The Iron Wolves of Blackmoor: The Witch of The Drowned Tower

Black water swallowed the tower to its third course of windows. Pale stonework jutted from the marsh like a broken finger, its upper stories dark and silent, but lamplight flickered behind the lowest glass. Kael Ashford reined his horse to a halt on the raised causeway, mud sucking at the hooves, and studied the ruin through the drizzle.

Captain. Gren Lothaire rode forward, his cloak dripping, his face unreadable beneath the wet brim of his helm. One of the scouts swam back. Found someone living inside.

Living? Maeve Derrin brought her mount alongside Kael's, close enough that her knee brushed his. The place has been drowned for twenty years.

Gren's jaw tightened. There's a witch.

The word landed heavy among the outriders. Kael watched their hands drift toward sword hilts and saw the scout being hauled from the water by two of his own men, the fellow retching swamp water, shivering so badly his teeth clicked together.

How many? Kael asked.

One, the scout managed. Woman. Asked our names and then told us to bring our commander. Said she had something to trade.

Kael looked again at the tower. Rain needled the surface of the flood. Somewhere in the murk a frog went on croaking, oblivious, and somewhere else a dead branch cracked under the weight of rot.

Dismount, he said. Gren, take four men and hold the causeway. Maeve, with me.

Gren inclined his head. If it's a trap?

Then we spring it with fewer dead than if we bring the whole company. Kael swung down from the saddle. His boots found the broken paving stones and the water crept over them at once, cold enough to ache through the leather. Choose men who can swim.

He did not wait to see which four Gren selected. He knew, without looking, that Gren would choose the ones least likely to panic. Maeve fell into step at his right shoulder as he crossed the last stretch of causeway to the tower's lower door, a slab of iron-banded oak that had swollen into its frame and been pried apart with what looked like a crowbar, recently, the splinters still pale.

She was waiting for visitors, Maeve murmured.

Yes.

Kael lifted the latch and pushed. The door screamed on rust, and the sound rolled out across the water like something alive.

Inside, the tower's ground floor had been converted to a single room. A hearth dominated the far wall, the fire laid and burning, and around it hung bundles of dried herbs whose scent cut through the damp, sharp and green. Shelves lined every available surface, crowded with stoppered jars, rolled scrolls, candle stubs melted to one another in pale wax cataracts. A cot stood in one corner, neatly made. A kettle hung over the flames.

And in the center of the room, on a stool carved from driftwood, sat a woman.

She was younger than Kael had expected, though her age was difficult to pin. Her hair was the color of river silt, cut short and ragged, and her skin had the pallor of someone who lived by firelight. Her eyes were pale gray and utterly steady on him as he ducked through the low doorway. She wore a coat that had been good once, salt-stained at the hems, and her hands rested on her knees, fingers loose. Unthreatening.

You came quickly, she said. I had not finished the tea.

Kael took in the room in a single sweep: two doors leading deeper into the tower, both closed; a window slit too narrow for a man to enter; no visible weapon except an iron poker leaning against the hearth. Maeve, behind him, did not relax.

I am Kael Ashford, he said. You asked for me.

I asked for the commander of whatever host passed the marsh. You are the one who came. She tilted her head. I am Seris Vael. I have lived here for nine years. I would like to leave.

The fire popped. A log shifted, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney.

Leave to go where? Maeve asked.

South. To anyone still standing. Seris Vael smiled, and the expression did not touch her eyes. I have been alone too long. I have news for whoever leads an army in this country, and I would trade it for an escort and a horse that does not sink.

Kael stepped further into the room. The floor was dry beneath a thick rug woven from rushes. He could feel the chill of the marsh behind him on his back, the warmth of the fire ahead on his face, and the patient weight of Seris Vael's regard between.

What news? he asked.

She did not answer at once. She stood, crossed to the hearth, and lifted the kettle with a cloth. Steam curled from the spout as she poured into three clay cups. She offered the first to Kael, the second to Maeve, and kept the third for herself, cradling it between her cold-looking fingers.

There is a cache, she said. Old. Older than the kingdom that fell here. A vault under the Standing Stones, a day's ride west, buried when the water rose and forgotten when the survivors stopped coming back. War-sorceries. The kind that end sieges.

