Chapter 50: The Porter Returns

Chapter 50: Chapter 50: The Porter Returns

Nobody in Ironfang moved.

They stood in the dark passage with the rubble of Garrick’s wall scattered around their boots, and they stared. Not at the knight in the broken doorway with her sword still burning white, nor at the broad man in an apron behind her with a cleaver in each hand. Not even at the rifle barrel that had just slid out over the edge of an empty burial alcove above their heads.

They stared at Elias.

Vance’s bow had come halfway up and stopped there. Rourke’s mouth was open. Petra, the healer, had both hands pressed over her lips. Sato took a step back and bumped into the wall.

"Pierce," Rourke said. It came out like a question.

Garrick didn’t say anything at all. His face did the thing Elias had seen it do once before, across a floodlit parking lot outside the Drowned Cathedral: it went perfectly, completely blank, the way stone is blank. His stone-grey hands were still half raised from building the wall. They were shaking.

Behind Elias, inside the chamber, Tully was standing in the black water with his porter’s packs hanging off one shoulder, staring at all of them with his mouth open.

"Tully," Elias said, without looking away from Garrick. "Come here. Get behind the knight."

Tully didn’t move.

"Now, Tully."

Tully came. He splashed back through the doorway, past Elias, and stopped behind Aveline, who shifted half a step to cover him without being asked.

Garrick found his voice.

"Well," he said. It came out rough, and he cleared his throat and tried again, louder, for the benefit of his guild. "Well. Look who it is. The thief."

He turned to the others. He spread his hands, the picture of a reasonable man.

"This is the porter who abandoned us in the cathedral," he said. "Who ran and left Brody and Colt to burn. Who walked out of that gate with our loot in his pockets." He nodded at Aveline, at Tobin, at the rifle in the alcove. "And now he’s back with a crew of unregistered hunters, following us into a claimed gate to rob us again. You all saw the kiosk. He doesn’t belong here."

"No," Elias agreed. "I don’t. I’m not on the claim. The kiosk logged me coming in at 22:02. It’s on the record." He held Garrick’s eyes. "So is everything else."

The passage was very quiet. Somewhere, water dripped.

"You said I volunteered to hold the door," Elias said, loud enough for everyone to hear. "In the cathedral. You stood in front of the cameras and told the whole city I was brave. That I stayed behind so your wounded could get out." He tilted his head toward the rubble at their feet. "That’s not what happened. You know it’s not. You just did it again, Garrick. Right in front of them."

"He’s lying," Garrick said.

"Then explain the wall," Elias said. "The one you just built. Across a door. With your porter on the wrong side of it."

Nobody answered. Rourke glanced at the rubble. Petra looked at Tully, standing pale and shaking behind the knight.

"Toby Tolliver," Elias said. "Sunken Mill gate, two years ago. Nineteen years old. The report says he didn’t make it out in time." He turned his head slowly, looking at each of them. "Corey Bask. Briar Hollow, last spring. He had a little girl. The report says the same thing. Didn’t make it out in time."

Petra lowered her hands from her mouth.

"Corey," she said, very quietly. "You told us Corey ran. You said he panicked and ran into a side passage and we couldn’t find him." She was staring at Garrick now. "I healed that boy’s hands a week before. He was so proud of that raid."

"Petra—"

"Every time," said a new voice from the passage behind them all. "Every single time, the boss was irregular, and every single time, he knew before anyone went in."

Everyone turned.

Dex was standing at the bend in the passage, soaked to the waist, his hair plastered to his forehead. He was holding his phone up in front of him, its camera light glowing a small, steady white in the dark.

"Hi, Elias," Dex said. "Sorry. I know you said stay outside. But I told you I wasn’t going to watch from the other side of a wall again." He kept the phone pointed at Garrick. "I’ve been recording since the door. Got the shove. Got the wall. Got porters draw aggro." He swallowed hard. "And I’ve got Appraiser logs from all three raids. Sunken Mill, Briar Hollow, the cathedral. Time-stamped. Red readings, every one. And my own notes, every time, saying I told you."

