The blood moon went down the night we came back, and Helix shut itself up like a barn ahead of weather.

Shutters latched. Doors barred. Nobody in the street after dark who did not have to be there. The light on everything was a kind of pale red, like the land had been washed in watered wine, and the moon sank slow and low and took its time about it. Nobody I asked could tell me what it meant.¹

I sat in the Strumpet with four gold to my name and no shield. The mummy had taken the last one off my arm that same afternoon. A shield is fifteen gold. I said so out loud, mostly to myself.

Nimue asked how much I needed. I told her. She counted fifteen out of her own purse and pushed it across the table and said she would have to do the math on it later. That was all she said about it. I have known people who would have made a speech of it.²

Olsted

Anister did not sleep. He sat up until ten o'clock with a candle, some rags and a pot of wax, making arrows that would hold a flame. He means to go back for that mummy someday, and he means to have fire when he does. Four of them came out the way he wanted. He wrapped six more in cloth to be dipped in oil at the last minute, since oil dries on a rag faster than you would think.³

In the morning we hired a man to hold the torches.

His name is Olsted. He wears a straw hat and a burlap shirt, and his shoes are a size too small for him, so he walks like a man going downhill on a wet day. He will hold any torch you give him for one gold a day. He has nothing of his own but a knife. Anister gave him four torches and Nimue gave him flint and steel, and he thanked us both kindly and put everything in his pockets. Charlotte paid his day. He tipped his hat to her.

He told us his mama always said this was the best way to lie low in the middle of a fight. He said he never knew what she meant until now.

There is no torch maker in Helix. They ship them in from somewhere else. Everything a person needs to go under the ground costs more in this town than it ought to, and the shopkeepers know exactly why.

The wet room

Nothing troubled us on the road. We were at the Barrowmaze by noon and went down into the barrow where we left the mummy. There were our own footprints going the other way, long strides, the prints of people running.

The stairs go down a long time. Two or three minutes of going down in the dark before they level out, and it is colder at the bottom than the top by a good deal. There is a door to the north with water standing in the cracks around it.

Nimue put up her armor of force before we opened it, and it came up strong -- stronger than I have seen it.⁴

Past the door the room was wet. Not pooled. A film of water over the flagstones, and dripping somewhere off past the torchlight, and water running down the walls. In the northwest corner it had been running long enough to grow stone. Little spikes of it hanging from the ceiling, white and grey, like icicles that never melt.

Along the west wall there were alcoves, round ones, dozens of them, maybe a hundred. There was a whole skeleton laid in every one.

To the east was a door standing partway open. Charlotte pushed it and the room behind it was full of webs, wall to wall, thick as wool. She shut it again, and nobody argued.

Past that there was a heap of rubble where there used to be a wall. Anister got down over it and read the ground. Something had broken out from the inside, a long time ago. Something heavy. It had walked off south, and the trail was so old it was nearly gone, just dents in the floor where the feet had come down.⁵

We stayed away from the mummy's hall. Anister and I looked around the corner at the other end, in case anything was waiting there. It was a small room with nothing in it but grit. So we searched.

Out of the walls

Anister and Nimue and I went down the alcoves one by one, moving the dead to look under them. Charlotte and Olsted watched the doors with the two torches. It is slow work and not pleasant, and I say a word over each one when I move them. It seems right to do.

Partway through, Charlotte heard voices. Far off, somewhere down one of the halls. Somebody yelling. She could not tell who and she could not tell where.⁶

We found nothing. I had my hands on the bones of a man in the fourth or fifth alcove when the one next to him moved.

They came out of the walls. Seven of them, crawling out headfirst and dropping to the floor like sacks of rock, and then getting up slow. They were not like the skeletons we have fought before. The water had been at them for a hundred years, and it had put stone on them the way it had put stone on the ceiling. Grey crust over every bone, lumped up thick on the joints and the skull. Their hands were more rock than finger. They looked like something you would dig out of a creek bank.

