Nettle & Bone(70)
There were five openings off this hallway, but they ignored them all. The tomb at the end was less grand than the ones that came after, though the carvings were more realistic. Marra could have done without the image of the beast with its mouth full of entrails, each curl and twist lovingly detailed, crouched over the entryway.
The tomb was a crossroad, four openings on four walls. They looked at each other helplessly and went forward. Another three openings, another cross …
Marra began to feel an itch at the back of her brain, as if she’d seen something like this before.
Was there a map somewhere in the palace? Something about this seems familiar.
She did not have time to dwell on it. The next tomb had been robbed.
“Saint’s teeth,” muttered Agnes. The sarcophagus lid was smashed. The rows of weapons had clearly been plundered. A broken pike lay discarded on the floor where it had been used unsuccessfully as a lever. Someone had chiseled the gems from the plinth, leaving beasts with broken sockets for eyes.
“They didn’t finish raiding it,” said the dust-wife thoughtfully.
“How can you tell?”
“In my line of work, you get a feel for it. They may have been interrupted, or were too nervous to finish the job.” She laid her hand on the sarcophagus and tilted her head. After a moment she said, “Whatever’s in there, it’s lost most of its personality. It’s probably annoyed that it’s been robbed, but there’s just not enough left to work with.”
Something whistled nearby. Everyone jumped. Bonedog jerked upright, straining against the leash. Fenris was holding him now, and the dog pulled so hard that he nearly jerked the warrior off his feet.
“The ghost?” asked Fenris, trying to hold Bonedog.
“Not this one,” said the dust-wife. “Another one wandering the halls, perhaps.” She turned in her tracks. “I can’t quite find it…”
Bonedog subsided slowly, his illusionary hackles lowering. The whistle was not repeated.
Two tombs later, they heard it again. Bonedog actually bayed this time, his ghostly voice waking echoes like sibilant birds. “I don’t like that,” said Agnes to no one in particular.
“I can’t get a grip on it,” said the dust-wife. “It should have some attachment to a body somewhere, but there isn’t one. The bodiless dead are much harder to grab. But they also can’t hurt you, usually.”
“Usually?”
“Never say never.”
The last syllable of never echoed for much too long, er … er … er … And then Marra realized it wasn’t an echo at all. She took a step back from the mouth of the hallway behind her.
… un … un … un … run … run…!
“Did an echo just tell us to run?” asked Agnes, adjusting Finder and looking rather calmer than Marra felt.
“Do ghostly echoes have our best interests at heart?” asked Fenris, also remarkably calm.
“Rarely,” said the dust-wife.
Marra thought, I’m surrounded by lunatics, and I love them all, but maybe we should be running anyway. She took another step back.
… run … running … coming … coming … coming for you … run …
Erk, said the brown hen, with deep distrust.
Whistles erupted from the hallway they had just come down. The echoes sped up until they tripped over each other—Run! Coming! Hide! Robbers! Run! Run!
Bonedog went berserk. Fenris stopped trying to hold his leash and just picked him up bodily, hands slipping through the illusion to clutch at his spine. The dust-wife slammed the butt of her staff on the ground. The hen crowed.
The thief-wheel filled the passageway and came spilling out into the room.
* * *
At one point, it might indeed have been a wheel. When it was smaller, perhaps, when there were only five or ten souls jammed together, rolling over each other, ghostly faces screaming before being ground into the floor to move the bulk of the creature along. Now there were dozens of faces and the wheel had become a thick slug, elongating through the passageways, ten feet high and the gods only knew how long.
Run!
Hide!
It’s coming!
Run, robbers, run!
It filled the doorway, heaving with screams as if breathing. The echoes rang through the room. Some of the faces had hands beside them, waving frantically, and Marra realized that the graverobbers trapped inside were trying to warn the living humans away. They aren’t threatening us. They’re trying to tell us to get away before it gets us, too.
The dust-wife never faltered. She stepped forward, directly into the thief-wheel’s path. “Bodiless dead,” she said. “We are not graverobbers. You have no power over us.”
She was so calm and so confident that Marra believed her. Of course the dust-wife could fix it. She was the master of the dead. She could raise ghosts and lay them. Why had she ever doubted?
The thief-wheel screamed a warning from fifty mouths and ran the dust-wife down.
The moonlight vanished. The room went pitch-black.
Marra blundered away from the thief-wheel, staggering through the dark. She pitched over something and went down hard, skinning her palms on the ground. She could hear shrieks and shouting, the wails of the dead, and over it all, the furious clucking of the demon hen.