Clarisse died in the night.

Nobody can say where. She had gone off into the dark with her lamp when the hall filled up with the dead, and the lamp is still down there somewhere, and so is she, and that is the whole of what anyone knows. Bancroft has been keeping a count without meaning to. Irulan. Clarisse. Four hired men and their dogs, if you count the dogs, and he does. It is a poor kind of arithmetic and it only goes one way.¹

The dragon

They had left Bilbar where he fell, under the wall of triangles, with the rusted crossbow still bolted to its stool and pointed at the door. When they came back to him there was somebody already there.

She was a goblin, and she was small even for one, and she was wearing a dragon. Not a real one. A suit of it, stitched by hand out of something green and heavy, with a hood that had felt teeth sewn round the lip and two eyes drawn on the sides in what Bancroft would swear was crayon. One of the wings had come partly loose. She had her hand down the front of Bilbar's codpiece up to the wrist.

Anister asked her what she was doing with their friend.

She said she would not exactly call him a friend, and Bancroft, who had paid the man three gold and buried him nowhere, did not have an answer to that. What she came out with was a little stoppered bottle wrapped in rags. Bilbar had been stuffing himself, it turned out, and had kept something to drink in the padding. She kept the bottle. There was no gold on him at all.²

Her name was Fantasia. She said she was a dragon. She said it several times, and when Anister asked, carefully, whether she had any skills the party might use, she said she could look for traps, and she would be very dragon about it while she did.

He will say this for her. She does everything slowly. She spent a full ten minutes on that room, one alcove at a time, and she found nothing because there was nothing, and she was sure. He has known men who would have glanced at it and been sure. He would sooner have her kind of sure.³

What went down the hall

The dead came past while she was working.

Bancroft was outside the door with his ear to the far one, and Nimue was in the passage with the torch, and Anister had gone off into the dark to keep watch and sniffed something out of a paper twist that was supposed to sharpen him and did nothing. Then there was shuffling from the west. Bancroft has heard that shuffle enough times to know it in his sleep, because he does hear it in his nightmares, and he looked up.

Four of them, and the two in front wore loose white shifts with signs stitched into them and bands of gold round their heads, and all four had a pole on their shoulders, and between the poles rode a covered litter, curtained, swaying, with something in it. They were humming. Bancroft did not know the dead could hum.

Nimue saw all this before he did, and she told him to get into the room and shut the door.

They stood in the dark with the goblin and listened. The humming came up to the door and stopped. Something heavy went down, thump and thump, and a latch lifted, and a door opened and closed, and the humming went on into the stone and faded. When they came out there was a clay jar on the floor of the hall where nothing had been. Plain, wax-sealed, set down neat as a milk pail on a step. Fantasia looked it over and said it was not a trap and picked it up. Nobody has opened it. Bancroft does not think anybody is going to.⁴

His light went out while they were searching. Fantasia borrowed his flint and lit a lantern and that was the last of the oil. They went through the bones the last looters had dumped in the middle of the floor and Anister, who has an eye for such things, found the money they had missed -- a good heavy handful of it, enough to make the day pay. Then they put Bilbar and Chick Magnet into one of the empty triangles, the dog first, because it was easier, and Fantasia said may they rest in peace, and that was the funeral.⁵

Following the litter

Somebody had knocked a brick wall through to the north, and beyond it was a room too big for the light.

There was tapping from a long way off, north again, the flat patient sound of a pick on stone. Somebody was mining down here. Somebody had started on the east wall of this very room and given up. Anister crouched in the dust and read it like a page: footprints, but bone, not boot; a wide smear where the litter had been set down and turned; the trail going on north through a door. Bancroft put his ear to the door for ten minutes and heard nothing worth ten minutes.⁶

North was another room of the round holes, every one already pulled out and picked over. He looked at the ceiling before he looked at anything else. He has learned that here. Then he was supposed to be searching the alcoves with Nimue, and instead he said her name.

There was moaning somewhere in the walls themselves, not behind any door they could find.

East was a room the roof had come down on. Anister put his nose in it and could not say whether it would come down again. Past that was a wide hall with pillars, and a mound in the middle of it four feet high of animal bones and old leather and bits of mail, and lying on the mound, like a dropped glove, the shed skin of a snake.

