Season One • Chapter 13
They were the last to arrive at the entrance.
Haruki had suggested it on the road --- hang back, let the others go in first, take the time to think. The others had not argued. The entrance was a stone archway set into a low hillside, the kind of structure that had been built to last and had succeeded --- old in a way that the goblin camps and the bandits on the road had not been, carrying the particular weight of something that had been here long before any of them and would be here long after. Steps descended into darkness beyond the arch.
Haruki stood at the top of the steps and looked at it.
"Something's off" he said.
Lyra stood beside him. "I've been thinking the same thing since the square."
"The danger emphasis. The scarred man made a point of it --- named it directly, gave it weight. But skeletons are not that dangerous. Strong, yes. More than goblins." He paused. "But thoughtless. They don't adapt, they don't coordinate, they don't surprise you. You read the pattern and you stay ahead of it."
"Why the big deal then" Lyra said. Not a question.
"That's what I keep coming back to."
Hayate was looking at the steps. "Are we going in or not?"
"We're going in" Haruki said. "Carefully."
The darkness at the top of the staircase became something else at the bottom.
Light --- warm and flickering, torches mounted to the stone walls at intervals, already burning. Someone had been here ahead of them and had lit the way. Haruki looked at the torches and felt the bad feeling settle slightly.
"That helps us" he said, keeping his voice low. Sound carried differently underground --- a lesson the stone walls were teaching immediately. "Lit routes are cleared routes. We take the one that isn't lit."
They moved down the narrow hallway in single file --- Haruki at the front, Lyra at the rear, Hayate between them with the greatsword angled to fit the passage. The torchlight threw long shadows and the stone on either side was cold and close and the air smelled of age and dust and something underneath both of those things that Hayate couldn't name.
The hallway opened into a large room.
Five paths branched out from it in different directions. One of them --- the leftmost --- had torches lit along its visible length. The other four were dark.
Haruki looked at the lit path. Then at the others.
"One path" Lyra said quietly. "Three parties. They all went the same way."
"Or were directed to" Haruki said.
Hayate looked at him.
"The rightmost path" Haruki said. "We go our own way. And we move quickly --- I want to be out of here as soon as possible."
The rightmost path was dark and they moved through it with a torch Haruki had pulled from the bracket behind them. The first room they reached had four coffins and four skeletons --- upright, moving, turning toward them with the slow mechanical attention of things that operated on proximity rather than thought.
The party dispatched them in under two minutes. No injuries. No complications. The skeletons moved in straight lines and telegraphed every action before it happened, and fighting them felt less like combat and more like solving a problem that had already told you the answer.
They kept moving.
The next room was larger --- six coffins, six skeletons. Same result. The room after that was larger still. Each room yielded easily, the party working through them with the efficient rhythm of people who had found the correct approach and were applying it repeatedly. They came out of every room unscathed.
The bad feeling did not go away.
Haruki could not locate a reason for it. The skeletons were manageable. The path was clear. Everything was proceeding in the most straightforward way possible. He kept moving and kept the feeling filed where he could see it.
"Still one lit path" Lyra said, from behind him, between two rooms. "We should have crossed at least one other party's route by now."
Haruki said nothing. She was right. Three parties in a tomb with five paths and only one trail of lit torches --- the mathematics of it did not resolve cleanly no matter how he arranged it.
He kept moving.
The scream reached them in the hallway between the fourth and fifth rooms.
It came from ahead --- not close, not far, somewhere further down the path they were already on. A single voice, cut short.
The three of them looked at each other.
They ran.
The hallway ended in a set of doors --- heavy stone, already open, the darkness beyond them giving way to something larger. They came through at speed and pulled up.
The room was enormous.
The ceiling rose into shadows too high for the torchlight to reach, supported by pillars that ran in two rows down the length of the space --- ornate, carved, the stonework detailed in the way of people who had built this to honour something and had taken the time to do it properly. The walls between the pillars were etched from floor to ceiling with images --- figures, battles, processions, the pictorial history of kings laid out in stone across the entire length of the chamber. A story told in a language of pictures, old enough that the people who had commissioned it were dust.
At the far end of the room, a figure.
They were too far to make it out. A dwarf lay on the ground between them and it --- one of the four from the square, armour caved in on the left side, still. The other three dwarves were spread around the figure in a rough formation, weapons up, not attacking. Frozen.
Haruki was already running toward them.
As they closed the distance the columns fell away on either side and the room revealed itself. The orc party came into view --- four of them, also surrounding the figure, also not attacking. And behind a pillar to the right, the two hooded figures, pressed against the stone.
All three parties. All here. All looking at the same thing.
They were close enough now.
The skeleton king stood at the centre of the room.
Ten feet of ancient bone, still and terrible, wearing a crown that was large and ornate and had clearly been placed on a head of some importance once upon a time. In one hand --- a longsword. Longer than Hayate's greatsword. The blade was jagged along its edge, the metal eaten by time and neglect, the pommel missing entirely, leaving only the bare tang. It was a weapon that had not been cared for in a very long time. It was still obviously lethal. The blood on the blade, dark and not yet dry, confirmed it.
Hayate felt something.
It was subtle --- a wrongness in the air around the king that he registered not with his eyes but with something underneath them. A dark mist clung to the skeleton, barely visible, more felt than seen. His Dark affinity pulled toward it the way a compass needle pulls toward north, and what it found there was not right. Not the ordinary darkness of an old tomb. Something else. Something that had been placed.
He tightened both hands on the greatsword.
Across the room Haruki had gone very still --- the particular stillness of someone absorbing a situation too quickly to respond to it yet, running the numbers, finding them insufficient. His expression gave nothing away except to someone who knew his face.
Lyra had stopped moving. Her hand was at the quiver. Her eyes were on the king and they were not afraid --- they were doing what they always did, which was assess. But the assessment was taking longer than usual.
The skeleton king's empty gaze moved across the room.
It found them.