by Alex Irvine
“Delightful, I would say,” Paelias added. He picked up an uncut ruby the size of an acorn. “Hard to believe nobody ever bothered to come find this before.”
A distant boom echoed in the chamber and down the hall. All of them looked back toward the tomb entrance, which was much too far away to see directly. “Our tiefling friend?” Kithri wondered.
Another boom came, and the rumble of what sounded like a collapse. “Well,” Lucan said to Biri-Daar. “I hope you’re right that we can get to the Keep from inside here. Now how were we going to get out of the Keep?”
“One thing at a time,” Biri-Daar said. She was still looking back to the entry passage, and she drew her sword. The rest armed themselves as well, as the guardians of the Road-builder’s tomb began to pour into the antechamber.
They were long dead, the last crew to work on the Crow Road, buried with the Road-builder instead of beneath the stones of his road. Their bodies were held together by the posthumous strength of his magic—some had once been human, others dwarves, even a few tieflings and orcs among them. They thronged in the entry hall, dully responsive to their single imperative: to destroy the intruders.
And, incredibly, to rebuild the tomb. As Paelias flung a searing splash of light onto the ceiling, they saw back toward the entrance that some of the reanimated workers were already moving stones and mixing mortar from the dust of the floor and the black fluids of their own bodies. How many times had this happened before? “I revise my earlier statement,” Paelias said. “Instead, I choose to find it hard to believe that anyone ever survived this to get into the Keep.”
“Hold them!” Keverel cried out suddenly, as within the antechamber more walking dead emerged from the stones of the walls. He forced them back with the channeled power of Erathis, blinding and confusing them, as the rest of the party dug for their lives. They used the picks and shovels and mauls, but gold was a poor material for weapons—heavy and soft and slippery in the hands of the half-decayed guardians. A heavy sledgehammer, its striking face set with a single great emerald, went over Remy’s head and rang against the wall, cracking the gem and bending the hammer’s handle. Remy first struck off the hands holding the hammer, then the head of the animated corpse. But right behind it loomed a great hulking corpse of what must have been an ogre in life, swinging a pick whose head was as long as Remy was tall. Keverel was smashing his way through the others, breaking them apart and crushing the skulls to make sure.
At the antechamber’s entrance, Biri-Daar and Lucan and Paelias made a wall too strong for the surge of undead to break. The corpses died again and again, some of them coming back to life beneath the marching feet of their successors only to be cut down again as soon as they could rise. It was going to be up to Remy to deal with the undead ogre.
It brought its great pick down, burying it a foot into the stone floor as Remy skipped aside and hacked at its arm. Once, twice, three times he struck as the great hulking zombie worked the pick free. On the third blow, he severed its arm just above the elbow. It swung the stump at him, spraying him with a foul black fluid. With its other hand it got the pick free and pivoted to gut him with a sideways swipe.
Remy ducked under it and dragged his blade along the underside of its wrist, cutting it to the bone. The pick flew from its hand and crashed into the other wall, crushing a smaller zombie against the row of wheelbarrows. The ogre’s severed arm still clung to the pick handle. It reached for Remy, its eyes infernally alight.
And then one of them went out, its light replaced by the gentle gleam of Keverel’s magic imbuing the steel haft of one of Kithri’s throwing knives. A moment later, the same happened to its other eye. Remy closed, swinging his sword as if cutting down a tree. He chopped through one of its legs and danced back as it fell. Behind him he heard Biri-Daar and Lucan shouting about something but he could not turn to see what it was; as the zombie hulk hit the ground, he struck again and again at its blinded head, eventually hacking away part of its skull and brain. Tremors ran through it, subsiding into silence.
Remy turned to see that everyone else had stopped fighting as well. All visible corpses were just that—corpses. Keverel was whispering blessings over them to permanently release those that had been rising again.
Ten or twelve feet outside the antechamber door, the last stones were being fitted into a new wall closing off the hall. The Road-builder’s crew were doing their jobs.
“This was a trap for wandering tomb robbers,” Paelias said. “Not hardy fighting folk such as ourselves. One wonders if the Road-builder left anything a little more interesting.”
