It rained all morning. Bancroft lay in the dark under the roof of the Brazen Strumpet and listened to it, the way he has listened to rain his whole life, working out what it would do to the barley. There is no barley. There has not been any for a year. He listened anyway.

There was a new one at breakfast.

She came down the stairs in a pink dress with skulls printed on it, a bow in her hair and the hair pulled up high in a tail, a staff in her hand, and she was tall. She said her name was Charlotte. She said she was a baker, from a long line of bakers, one of thirty children off an island somewhere, and she said all of it the way you say a thing you are proud of. Somebody told her there is no baking in the barrows. She took that better than most would have.

Anister and Nimue and Charlotte all cracked their heads on the low beam getting up, one after another, like a thing rehearsed. Bolo brought the oatmeal round and looked at the window and said it would be a wet one.

They spent a while over the chests. Bancroft has two now and there is a limit coming on that, because a room with three chests in it stops looking like lodging and starts looking like a den. Anister said they needed a building. Then everybody said it. They went out the door saying it, Bolo shaking his head at their backs, and on the way they put a little gold aside as a common purse, which is the first sensible thing anyone has proposed in a month.¹

Five gold a day

They wanted a hireling. Bancroft has stopped pretending he likes asking. The common room knows what this company does with hired men, and when the question went round there was a good deal of looking at the floor. One fellow nodded to them from the corner and said you could not pay him to go to the barrows, and nice to see them all the same.

The rain had thinned the field to one woman.

Her name was Hizma. Chainmail, mace, shield, and a scroll case, and a quill and a roll of parchment slung across her back, and a big dog at her heel. She priced herself before she said good morning: five gold a day and half a share of anything they carried out. She did not have friends, she said. She had business associates. The dog was one of them. His name was Poochie and he worked for treats, and she was not charging for him this trip, and they should consider that a kindness and remember it.

She served Denara, who is the goddess of trade and paperwork. Bancroft has met the fervent kind of cleric and the frightened kind and the kind who drinks, and he had not before met one who worships a ledger and means it. He had heard of one. Oscar, the priest of paperwork at the Grey Company office, whom nobody has ever seen and everybody has heard of, serves the same goddess from behind a door in the back of that building, and it was Oscar who worked out that a healing prayer is a thing you can charge for, by the wound, in advance, on a schedule of fees. He calls it health insurance for adventurers. Bancroft asked whether she knew him. She said they knew of each other, the way two people in the same trade do, and that she thought his idea was the best one anybody in Helix had had in years, and that she had one of her own along the same lines. She would not say what it was. Not yet.² Anister asked her what her god gave her against the dead. She said she could drive them off, for a reasonable fee. Bancroft asked about light and about healing and she had neither. She said torches were for light and the way to stay whole was to leave before you needed mending, which Bancroft has heard from wiser people and has never once managed to do.

She had found the dog in the barrows. He had belonged to another company, she said, and that company had not fared well, and she came upon him wandering and made him an offer of treats, and he accepted the terms. Bancroft looked at the dog a while after she said that.

Charlotte reached down to pet him and he took a snap at her hand. Hizma said she would rather not, on account of the claims that would follow. Charlotte asked what a claim was. Hizma told her. She was still telling her three hours later, out on the road, and she had lost Charlotte inside the first quarter hour and did not appear to notice. She had lost Bancroft the moment she mentioned math.³

Bancroft said, out loud, where everyone could hear, that they should try to keep this one alive. He said it more than once.

Charlotte slapped her. Not hard. Bancroft does not know why and has decided not to ask. Hizma looked at her a long moment and said she would not do that again, and the dog growled, and then she asked whether this was normal in the company or whether she should leave. She was told she was welcome. She said the money was good, she supposed, but they might want to rein in this Charlotte woman. Charlotte said her name was Charlotte Akimeg, thank you very much.⁴

They had paid the five gold between them. They walked out into the rain.

The swamp

They were an hour out. The rain was light and steady and the reeds were going in it and the mud ate a boot to the ankle at every step, and under the rain there was a sound Bancroft did not place until it was too late to matter, a dry clicking all round them in the reeds.

Three of them came out of the water at once.⁵

Scorpions. Big as camels. He has been asked since how big that is, and had to admit he had never seen a camel. So, a camel is as big as a giant scorpion, then. They were already close when anyone saw them, and they were fast, and nobody got a hand up before they arrived.

A claw took Nimue. She folded and stopped moving. It lifted her off the ground and rushed off with its prize.

The second one came at Bancroft. The tail came over the top of it faster than a thing that size should move and he got the shield up, which is the only thing he did right all morning, and the shield came apart. It broke across the strike like a plate dropped on a floor and he stood there in one piece holding a fistful of straps; his second shattered shield in two days. Sometimes they last; sometimes they don't.⁶

The third went at Hizma. She got clear of the claw. She said, quite loud, that it was not undead but it was a worthy foe regardless, which Bancroft believes was meant to be brave, and then the tail came over and took her and she went down in the mud without another word.

