A man who has farmed will tell you that half the work of any job is fetching what you should have brought, and the other half is doing the job wrong once before you do it right.

The wall at the back of that barrow wanted picks and shovels, and what they had between them was a crowbar and good intentions.¹

Wig

There was a halfling waiting for them in the common room of the Brazen Strumpet, with a tall conical hat that sagged over to one side, a pack on his back stuffed to the flap, and a piece of straw already going in the corner of his mouth. He said his name was Wig. He said it the way a man says a joke he has told a thousand times and still enjoys, and then he waited, and Anister obliged him and asked whether that was why he wore the hat, on account of not having one. Wig said his mother thought it would be funny. He said his mother thinks a great many things are funny.

He was brand new to it. He said so straight out, and said it had never stopped him before, and that he believed in forward thinking, and that there was no stinking thinking in Wig's brain.²

He had three torches, two ropes, rations, flint and steel, a crowbar, a staff and leather armor, and no shovel, and no room for one. He thought about it a while and then dug out two flasks he had been carrying and handed them over. Apple cider, usually. Empty at present, because he had drunk them. He would leave them with his mother. He does not keep a room at the Strumpet. Bancroft figured Wig was unlikely to need one.

Anister told him that the trick in the barrows is to light the second torch before the first one goes, because you always want two. Wig said got it, did not know that, and thanked him. Then Bancroft said a pickaxe is as good as a lockpick, because it opens doors when you pick and it opens doors when you ask, and Wig leaned over to Nimue and asked, quietly, whether he was normally like this.

Nimue said yes. She said it about six times, five more than was strictly necessary.

Bolo did not charge extra for the night. The blood moon sets tomorrow, somebody said, and the townspeople blame it for a good deal, and nobody in the company could say what actually happens when it does. They went to bed anyway. Cloudy in the morning, no rain.

Boot tracks

Anister saw them before anyone else was off the road. Boots, all around the mouth of the barrow, fresh enough to read. He crouched over them a long time and worked them out: seven or eight, shod like people who do this for a living rather than people who wandered past, there the night before last, not that morning. They had walked all around the entrance and they had not gone in. Then they had gone off to the northwest.³

Bancroft has been a year at this now and he has never once liked the feeling of a place he has left alone for months being suddenly interesting to somebody else.

Anister did not like the other half of it either -- that their own tracks ran from this door straight back toward town, plain as a signpost. So he broke a leafy branch off a tree, put everyone inside the threshold to keep their feet still, and went out and swept. Not a clever job. A patient one. He worked the marks out of the ground and smudged a false line off to the north, and when he was done he asked whether it looked stupid, and it did not.⁴

Wig watched the whole thing with his hat pushed back and said, a ranger in its natural habitat, and that his mother would be very impressed.

The slab

Two of them dug and two of them watched. Twenty minutes of pick and shovel on brick that had been sealed up by somebody who did not want it opened, and Nimue stood at the bottom of the stairs the whole while, which is why they were not taken.

She heard whispering up top. She went back and shushed them and said there was company.⁵

Bancroft's proposal was to go dig in the wrong alcove and look like fools who had found nothing. Anister's improvement on it was to gather up an armload of loose skeleton and walk out with it like treasure. Nimue did not do either. She climbed up on the stone slab in the middle of the floor, so that all four of them coming down the stairs with their torch could see was a small figure on top of a tomb with her arms up, and she told them to back off, this one is ours.

It worked completely. It worked better than anything this company has tried in a year.⁶

They put their hands up. "Whoa, lady, no rash moves, we did not know anything was in here." One of them started yelling up the stairs that the place was occupied, and then there was metal on the steps, and a man came down in full plate with a shield on his arm and looked her over and asked, pleasantly, who she was with.

"We're the Dimly Lit," she said.

He said he had been hearing about them around town. Good exploits. He said no harm, no foul, that they were both here for the same reason, and then he asked whether they had been here yesterday, and she said she had only got in that morning, and he took that for whatever it was worth. Then he said, boys, looks like this one is el ocupado. He said he had only wanted to take the measure of the Dimly Lit. He wished them happy raiding and went back up the stairs with his four around him like a tail.

Bancroft would rather have had a fight than that conversation. A fight tells you where you stand.

The steel door

The seal came down all at once, brick and rubble together, and left a hole nobody will ever close again. Down the stairs, into air that had not been breathed. There was a hallway going south, a wooden door to the north with water seeping out from under it across the flagstones, and one other door that had no business being there at all.

Rusted steel. Every door in the Barrowmaze is wood with a little iron banding. This one was a slab of metal gone orange with age, and it was locked.

