The Barrow

by Mark Smylie

  Erim and Wilhem Price looked at each other in confusion, still standing in the entrance, uncertain of what to do. So they raised their weapons.

  Arduin hefted his war sword up, gleaming dangerous in the lamp and torchlight. “Shut your hole, peasant! I’ve put up with your insolence long enough!” he growled. He started to pick up speed, his pursuit of the three Danian men around the room now in earnest. They started to stumble backwards faster, laughing and cursing and shouting in fear and surprise, weapons raised, Godewyn’s eyes flashing with the anticipation of the coming fight.

  But Stjepan’s voice cut through their cries high and sharp. “My Lord, the map!”

  Everyone else in the chamber came to a halt and froze, staring at him and Annwyn, standing in the middle of the chamber, looking at each other under his upraised torch.

  “The map, my Lord,” said Stjepan. “It says . . . dig.”

  Everyone looked at Annwyn, then down at the floor, at the flat earthen ground on which she stood.

  Annwyn smiled broadly at Stjepan, then, a look of triumph on her face.

  Too Tall and Wilhem Price passed tools and bags of equipment from the pillared antechamber into the high-domed tomb to Caider Ross and Godewyn. Annwyn walked around the chamber, her cloak wrapped tight about her body and her modesty restored, and yet it kept slipping off her shoulders. Stjepan stood in the center of the room as Leigh marked off a circular area of the floor around him.

  “So then we dig,” called Godewyn over his shoulder as he set down a set of shovels and picks. “Even with Gilgwyr wandering around here still?”

  “I’ll stand guard,” offered Arduin.

  Godewyn snorted derisively and exchanged glances with Stjepan and Caider Ross as they began removing the heavier layers of their brigandine and leathers and clothing. “Aye, his Lordship will stand guard,” Godewyn said under his breath.

  Wilhem Price was about to follow suit and started to unbuckle his cuirass, but Arduin raised his hand to stop him. “No, no, Wilhem, my sister must be removed from this place. Take her back to the camp, and watch over her there,” he said.

  Leigh grunted and nodded. “I will be part of her escort. I brought her here; it is my duty to see her safe,” the Magister said gruffly.

  Godewyn frowned and looked around to Too Tall. “Here, Garrett, you go with them, too,” he said, and Too Tall shrugged.

  “But Garrett’s a miner,” objected Stjepan.

  “Meaning I’ve had my fill of digging in the dirt,” Too Tall said with a grin.

  Stjepan and Godewyn exchanged a glance, and then Stjepan turned to Erim. “If things look safe in camp, you and Too Tall try making it back here,” he said. “Everyone digs on this one, if we can afford them.” Too Tall shrugged again, and Erim grunted and nodded grimly, joining those who were headed back to camp.

  Wilhem Price, Leigh, Too Tall, Erim, and Annwyn slipped one by one from the chamber; Annwyn paused in the archway and took one last look back at them over her shoulder.

  Stjepan caught her eye for a moment as he pulled on a pair of tight leather gloves. And then he turned, hefted up a pick, and swung it into the dirt.

  Erim stepped back into the inner barrow’s first chamber and surveyed the chamber and its exits, holding a lantern high in one hand and her rapier in the other as she cataloged the prints on the ground, the position of the urns and grave goods. She listened, and other than the breathing and light clatter of her comrades behind her, she could hear nothing. She stepped to the side, slipping the handle ring of her lantern over a spike that had been driven into the wall opposite to where Godewyn had earlier left his lantern.

  Too Tall stepped in the chamber next and started working on lighting yet another extra lantern, followed by Leigh, Annwyn, and Wilhem Price, also bearing a lamplight.

  Erim moved to lead them out through the exit passage but Annwyn’s voice stopped her. “Please,” said Annwyn. “Before we go, we must find Malia.”

  Erim felt a pang of guilt but shook her head. “My Lady, it’s dangerous down here,” she said. “We don’t know where Gilgwyr is, and he may have killed two of us already . . . and it’s also very easy to get lost.”

  “Please,” said Annwyn, stepping closer. “She is like a sister to me. If she is in danger, we must at least try.” Annwyn implored Erim with clear blue, dead eyes.

