They did not take the staircase immediately.
That was Fendor’s decision, and for once nobody argued with him.
The broad descent waited at the center of Ragnap’s tomb, disappearing into darkness beneath stone that had survived thousands of years without the courtesy of explaining what had happened to the people buried around it. They had already awakened mummies, fought beetles large enough to spit acid and discovered that the honored companions of a legendary hero had somehow been turned against anyone entering their resting place.
Walking past an unchecked burial chamber merely because the staircase looked more important would have been the sort of thing they once did.
Experience had not made them less curious.
It had occasionally made them less stupid.
The remaining chamber mirrored the one they had already searched. That was the first warning.
Fendor stopped at its threshold and studied the floor instead of the coffin.
Stone tiles ran beneath the dust in a pattern almost identical to the opposite side of the tomb. Near the center, one slab sat slightly higher than the stones around it. Not enough to notice while walking. Enough once a person knew what had happened elsewhere.
He crouched.
“Here.”
Kaylor looked down.
“A trap?”
“The same kind, I think.”
“Can we break it?”
Fendor looked at him.
“You know there are solutions that don’t involve breaking things.”
Kaylor glanced toward the ancient coffin waiting in the room.
“Eventually we end up breaking something.”
“That is not the same argument.”
Isamu stepped around the suspicious stone without touching it.
Nethnarel followed.
Hexen watched the floor, then the walls, then the coffin.
Everything remained still.
That bothered him.
The tomb did not feel evil in its bones.
That distinction had become clearer the deeper they went. The stonework celebrated Ragnap. Carvings showed victories, protections, battles fought on behalf of people rather than against them. Small statues rested in alcoves. Funerary urns had been arranged with care. Even the architecture possessed something solemn rather than cruel.
Someone had built this place to honor a hero.
Something else had taught it to kill.
Kaylor reached the coffin.
Fendor remained near the entrance.
“Perhaps we don’t open that.”
Kaylor placed both hands on the lid.
“Then why did we come in?”
“To verify that the room was safe.”
“It isn’t.”
“We have verified it.”
Kaylor pushed.
The lid moved.
Fendor sighed.
“Of course.”
The smell reached them first.
Not ordinary decay.
The corpse-stink of something that had been sealed for centuries and then denied the peace of becoming dust rolled from the coffin in a wave so powerful Isamu turned his face away despite himself. Nethnarel raised one sleeve over her nose. Kaylor’s expression barely changed, though his eyes watered.
Movement followed.
One wrapped figure sat upright.
Then another.
Then another.
The burial chamber had not contained one honored dead.
It had contained several.
Their bodies emerged with the same wrong vitality as the mummies they had already fought. Ancient cloth hung from armor darkened by age. Fingers curled around weapons that should have rusted into uselessness long ago.
Kaylor stepped backward.
“I suppose that’s the answer.”
Fendor drew the Oathbow.
“To which question?”
“Whether we should have opened it.”
“Then the answer was no.”
The first mummy climbed from the coffin.
Nethnarel acted before the others could spread.
Fire rose across the chamber.
Not a burst.
A wall.
Flame erupted in a straight line between the coffin and the heroes, filling the ancient room from floor to ceiling with a roaring barrier of orange-white heat. Dry funerary wrappings ignited immediately. The first creature walked into the flames without hesitation.
Hexen stared.
“They don’t care.”
“They’re dead,” Nethnarel said.
“So?”
“So their judgment is impaired.”
The mummy stepped through.
Its wrappings burned.
Kaylor met it.
Peacemaker struck hard enough to turn the creature sideways, but a second undead shape emerged through the flames behind it. Then a third.
The fire made them worse to look at.
Blackened cloth peeled from bodies that continued moving long after pain should have stopped them. Their mouths opened without breath. Their weapons came forward with the certainty of soldiers answering an order older than memory.
Fendor loosed.
His first arrow entered the chest of the nearest mummy.
It kept coming.
The second struck higher.
The creature staggered.
Kaylor finished it.
The others spread.
Isamu moved toward the flank, using the coffin itself to limit how many could reach him at once. The Swarm Gloves tightened around his hands. Insects shifted beneath their surface, but none emerged. He struck one undead guardian across the jaw, turned beneath its answering blow and hit again before it recovered.