It picked her up and carried her off into the rain.

The dog went after her. Anister shouted for him and the dog was not listening to anybody in the world just then. He bit Anister on the way past and was gone into the reeds after the thing that had his woman, and they did not see either of them again.

They ran. Bancroft found the way out and takes no credit for it. In the rain, with the reeds closing behind them, they ran the wrong way entirely and came out further along toward the barrows than they had started.⁷

What was left

Nimue came out of the mud after them.

She has worn a stone on a cord round her neck since the day she walked in wearing Irulan's cloak, and nobody has got out of her why. The claw caught her at the throat, where the stone hung, and the stone took the worst of it and burst. She walked out of the rain grey and bleeding with her hand over the place, and she tugged Bancroft's sleeve and said she was bleeding here, in case he had missed it.

She said afterward that while she was down she heard somebody say, oh, you again, and tell her to go. She did not say who.

There is a mark on her neck now, purple and swollen and ugly, and it does not close. Bancroft asked Silvanus and Silvanus gave what he had. It was enough to put her back on her feet. It was not enough to take that off her, and he does not think anything will.

Charlotte said they should go back and try again tomorrow. She said today felt like a bad omen and she was not wrong. The answer to that was that tomorrow the road would still be there, with the same swamp on it, and they would have paid a day's board for nothing.

They went on.

It stopped raining about noon. They came up on the barrows two hours late, muddy, looking over their shoulders, and Charlotte got her first proper sight of the place. Bancroft did not say anything to her about it. There is nothing you can say that helps.

The dead door

They argued about where to dig.

There is a temple out to the east that they have looked at from a long way off for a year now and never once walked up to. Columns, statues, the whole thing. Two of them wanted it. Bancroft has been out here long enough to know that the further east you go the worse it gets, and he said so, and Charlotte said that could not possibly be true.

They did not go east. They walked instead to a barrow they had already emptied, the one with the four statues and the bowls of gems, and stood at the mouth of it until one of them remembered. Then they walked to another one they had already emptied and did the same thing. Bancroft puts this down because it happened, and because the maps they keep are not as good as they think.

The one they settled on is marked on the map as the dead door, with a note under it in somebody's hand: plants do not go near. That is accurate. Nothing green grows within a stone's throw of the opening and nothing has for as long as anyone has looked, and Bancroft, who has spent his life among growing things, does not like standing where they will not.

They had been in it once before, years back by the way people tell it. There was a sword on a slab and somebody took the sword, and the walls opened up and the dead came out of them, and they left at a run. They never went back and they never searched it. The sword was lost later to lizard men in a pit, and it sits on a statue somewhere now, and the company has tried twice to get it back. It was said, at the top of the stairs, that this company has lost every magic weapon it ever found. Bancroft had the elvish sword on his hip when it was said, the one he kept thinking it must be magic in defiance of every spell that said it was not.

He lit a torch and went down first, because for once he has no shield and thus a free hand.⁸

Silvanus

The room was as they had left it. A slab in the middle with a rotted torch on it that Anister had thrown down there years ago and a plain longsword beside it that nobody had wanted. Six hollows in the walls, three a side, each one cut to the shape of a man. And in the hollows, the men.

They turned their heads when he came in. All of them, slow, and the torchlight went across their eyes and came back.

He held up the holy symbol and said, by the roots of the Great Oak, return to your graves.

The dark in that place leans on Silvanus's light, Bancroft can feel it doing it, and the first time he said the words the dark leaned harder than he did. So he set his feet and said it again in Silvanus's name and shook the symbol at them, and green light went out over the room, and two of them broke and turned their faces to the wall. Anister put an arrow into a third. It skipped off the chainmail and found nothing.⁹

Then there was scrabbling in the side passages, bone on stone, and they came out of the dark on both sides. One swung at Bancroft and missed. One swung so wide it hit the wall behind him and chipped its own sword. Behind him on the stairs Nimue threw a bolt of light at the nearest one and it died in her hand, and she threw another and it barely marked the thing, and she said something about the point of being a mage that Bancroft will not repeat.

He said it a second time. Drive these forth. Destroy them if you can. Turn them to dust.

He put the whole of himself behind it and got everything at once. One went, face to the wall. One caught, and burned, and went up in the hot green radiance of the god until there was nothing on the floor where it had stood but powder. And one stood there in the middle of all that light and did not care.¹⁰

Charlotte watched it from the stairs. She said afterward she had heard of such things in tales and had not thought them true.

The long part

The rest of it took an hour and a half and most of it was the same swing over and over. These are the parts that were not.