Anister put his ear to the wet one and heard water running behind it. Bancroft put his ear to the steel and heard nothing whatever. Not the small sounds a closed room makes. Nothing at all, and he was listening hard enough to have heard them.⁷

They searched it for traps, both of them, and found none.

Nimue gave up two hairpins for the lock. She would not hand them over until it was settled that she wanted them back, and there was a good deal of argument on the side about whether a hairpin can be a dagger, which she says it can.

Anister bent one for leverage and had the lock open on the first try. He had never picked a lock in his life, and he won't be able to say that again.⁸

He wrapped his hand in a sack, stood to the side, and pushed the door open, and something went ptwang and put a needle through his belly.

Not his hand. His belly. He is a dwarf and dwarves are built for poison, which is the only reason he is still walking, and it still cost him a few tense minutes of cramps and fever and shortness of breath and left the skin around it going black and dead. His own healing draught failed him entirely. Bancroft laid hands on him and the prayer came through clean.⁹

The trussing of the gargoyle

Behind the door: a room twenty feet on a side, a gargoyle of stone twelve feet tall with its wings up over its head and both clawed hands stretched out toward the doorway, and a stone sarcophagus sealed all the way round with wax.

Nobody could tell them anything about either. Bancroft looked at the thing a long while and it told him nothing, and Anister did no better, and Nimue no better than that. Wig said it was amazing craftsmanship.¹⁰

What followed was the best hour of work this company has ever done, and none of it mattered.

Anister touched the gargoyle with one finger. Nothing. He put a boot on its foot. Nothing. He climbed part way and stopped and got down. Then he asked Wig for a rope, and got sixty feet of it, and figure-eighted the whole sixty around the statue's feet until they were bound together. Then he asked for the other rope, and Wig handed it over saying, well, all right, and Anister went up on Bancroft's shoulders -- Bancroft nearly dropped him, and then did not -- and put the large sack down over the gargoyle's head and lashed twenty feet of rope around the sack to hold it, and used the rest binding the arms.¹¹

He said, to everybody, in the manner of a man who wants it remembered later, that the knots were tight and knotted and not loosely and easily removable. Nothing down there has tested them yet.

Head bagged. Feet roped. Arms roped. Bagged and tagged, he said.

Then they searched the room for traps and secrets and found neither, and there was nothing else to do but the coffin.

The lid

Bancroft chipped the wax off with the crowbar. Ten minutes of it, all the way round. Then Anister asked whether they could open it partway, from the feet end rather than the head end, so that whatever was in it could not simply sit up and start swinging, and Bancroft leaned on the corner and turned the lid instead of lifting it, and got an inch of gap where their feet ought to be.

They put a torch to the gap. Wrapped linen.

He started to turn it further and the lid came up on its own.¹²

It had been laid face down. That is what let it push. It came up out of its own coffin on its hands like a man getting off the ground, and it stood, and it was six and a half feet of desiccated meat wrapped in linen with black claws, and the wrappings had writing on them that moved when you looked at it. A band of gold across its brow. An ornate gold rod in its fist with black opals set into it.

It did not roar. It never made a sound the whole night.

Nimue asked whether she could read the sigils and was told that they were arcane and that they crawled and that she was not, at present, in a position to read anything.

Fire

Anister got the first swing in, with a torch, while it was still coming up out of the box, and the fire took it and hurt it badly -- more than a torch ought to hurt anything.¹³ The flames licked over the linen and it stood there and looked at him and did not make a sound, which he said, out loud, he appreciated.

That was the last thing he did right with it. A torch in a fight is a club, and a man who has spent his life on a bow and a sword swings a club about as well as he would swing a chair, and Anister spent the rest of the night finding that out. He got so far as offering the thing to the mummy handle first, on the grounds that he could not very well pass it the burning end.

Wig hit it with his torch, being a man who has actually used one.

Then it was Bancroft's turn and he did the only thing he is actually for.

He held out the holy symbol and it guttered and went out. He shook it, hit it once against the stone of the sarcophagus, and it came up green and weak, and the words came out with it: in Silvanus's name, return to the earth from whence he came, sink down below the ground and into the roots. It did not take the first time. He dug in and said it again, and the second time it held, and even then the thing in front of him was so far above him that most of the strength went out of the prayer on the way -- and it still caught, by the width of a hair.

And the thing failed it as badly as a thing can fail. It went backward into the corner and it said, no, Silvanus, I hate her, and it stayed there.¹⁴

Not destroyed. The dead only go to pieces for you when they are less than you are, and this one was a great deal more. Driven off, then. Half a minute of it, which is the most generous gift Bancroft has ever been handed.