Hexen stayed near the edge of Nethnarel’s fire.
The wall had divided the room neatly.
Unfortunately, the mummies treated flames as an inconvenience rather than a boundary.
One came through burning from shoulder to knee.
Hexen brought his staff across its chest.
The thing seized the weapon.
For an instant they stood locked together.
Then Hexen changed.
His body dissolved upward.
Flesh became wind.
The druid expanded into a twisting column of air, his shape abandoning every constraint of bone and muscle. The mummy lost its grip because there was suddenly nothing solid enough to hold.
Hexen surged around it.
The creature was lifted from its feet and thrown back through the wall of fire.
Fendor watched it vanish into the flames.
“I approve.”
Hexen’s voice came from everywhere inside the moving air.
“Of?”
“That.”
The mummy returned.
Still burning.
Fendor reconsidered.
“Less impressive than I hoped.”
Kaylor drove another creature toward the coffin.
The undead guardian raised its weapon.
Kaylor’s helm darkened.
Red light gathered behind his eyes.
The effect had frightened living men before.
This thing had been dead too long to care.
Kaylor glared at it.
The mummy struck him.
Kaylor blocked.
“Fine.”
He hit it instead.
That worked better.
The battle became brief in the way high-level violence often did.
Not easy.
Brief.
Nethnarel’s Wall of Fire controlled the chamber. Hexen’s elemental form denied the undead stable footing. Isamu attacked through openings created by their movement. Fendor placed arrows where burning wrappings revealed weak points. Kaylor did what Kaylor had always done best when moral ambiguity finally gave him something uncomplicated to hit.
He stood in front.
He took what came.
He answered harder.
The last mummy crossed the flames already collapsing.
Fendor’s arrow struck first.
Isamu hit it from the side.
Kaylor brought his blade down.
The corpse returned to the floor.
This time it remained there.
Nethnarel let the fire die.
Smoke gathered against the ancient ceiling.
Nobody spoke until the smell improved enough for conversation to become desirable again.
Fendor looked at the coffin.
“Anything else inside?”
Kaylor glanced toward him.
“You want me to check?”
“No.”
“Good.”
Fendor paused.
“Yes.”
Kaylor smiled.
They searched.
The weapons carried by the dead were old but otherwise ordinary. Whatever importance their owners had possessed came from history rather than enchantment.
The coffins held little more.
Coins.
A modest scattering compared with the wealth the heroes had carried from dragons, mirror realms and impossible cities, but still enough to prove these people had not been buried without honor.
Fendor counted out the old gold.
“One hundred forty.”
Kaylor looked at him.
“You counted?”
“Someone has to.”
“We have more money than we know what to do with.”
Fendor put the coins away.
“That attitude is why the Manticore’s Tail needs an audit.”
Nethnarel groaned.
“Not again.”
“We haven’t resolved it.”
“We were nearly killed by lightning-spitting beetles less than an hour ago.”
“Accounting survives adversity.”
Hexen returned to human form.
“I preferred you when you were complaining about the swamp.”
“I can do both.”
They went to the stairs.
Fendor checked them carefully.
Then checked again.
Nothing.
No loose stone.
No hidden wire.
No magical sigil.
No gap concealing a blade.
The stairway was insultingly ordinary.
Kaylor looked down.
“Safe?”
Fendor gave him the expression of a man who had learned never to answer that question absolutely.
“I don’t see a trap.”
“Good enough.”
Kaylor stepped onto the descent.
The tomb closed behind them.
Stone struck stone with a force that shook the stairwell.
Everyone turned.
A wall had dropped across the passage above, sealing the route back to the burial chambers.
Kaylor stared.
Fendor folded his arms.
“You asked.”
“I did.”
“Good enough?”
Kaylor looked down the stairs.
“We were going this way anyway.”
“That is exactly how tombs win.”
They continued.
The walls changed as they descended.
Ragnap’s story followed them.
Carved scenes stretched along both sides of the stairwell, larger and more detailed than those above. The ancient hero appeared in battle beside companions whose faces time had nearly erased. In one panel he stood before a city gate. In another he faced a creature whose wings covered an entire carved sky. People knelt around him not as subjects but as survivors.