Bancroft knew the room then. He has not been in it. He has heard it told, more than once, about a snake as long as a barn that came down off a ceiling exactly like this one, and about who did not walk out. Nobody said the names. Somebody said the pile looked like a place an animal might live, which was true. It was not what anyone was thinking about. They dug in it for ten minutes and found that somebody else had dug in it first, and taken something big out of the middle, and left the hole.⁷

The torch died there. Bancroft lifted his shield and asked Silvanus for light, and the light came, and went out. He shut his eyes. He said please. He does not remember ever saying please to the god before. Then something touched the face of the shield, lightly, the way you touch a horse you don't want to startle, and when he opened his eyes it was burning steady and green.

Nimue was already turning away. She rolled her eyes as she went. Bancroft carried that shield for three more hours and never once knew whose light he was carrying.⁸

Skulls

The south door opened on a passage that went south and east, and off it a little chamber cut with eight-sided holes, and in every hole a skull, turned to look at the door.

Nimue took one down and tipped it, and it rattled. She took the next. It rattled. She had the third in her hands when she stopped and did not take the fourth. It was white on white, so you had to look: the whole crown of it was crawling. Little pale grubs, thick as a fingernail, all over the bone and in the eye holes, and nothing on any other skull in the room, as if somebody had baited a trap with it.⁹

Then the wings came.

Stingbats, three of them, the size of small dogs, and they came out of the north passage straight down onto Anister, who had gone up ahead into the dark to be stealthy and had been heard doing it. One went for his face and put its needle up his nose. He stood there with a thing on his face and another on his back and the third going round his head, and loosed an arrow past all three of them into the wall.

They killed them, in the end. Nimue's bolt took the back half off the one on his face. The dragon put an arrow into the wreck of it and finished it. Bancroft came up the passage and split the second, and the third took one glancing bite out of Anister and died on Bancroft's sword a little after. Then Fantasia stepped out of the shadows and stabbed the corpse, hard, and said she had done it, and everybody agreed that she had.

Anister was standing in the middle of it bathed to the elbows in his own blood and worse. He said he was fine. He is a dwarf; they say that.¹⁰

The fourth skull

They should have left it.

Bancroft said so, and meant it, and it is on the record. But Anister had crept up close enough to watch the grubs and seen them sweating a slime like snails do, and he had a thought about what that meant, and the thought was undead. So Bancroft raised the holy sign and asked Silvanus to drive them out or burn them, and he felt what he has felt before down here: the dark of the place leaning in on the prayer, pressing it flat, and then a small dry pop like a seed case, and nothing.

Anister offered him something then, quietly. A way to try again. Bancroft said no. He does not entirely know why. He had asked once, and been answered, and it did not seem right to go back and knock.¹¹

Anister is a patient man and he had a candle. He stuck it on the end of an arrow and held the flame under the skull from as far off as his arm would reach, and the grubs did not care. So he lit a torch off the candle and did it again, closer.

The skull came apart.

There had been no skull. It had been grubs the whole way through, packed in the shape of one, and when the fire touched them the shape let go and the whole mass of them sprayed out over the floor, and half of them burned and the other half turned, all together, and came for him.

What Bancroft learned in the next few minutes he will write down plainly so that it is written somewhere. Fire works. Nimue's bolt, which has killed everything else in this place, went into them and they did not notice. The sword works, after a fashion: the ones you cut burst, and what comes out of them is pus, and you do not want it on you, and he got most of it on the floor and the rest on his greaves. Anister burned a good many. Nimue, with three hits left in her, said she was staying behind the people with armour and stayed. The dragon vanished into the dark and stayed vanished.

Bancroft dropped the sword and took the torch. He found them where they had gone to ground, up under the lip of the alcoves, waiting, and he put the fire in among them and a fair few died, and then the rest of them came down onto him all at once, and this time they found the gaps.

He felt them go in. At the wrist, at the collar, wherever the plate does not meet. Small and cold and busy. He can see them now if he pulls his sleeve back, moving under the skin of his forearm like something under a blanket.¹²

Anister says he has a draught that ends a poison, or a sickness, whichever this is. He said it as though it were settled. Nimue got six gold out of two skulls and a grubby third she has not opened yet. The sword is on the floor behind them. Clarisse's lamp is somewhere ahead. Fantasia is a dragon.

He told the thing in the river that he wanted to go back to growing things. He has things growing in him now.