leather of the wings. They went for the blood. Everyone in that room was carrying old wounds from the first fight and the bats could smell every one. Two of them got onto Clarisse at once, into her neck, and she went down under them. For a bad moment she was neither alive nor dead, just a shape on the floor with two of the things drinking her, and if they got another turn at her she was gone for good.

Bancroft tried to pull one loose and made a hash of it. That is the part he will carry. The things have barbs on that needle, backward-facing, so that a hard yank does not draw them out -- it tears. He hauled, and instead of freeing her he drove the barb deeper and opened her throat, felt the give of it wrong under his hands, heard the sound it made.¹² He is a healer. He put a hole in a girl's neck trying to help her. He got the thing out in the end, twisted and worked it free the way you'd back a fishhook out, but the damage was done and it was his hands that did it. If Irulan had not been Irulan -- if she had not come across the room like a thresher and taken the last of them apart with one enormous stroke of the longsword -- Clarisse would have died on that floor with Bancroft's clumsiness the last thing done to her.¹³

She did die, in the smaller way. Her heart stopped. But the god was listening, for once and truly, and Bancroft called her back.¹⁴ He blessed his own hands first so they would not fail her a second time, and then he laid them on her and asked Silvanus to shepherd her soul the road back from Helix, and it came. She woke with a hole in her throat that will never quite close right and a voice gone low and rough from it, and she will hide it under a scarf and make it a fashion, because she is Clarisse and she would make a burial shroud a fashion if it came to that. Bancroft told her, quiet, that the god who gave her back does not much care to be ignored, and that she was on thin ice, and that she might think about which way she wanted to worship. She said thank you and maybe. It is the most any of them ever says.

What the blood called

He had barely got her breathing when the pack came.

They had bled all over that room -- the halfling's blood tracked in on their boots, Clarisse's on the floor, everyone's cuts weeping -- and the smell of it went out down all those corridors like a shout, and it called the fast dead the way a gut-pile in the yard calls the wolves. Four of them, running, the red-eyed hungry kind, and they came into the room already knowing there was meat in it.¹⁵ They did not spread their hunger around. They picked Anister, who was the most torn up of any of them, and they swarmed him, and inside a single exchange they had him down to the edge of dying with three more of them still on their feet around him.

There was one thing left to do and it was Bancroft's to do. He got his holy symbol up and put the whole of his faith behind it, more than he had all night, and called on Silvanus to drive the filth back to the ground it crawled out of.¹⁶ And this time the god answered better than half. Two of the four broke and ran -- one of them dragging off its pet, a stingbat it had kept somehow, the pair of them fleeing together into the dark like a thief with his dog. Two stayed. Two of the fast dead, still in the room, still hungry, and Anister bleeding out on his feet between them and the door.

That is where the night left them. Two dead things and a dying friend and a man with his god's name in his mouth, in a room where a scratched warning on the wall had told them, plain as anything, to make no sound.

They had made a great deal of sound. They had bled on everything. And the dark had heard all of it.