Hexen ran one hand lightly over the stone.
The deeper they went, the more the tomb became celebration rather than burial.
That made the corruption harder to understand.
Above them, something clicked.
Fendor stopped.
“What?”
Small openings had appeared along the border between wall and ceiling.
Hundreds of them.
Nethnarel looked up.
“Those weren’t there.”
Light emerged.
At first Hexen thought lamps had ignited within the carvings.
Then the lights moved.
Tiny brilliant shapes slipped from the openings and floated into the stairwell. White-blue radiance buzzed around each of them, bright enough to leave streaks across the eye when they changed direction.
One became three.
Three became ten.
Then more.
Fendor raised the Oathbow.
“Those are not lamps.”
The first light struck Nethnarel.
There was no blade.
No visible body.
Only contact and electricity.
The air cracked.
Nethnarel recoiled as power traveled across her clothes and through her body.
Then the light vanished.
Fendor blinked.
“Where did it go?”
Behind Isamu, another appeared.
Lightning flashed.
The monk twisted aside.
The creature became visible only at the instant it attacked.
Then it disappeared again.
Kaylor drew.
“Wonderful.”
The stairway erupted.
The wisps did not fight like anything with mass. They moved at impossible speed, darting from the high walls and ceiling, becoming visible only long enough to shock whoever they reached before fading back into near-invisibility.
Fendor shot where one had been.
The arrow struck stone.
Another light crossed behind him.
He turned and loosed again.
This time the arrow found it.
The glowing thing flickered.
Not enough.
Nethnarel raised both hands.
Magic missiles did not care how quickly something moved after they were cast.
That made them useful.
Force split outward in several directions, each bolt curving toward a different light. The chamber flashed as magic connected with moving targets the eye could barely follow.
Several wisps dimmed.
One went dark.
“Better,” Fendor said.
The ground rumbled.
Kaylor closed his eyes briefly.
“Of course.”
Stone broke near the base of the stairs.
Another giant beetle tore itself upward.
The creature’s armored body slammed through ancient floorwork as though burial architecture had been designed merely to make its arrival more dramatic.
Hexen, still in elemental form, rushed toward it.
The beetle attacked the moving air because it apparently possessed no objection to fighting weather.
Its claws found enough substance to matter.
Hexen twisted away.
Above him, the lightning creatures swarmed.
Isamu looked up.
Thirty feet.
Perhaps more.
The nearest target hovered against the upper wall.
He ran.
Kaylor saw him go.
Not along the stairs.
Up the wall.
Isamu’s first steps hit carved stone as easily as level ground. Momentum carried him higher. He crossed the vertical surface while lightning chased him, then pushed away into open air.
One glowing creature darted toward him.
Isamu caught it.
Not cleanly.
No living hand should have been able to close around lightning.
The Swarm Gloves were not ordinary hands.
For a heartbeat electricity filled his fist.
Insects writhed across the glove’s surface.
Isamu twisted.
The creature tore free.
Fendor fired past him.
The arrow extinguished it.
Isamu landed farther down the wall and immediately ran again.
Fendor stared.
“I refuse to compete with that.”
“You fly,” Kaylor said.
“Currently I don’t.”
“Then drink another potion.”
“We are not solving every problem with consumables.”
A wisp struck him.
Electricity snapped across his armor.
Fendor’s eyes narrowed.
“Where are the potions?”
The stairwell became chaos.
Hexen moved through it as a living windstorm, striking creatures at elevations nobody else could easily reach. Isamu ran along walls. Fendor waited for each brief appearance and fired before the light vanished again. Kaylor split his attention between the giant beetle below and whatever electrical thing decided to attack him from behind.
Nethnarel became the center of the wisps’ attention.
Perhaps because her magic had hurt several of them.
Perhaps because they recognized the greatest concentration of power.
Three converged.
The first shock staggered her.
The second nearly dropped her.
The third did.
Nethnarel fell.
She had been hovering just above the stairs when consciousness left her.
The magic holding her aloft vanished.
Her body struck stone.
“Neth!”
Isamu turned.
A wisp attacked him.
He ignored it.
The shock hit across his shoulder as he ran toward her.