Garrick looked at the phone, and something in his face finally cracked.

"Kill them," he said.

Nobody moved.

"I said kill them!" Granite crawled up Garrick’s neck and over his jaw, his voice rising to a roar that echoed off the stone. "The porter, the appraiser, and whoever these people are! It’s a B-rank gate! People die in gates! Nobody will ask!"

Vance moved first. He nocked an arrow in one smooth motion and drew it back to his cheek, aimed straight at Dex. Rourke hesitated for half a second, then lowered his head and raised his heavy shield and stepped up beside Garrick.

Sato didn’t move. He looked at the shield on his own arm, the arm still strapped from the cathedral, where he’d held Brody up while Brody’s melted shield burned through his skin. Then he looked at Garrick.

Slowly, Sato lowered his shield and stepped back against the wall.

Petra stepped back beside him.

"No," she said. Her voice was shaking, but she said it anyway. "No. I’m a healer. I’m not doing this."

Three of them left, then, Elias thought. Garrick, Vance, and Rourke on one side of the passage. Sato and Petra pressed against the wall. And Tully and Dex in the middle of it all, with Elias, Aveline, Tobin, and a rifle in an alcove between them and harm.

"Vance," Marcus said quietly from the alcove above. "Lower the bow."

Vance’s eyes flicked up toward the voice. The arrow didn’t move.

And behind them all, inside the round chamber, the water began to churn.

It started at the dais.

On the throne of rusted shields at the far end of the chamber, the figure that had been sitting motionless for who knew how many centuries lifted its head the rest of the way. The two points of blue light under its iron crown blazed brighter. Then it put one gauntleted hand on the arm of its throne and stood up.

It kept standing up.

The Barrow Lord was taller than the Ossuary King had been, broader than the Mine Wyrm’s skull. Its armor wasn’t armor at all. It was shields, hundreds of them, rusted and dented and fused together into plates across its chest and shoulders and arms, each one bearing the faded crest of some army that had come to this tomb and never left. Its sword was as long as Aveline was tall. Its crown was a ring of black iron spikes driven straight into its skull.

[WARNING: Irregular boss detected.]

[The Barrow Lord — Grade: A-.]

It raised its sword and struck the flat of the blade against the stone floor once.

The sound rolled out of the chamber and down the passage like thunder.

And the water answered.

All across the round chamber, the black water began to boil. Shapes rose out of it: helmets first, then shoulders, then whole figures in rusted mail and broken plate, climbing up out of the flooded floor where they’d lain drowned for centuries. Not ten. Not twenty. The Link drew them as fast as it could, and the red markers kept multiplying: forty, sixty, eighty, a hundred.

And behind Ironfang, back down the passage, in every alcove the family hadn’t reached, the dead on their stone shelves sat up.

They were surrounded. All of them. Ironfang, the family, Dex, Tully, Petra and Sato against the wall. The armored dead were climbing out of the water in front and out of their shelves behind, cold blue light burning in a hundred visor slits.

Nobody was aiming at anybody anymore. Vance’s arrow had swung away from Dex and was pointing at the nearest wight. Rourke had turned his shield toward the chamber. Even Garrick, granite crawling over his whole body now, had turned to face the Barrow Lord with his fists raised.

For one strange, terrible second, they were all on the same side.

It didn’t last.

"Kill the porter," Garrick said, without turning his head, "and then we run."

Elias looked at his mana. Forty-eight, with three summons out.

He needed four.

"Lena," he said.

The air beside Tully cracked open, a jagged white line like plaster splitting, and Lena Lawson stepped out of it in her borrowed white coat. Thirty mana gone in an instant. Eighteen left. She took in the chamber in one sweeping look: the boss on its dais, the hundred dead in the water, Garrick turning to stone, the terrified boy with two packs on his back.

She put one hand on Tully’s shoulder and pulled him behind her.

"Well," said Dr. Lena Lawson. "I suppose I’ll be busy tonight."

On the dais, the Barrow Lord lifted its enormous sword and pointed it straight down the passage at all of them.

The dead began to march.