“More interesting than being forced to go through the rest of the tomb and discover what joys await us in the Inverted Keep? Careful what you wish for,” Kithri said. She was eyeing the ceiling, and as soon as she spoke, she began climbing one of the walls, using the edges of alcove and sconce for footholds until she was within arm’s reach of the ceiling. Then out came a stubby, thick-bladed knife and she began to work it into the nearest of the star map’s constellations.
“Don’t,” said Paelias.
Kithri couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “These are diamonds, Paelias. What do you mean, ‘don’t’?”
“I mean don’t,” he said. “It is not for nothing that I chose the path of the starpact. Maps of the sky are sacred.”
“I’ll put something else in their place,” Kithri said.
“Kithri. Look around you. Is there not enough to carry?”
The argument might have gone farther, but the ogre corpse interrupted it by coming back to life. It reared up onto its single leg, wounds still gaping, the pulpy mass of its brain sliding out through the holes in its skull left by Remy’s sword. With the advantage of surprise, it struck with its remaining hand, the momentum of the blow toppling it off balance even as its open palm swatted Paelias flat against the wall.
Keverel jumped forward, his mace crashing into its head as it hit the ground again. He pounded it into silence, then spoke his blessing and release. The others were gathering around Paelias, who had fallen motionless across two of the wheelbarrows, his posture not unlike the vanquished zombie crushed by the hulk’s pick. Lucan slapped lightly at his face, and Paelias’s eyes slitted open. He said something in a language Remy didn’t understand.
Lucan answered in the same language. Elvish, Remy realized. Lucan looked up at Keverel, who was wiping his mace clean. “His mind is scrambled,” Lucan said.
The cleric squatted in front of Paelias, who focused on him with difficulty. “Paelias,” Keverel said. “Do you know who I am?”
“The Erathian,” Paelias said. “Keverel. Holy man.”
“Yes,” Keverel said. Out of Paelias’s field of vision, he was doing something with his hands. Blood began to trickle from the star elf’s nose. He licked it from his lips, but kept eye contact with Keverel.
“We can’t stay here,” Biri-Daar said. “The crew will awaken again if we are here long enough to let them.”
“Perhaps not,” Kithri said.
Lucan nodded. “Perhaps they have done their work once they have walled us in.” From the other side of the new wall, the sounds of building echoed. The crew was completing its work.
“Do they plant the trees again?” Kithri wondered.
“Don’t be stupid, Kithri,” Paelias said suddenly. “They’re zombies. The undead don’t go out in broad daylight to plant trees, for the gods’ sakes.”
Everyone looked at Keverel for confirmation. He winked. Paelias looked around at each of them, wiping away the blood from his lip. “What?” he said. “What?”
“Never mind. Are you fit to go on?” Biri-Daar asked.
“If he can insult me, he’s ready,” Kithri said. “Let’s get what we can carry and see what the rest of this hole has to offer.”
“Not the star map,” Paelias said.
Kithri glared at him. “Fine. Not the star map.” She looked up at it with longing that would have been touching had it not been motivated en
tirely by greed. Then she sifted through the litter of spilled gemstones and dismembered zombies, looking for the most efficient way to fill her pockets with riches.
Remy found himself next to Keverel as they found a zigzagging descending passage from the antechamber to what they assumed must be the actual burial chamber. “What did you to do him?” he murmured, not wanting Paelias to hear.
“Some healing closes wounds on the outside of the body, some on the inside,” Keverel said. “His wound was to both body and mind, at the place where they meet. Very difficult to minister to those. But Erathis is powerful. He has never deserted me in a time of need.”
Biri-Daar hissed from just ahead, a signal they had learned meant shut up, potential danger. Slowing, the group drew tighter as they came to a short stair at the bottom of which was another plastered-over entrance. On the floor directly in front of it lay a trowel and a pan of long-dried plaster. Biri-Daar descended the stair and said, “Be ready for the road crew.”
Weapons drawn, they looked in all directions as she slid the pan and trowel out of the way. Nothing happened. She tapped at the plaster. Nothing. “Be ready,” she said again, and punched a hole in the plaster.
