Every animal that works a farm will run from something, once. A horse that has never shied in its life will shy at a paper sack caught in a hedge, and when it goes, it does not go anywhere in particular. It just goes, ears flat, blind, and it will run straight through a fence it has known since it was a foal and cut itself to ribbons doing it. You cannot talk it down. There is nothing left in it that can hear you. All you can do is get in front of it and knock it over, and getting in front of it is how men get killed.

Bancroft has put his shoulder into a spooked cow before and walked away limping and satisfied. This week he found out what it is to be the cow.

Finishing what was in the room

They picked up where the last night dropped them: two fast dead still standing, Anister nearly emptied out, and the god's light still burning behind the eyes of the ones Bancroft had driven off.

That last part is worth saying plainly. When Silvanus turns the dead, they do not simply retreat. They go blind and frantic. They scrabble at the walls with their fingers looking for a hole to get out of, whining, and they do not fight back. Bancroft has told himself for a while now that turning is a mercy -- that it buys the party a door and costs the enemy nothing but dignity. That is not what it is. What it is, is that he blinds a thing and his friends then kill it while it claws at stone. The party walked around them and cut them down one at a time and there was a good deal of cheerful talk about it, and Bancroft did his share of the cutting. He does not repent of it. They were dead men who had eaten a halfling in a corridor. But he will not call it a mercy any more.¹

The killing itself went the way it goes. Clarisse put her foot down on a dead stingbat in the dark and the thing squelched and gave her away, and her thrown dagger arrived hilt-first and bounced off a skull.² Irulan opened one nearly to the spine and it kept coming. Anister put an arrow through a face from across the room, straight in, and the thing went down and got back up with the shaft still in it.³ That was the night's rhythm. Every one of them went down twice. You would put a thing on the floor and watch it lie there and start to think about the next one, and then the fingers would move.

Bancroft took one with the elven sword, a clean deep cut, and it fell and twitched and tried and could not.⁴ Irulan came within a hair of ruining her blade on the gargoyle's plinth on a bad swing, swore, gathered herself, and took the next one through the thigh instead.⁵ Later she brought that sword down and split one lengthwise, and both halves lay there twitching and trying to rise separately, which is a thing Bancroft would rather not have watched. The last one he only got a glancing blow on, the flat of the blade, and it collapsed anyway because there was so little left of it.⁶

Somewhere in the middle of it his light went out. That is the true enemy in this place, not the dead. He stood in the dark with a shield on one arm and asked Silvanus for light with everything crowding him, and got it, brighter than he deserved.⁷

Irulan killed the last of them a moment later.⁸

What the room was hiding

They had been searching that chamber when the pack hit them, so they finished it. Forty minutes on their knees with the lights guttering.

The statue was a gargoyle. Winged, crouched on its dais, and the reason its left arm ends at the elbow is that it is looking at the hand. Head down, wings folded, staring at a stump where a hand ought to be. Anister had been keeping clear of it all night on the theory that it might come alive, and Bancroft does not think it will, and he also does not much care to be the one who is wrong about it.

The only thing of value in the room was a gem the size of a thumbnail, and it was under one of the dead stingbats, packed in their filth. Anister dug it out with a scrap of leather rather than ruin the cloth he breathes through, which is the sort of judgment that keeps a man alive down here. Ten gold, maybe. That was the whole take for the night.

And on the east wall, still: Make no sound, they will seek you out. They read it again in better light. They took no instruction from it whatsoever.

The ones behind the door

There had been growling behind the north door for two hours while they searched. When they finally opened it there were half a dozen mongrel-folk crowded together in the dark in tattered robes, and every one of them was wrong in a different way -- one swollen fat, one with lips that hung to his chest, one with his own bones coming out through the skin of his arms, one all over hair. They saw the light and the armor and started saying no, no, close the door, and picking up little sticks.

Anister tried to be friendly and made a hash of it.⁹ Irulan called out that Stickman was alive up north, alone, and the hairy one lifted his head at that -- Stickman is alive? -- and for a breath there was something in the room besides fear. Then the others closed over it and went back to jabbing at the air and telling them to go away, this is our home.

Anister asked what lay south. And the answer was: I will never tell you. You are with the necromancers. That one there serves the Necromancer.

That one there was Bancroft.

