Chapter 49: The Sunken Barrow

Chapter 49: Chapter 49: The Sunken Barrow

The Sunken Barrow had opened at the edge of the old reservoir, where the water had receded during a drought years ago and never come back. The gate hung over a mound of cracked mud and dead reeds: a low, dark tear the color of deep water, ringed with a faint grey mist that clung to the ground and didn’t drift.

Elias watched from the shadow of a pump house a hundred meters away, his scarf pulled up and his hood down low.

Ironfang arrived at ten.

Two black SUVs. Garrick got out of the first one in full armor, stone-grey plates over a dark gambeson, and stretched his neck until it cracked. Vance came next with his bow case, then Rourke, the tank with the neck tattoo, then Petra the healer and Sato, the second tank, whose shield arm was still strapped from the cathedral. Brody and Colt weren’t with them. Elias wondered whether they’d healed, or quit, or something else.

And then a young man climbed out of the second SUV with two enormous porter’s packs on his back and a grin on his face.

Tully.

He was skinny and gangly, with a mop of red hair and the eager, slightly nervous energy of someone who’d finally been picked for the team. He said something Elias couldn’t hear, and Rourke laughed, and Tully looked delighted that someone had laughed. He hitched the packs higher on his shoulders and practically bounced toward the kiosk.

Elias looked at him and saw himself, five weeks and a lifetime ago.

Garrick tapped his license on the kiosk. Green. The six of them walked up the muddy slope and through the gate one by one, Tully last, and the mist closed behind them.

Elias waited ninety seconds. Then he walked to the kiosk and tapped his own license against it.

The screen flashed red.

ENTRY DENIED: Gate claimed by Ironfang Guild. Unauthorized entry will be logged and reported to the Hunter Association.

"That’s a rule," said Marcus’s voice faintly, through the Link.

"I know."

"A real one. Not one of mine."

"I know." Elias looked at the red screen. A kiosk wasn’t a door. It couldn’t stop anyone. It could only write down that you’d come.

Good, he thought. Write it down.

He walked past it, up the slope, and through the gate.

The kiosk kept flashing behind him. UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY LOGGED: Pierce, E. 22:02.

On the other side of the gate, in the cold, wet dark, he said three names, and three folds of white-gold light opened around him. Aveline. Marcus. Tobin. Ninety mana.

He held the fourth name back. Lena would come when she was needed, and not before. Four summons would drain him dry before they ever reached the boss.

"Two minutes behind them," Marcus said quietly. "Link’s up. I can see their markers ahead."

"Then we follow," Elias said. "And we don’t let them see us."

The Sunken Barrow was a grave that had filled with water.

They walked through a long passage of fitted grey stones, waist-deep in water so cold it ached. The ceiling was low and arched, built from slabs carved with spirals and the faint shapes of kings. Every few meters, alcoves opened in the walls on either side, and in every alcove lay a body in rusted armor, laid out on a stone shelf with its hands folded over a sword.

There were hundreds of them.

Ahead, beyond a bend in the passage, the Link showed six grey markers moving slowly forward. Ironfang. Elias could hear them faintly: Rourke’s heavy boots splashing, Petra murmuring a light spell, Tully saying something cheerful that echoed off the stone.

"Here they come," Marcus breathed.

Behind Ironfang, in the alcoves Ironfang had already passed, the armored dead began to move.

It was slow at first. A gauntleted hand unfolding from a sword hilt. A helmet turning on a neck of bone. Then the first one sat up on its shelf, rust flaking off its armor, cold blue light burning in the slits of its visor. It swung its legs down into the water and stood up behind Ironfang without a sound.

Ironfang didn’t look back. Ironfang never looked back.

In the Link, red markers bloomed in the alcoves behind the guild: three, then five, then eight. Barrow-wights, rising one after another in Ironfang’s wake and wading after them toward their unguarded backs, toward the porter at the rear with two packs on his shoulders.

"They’re going to hit Tully first," Elias whispered.

"They’re going to hit Tully first," Marcus agreed. "Unless something gets there before them."

Elias went.

This was what Assassins were for. Not shields. Not rifles. Quiet.

He slid forward through the dark water without a ripple, Quick Step carrying him low and fast along the passage wall, and came up behind the last wight just as it raised its sword over the back of the column ahead. He caught the back of its helmet with his left hand, pulled its head back, and slid his cheap pawnshop knife into the gap between its gorget and visor.

The blue light went out. He lowered the wight gently into the water so it wouldn’t splash.