Maeve's cup stopped halfway to her lips. Kael kept his face still.

War-sorceries, he repeated.

Yes. She blew across the surface of her tea. You have heard it before, I expect. Every hedge witch from here to the coast claims to know where some great weapon sleeps. I will not insult you by asking you to take my word. I will take you to the door. What you find beyond it is your proof.

Kael drank. The tea was bitter, with a faint undertone of something floral he could not place, and very hot. He let it scald his tongue rather than swallow too quickly.

Why now? he asked. Why wait nine years?

Seris Vael set her cup on the shelf beside her and folded her arms.

I waited for someone worth giving it to. Her gaze moved to the window slit, where rain was a silver thread. I have watched four armies pass since the drowning. Bandits, mostly. One column of foot soldiers flying a banner I did not recognize, ten years back. They would have sold the contents to the first lord with coin. She looked back at him. You are different.

You do not know me, Maeve said.

I know you came with twelve horses and left them on the causeway. I know you left your rearguard in a place where the water runs fast, which is a sign of a commander who has thought about retreat. I know you entered my door ahead of your soldier. Seris Vael smiled again, and again it was a careful thing. I know enough to begin.

Kael set his cup down on the edge of the hearth. The firelight guttered, steadied, threw their shadows long across the rushes.

Maeve, he said, without turning. How much can we trust her?

Not at all, Maeve said frankly. Which is why we should listen.

Kael grunted. He looked at Seris Vael for a long moment, weighing what he saw against what he needed. She returned his gaze without flinching, and her stillness had the quality of deep water.

The Standing Stones, he said. Who else knows of them?

Anyone who remembers the old histories. There are not many left. Seris Vael lifted a hand, gestured vaguely. A handful of scholars in the southern libraries. One of them may have sent word north. I do not know. I have been out of the world.

And the vault itself? Warded?

Trapped, she corrected. Warded is a word people use when they do not want to say what it really is. There are deaths inside. Old ones. I have read enough to understand the shape of them, and I believe I can take us past the first two. After that, she spread her hands, after that we will see.

The honesty sat strangely in the room. Kael found himself cataloguing it the way he catalogued a road: the slope, the footing, the places where a horse might stumble.

You would come with us, he said.

I would. Her chin lifted. I have spent nine years studying the entrance and nine years more waiting for someone brave enough to open it. I would like to see the inside before I die. That is vanity, not bargain. I will not pretend otherwise.

Kael nodded slowly. He turned and looked at Maeve.

If I bring her into the host, Gren will have my head on a pike by morning, she said. Or he will try.

Gren can be managed.

Gren can be managed if you explain the situation to him before he draws his sword, which is a different thing.

Kael almost smiled. They had argued this way since before the war, the two of them, and the rhythm of it was a kind of comfort.

Send for him, he said. All of them. We will talk here.

Maeve ducked back through the door. Kael heard her voice outside, sharp and carrying, and Gren's reply, lower. Rain hissed against the water. A heron took flight from somewhere unseen, its wings clapping the air in slow strokes. Seris Vael watched it through the window slit and did not speak.

You fought in the south, Kael said. Before the drowning.

She looked at him. Surprise moved across her face and was gone.

I did. Briefly.

For whom?

For the woman who lost. Seris Vael's mouth twisted. It is a long time ago. It does not matter now.

It might. Kael kept his voice even. The host I am bringing into this country remembers the south. Some of them remember it well, and not fondly. If your name is known to them, I would rather hear it from you.

She was quiet for a moment. Then she reached past him and took her cup from the shelf, turning it in her hands.

I was a field scholar, she said. Attached to the Eleventh Corps. We mapped the coast for a year, then we were recalled, then the army was broken, and I walked north until I ran out of land. I did not kill anyone. I tried not to let anyone die on my account. I failed at the second more than the first.

Eleventh Corps, Kael repeated. He had not served with them, but he knew the name. They had held a stretch of shoreline for two seasons against a force three times their size, and the songs about them were not all songs of praise. Who commanded you?

Colonel Maren Vael. My mother. She is dead. Seris Vael drank. That is the whole of it.

Kael studied her. The firelight put deep shadows in the hollows of her throat. She did not look away.