He has thought about it since. He is a big man in plate with a holy symbol on his chest, walking through a graveyard full of walking dead, and the walking dead do not seem to trouble him the way they trouble everyone else -- he raises a hand and they go blind and crawl away from him. If you were a frightened thing living in a hole and you saw that, you would not stop to ask which god. He serves the green and growing things. He tried to say so. They were not taking questions. They shut the door and the party let them, because you do not win an argument with something that has already decided what you are, and because they were, in the end, only frightened.

Down, and nothing there

South of that was a stair, and the stair went down, and below it was ground nobody had walked.

They did it right, for once. Clarisse went ahead in the dark and listened at things. Behind a yellow curtain to the east, two voices arguing, and then, unmistakably, somebody cooing at a cat. Anister got down in the dust and read tracks and found rat prints going east, big ones, and nothing at all going south. So they went south, because south was where nothing had been.

South was three rooms and all three were empty.

The first had its door smashed off the hinges from the outside, which is a sentence worth sitting with, and a carving of a setting sun on the back wall, and nothing else. The second had a blank wall where a carving should have been, as though the stonecutter had been paid half and never came back. The third was locked, which had them all hopeful, and Clarisse got it open with a fingernail she grows long for the purpose, and it was the emptiest of the three. Forty minutes a room. Bones rattling somewhere off in the dark the whole time, getting nearer and then not.

That is most of what this place is, and nobody writes it down. Hours of kneeling in the dust in a cold room finding out that a room is a room.

While they were at it, somebody asked Bancroft to put light on something again and he said no. Said he would rather burn a flask of oil and keep the prayers for when they were needed, that Silvanus will carry him when he has to be carried and he does not intend to be carried across level ground. He meant it. He is a farmer's son and there is nothing in him that likes owing.

Thunder went off somewhere above the ground, a long way off, and he felt something go through him, warm and unbothered, the way a man's father looks at him when he has said something young. He did not know what to do with that, so he said nothing about it and moved on.¹⁰

Then they came to the black curtains.

Spooked

Three walls hung with black cloth, and behind the western one, off past a door swollen and damp in its frame, something was scraping stone on stone, over and over, patient about it.

Clarisse pulled the southern curtain back. Behind it was an alcove where the ceiling had come down some long while ago, rubble and dust, and in the rubble were bones and pieces of chain mail, which meant somebody else had come this far once.

And the shadows in the alcove were not lying the way shadows lie.

One of them came off the wall.

Bancroft is going to write this down plain because there is no way to write it that makes him look better. He was at full strength. He was armored, and lit, and he had been offered a chance to steady himself and had turned it down half a minute earlier on the grounds that he was fine and the odds were good.¹¹ The thing came off the wall and it had no head. Not a hood, not a helm -- a man's shape standing there with nothing above the shoulders, walking toward them through the curtain like it had all night.

And something in Bancroft simply left.

He does not remember deciding. He remembers his sword hitting the floor -- he threw it away, he opened his hand and threw away the elven longsword he has carried since the statue room, the one he is proudest of -- and then he was running in the dark, screaming, with his shield strapped uselessly to an arm that was pumping. Anister went the same instant and the same way, dropping his torch and his blade, and the torch died where it fell so the two of them ran blind. Bancroft ran past Irulan close enough to touch her and did not know her. She said afterward that he looked straight through her.¹²

He does not have anything wise to say about it. He has stood in front of ravenous dead and had his own blood refuse to clot and said the words over a gnawed halfling without his hands shaking. And a shadow with no head came off a wall and he dropped the sword and ran like a heifer through a fence.

The women held. That is the part that matters and it should be said first, not last. Irulan lit a torch off Clarisse's lantern and it burned wrong from the moment it caught, dim, with the dark leaning in on it. Clarisse went and picked both swords up off the floor and put them in her pack, hers and Anister's and Bancroft's, and wrote them down as such. Then the two of them went after the men in the dark, with a headless thing somewhere behind them, and tried to get them back.

Irulan caught Anister and slapped him across the face hard enough to turn his head and it did nothing at all. He only looked more afraid, and got away from her, and went down a staircase he could not see -- there was a whoop, and doors opening somewhere below, and later he walked into a wall face-first in the pitch dark and bloodied his nose on it.