Wig, seeing the mummy cowering and helpless, went to hit it.

It took a fast bit of talking from Anister to stop him -- Wig, if you touch him, he will kill us all -- and Wig looked extremely disappointed and put the club down. He had been quite sure he was going to do it real damage, too.

Half a minute, well spent

They used every breath of it. Anister called down a hunter's blessing against mummies, which is one of the two things he can do that Bancroft does not understand and does not ask about, and it caught perfectly, and it cancelled out the business about the torch as a happy accident. Nimue put up her armor of force. Bancroft reached for a shield of faith and fumbled it away entirely, then said a blessing over Nimue that put something back in her that she had spent, and then set his sword alight with a cleansing flame that burns undead worse than it burns the living.

Then the half minute was up.

He hit it with the burning sword, solid, and it took the hit. Anister had held his torch swing to come in on the same beat, and swung, and missed, and would not have it, and swung again -- and came around so wide that the torch hit the flat of Bancroft's sword and burst apart in his hands.¹⁵

Anister looked at each person in the room, one at a time, and said nothing.

Nimue's bolt hit perfectly and did everything a bolt of force can do. Wig climbed up into the open sarcophagus, being a halfling and finding it the only way to reach, and poked at the thing with fire and connected.

Then it came for Bancroft. Only Bancroft. It walked straight past Anister as though he were part of the wall.

It puts a hand on you. That is all it does. A long hand laid on a man's shoulder, gentle as a blessing, and something goes out of him. It did that three times in a row, faster than a man can flinch, and it does not miss. The first one landed. The second one Bancroft refused outright, dug in and made it come again, and that time the thing fumbled its own grip, which is the only laugh anybody got all night. The third he could not stop, so he took it on the shield instead, and the shield came apart across it -- the whole shield, bought three days ago with borrowed money -- and he took nothing.¹⁶

Then there was no shield.

They had put a good thirty wounds into it by then -- fire, force, steel, a halfling with a stick -- and it was not bleeding. Hurt somewhere under the linen, and not bleeding.

Anister put an arrow into it from across the room, a clean hit at that distance, and the arrow might as well have gone into a wall. Fire was their only answer, and it was not enough.

Bancroft got one more good cut in with the burning sword. Then it laid a hand on him again -- barely a graze, hardly a scratch to look at -- and his heart stopped. Just for a beat. He felt it stop and he felt it start, and it started because he reached down after it and dragged it back.¹⁷

That was the last of it. Everything any of them had left to spend, gone.

Running

Bancroft said it, because somebody had to and because he was the one it was killing. I am done here. It is time to go. This one is beyond us.

They ran. Wig said, well, everyone's leaving, so I'm leaving. Nimue wanted the last one out to shut the door and had to be talked out of it, since the last one out was going to be Anister and the door would have left him in the dark with it.

They should not have got away. By any reckoning of that climb they did not.¹⁸

They got away anyway. It came up the stairs after them and then... stopped. Bancroft would have sworn it was a stride behind him the whole climb, but when he turned to look, it was not there. Ten minutes of going up in the dark at a dead run, and at the top they came out into open air and stood there breathing.

Something down there let them go. Bancroft does not know what and does not expect to find out.

The gargoyle never moved. It is still standing in that room with a sack tied over its head and sixty feet of good rope on its feet, and neither of them is getting any of it back.

What it was worth

Afterward, topside, they worked out what they had seen: the gold band about three hundred, the rod with the black opals about eight hundred. Eleven hundred gold, lying in a room they cannot enter, on a body they cannot hurt.

They have been lean for weeks. Nimue said what she has been saying: every good weapon this company has ever found has been taken off them again, one way or another, and she is not wrong, and nobody argued. Anister laid it out plainly. It reaches three times before you can breathe. It hardly ever misses. One touch is enough to finish a man on a bad evening, and they have no way to make it bleed. There is no order in which they can go at that thing and win. That is not bad work. That is a wall.

Wig had a bit of luck about him he could have handed round, and forgot to, which was the one useful thing available to him all night.

Anister wanted to go back with four flasks of oil and lay burning ground between it and the door. Bancroft's idea was worse: send the others down to bargain, offer up his own whereabouts in trade for the crown and the rod, and see what a thing like that does with an offer.

Nimue's was better. Go back to town, sleep, and wait for some other group of idiots to go down there and play with the mummy.

They came out of it a little wiser and nothing else, which is how most of these end. Wig was pleased with himself the whole walk home.¹⁹