Charlotte had seen the first one move and shouted, so none of us were caught with our backs turned.⁷

Rock and bone

Charlotte slung a stone at the nearest one before any of the rest of us moved. It cracked a chip off the crust and did not do much else.⁸

They came for us. One scraped Nimue across the arm, but the armor of force took most of it. Three swung at me, one after another, and I turned every one of them on the steel.

Then I held up the symbol of Silvanus and called on him to send them back into the ground, and he answered me.

It went out of me green and hard, and most of them broke and ran. They scrambled back from me into the corners of the room. The one nearest the wall did not run. It came apart where it stood. The stone on it and the bone under it went to powder together and fell in a heap.⁹

Two stayed on their feet. One of them was on Nimue.

Anister put an arrow into it and the arrow burst to splinters on the crust. Nimue's bolt of force went into it and barely marked it. Charlotte's stone did better. She was smart about it and slipped in behind Nimue, and Nimue looked at the halfling-sized hole Charlotte was trying to fit into and asked her what she thought she was doing.

The other one went after Olsted. He did not fight it. He does not fight. He put his arm up, and the thing's hand came down on his elbow wrong, and one of its stone fingers snapped off clean. Olsted looked at the finger and said he did not know he had it in him.¹⁰

I asked Silvanus for fire on my blade and it came up roaring, better than it ever has. It lit the room around me like a hearth.¹¹

Then the one by Charlotte swung for her and missed, so close she felt the wind of it, and the next one hit me hard enough to ring my helmet. They hit harder than skeletons ought to. It is the stone on them. A fist of rock on the end of an arm.¹²

I cut back. The burning edge went into the stone and hissed like a wet log on the fire, and the thing staggered. Anister put an arrow into the crack I had made, and it fell to pieces on the floor.¹³

That was the only one we killed all night. I did not know it at the time.

Then it all went wrong at once, the way it does.

The last one swung at Nimue and scraped its hand down the armor of force for a long second, and another finger broke off and went clicking across the floor. The rest of us did no better than it did. I swung and missed, and swung again, and the edge of my sword caught the crust wrong and chipped. I felt it go. Little flakes of steel came off it and fell burning to the floor. Anister drew too hard and the bow cracked in his hands. Nimue's magic gave out on her halfway through the words and did not come back.¹⁴

A torch went out. Olsted started edging for the door with the other one, and it took Nimue and Anister both to talk him into staying close. The one still standing hit me again.

We went out the door and shut it on them.

Poking the bear

On the stairs outside I prayed over my own hurts. It did not take the first time, and I asked again, and the second time it came through clean and closed me up nearly whole. Nimue put a light on the brim of Anister's hat, so now he goes about lit up like a lantern on a pole.¹⁵

Nimue wanted to go down the other hallway. The one we had not tried. That was the sense of it.

Anister wanted to open the door again. His idea was to let them come to us in the hall, one or two at a time through the doorway, and have me turn them where they could run off into the dark and not come back. He laid it out plain. He does not see another way for this company to win anything. We cannot beat things down, he said. We can only hit them a little and run and come back and hit them again. He has been living lean too long. We all have.

It was two against two, and nobody broke the tie, so Anister broke it himself.

Anister opened the door, looked, and shut it again. Nothing. The skeletons had gone back into their holes.

Then he went back for a longer look, and they came out of the walls at him.¹⁶

Stoic as rock

They caught him flat that time. Two of them were on him before he could lift his bow, and one of them hit him hard.

I went to the door and held the symbol up and called on Silvanus again, and nothing came. I dug in and asked a second time. There was more of me in it than there had been the first time, because I knew what I was asking for now.

It was harder. That is the only way I know how to say it. Earlier the words had gone out of me like water out of a bucket. This time it was like shouting across a field in a gale. Every time I call on him down here it gets harder. There is something in that place pushing back, and it pushes harder each time.

The words went out anyway. One of them came apart into dust. One of them turned and ran.

Three of them stood there.

They did not flinch. They did not step back. They did not do anything at all. The prayer went into them and nothing came out the other side. It was like praying at a millstone. They just looked at me with those stone faces, and then they looked back at Anister and went on with what they were doing.