  Erim blinked once, nervously, and glanced at Too Tall; Garrett shrugged in response. Erim debated silently with herself for a moment. Leigh watched quietly and patiently as she made up her mind.

  “Very well, my Lady,” Erim said. She indicated the archway that led to the shrine of Ishraha. “Let’s try this way first.” She turned to Too Tall. “Let’s change the order. Can you take rear? We’ll need something sharp at each end now.”

  The short man nodded. “Sure, no point in having Gilgwyr come up behind us.”

  Erim grunted her thanks and led the way out. Wilhem Price followed, holding a lantern up to light their way. Annwyn and Leigh followed, and Too Tall was last. He stopped for a moment, lifting his lantern to scan the room and listen to the sounds of the barrow, and heard nothing.

  Stjepan, Godewyn, and Caider Ross were working in a rough circle by multiple lamplight, shoveling cold, hard dirt from the center of the high-domed chamber and trying to be careful not to hit each other or each other’s shovels. After a few minutes of hesitant experimentation they’d found a decent rhythm. Many minutes later they’d managed to dig a couple of feet into the ground in the center of the chamber and were slowly expanding the hole. They were tossing the displaced earth away from the center as far as they could, but every now and then one of them would stop digging in the hole to shift a mound of dirt a bit further away.

  Arduin stood by the entrance to the chamber, one eye on what they were doing, one eye on the pillared chamber beyond the archway, his war sword cradled in the crook of his couter. Caider stepped out of the hole, breathing heavily, and sopped his brow with his gloved hand and his shirt; grimacing, Arduin picked up a water skin from a satchel and handed it to him.

  “Thanks, milord,” said Caider with a grin that showed off a couple of teeth missing from brawls and fistfights, and he took a swig.

  Arduin grimaced. “Don’t mention it,” he said sourly.

  They stood within the treasure-filled burial chamber. Erim watched with a bit of confusion and curiosity as Annwyn walked around the bier, looking at the body and sword intently, attended by her brother’s squire. Too Tall lounged in the entrance, watching and listening back into the entry passageway.

  Leigh also studied the body as Annwyn did, but whereas her gaze held some element of fascination or curiosity, he could only look at the body and sword with an expression of sour, bitter disappointment.

  “My Lady? Can we go now?” asked Erim gently.

  Annwyn gave a small smile. “Forgive me,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything quite like this. And you say you don’t know if this is actually the great wizard Azharad?”

  Erim shrugged and shook her head. “Book’s still out on that one,” she said.

  Annwyn nodded, and looked around the chamber. “Well, Malia is clearly not here,” she said. “Please lead on to wherever you think best to search next.”

  Too Tall grunted and headed out of the room.

  Stjepan and Caider Ross were now about three feet under the dirt floor in the center of the chamber, the upper halves of their bodies visible above the uneven lip of the expanding hole. The speed of their digging had slowed the deeper they got and as they were forced to dig outward as well as downward to give themselves room to maneuver.

  Arduin still stood sentry by the entrance archway. Godewyn rested on his haunches on the opposite side of the chamber, his back pressed against the wall, drinking from a canteen. His gaze wandered the corbelled ceiling, idly wondering how much the gems and gold inlays would be worth if he could figure out a way to get up there and pry them loose; only the first tier of corbels was in easy reach. The frames of the corbels
almost passed for square, recessed doors, and the thought suddenly occurred to him that perhaps one of them was just that.

  “You sure it said dig, Black-Heart?” said Godewyn, his eyes narrowing as he stared at the ceiling.

  Suddenly, there was a sharp metal clang.

  Standing with surprise, Godewyn rose and came opposite of Arduin as he also walked over to look down into the hole. Stjepan and Caider Ross were half bent, staring at each other; Caider moved his shovel and it clanged again. Stjepan tested the same spot, with the same sound.

  “Metal for sure,” whispered Caider, and he dropped down to his knees and cleared a bit of dirt with his hands.

  Black, rusted iron looked up at them.

  Too Tall led them back into the inner barrow’s first antechamber, and paused beside the southerly exit while the rest of the group filed in after him.