Your mother held the cliffs at Ashenmere, he said.

Yes.

I have met men who were there.

Seris Vael's fingers tightened on the cup. Then you have met men who survived because of her, and men who survived in spite of her. Both kinds will tell their story. She set the cup down again, precisely, in the same ring of damp it had left before. What they will not tell you is what it cost her to hold that line. But that is not a conversation for now.

The door scraped open behind them. Gren came through first, ducking low, his hand not on his sword but near it. Two of his chosen men followed, and Maeve behind them, all of them steaming in the sudden warmth, all of them looking at Seris Vael with the flat appraisal of soldiers cataloguing a possible threat.

Seris Vael rose and inclined her head to Gren.

Captain, she said.

He did not return it. His eyes went to Kael.

This is the witch, he said.

This is the scholar, Kael corrected. Sit, if you can find room. We have a deal to discuss.

Gren's mouth thinned, but he obeyed. He chose a place by the door, where he could see both the tower's interior and the causeway through the gap, and settled his back against the wall. His men found spots on the floor. Maeve remained standing, near the hearth, where she could move quickly if she needed to.

Seris Vael, Kael said. Tell them what you told me. From the beginning.

She did. Her voice was unhurried, and she did not embellish. She spoke of the cache, of the vault under the Standing Stones, of the war-sorceries she believed to be inside. She spoke of the trap at the entrance and what she knew of its shape. She did not promise more than she could deliver, and she made plain what she could not promise at all. The rain outside went on falling, and the kettle went on steaming, and by the time she had finished the cups were empty and the room was very quiet.

Gren was the first to speak.

Trap, he said, as if tasting the word.

Yes, Seris Vael said.

And the cache may not be there.

It may not. I believe it is.

Belief, Gren repeated, in the same flat tone.

Yes. She met his gaze without expression. I am not a soldier. I do not have the luxury of certainty. I have what I have read, and what I have inferred, and the door I have stood outside for nine years. That is what I am offering.

Gren looked at Kael. Kael looked back.

The army we are marching into the Ashen Wastes, he said, does not have the supplies to fight a long campaign. If there is even a chance that what she says is true, it changes the math. If there is not, we have lost a day and gained a guide who knows the marsh. Neither outcome kills us.

And if the trap kills us, Gren said.

Then we will not have time to regret it. Kael turned to Seris Vael. You will ride with the column. You will speak to no one until I say otherwise. You will tell me everything you know about the entrance, tonight, before you sleep. And if at any point I judge that you are leading us into a death that serves you rather than us, I will leave you where you stand. Do you understand?

Seris Vael inclined her head.

I understand, she said. I would expect nothing less.

Kael looked at Gren. Gren looked at the floor. After a moment, he gave a small nod.

Then we ride at first light, Kael said. Maeve, see that she has a horse and dry clothes. Gren, double the outriders on the causeway tonight. I do not want anything coming at us from the water.

He paused. The fire was burning lower. The shadows in the room had grown longer, and the rain had thickened outside, drumming against the stones above them in a steady, patient rhythm.

One more thing, he said. He looked at Seris Vael. When we open that vault, whatever is inside, I will decide how it is used. Not you. Not anyone else. Me. Is that clear?

It is, she said. And for what it is worth, I would not want it any other way.

Kael studied her for a long breath. Then he turned and walked out into the rain, and the cold of the marsh folded around him again like a hand.

Behind him, the firelight fell through the doorway, and the witch began to gather her things.

The rain had thinned to a fine mist by the time Kael Ashford reached the gate of the holding house, and through that mist the causeway stretched away to the south, a black ribbon over water that reflected nothing. He could hear it, the slow suck and release of the marsh against the stones, a sound like some great throat breathing in its sleep. Gren Lothaire was already at the parapet, his cloak pulled high, watching the line of stakes that marked the deeper pools. Kael did not speak to him at first. He stood beside him and let the cold settle into his bones.

She rides in the center, Gren said, without turning. Maeve has her horse between the carts. She has not spoken to anyone. She has not eaten. She sits very still and watches the road as if she expected something to step out of it.

Let her watch, Kael said.