Around the next bend, two more wights rose from their shelves. Aveline caught the first by its sword arm before it could swing, turned it with a twist of her shoulder, and pressed it face down into the water under her shield until it stopped moving. Tobin took the second with a single clean chop of his cleaver through the back of its neck, then caught the falling helmet before it could clatter against the stone, and set it softly on a shelf.

"Like deboning a fish," he whispered. "Patience, lads. Patience."

Marcus didn’t fire once. A rifle shot in this tomb would echo for a kilometer. He just watched the Link and murmured into Elias’s ear. Left alcove. Behind you. Two more, waking up.

They worked their way down the barrow like that for twenty minutes, killing in silence, always just out of sight. Eleven wights. Fourteen. Nineteen. Every one of them had risen behind Ironfang and waded toward its unprotected back, and every one of them died without Ironfang ever knowing.

Once, the column ahead stopped. Elias froze against the wall, one hand on Aveline’s arm.

"Did you hear something?" Tully’s voice drifted back, nervous.

"Water dripping," said Vance’s voice. "Keep up, porter. You’re slow."

Tully kept up.

Elias let out his breath and lowered a dead wight into the dark water at his feet. You’re not slow, he thought. You just don’t know what’s behind you.

The passage ended at a door.

It was a single slab of black stone, three meters tall, carved with the figure of a king sitting on a throne made of shields, his sword across his knees and a crown of iron on his skull. The water stopped at its threshold, as if it didn’t dare go further. Beyond the door, faint blue light leaked out around the edges.

Ironfang had stopped in front of it.

Elias crouched behind the last bend in the passage, thirty meters back, with Aveline pressed against the wall beside him and Tobin behind her. Marcus had climbed into an empty alcove above them, flat on the stone shelf where a dead king had lain, his rifle braced across his arm.

"Garrick’s not reading it," Marcus murmured. "Nobody’s appraising the door."

"He doesn’t need to," Elias said quietly. "He already knows."

Garrick put one stone-grey hand flat on the door and pushed. It ground slowly open, and blue light spilled out into the passage. Through the gap, Elias caught a glimpse of a vast round chamber beyond. Stone pillars. Black water. A raised dais at the far end with something sitting on it, motionless, on a throne built of rusted shields.

Then Garrick turned around and smiled at the porter.

"First raid, first room," he said warmly. "Tradition. The porter goes in first and sets down the packs. Gets you a bigger share. Go on, kid."

Tully looked at the open door. He looked at the dark room with the throne at the end of it. For one second, Elias saw something cross his face, a flicker of the instinct every porter learned the hard way.

Then it was gone, and Tully grinned, because the guild master was smiling at him, and nobody ever smiled at porters.

"Sure," he said. "Sure thing, boss."

He hitched the packs up on his shoulders and stepped through the door into the blue light.

Garrick’s hand moved fast. It hit Tully square between the shoulder blades, a flat stone palm, and shoved. Tully stumbled forward into the chamber with a startled yell, his packs swinging, and went sprawling onto his hands and knees in the black water beyond the threshold.

And Garrick raised both hands.

Stone poured out of his palms like water from a broken pipe, grey and grinding, stacking itself brick by brick across the doorway from the floor up. Knee-high. Waist-high. Behind it, Tully scrambled to his feet, turned around, and saw the wall rising between him and the rest of the guild. His face went white.

"Boss?" he said. "Boss, what’re you—"

On the dais at the far end of the chamber, something on the throne of shields lifted its head. Two points of cold blue light opened in the shadows under its crown.

The wall reached Garrick’s chest. His shoulders. Through the narrowing gap above it, Tully was staring out at them, shaking his head as if he couldn’t understand what he was seeing.

"Nothing personal, kid," Garrick said. "Porters draw aggro."

Elias was already moving.

He didn’t think about the plan, or the rules, or the kiosk flashing red behind him. He thought about a wall going up brick by brick in a cathedral full of black water, and a voice saying those same exact words, and he moved.

But Aveline moved faster.

She went past him in the dark passage like a falling star, sword already drawn, white fire running down its edge from a blow she’d been carrying since the foundry. She crossed thirty meters in six strides. Vance turned, saw her coming, and opened his mouth to shout.

Aveline’s sword came down on the wall.

It split from top to bottom like a log under an axe. Stone exploded outward in a spray of grey rubble across the passage, and Garrick staggered backward with his hands still raised, granite dust in his hair, staring at the knight in dented plate armor standing in the broken doorway where his wall had been.

And behind her, stepping through the dust and the blue light with his scarf pulled down, came the porter he’d left to die.