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“Any sign?” Biri-Daar asked quietly.

“None I can find,” Paelias said. Keverel shook his head. Kithri darted forward to look for the kind of mechanical ambush that even the most skilled magic never found. She, too, backed away without finding anything.

Biri-Daar gave the plaster an experimental tap. All of them could hear how hollow a sound it made. She hit it again with a forearm, sending a cloud of dust rolling along the floor and leaving a visible dent in the door. Lucan punched a hole through where she had hit it and he peered into the darkness on the other side. “Antechamber,” he said. Then he sneezed.

Remy and Biri-Daar broke out a hole big enough to step through, covering themselves with choking dust that picked up the magical glow. The effect was of walking into a faintly luminescent fog as they passed into the antechamber and saw what lay within. Like many prominent personages who built themselves extravagant tombs, the Road-builder had wanted his to reflect his station and achievements in life. So in the antechamber were arranged the tools and materials of exploration and roadbuilding. In wall sconces, bejeweled surveyor’s tools gleamed next to hanging picks and shovels of solid gold. On the ceiling, a sky map was picked out in diamonds.

Along the walls below the sconces, rows of shining silver wheelbarrows were piled high with uncut gems and chunks of ore representing debris. “Amazing,” Lucan said.

“Delightful, I would say,” Paelias added. He picked up an uncut ruby the size of an acorn. “Hard to believe nobody ever bothered to come find this before.”

A distant boom echoed in the chamber and down the hall. All of them looked back toward the tomb entrance, which was much too far away to see directly. “Our tiefling friend?” Kithri wondered.

Another boom came, and the rumble of what sounded like a collapse. “Well,” Lucan said to Biri-Daar. “I hope you’re right that we can get to the Keep from inside here. Now how were we going to get out of the Keep?”

“One thing at a time,” Biri-Daar said. She was still looking back to the entry passage, and she drew her sword. The rest armed themselves as well, as the guardians of the Road-builder’s tomb began to pour into the antechamber.

They were long dead, the last crew to work on the Crow Road, buried with the Road-builder instead of beneath the stones of his road. Their bodies were held together by the posthumous strength of his magic—some had once been human, others dwarves, even a few tieflings and orcs among them. They thronged in the entry hall, dully responsive to their single imperative: to destroy the intruders.

And, incredibly, to rebuild the tomb. As Paelias flung a searing splash of light onto the ceiling, they saw back toward the entrance that some of the reanimated workers were already moving stones and mixing mortar from the dust of the floor and the black fluids of their own bodies. How many times had this happened before? “I revise my earlier statement,” Paelias said. “Instead, I choose to find it hard to believe that anyone ever survived this to get into the Keep.”

“Hold them!” Keverel cried out suddenly, as within the antechamber more walking dead emerged from the stones of the walls. He forced them back with the channeled power of Erathis, blinding and confusing them, as the rest of the party dug for their lives. They used the picks and shovels and mauls, but gold was a poor material for weapons—heavy and soft and slippery in the hands of the half-decayed guardians. A heavy sledgehammer, its striking face set with a single great emerald, went over Remy’s head and rang against the wall, cracking the gem and bending the hammer’s handle. Remy first struck off the hands holding the hammer, then the head of the animated corpse. But right behind it loomed a great hulking corpse of what must have been an ogre in life, swinging a pick whose head was as long as Remy was tall. Keverel was smashing his way through the others, breaking them apart and crushing the skulls to make sure.

At the antechamber’s entrance, Biri-Daar and Lucan