I said something I will not write down here. Silvanus has heard worse from me, but not much worse.¹⁷

I do not know what it means when the god answers and the dead do not listen. I have been at this a year and it has always been one or the other -- either he does not answer me, or he does and they run. I did not know there was a third way for it to go. Now I do.

The door

Anister did not die, which is to his credit and nobody else's. They swung at him again and again and every blow went wide. Then he tried his sword on them and could not touch them either.¹⁸

Nimue put her armor back up. She had nothing else left. I called fire onto the blade again and it came, though not as strong as the first time. Anister tried to dose himself with his healing draught and it did nothing for him.¹⁹

For a while nothing happened. They would not come through. We stood around that doorway with our weapons up, feeling foolish.

Then they came through, and they came for me. Three of them. One landed. Charlotte had her sling up and missed. Anister put an arrow into the nearest one and hurt it. Then Charlotte came up behind me, got me by the belt and hauled me back from the doorway, and shut the door in their faces.

I opened it again and cut the one Anister had hurt. It hissed where the fire went in. It is always the first cut that does the most, I have found.²⁰

Two of them came at the doorway at once, trying to shove past me. I put my shoulder into the first one and it went back down on its heels. The second one I could not hold. I got my weight on it and it was like pushing against a cart with a mule still in the traces. It went by me.²¹

It went straight for Charlotte. She is not built to take a blow like that, and it had one ready.

It put her down.

I heard it more than I saw it. A sound like a stone dropped on a board. The torch she was holding hit the floor and went out, and she did not get up.

Charlotte

Nimue got her under the arms and dragged her up the stairs. A halfling dragging a grown woman up a flight of stone steps in the dark. I do not know how she did it and I did not see most of it. Olsted went after them with his torch, which was the right thing for him to do. We needed the light more on the stairs than we did at the door.

Behind me the door started to boom. Something was hitting it from the other side, over and over. It cracked. It held a little longer, and then it broke all at once and they came through.

I hit the next one hard enough to crack it open. Anister's bow slipped in his hands and the arrow went nowhere. He set his jaw, drew again, and the next one went in true.²²

Up on the stairs, Nimue turned Charlotte over and saw her face.

She lived. She came back to herself choking, and the first thing she said was, "Did we win?"

It cost her. It always costs something. The talons had come down across her brow and into the eyes, both of them. When the blood was cleared off there were two long scars running straight down her face, and her eyes set back deeper in her head than they were that morning. She will carry that the rest of her life. She is young and she will carry it a long time.²³

Nimue wrapped her head and told her she could walk now, so she had better. She did.

The stairs in the dark

The fire went out of my sword.

It flickers when it goes, and then it is just steel again, chipped steel. Down there that means one less light. There was a skeleton in front of me and I swung at it and missed.

Then the light on Anister's hat went out. Then the last torch near us guttered and died. The only light left in the world was Olsted's torch, sixty feet up the stairs, a spark about the size of a coin.

I felt them come at me in the dark. Two of them. I could hear the grinding of the stone on their joints. One landed. I could not see to answer it.²⁴

Then there was a scrape and a flare, and there was Anister in the middle of them, down on one knee, holding a torch up. He had struck it in the pitch black, with skeletons all around him, on his first try. He does not usually get lucky. He got lucky then.²⁵

Then he put his head down and went straight through the middle of them, knocked one aside and was up the stairs.

Caught

Nimue had Charlotte on her feet and Olsted with his light, and she got us all moving. Up and out, as fast as we could go.

We did not make it.²⁶

They caught us near the top. I do not know how. Things made of rock should not be able to move that fast on stairs. But they were there when we got there, on every side, and the stairs are too narrow to go around anything.

So that is where we are. Anister has almost nothing left in him. I am not much better. Charlotte cannot take one more hit and is standing up anyway. Nimue has no magic left but the armor on her back, and Olsted has one torch and a hat and his mama's advice.

We have been here before. Not these stairs, and not these dead, but this spot. Every one of us has been this close to it and walked away, some of us more than once. I don't know that we will this time. But I know Silvanus answered me twice today, even if what he answered with did not take. I am going to call on him again.

I will write the rest when I know it.