She asked Maeve for a knife. Maeve gave her one. It was the right thing to do, but I do not like it.

Kael glanced at him. The lamplight from the courtyard behind them caught the line of Gren's jaw, the rain beading on his hood. He was a hard man to read, Gren, and that was one of the reasons Kael trusted him.

She is a witch who has lived alone for two years in the reeds, Kael said. I would be more concerned if she had not asked.

That is what I told myself. Then I told myself I would be a fool to be comforted by it.

Kael turned back to the causeway. Somewhere out there, the lantern on the third watch-boat had gone out, and he could hear the soft sound of oars being worked as the crew relit it. The marsh gave up no secrets willingly. He had learned that young, and the lesson had not softened with age.

When you doubled the outriders, he said, did you put Vael on the south bank?

Gren looked at him now. No, he said. I put her on the north. The south bank is a killing ground. If we are ambushed there, I want her where the line will hold.

Good, Kael said. Then, after a pause: How many men have we fit for a long march?

If we strip the holding, forty-six. If we leave the women and the wounded, fifty-eight. If we do neither, seventy, and half of them will be dead before we reach the marsh road.

We cannot strip the holding, Kael said. And we cannot leave the women. We march with seventy, and we lose none before the marsh road. That is the task I have given you.

Gren nodded. He did not ask how it was to be done. They had served together long enough for that. He simply said, It will be done. Then he turned back to the parapet, and Kael left him there.

He crossed the courtyard to the door of the small chamber where Seris Vael had been given a pallet. He did not knock. He pushed the door open and stepped inside, and the smell of wet wool and lamp oil and something sharper, something that reminded him of lightning, came up to meet him.

She was sitting on the pallet, her back to the wall, her hands folded in her lap. The knife Maeve had given her lay on the floor at her feet, as if she had put it there deliberately, away from her hands. She looked up at him without surprise.

You have come to ask me about the entrance, she said.

I have come to learn what you know, Kael said. I will decide what I ask.

A small movement at the corner of her mouth. Not quite a smile. She inclined her head.

Then learn, she said. And I will tell you everything. But first, Lord Ashford, I must ask you for a thing, and you must hear it as a price, not as a whim. I do not ask it to bind you, but because I cannot in good conscience lead your men into that vault without it.

Kael did not sit. He stood with his back to the half-open door, and the lamplight from the courtyard made a pale line across the floor between them.

Speak, he said.

The vaults of Krayne were sealed with oaths, she said. Blood-oaths, sworn by the founders and renewed by every lord who claimed the cache. To open a door that has been so sealed, you must give the door a name that is true. Not a title. Not a house name. A true name, spoken in your own blood, by your own tongue. If the name is false, the door will not open. If the name is true but the blood is unwilling, the door will take what it is owed. If the name is true and the blood is willing, the door will open. But it will remember you. Every vault you open, it will remember. And one day, when you have opened enough, it will call you home.

Kael said nothing. The rain had begun again outside, heavier now, drumming on the roof.

I will not lie to you, she said. The vaults have killed men before. They have taken hands. They have taken eyes. They have taken the part of a man that knows how to want anything at all. I have seen the bones inside the antechamber of the Black Vault. They were not all old.

And you, Kael said. Did you ever open such a door?

She looked at him then, and for the first time he saw something in her eyes that was not composure. It was not fear. It was older than fear. It was the look of a woman who had stood once before a thing she could not outface.

I opened the Third Vault, she said. The Vault of Names. I gave my true name. The door took three years of my life, and I felt them go. I felt them leave me like heat leaving a body in winter. I have never fully regained them. There are days when I cannot remember my mother's face, although she is not yet two years dead.

Kael nodded slowly. He thought of his father, who had died in the south campaigns. He thought of the smell of the man's coat. He thought of the way the man had laughed once, when Kael was very small, at something he could not now recall.

And the cache Sylan Krayne has already taken, Kael said. Tell me what it is.

Seris Vael was silent for a long moment. The rain filled the silence. The lamp on the wall guttered once and steadied.