Fendor shifted his aim.
His next arrow burst when it struck.
The explosion of force caught two lights close together. One vanished completely. The other spiraled away, flickering.
Kaylor tried to move toward Nethnarel.
The beetle blocked him.
Its jaws opened.
Kaylor drove his frost-rimed blade into the creature’s head and forced it aside.
“Move.”
The beetle did not.
Kaylor struck again.
The creature collapsed.
That cleared the path.
Isamu reached Nethnarel first.
She was alive.
Barely.
Her body remained still except for shallow breath.
Kaylor came down the stairs.
Somewhere behind him Hexen slammed another wisp into stone.
Fendor shouted.
“Don’t bunch up!”
Too late.
A light appeared above them.
Electricity descended.
Isamu twisted himself over Nethnarel.
Kaylor raised his weapon.
The shock struck both men.
Nethnarel remained untouched beneath them.
Then Fendor’s arrow arrived.
The light went out.
Kaylor looked at Isamu.
“Get her up.”
Isamu nodded.
Magic moved through the group in the ways it always had after Grazim’s death—less certain, less abundant, spread among people who had once depended upon one man to make survival look easy.
Enough reached Nethnarel.
She inhaled sharply.
Her eyes opened.
For a moment she stared up at Isamu.
Then at Kaylor.
Then at the lights still fighting above them.
“How long?”
“Not long,” Kaylor said.
Nethnarel sat up.
“Good.”
Isamu frowned.
“Why?”
She raised one hand.
Force gathered around her fingers.
“Because I’m still angry.”
The next wave of magic missiles divided across the stairwell.
Several wisps vanished at once.
Hexen drove another from the air.
Fendor shot one as it tried to escape into the ceiling.
Isamu struck the last close enough to reach.
The glow collapsed.
Darkness returned.
Not complete darkness.
Nethnarel’s magic illuminated the stairs.
That was somehow less comforting now.
Nobody moved for several breaths.
Kaylor looked upward.
“No more?”
Fendor kept the Oathbow ready.
“Never ask that.”
The tomb answered with silence.
Eventually they accepted it.
Nethnarel sat on the stairs while the others tended wounds.
She had come closer to death than anyone wished to discuss.
Again.
Several years of peace had dulled the memory of how quickly a battle could turn from irritating to fatal.
Not erased it.
Dulled it.
Kaylor handed her a healing potion.
She drank.
Fendor looked toward the walls.
“What were those?”
“Something magical,” Nethnarel said.
“Insightful.”
“They weren’t natural.”
“More insightful.”
Hexen studied one dark mark where a wisp had died.
“Part of the tomb’s defense.”
Fendor frowned.
“Originally?”
That question returned them to the same problem.
The tomb had been built to honor Ragnap.
The defenses now behaved like corruption.
Which parts were original?
Which had been twisted?
Nobody knew.
They descended farther.
The stairway ended in a larger chamber.
Urns and carved memorials lined the walls. Small statues portrayed Ragnap in different moments of his legend. None showed cruelty. None celebrated conquest for its own sake. The place still looked like a shrine built by people who had loved or admired the man buried beneath them.
At the far side stood a heavy curved door.
Beyond it, faint light showed through narrow gaps.
Hexen was still air when he approached.
He pressed against the stone.
Wind found openings smaller than flesh could use.
His form narrowed.
Then passed through.
Fendor watched him vanish into the seam.
“I would like that ability.”
Kaylor shook his head.
“You’d use it to avoid paying at the inn.”
“I own the inn.”
“Part of it.”
“That is enough.”
On the other side, Hexen found a larger chamber.
The floor rose toward the far end in broad tiers.
Not stairs exactly.
Something closer to a low stone pyramid or stepped platform.
Light gathered near its summit.
He could not see enough from the doorway to understand the source.
But he felt something.
Power.
Old.
Wrong.
Hexen returned through the crack.
“There’s a chamber.”
Kaylor looked at him.
“Anything alive?”
“I don’t know.”
Fendor sighed.
“Excellent.”
“A raised platform. Light at the far end.”
“Enemies?”
“I didn’t see any.”
“That answer has become meaningless.”
The door was locked.
Nethnarel examined it.