  “What’s down there?” Annwyn asked.

  “You’ll see,” Too Tall said with a shrug.

  He took lead as they entered the passage. Leigh and Annwyn and Wilhem Price followed, and then Erim.

  She’d gotten maybe twenty paces down the passage when she thought she heard a faint sound behind her. A scritch or a scratch.

  Erim stopped and turned around while the others continued to follow Too Tall down the passage, taking the noise they were making with them. As the passage grew quiet, the sound repeated itself, and Erim slowly slid one of her point daggers out into her left hand to join the rapier in her right, and silently she slipped back up the passage toward the antechamber.

  Stjepan stood outside the expanding hole this time, his shirt drenched in sweat. He guzzled water from a canteen. Godewyn and Caider Ross were the ones down in the pit now. They were using picks and mattocks and the thinner shovels to break up the dirt and packed earth, and then switching to the wider shovels to fling the dirt out of the pit where Stjepan was then clearing it to the sides of the chamber. The pit was four, almost five feet deep, and they had exposed the top of what appeared to be a rounded casket made of black iron, buried upright in the ground. Strange swirling designs and markings in Maerberos similar to the ones on the map were etched into its surface, and one exposed side of it was etched with what appeared to be the start of an image of a man wearing a horned mask.

  “Queen of Heaven help me,” gasped Stjepan, after drinking his fill. He looked down at the two feet of casket that they had exposed. “If that’s what we think it is, we’ll have to dig . . . what, probably at least nine feet down to get it out. This could take the rest of the night still.”

  “Been a while since you had to do a real man’s work, eh, cartographer?” called out Godewyn as he swung a pick into the earth.

  Stjepan snorted and spat to the side. “And what would you know about a real man’s work? You’re a robber and a pimp,” he said.

  Godewyn paused in his digging and shrugged.

  “That’s a real man’s work,” he said.

  Carefully and stealthily, Erim entered the antechamber of the inner barrow, blades at the ready. The lanterns she and Godewyn had left spiked to the walls still guttered and lit the chamber in flickering shadows. But there was no one else there.

  She slid softly in a half-crouch from one end of the chamber to the other, studying the tracks on the ground and listening at each of the arched exits.

  Nothing, she thought.

  She straightened, shaking her head. She stood silently for a long minute, relaxed, her blades ready, just listening.

  Fuck, still nothing, she thought.

  She sheathed her point dagger and slid Godewyn’s lantern off its spike on the wall. She turned and headed back into the southerly passage.

  Twenty paces down the passage, Erim heard the sound behind her again, back from where she had just come. She turned, almost angry, setting the lantern down and slipping her dagger back into her left hand and lifting bared steel points at the ready again.

  She slid forward a step or two back toward the antechamber and the lantern on the ground behind her suddenly guttered and almost plunged the passageway into darkness. Her instincts kicked in and she turned quickly, barely in time to parry a blow to her neck from someone behind her.

  She fought the figure in the semi-dark, she wasn’t sure what was happening to the lantern, it was as though a strong wind was catching the flame and making it flicker and gutter, threatening to douse it, but there was no wind in the tunnel, just a dark figure, cloaked in the shadows of the passageway and lurking behind a point of flickering steel. A rapier, wielded by a trained duelist, and Erim found herself desperately giving ground against an onslaught of cuts and lunges.

  And yet, I know this pattern, she thought suddenly. A second or two later and she had just about seen enough to know how to run the dark shadow through, when suddenly a black shape flew out of the darkness at Erim and wrapped itself around her left thigh. She looked down. It was a giant millipede, glistening black in the flickering lamplight. She could feel its many legs start to dig into her flesh, even through her flared black breeches. As it began to crawl up her leg, she jumped up and back and whirled in a panic, kicking her leg and bringing the cutting edge of her rapier down to slash at the hideous creature.

  But the millipede vanished under her blow as if it had never been there, and instead the cutting edge of her rapier sliced deep through her breeches and into her own leg.

  The pain was enough to distract her. A hand appeared from behind her to cover her mouth and her eyes widened in shock as she watched a foot of bloodied steel spring from her guts, her mind briefly uncomprehending as to what her eyes were seeing.