Anister named them. He does something with the naming that Bancroft has never got a straight answer about, and afterward his eyes were very wide and he could see where they came apart and he shot better for it, and he was cheerful in a way that Bancroft found unsettling under the circumstances.¹¹

Nimue could not land anything. Not one thing, all night. She threw everything she had and it went wide or it guttered out or it did nothing anyone could see, and twice she gathered herself and went at it again and it failed her the second time as well, and when the last of it was gone she sat down on the floor and said she was the torchbearer now and would somebody else please kill them. Bancroft has carried a torch for a whole night before and did not say so. Charlotte went over and patted her on the head.¹²

Charlotte could not make fire. She tried twice with flint and steel and got nothing both times, and got it on the third when nobody was counting, and shook her fist at the ceiling. Then she tried the sling. Bancroft understands she has read about slings. The first stone came out at such an angle that she stretched the sling itself, and it has thrown short ever since. The second one hit Bancroft on the helmet. He told her his helmet was already dented, which was meant kindly and was also true. The third skittered across the floor and dinked off a skeleton that was already dead.

Then she threw her knife and it went in dead centre and stuck, and she stood there looking as surprised as anybody. She walked three steps into the fight to get it back and three steps out, and threw it again, and it went in again. After that she would not use anything else.¹³

Bancroft asked Silvanus for fire on the blade. He said, and he will admit it, that Hizma had bragged of her holy weapon, and that Silvanus's cleansing fire had more in it against the dead, and would the god care to show them. The god did. The sword ran with light for a while, and that was what did the work, and when he was cut he asked Silvanus to close it so that he could put the rest of them back in their graves, and it closed.¹⁴

The sword

The elvish longsword is gone.

He had it a year. They took it off something in a barrow with lizard statues in it and never did find out whether it was enchanted, and he half believes now it never was, but it was a good blade and it sat in the hand right and he had come to trust it.

Here is how it went. The god's fire on the blade was running out. He had a few swings left in it and one of them came up short, not by much, and he could feel it coming up short and he would not waste the fire. So he put his shoulder into a stroke that was not quite there and made it be there. Something has to pay for that. The blade went through the skeleton with the fire on it and the fire went through and the blade went with it, and there was nothing in his hand afterward but the hilt.¹⁵

Anister looked at the slab and said, that'll work. Then he said it was a good thing it had not been magic.

Bancroft picked up the plain longsword that had been left there all those years ago when they took the good one, and finished the night with it. It is heavy in the wrong places and swings like a fence post. He has used a fence post before, just not on undead.

The one with the chipped sword swung at him again near the end and missed so badly the blade came loose on its hilt, and it stood there holding a thing that wobbled. The last of them, when it was down to one and it had been hit by everybody and was still standing, swung at him in a way Bancroft can only describe as tired. He told it to fall down. It came apart into dust and rubble on the floor.

The wall

Charlotte handed off the lantern and stood at the stairs to watch the door, and the rest of them searched it for forty minutes and found nothing at all.

They searched it another forty, and near the end of that Anister stopped at one of the hollows and put his hand flat on the back of it and knocked. The others thump. That one rang thin.

He says there is something behind it and Bancroft believes him, because a dwarf underground knows what a wall is doing better than a man does. It would take a quarter hour with a pickaxe. Nobody had a pickaxe. Charlotte offered a dagger and Anister offered a mop. He carries a one-handed mop. Nobody has ever found out why. Charlotte has a pickaxe, as it turns out, in her room, in Helix, two hours behind them.¹⁶

So they will come back with a sledgehammer. Nimue kept the wall off the shared map, where anybody wandering through could read it, and drew her own copy instead, which was her idea and a good one.

Bancroft wrote the note beside it. The note says, moves like the hammer. He was asked what that meant, and told he would look at it in two months and have no idea. Bancroft explained it. It reminds him of a hammer, which reminds him of a sledgehammer, which reminds him the wall is thin and needs one.

Counting

Bancroft did the sums on the walk out. Five gold for Hizma. Fifteen for the shield. Twenty for the sword. They came home lighter than they left and carrying nothing, and the one thing of value in that barrow had been the sword on the slab, and they had taken that years ago and lost it since.

There ought to be a refund, somebody said, when a hireling dies inside three minutes. Was there a warranty. Was there such a thing as hireling insurance.

There is not. That was the idea Hizma would not tell them at breakfast. She let it out on the road, in the middle of all the talk about liability that nobody was listening to: Oscar sells healing by the wound, and she meant to sell the wound itself, before it happened, to companies like this one, once she had a little put by from this job to start with. She had worked out that there was a need. She was right about the need.

Bancroft keeps a count. He does not mean to and it does not get shorter. Irulan. Clarisse. Fantasia. Four hired men before this and their dogs.

And now a woman who charged for everything and would not let anyone pet her dog, who he knew for about an hour, and who was right about the one thing she cared about and did not live long enough to sell it to anybody. And a dog that had already buried one company and had found a second, and went into the reeds after her without being asked.

He said they should try to keep this one alive. He kept saying it.