The doorway was timbered over as well as plastered, and took longer to break down. When they were done there was still no sign of the road crew. They stepped over the rubble of the doorway into the Road-builder’s burial chamber.
It was two or three times as large, in every dimension, as the antechamber. Their light barely reached the ceiling, but it did manage to pick out a diamond star map slightly different than the previous. Remy wondered if each one reflected the sky on a particular date, and if so what the dates were. The Road-builder’s death? The completion of the Crow Road? Probably he would never know. The treasures in the burial chamber were different. The antechamber had celebrated the Road-builder’s tools; the burial chamber celebrated the culmination of the work. The floor was a map of the Dragondown, with the Crow Road picked out in a single poured stream of gold. The Whitefall was a string of opals, the Blackfall obsidian. The Dragondown Gulf, covering nearly a quarter of the room’s floor, was worked from lapis lazuli. In the center of the room, the Road-builder’s sarcophagus sat untouched. Four feet high and seemingly large enough for three men, it was inlaid in gold, jade, and mother-of-pearl with a fantastically complicated collage of different creatures. There were men and halflings, crows and wolves, legendary creatures Remy had never believed existed such as beholders and the semi-sentient molds said to creep the darkest corners of dungeons. Demons, dragons, vampires …
“These are all of the creatures he buried under the road,” Keverel said. “His menagerie.”
Lucan walked over to it and tapped on its lid. “Do we crack it?”
Remy looked to Biri-Daar, knowing what her answer would be. She would have enough respect for the dead that she would not have the sarcophagus itself violated even if they took with them everything else they could carry.
“Yes,” she said.
Stunned, Remy echoed her. “Yes?”
“It has been many centuries since the Road-builder lay in this tomb,” she said. “Open it.”
Lucan found the seam dividing lid and case. He wedged the blade of his knife into it, working it all the way around the sarcophagus. Bits of precious stone and gold flaked onto the floor. “I’m going to need a hand here,” he said when he’d circumambulated the sarcophagus. Biri-Daar, Keverel, and Remy stepped up.
On Lucan’s count of three, the four of them heaved the lid up. It overbalanced, tipping on end and sliding to the floor with a deafening boom. “That ought to bring the road crew along,” Kithri observed. Whatever anxiety the idea provoked in her was not enough to prevent her stooping to scoop up some of the larger fragments of gold inlay.
The inside of the sarcophagus, as Biri-Daar had suggested, was empty.
But not just empty. Instead of a floor, only black space lay at its bottom. A cold damp breath blew out of it.
“Rope,” Biri-Daar said.
Among them, they had two hundred feet. “This is where we go down to go up,” Lucan said.
“And then,” Remy added, remembering their morning’s exchange, “up will be down. Is two hundred feet enough?” he added as the rope uncoiled down into the darkness.
“Someone has to go first to find out,” Keverel said. “I will.”
“No, you won’t,” Kithri said. “I will. I’m light enough that if there isn’t enough rope you can pull me back up.”
“The halfling talks sense for a change,” Lucan said.
Kithri climbed up onto the lip of the sarcophagus, tipped an imaginary cap at them, and rappelled away into the darkness. She looked up when all of her save her face was in shadow. “One tug means all is well. Two means leave me. If you feel two, don’t believe it. What I mean is three, except I didn’t have time.”
“What would three mean?” Paelias asked.
“Help,” she said, and lowered herself out of sight.
They had received no message from her when the road crew arrived at the door looking to clean up their mess … and them with it.
This was the elite, the foremen and their hand-picked laborers. They were brawny, grim, twirling their picks and mauls with flippant menace. There were dozens of them, crowding the passage from the burial chamber doorway past the first bend and beyond. “Don’t think we can let them rebuild the sarcophagus lid,” Paelias said, looking down at the pieces of it scattered around their feet.
“Not until we get down there,” Lucan agreed.
Remy shrugged. “Or Kithri comes back up.”
“Hold them,” Biri-Daar said.
The words had not left her mouth before Lucan’s arrows were ripping into the front ranks of the crew. As they slowed, piling the others up behind them, Remy and Biri-Daar herself met them at the doorway, holding them at the choke point where they couldn’t use their numerical advantage. Keverel, a step back, held forth his holy symbol. “Erathis commands!” he boomed. “You shall not enter!”