  Erim screamed into the hand as the pain and sensation and knowledge of being run through gripped her tight.

  Annwyn stood before the three stone biers in the chamber and stared at the bodies of three desiccated women in barbaric jewels and cloth. She ignored the large tunneled opening in the wall to her left.

  “We shouldn’t be here, my Lady. It is not safe here, in this place,” whispered Wilhem Price. He stood near her, his arming sword at the ready in one hand, a lantern in the other to provide his Lady with light.

  “I am quite tired of being continually warned about my safety, when we stand in the middle of a wizard’s barrow in the Bale Mole,” chided Annwyn softly. “None of us are safe here.”

  Too Tall had taken a spot by the entrance archway into the chamber, and while he would occasionally look out into the hall he spent most of his time watching Annwyn. Leigh stood impassively holding up another lantern, and he too watched Annwyn with beady eyes. She approached the woman’s body on the central cairn, and began to walk around it slowly, studying it.

  “This woman was a queen, I think,” said Annwyn.

  “One of Azharad’s brides, I would guess,” said Leigh. “It was said by both his enemies and his allies that he loved to indulge in the flesh of beautiful young women. In more ways than one. But these women must either have pleased him greatly, then, or themselves been witches and priestesses amongst the Nameless, to avoid his cooking pots and instead receive the honor of being interred here in his barrow.” Wilhem Price looked quite queasy at that.

  “Look how women would dress in so dark an age,” Annwyn said. She ran a hand over the sheer garments that were left upon the body. Thin, sheer silks with slits that exposed legs and thighs and hips, now rotting with age, tightly wound tops banded with thin rings of woven gold, high gem-set necklaces and bronze bracelets made to look like twining serpents. “So crude, so revealing. I have been cloistered for so long, but still I would sometimes hear my brothers or our knights and servants talking, and I have heard that the temple-courtesans of Dieva, Goddess of Pleasure, still wear such things . . . where her temples are allowed, that is . . .”

  “Dieva and her sacred prostitutes, my ass. A whore’s a whore,” muttered Too Tall.

  “Watch your tongue!” hissed Wilhem Price, his face blushing a deep red. “You are in the presence of a Lady!”

  “I expect for you, we ar
e all whores, isn’t that right?” Annwyn asked. As she walked around the bier, she let her robe slide open a bit, showing a bit of pale ivory leg. Too Tall chuckled at his good fortune and turned to watch her more closely while Wilhem Price swallowed nervously. She indicated the body and its garb. “Perhaps you’d like to see me wearing such barbaric things . . . dressed the ancient Queen? Or the temple whore, if you prefer.”

  Too Tall grinned at that. “Queen, whore, makes no difference to me how a woman dresses,” he said. Annwyn turned and looked at him, her robe now sliding off her body almost completely, revealing her pale shoulders and shapely breasts and hips and a flat, smooth belly. The pieces of the map appeared and disappeared in her skin, and seemed to be moving most around her nipples and down her belly, as though the words and images were touching her skin from within her. Wilhem Price gawked, totally confused at what was happening. “Only thing that matters is whether she’s wet and willing when she undresses,” Too Tall said. “And sometimes I guess even that don’t matter all that much.”

  Annwyn smiled and stepped back a bit, showing off more of her body. Too Tall took a step forward, grinning as he started loosening his doublet. Wilhem Price was frozen, his eyes darting back and forth between them.

  “Willing? Oh, aye,” said Annwyn breathily.

  There was a flash of steel from behind Too Tall and his head popped off and a geyser of blood shot up into the air and spattered over the ground, even reaching Wilhem Price, and the short Danian man was suddenly much shorter.

  The squire turned, wide-eyed, finally freed to move by the sudden act of violence, and he swung himself protectively in front of the Lady Annwyn, lifting both his arming sword and his lantern and facing the entrance to the chamber as the twitching, headless body of Too Tall fell to the floor.

  “I think indeed that I shall be willing to be the Queen of the Bale Mole,” whispered Annwyn in Wilhem Price’s ear, as she slid an arm around him and pressed herself against his back.