She had acquired a strange collection of practical skills over the years, partly because adventures repeatedly punished specialization. Locks were not her preferred field.
Still, she tried.
The mechanism was ancient.
Complicated.
Her tools found resistance in places that should have yielded and empty spaces where pins should have been.
She frowned.
Fendor waited.
“Well?”
“This lock is ridiculous.”
Kaylor stepped forward.
Nethnarel looked at him.
“No.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You made the face.”
“What face?”
“The door face.”
Fendor nodded.
“He does have one.”
Kaylor put one hand against the stone.
“Can you open it?”
Nethnarel tried once more.
Something clicked.
Not the correct something.
She withdrew the tool.
“No.”
Kaylor smiled.
Nethnarel stepped aside.
“I hate that expression.”
He hit the door.
The first impact shook dust from the frame.
The second cracked something inside the mechanism.
Kaylor struck a third time.
The lock surrendered.
So did the trap.
Electrical energy exploded through the doorway.
Kaylor saw white.
The force ran across his armor and through his body before grounding itself into the stone beneath his boots.
He remained standing.
Barely.
Smoke drifted from one shoulder.
Fendor stared.
“Efficient.”
Kaylor looked at him.
“It opened.”
“That was not praise.”
“It never is.”
The door swung inward.
Light spilled into the corridor.
Kaylor entered first.
Peacemaker came free as he crossed the threshold.
The chamber beyond dwarfed the rooms above.
The stepped stone platform rose ahead like a buried monument within the monument, each level leading toward a bright point at the top. Carvings covered the surrounding walls. Some showed Ragnap’s battles. Others showed companions beside him. The entire place seemed constructed to draw the eye upward.
Kaylor took several steps.
Then the voice came.
“Flee!”
It filled the chamber.
Not loud merely because of volume.
Loud because the stone carried it.
Kaylor stopped.
The light at the summit intensified.
A figure appeared within it.
Armored.
Powerful.
Human, or close enough that the difference no longer mattered after thousands of years.
Kaylor knew the face.
Every wall in the tomb had shown it.
Ragnap the Strong.
For one impossible heartbeat, the ancient hero stood whole.
Not mummy.
Not corrupted corpse.
The man from the carvings.
His expression was desperate.
“I cannot stop him!”
The words rang through the chamber.
Then the light changed.
Ragnap’s body convulsed.
His posture twisted.
Something darker moved through him.
The hero disappeared beneath it.
What remained stood in the same place wearing his shape incorrectly.
Kaylor raised Peacemaker.
Behind him, the others entered the chamber.
Fendor saw the final flicker of Ragnap’s true form vanish.
“What did he say?”
Kaylor did not look back.
“Run.”
Fendor glanced toward the closed route behind them.
“Convenient.”
At the summit, the twisted figure lifted one hand.
It pointed directly at Kaylor.
Power crossed the chamber without visible shape.
Kaylor felt it enter him.
Not strike.
Enter.
For one terrible instant his body began to rot from somewhere beneath the skin. Cold spread through his chest. His muscles seized. The taste of decay filled his mouth.
He remained standing.
The magic weakened.
Not enough to make the pain small.
Enough to survive.
Kaylor breathed through it.
Peacemaker’s black blade rose.
The corrupted figure watched him from the top of the ancient monument.
Fendor came beside him.
“Was that Ragnap?”
Kaylor nodded.
“The part still fighting.”
“And the rest?”
Kaylor looked at the thing wearing the hero.
“I think we’re about to meet him.”
Hexen stared upward.
The tomb’s entire story changed.
The hostile dead.
The corrupted guardians.
The defenses turned against anyone who entered.
Ragnap had not been the source.
He had been another prisoner.
Whatever had reached this place had taken the companions first.
Then the tomb.
Then the hero at its center.
And for a few seconds, after thousands of years beneath an extinct tree, Ragnap the Strong had forced his way through long enough to give strangers one warning.
Flee.
Hexen tightened his grip on Grim Harvest.
Nobody moved toward the door.
Perhaps Ragnap had expected that.
Heroes rarely listened to good advice when someone else was still trapped behind it.
At the summit, the thing inside Ragnap raised its hands.
The dead began to move.