Clarisse caught Bancroft. She did not slap him. She got a shoulder into him and put him into the wall with everything she had, and it was near enough a tie between them that it should not have worked, and it worked.¹³ He came back to himself against the stone with his ears ringing and a woman with a hole in her throat telling him to snap out of it. The same woman whose neck he tore open with his own hands the week before, holding out his sword, which she had gone back and picked up off the floor for him.

She has already started telling it as after you screamed like a little girl, and she is welcome to. It is the true version.

What the true version leaves out is the true measure of a man is not whether you scream, or run, or piss your pants; the true measure of a man is running yourself out of it, turning around, and going back to finish the thing you started. Bancroft had been a little boy once, but he had long ago grown into a man: he ran himself out of the terror, turned around, and went back to find his friend.

Irulan's torch went out twenty minutes before it had any business going out. She said it did not burn down, it dimmed, all at once, like something leaned on it. Bancroft tried to strike a flame off flint and steel with hands that were not obeying him, and could not, and dug deeper and tried again, and still could not.¹⁴

Anister, meanwhile, alone and blind and out of his mind with fear, had blundered into the best find of the night.

The rose and the thorn

When he came back to himself he lit his last torch and found himself standing in a hall of pillars. Stone slabs down both sides, and on every slab a skeleton in the rags of a priest's robe, laid out and long past rotting. Carved on every slab, and on the double doors, and everywhere on the walls: roses and thorns. Very old work. Older than the rest of it, Bancroft thinks.

They gathered him up and went and looked at it together, once Bancroft had his light back on his shield.¹⁵ Clarisse checked it for traps and found none, and stood there looking down the long row of them with everybody quiet for once. Bancroft's suggestion was to go touch one and find out whether they all get up together, which he still maintains is a reasonable question that will have to be answered sometime by somebody. He was voted down, and the vote was four to one, and the one was him.

Because the room would take an hour to search properly and they had already been forty minutes in it, and because they had all started to feel the particular heaviness that means the sun is going down above your head.

Nobody goes home from the Barrowmaze in the dark. Everyone knows it. The party knows the story of every group that learned it the hard way. So they left a hall full of robed dead and rose carvings sitting there unopened, which galls Bancroft more than the running does, and started back.

The long way up

The rope ladder was gone.

Anister spent half a day braiding that thing a week ago out of forty feet of good rope so nobody would have to ride the block and tackle again, and they tied it off around the pillar at the top of the shaft, and somebody has taken it. That is three ladders now. There are other people down here, is the point, and some of them are worse than the dead.

So they went up on the plain rope, badly. Clarisse first, quick as a cat. Irulan next. Anister lost his grip halfway and fell, and Bancroft got under him and did not catch him, and he went down hard enough to hurt.¹⁶ Then Irulan had to haul him up on a line like a sack of feed, which he bore with poor grace.

Bancroft asked Silvanus for a blessing before he took hold of the rope, on the reasonable grounds that he weighs what he weighs and he was wearing all of it,¹⁷ and then the rope slipped anyway and he fell twenty feet in full plate and made a sound going down that everything within a quarter mile must have heard. He got up. He always gets up. Then their light went out at the top of the shaft and they had to tie a torch to the rope and haul it up before anybody could see to try again.

They came out of the ground at last and stood on the moor in full dark, and none of them had ever seen this place at night before. Bancroft had wondered about it. Now he has stopped wondering. It is four hours home across open moss and mist with your lights the only lights in the whole of creation, and the four of them walked it hunched and quiet and nothing came, which is not because the dark was empty. It is because their luck held, that once, all the way home.

They were back at the Brazen Strumpet somewhere near eleven. Bolo took one look at them and said they'd been through the wringer, and gave Clarisse her bath for nothing, which he claimed was on the house and which everyone understood to be on account of the smell. Somebody in the kitchen wanted to know who he was talking to. Nobody, dear, he said.

Ten gold in a gem. Two gold and five silver a head. One night.

Bancroft is not going to pretend it did not happen. He put his hand on the pommel of that sword this morning where it hangs on the wall of his room and thought about lying in his account and then did not, and this is the account. The god held. The armor held. The nerve did not, and it was not the man's to hold or not, and that is the part that frightens him more than the shadow did. He would like to believe that a thing which has stopped being able to hear you cannot be him. He knows better now.

The girl he nearly killed put him into a wall and gave him back his sword. He owes her for it, and it does not sit well, and he intends to go on owing her for a good long while.