It is the darkforge, she said. The Sixth Vault. It forges blades that are not steel. The metal is something older. It drinks, Lord Ashford. When such a blade cuts a living thing, it drinks what the ancients called the breath of the soul. Not the soul itself. The breath. The part that is willing. And once it has drunk, it remembers the taste, and it will want more. A sword forged in that darkforge will not stay sheathed. It will sing to its wielder. It will promise him things. And if the wielder is weak, or grieving, or hungry in a way that has nothing to do with food, it will have him.

Kael thought of his men. He thought of the boy who had held the line at the bridge last spring, and who had wept afterward for reasons he would not name. He thought of the archer who had lost his wife in the fever winter and had not drawn a good bow since.

How many such blades, he said, in the cache?

In the cache? Three. Perhaps four. I do not know if Krayne had them all out. He took the darkforge, not the blades. He will have to reforge them, or to wake them. Either way, he will need a smith who has given his true name to the Sixth Vault, and that smith will not be a smith at all, but a vessel. A man with no self left, only the hunger of the forge.

Kael let out a long breath. The air of the room was cold, and the mist from outside had crept in under the door.

And the cache that Sylan Krayne means to take next, he said. The one we ride for.

She looked at him, and her face did not change.

The Second Vault, she said. The Vault of the Marsh. It holds a thing that is older than the darkforge. Older than the founders. Older, I think, than the kingdom that fell. I have never seen it. I have only read the inventory that was kept by my order, and the inventory is not complete. But I know that Krayne wants it because, without it, the darkforge is only a hungry thing. With it, the darkforge can be aimed. It can be made to drink along a single line, instead of at random. A sword forged in that cache, wielded by a man who has been claimed by the darkforge, would be a weapon that could cut through an army by drinking the breath of every soul it passed through. It would leave the bodies alive. It would leave them breathing. But they would be empty. They would be husks. They would walk, and speak, and even smile, but there would be nothing behind their eyes. And they would not know it.

Kael closed his eyes. He stood very still. He heard the rain, and he heard Gren Lothaire's boots, somewhere above, and he heard the slow breathing of the woman on the pallet.

How do you know this, he said. How does an order of keepers know so much about a thing they were not supposed to open?

She did not flinch. She answered him as if she had been waiting for the question.

Because we opened one, she said. The Third Vault. And in the Third Vault we found the inventory. And we read it. And we understood, too late, that the inventory was not a record of what was sealed. It was a record of what had been tried. And it had been tried by our order, three hundred years before, and the record of that trying was the first page of the book we found.

Kael opened his eyes.

Your order, he said. Your order is the one that sealed these caches.

Not all of them, she said. Some were sealed before us. But yes. We sealed the Second Vault. We sealed the Sixth. We sealed the Seventh, and the Eleventh, and the Vault of Names. We did not seal the Black Vault. The Black Vault sealed itself. And we did not seal the First Vault. The First Vault is a rumor, even to us. We do not know if it exists. We are afraid that it does.

Kael looked at her. The rain was very loud now. He could feel the cold of the stones under his boots, and the cold of the doorframe against his back, and a colder thing behind that, the cold of a road that had no end.

You are asking me to ride with you, he said, to a place your order sealed, to open a door that will take my years or my eyes, to stop a man who has one cache already and means to take another, and you are asking me to do this with fifty-eight men and wet boots and a witch who admits she is not what she was.

She met his gaze.

Yes, she said. I am asking you exactly that. And I will swear the oath you require. I will swear it in my blood, on my true name, before your men, if you wish it. I will bind myself to your command until this is done, or until one of us is dead. I will not ask to be released. I will not ask to be thanked. I will only ask that, when we stand before the door of the Second Vault, you let me speak the words that must be spoken, and that you do not try to silence me, no matter what you hear.

Kael was quiet for a long time. The lamp guttered. The rain fell.

Swear it now, he said. Here. To me. And leave out nothing.

Seris Vael did not hesitate.

She drew the short blade she wore at her hip, a thing of dark iron with no ornamentation, and drew it across her left palm in a single clean stroke. The blood welled up black in the lamplight, thick as syrup, and fell onto the flagstones with a sound like a slow drum. She did not flinch. She knelt, and Kael knelt across from her, and the others stood in a loose half-circle, twenty-nine souls in wet wool and rusted mail, the rain hammering the broken roof above them.

