They got the grubs out of him. That is the good news, and it is the only thing that went the way anybody wanted.

He sat down on the floor of the skull room with his sleeves off and his vambraces off and his arms out, and the dragon came at him with a knife.

He does not blame her. He said yes. He had things moving under the skin of his forearms and no better idea, and she is a thief, and thieves are supposed to have small hands and steady ones. What she had that night was neither. She put the point in and it went somewhere it was not supposed to go, and Bancroft, who has been stabbed by enemies, can report that being stabbed by a friend who is trying to help feels worse and lasts longer. She got no grubs. She got a good deal of him.¹

Nimue tried it her way after that and sang the sleep on them, which works on living things that can be tired, and whatever these things were, they are not that. Nothing. Not so much as a slow-down. She said it had been worth trying and it had been.²

Then Anister took the knife.

He is a dwarf and he does close work the way a dwarf does close work, which is slowly, with the light held where he wants it, and no talking. He would find one and get under it and lift, and drop the thing on the stone, and go back in. Two at a time. Then two more. Bancroft asked Silvanus twice for the flesh to close behind him and it closed twice, and by the end of it his arms were his own again and there was a little wet pile on the floor that he did not look at.³

They went over the skull room one more time before they left it, all of it, every hole. There was nothing else in it. Whoever had baited it with the fourth skull had not thought it needed anything else.

Three in the road

They started back for the entrance, and a good part of the way there they came round into a hall with three of the dead standing in it.

Not coming. Standing. Shoulder to shoulder and facing nothing, the way a horse stands in a field at night, and it is worse than being charged. A thing that comes at you has decided something. These had not decided anything yet.

Fantasia's plan was to go over them. Off the wall and over the top of the middle one and down clean on the far side. She had the whole route worked out and she told them about it, and then she ran at the wall and did not get much of the wall and came down hard in the middle of the three of them.

One of them woke up and hit her.

That should have been the end of it right there, and it was not. She got a hand up under the swing and went out from between them low and fast, on all fours, the way something small goes under a gate, and she was clear on the near side before the other two had finished turning their heads. Then they stopped turning. Then they were standing quiet again, facing nothing, and it was as though none of it had been.⁴

The necromancer

Anister had a black cloak in his pack. Nobody knows why he had it, and there would be questions about it later, but he put it on and pulled the hood up over his face and walked out into the hall as though he owned every dead thing in it.

Bancroft could not hear what he said. He heard the tone. It was a foreman's tone, the one you use on men who work for you and do not like you, and the three of them turned their heads to it all together and then turned their bodies, and Anister walked them off down the east passage the way you would walk a dog. He did it for a good while. He never hurried and he never looked back at the party.

Then he had them far enough, and he wanted to be done with it, and he put the hood down.

There is not much to say about the next part. They saw a dwarf. Whatever the cloak had been doing, it stopped, and all three of them came round at once, and Anister came back up the hall at a flat run with the dead behind him.⁵

The rope

They ran it all the way. Through the round-hole rooms and the broken wall and the hall of triangles where Bilbar is, and up the last of it to the shaft, with the three of them coming on behind at that steady walk that never gets tired and never gets faster and always arrives.

The shaft has a rope in it. Twenty feet of daylight at the top of it, and the makeshift rope dangling. Nimue still had the rope ladder, rolled up in her pack and waiting.

The plan was sound, and Bancroft would make it again. He and Anister put themselves in the mouth of the room, shoulder to shoulder, because they are the two with steel on them. Nimue stood back and threw her light at whatever got close. And Fantasia, who weighs nothing and climbs for a living, went up the rope to kick the ladder down for the rest.

She did not get up it. She tried once and slipped and came back down to the floor, and got hold of it again and went further the second time, and Bancroft had his back to all of it because there were three dead men in front of him and one of them was in reach.

He heard her fall. He did not see it. It is a short sound and there is not much to it.

She had one hit point. She had one hit point the whole time she was down there, the whole ten days of her, and she went into every room in this place first and slowest and never once made a noise about it. Nothing in the dark ever laid a hand on her.

Ibri fell off a rope. Bancroft was there for that one too. She said something about her hats.⁶

Finishing

They killed the three of them over the top of her.

Bancroft does not remember it as well as he should. He remembers Anister's sword going wide and then coming back and taking one apart in a single stroke, and Nimue's bolts going in one after another until the second one stopped, and getting the elvish blade into the third one's chest and finding it did not much care and doing it again. He took a fist in the side and did not go down. One of them landed a blow on him that should have finished the argument and did not, and he cannot account for that either.

He remembers that they were slow and they were patient and it took a long time.

When it was quiet Nimue went and knelt down and turned her over.

Bancroft asked Silvanus twice. Once and then again, kneeling in the dirt at the bottom of the shaft with his hands on a goblin in a homemade dragon suit, and the light came both times and did nothing both times, because the light is for the living and she was not that any more. They gave her every chance there was to take a breath. She did not take one.⁷

They took her knife and her sling and the little bottle out of Bilbar's codpiece that she had been carrying since the day she found it, and they went up the ladder, and they left her at the bottom because there was no way to bring her that any of them could stomach.

Town

They opened the jar in town, the wax-sealed one the humming zombies set down in the corridor like a milk pail on a step.

There was a brain in it. A whole one, in some clear liquor, keeping well. Anister went and knocked on Maza's door with it to find out what it was worth and could not get the old man to so much as come to the door, which Bancroft takes as its own kind of appraisal. They looked it over themselves after that and got a good long look and came away sure of exactly one thing, which is that it was somebody's, once.

Nobody wanted it. Anister left it on the roof of the inn overnight, in case it attracted trouble, and it was gone by morning. ⁸

Bancroft has been keeping his count without meaning to and it does not get shorter. Irulan. Clarisse. Four hired men and their dogs. And now a goblin who was not a dragon and knew it perfectly well, and said it anyway, every day, to anyone who would listen.

He got the grubs out. That will have to be enough.