Slowed, pained by the holy force of the god, the undead tried to press forward. “Keep them back, Keverel,” Paelias said. He was leaning over the edge of the sarcophagus, the fingers of one hand resting on the rope. “We’ve got a tug.”
“Remy, you and the eladrin go,” Biri-Daar said. “Lucan too.” She had her talisman of Bahamut out; its fierce glow threw the room’s shadows into sharp relief and washed over the undead crew, driving them back. Remy started to argue, but Lucan shouldered his bow and caught Remy’s arm.
“It’s not cowardice when the chief tells you retreat,” he said. “We go to the Keep. So let’s go.”
When they got back to the sarcophagus, Paelias was already on the rope, skipping nimbly down the seemingly bottomless shaft. “Will the rope hold all of us?” he called.
“Two, anyway,” Lucan answered. “Go quickly and tug when you’re at the bottom. Go!”
Paelias went. Remy and Lucan looked toward the door. Keverel and Biri-Daar appeared to be holding the road crew back. “Go,” Lucan told Remy.
Remy shook his head. “You.”
“Remy, I’m going to have to throw you if you get stubborn. Then your box will break and every demon in the Dragondown will be here before we can catch our breath. Do you want that?” Lucan winked. “Go.”
The rope was taut in Remy’s hands, and trembling as Paelias rappelled farther down below him. His scabbard tangled his legs and his shield scraped against the opposite wall of the shaft as he lowered himself away from the rim. “Go, go,” Lucan said again. He looked up. “How goes it?”
“Move, Lucan!” Biri-Daar’s voice rang down the shaft.
Lucan’s face appeared over the rim. “Remy!” he called. “Is the rope slack under you?”
Remy braced his feet and reached down. The rope moved freely in his hand. “Yes,” he called back. “But I didn’t feel any tug.”
“Devil take the tug,” Lucan said, swinging his leg over the edge. “G
oing, Biri-Daar! Fall back, let’s go!” As he dropped into the shaft, Lucan looked down over his shoulder. “Quickly, Remy. Quickly. Even Erathis won’t hold them back forever.”
Remy had climbed his share of walls. And drainpipes, rope ladders, timber pilings … if it was a way to get from a low place to a high place or the other way around, Remy had climbed it. But none of that had prepared him for rappelling down a rope into pitch darkness of uncertain depth with a tenuous restraint holding back an undead army above him that would, given the chance, cast his rope down into the darkness after his suddenly falling body. Above him, he saw Lucan’s silhouette, and above it the rectangle of the sarcophagus rim, illuminated by the flowing energies of Erathis and Bahamut. “Biri-Daar! Keverel!” Lucan shouted. “Let’s go!”
From below Remy heard a voice. Kithri, he thought, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying. He called down to her, but she didn’t answer. Something lethal was doubtless lying in wait for them. Remy rehearsed the ways that he could finish the descent, come down off the rope, find his feet, and be ready to fight while a desperate and cruel enemy awaited him. Would Kithri and Paelias still be alive? He hadn’t heard any sounds of battle, or even the quick sounds of an ambush. No ring of steel on steel, no screams, no crash of bodies …
“Remy,” Kithri said.
She was closer than he would have expected. Remy looked down—and realized that down was no longer down. He was on his belly, scooting backward along a narrow tunnel. What he’d thought was looking down, was looking over his shoulder. Kithri was there, beckoning him. “You need to get off that rope,” she said. “I’m not sure when you move from tomb to keep, but I do know that we can’t be sure how far someone would fall along the way if we got too many people on that rope. Come on.”
He doubled around in the tight space and belly-crawled the rest of the way, coming out into a low, dark room that smelled as bad as any place he had ever been in his life. “Gods,” he said. “What happened in here.”
“Whatever used to happen in the Keep,” Kithri said, “its current residents still need a sewer. Get over here.” She led him across the floor to a raised ledge out of the muck, where Paelias was scraping filth from his boots. “Charming, these acts of derring-do,” the eladrin muttered. “Oh, look, our boy Remy is here. Welcome to the Inverted Keep.”