"I am Seris Vael," she said, and her voice dropped into a register that was not quite human, that resonated in the bones of Kael's chest and in the iron of the blade still in her hand, "and this is my true name, and I will not speak another. I bind myself to the command of Kael Ashford, captain of the Drymarch guard, until the Second Vault of the Drowned Tower is opened and its contents denied to Mordran Vale, or until one of us is dead. I will not betray him in thought, word, or deed. I will not withhold from him what I know that bears upon this hunt. I will not flee the field while he yet lives. I will not seek release, nor offer it, nor accept it if it is offered. This I swear on my blood, on my name, on the seven seals I helped to set, and on the door I mean to open. If I break this oath, may my name be taken from me, and may the thing I was before I had a name return to claim what is left."

The blood on the stones began to steam.

Not much. Just a thin curl of vapor, there and gone. But Kael saw it, and Gren Lothaire saw it, and the rain did not account for it. The oath was taken, and the air in the ruined hall felt different, as if a weight had been added to it, or removed.

Seris rose. She bound her cut hand with a strip of cloth she tore from her own sleeve, without ceremony, without complaint. Her face was the same face she had worn through the entire telling, the same careful blankness. But her eyes, when they met Kael's, were different. They were the eyes of someone who had put down a thing they had been carrying for a long time.

Kael stood.

"We move in one hour," he said, to the room, to the men, to Gren Lothaire's steady gaze, to the witch whose blood was still steaming on the stones. "Those who have families within a day's ride, send word that you may not return. Those who have debts, settle what you can. Sergeant Lothaire, take six men and see that the wounded get to the village and into beds. The rest of you eat what there is, and drink what you can spare, and then we go down."

Gren Lothaire nodded once. "And the witch?"

"She rides with me."

Gren's mouth tightened. He did not argue. He turned on his heel and began to call names.

---

The hour passed. The rain did not relent. Kael walked among his people and saw the thing he had hoped he would not see, and the thing he had feared he would not see, and knew that there was nothing else to be done.

Six of the men had sent word, or tried to. Two of them would not be coming back at all, one with a fever that had come on in the night, one with a wife who had wept until he could not refuse her. Of the twenty-nine who remained, seven had asked to speak with him privately, and he had spoken with each of them, and had released three with his blessing, and had kept four who had asked to be released and then changed their minds. He had not slept. He had not eaten. The cold had settled into his joints and would not leave.

At the appointed time, he gathered what was left of the Drymarch guard in the lee of the broken tower, where the rain was only a fine mist, and where the path began that led down to the river, and where the entrance to the flooded crypts was hidden behind a fall of moss-covered stone.

Twenty-six souls. Seris Vael among them, hooded, her bandaged hand hidden in her sleeve. Gren Lothaire, who had refused to stay behind, though Kael had offered it twice. Maeve Derrin, the archer, who had said nothing, who had only looked at Kael with her clear brown eyes, and nodded, and taken her place in the line.

The entrance to the crypts was a crack in the rock face, just wide enough for a man to pass through sideways. Beyond it, Seris said, the path descended for a hundred paces and then opened into the first of the vaulted chambers. The water would be chest-deep at the lowest point. There were stairs. There were doors. There were things in the water that had once been men.

"Stay in line," Kael said. "Do not break the line for any reason. If you see a shape in the water that does not move with the current, call it out, do not engage it alone. If you hear your name spoken by a voice you do not recognize, do not answer. The witch knows the path. Follow the witch. The witch is under my command. Any man who lays a hand on her answers to me. Any man who speaks to her without need, answers to me. Any man who lags behind, answers to me. We go down. We take what is in the coffer. We come back up. If we cannot come back up, then we will not come back up, and someone will have to tell our families. That is all."

He looked at Seris.

"Lead on."

She led on.

---

The first descent was a long slow tilting of the world, a passage of slick stone and black water that rose as they went down, that lapped at their boots, their knees, their waists. The air grew thick. The cold grew worse. Kael had been cold before, in high places, in mountain camps, in the long winters of the north, but he had never been cold like this, a cold that had weight, that pressed against his chest, that seemed to want to push him back up the slope and seal him out.

The first chamber opened before them like the inside of a drowned bell. The ceiling was lost in shadow. The water was still, and black, and gave back no reflection. Their breathing was the only sound, and the drip of water from their clothes into the dark.

Seris stopped. She held up her hand, and the line stopped behind her. She tilted her head, the way a dog tilts its head, the way a woman tilts her head when she is listening to something just beyond the edge of hearing.

"They are here," she said, very softly. "They have been here a long time. Do not speak above a whisper. Do not draw steel until you must. They feel the iron. They remember the iron."

"What do they remember?" Maeve Derrin asked, from her place in the line. Her voice was steady, but Kael heard the question under the steadiness.

"They remember that they were soldiers once. They remember the men who killed them. They remember the oaths they swore, and the oaths that were broken to them. They will try to speak. They will try to speak with voices you know. Do not answer. Do not answer any voice but mine, and the sergeant's, and the captain's."

Gren Lothaire made a sound in his throat that might have been agreement or might have been a prayer. He moved closer to Kael, and the line moved with him, and they began to cross the chamber.

The water was at their chests. It was black and smelled of iron, of old rot, of something Kael could not name but did not want to breathe. The cold of it sank into him through his clothes, through his skin, into the meat of him, into the bone. His teeth wanted to chatter. He set his jaw and would not let them.

Halfway across, the first shape rose.

It came up slow, the way a bubble comes up through tar. It broke the surface without sound, and the water slid off it in sheets, and it stood in the chest-deep dark and looked at them with eyes that were not eyes anymore, just pits of pale green light set in a face that had once been a man's face, a young man's face, and was now a thing of swollen gray flesh and trailing weed.

It wore the remnants of a leather jerkin. It had a sword in its hand, or what was left of a sword, a blade so rusted it was more rust than steel. It did not raise the blade. It only stood there, and looked at them, and its mouth opened, and a voice came out of it that was the voice of a boy of twenty, a voice that Kael did not recognize but that some man behind him did recognize, because a man made a choked sound, and then another man made a choked sound, and the line wavered.

"Forward," Kael said, in a voice that was no louder than a whisper but that carried through the chamber as if he had spoken it into every ear at once. "Do not stop. Do not look at it. Forward."

They went forward. The shape did not move. It only watched them pass, and as they passed, other shapes rose, one, then two, then five, then a dozen, a whole garden of drowned dead standing in the black water, their faces turned toward the line, their mouths opening and closing, their ruined hands reaching up but not quite reaching, as if they were held back by some chain that Kael could not see.

A voice spoke from among them, a voice that was almost Maeve's voice, that had Maeve's cadence, Maeve's lilt, that said, "Sister, why did you leave me in the water, sister, I have been so cold."

Maeve did not turn her head. Her jaw tightened. Her clear brown eyes stayed fixed on the back of the man in front of her, and she walked, and she did not answer, and the thing that had spoken her name sank back into the dark with a sound like a long sigh.

They reached the far side of the chamber. They found the stairs. They began to climb.

---

The second chamber was lower, and the water was at their shoulders. The stairs ended in a stone lip, and beyond the lip the path went down again, through a corridor of dressed stone, and the ceiling of the corridor was so low that Kael had to crouch, and the men behind him had to crouch, and the water lapped at their chins.

Seris moved ahead of them, her hood thrown back, her wet hair plastered to her skull, her bandaged hand held out before her as if she were feeling for something in the dark. She did not hesitate. She turned left, then right, then left again, and Kael lost the sense of direction entirely, and trusted her, and hated that he trusted her, and trusted her anyway.

The revenants were thicker here. They rose on either side of the corridor as the line passed, and some of them pressed close, and Kael felt the water move against his chest in a way that had nothing to do with the current. A hand brushed his. He pulled away. The hand followed. He set his jaw and did not look down, and the hand went past, and there was a sound in the dark like a man trying not to weep.

The coffer was in a small chamber at the heart of the crypt, set on a stone plinth in the center of a room that was dry, that was the first dry space they had come to. The plinth was waist-high. The coffer was iron, and old, and bound with a chain that Seris broke with a word and a touch. Inside the coffer were three scrolls, sealed with wax the color of dried blood, and a dagger of black stone, and a ring of pale gold that Seris did not touch.