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“The Erathian,” Paelias said. “Keverel. Holy man.”

“Yes,” Keverel said. Out of Paelias’s field of vision, he was doing something with his hands. Blood began to trickle from the star elf’s nose. He licked it from his lips, but kept eye contact with Keverel.

“We can’t stay here,” Biri-Daar said. “The crew will awaken again if we are here long enough to let them.”

“Perhaps not,” Kithri said.

Lucan nodded. “Perhaps they have done their work once they have walled us in.” From the other side of the new wall, the sounds of building echoed. The crew was completing its work.

“Do they plant the trees again?” Kithri wondered.

“Don’t be stupid, Kithri,” Paelias said suddenly. “They’re zombies. The undead don’t go out in broad daylight to plant trees, for the gods’ sakes.”

Everyone looked at Keverel for confirmation. He winked. Paelias looked around at each of them, wiping away the blood from his lip. “What?” he said. “What?”

“Never mind. Are you fit to go on?” Biri-Daar asked.

“If he can insult me, he’s ready,” Kithri said. “Let’s get what we can carry and see what the rest of this hole has to offer.”

“Not the star map,” Paelias said.

Kithri glared at him. “Fine. Not the star map.” She looked up at it with longing that would have been touching had it not been motivated entirely by greed. Then she sifted through the litter of spilled gemstones and dismembered zombies, looking for the most efficient way to fill her pockets with riches.

Remy found himself next to Keverel as they found a zigzagging descending passage from the antechamber to what they assumed must be the actual burial chamber. “What did you to do him?” he murmured, not wanting Paelias to hear.

“Some healing closes wounds on the outside of the body, some on the inside,” Keverel said. “His wound was to both body and mind, at the place where they meet. Very difficult to minister to those. But Erathis is powerful. He has never deserted me in a time of need.”

Biri-Daar hissed from just ahead, a signal they had learned meant shut up, potential danger. Slowing, the group drew tighter as they came to a short stair at the bottom of which was another plastered-over entrance. On the floor directly in front of it lay a trowel and a pan of long-dried plaster. Biri-Daar descended the stair and said, “Be ready for the road crew.”

Weapons drawn, they looked in all directions as she slid the pan and trowel out of the way. Nothing happened. She tapped at the plaster. Nothing. “Be ready,” she said again, and punched a hole in the plaster.

The doorway was timbered over as well as plastered, and took longer to break down. When they were done there was still no sign of the road crew. They stepped over the rubble of the doorway into the Road-builder’s burial chamber.

It was two or three times as large, in every dimension, as the antechamber. Their light barely reached the ceiling, but it did manage to pick out a diamond star map slightly different than the previous. Remy wondered if each one reflected the sky on a particular date, and if so what the dates were. The Road-builder’s death? The completion of the Crow Road? Probably he would never know. The treasures in the burial chamber were different. The antechamber had celebrated the Road-builder’s tools; the burial chamber celebrated the culmination of the work. The floor was a map of the Dragondown, with the Crow Road picked out in a single poured stream of gold. The Whitefall was a string of opals, the Blackfall obsidian. The Dragondown Gulf, covering nearly a quarter of the room’s floor, was worked from lapis lazuli. In the center of the room, the Road-builder’s sarcophagus sat untouched. Four feet high and seemingly large enough for three men, it was inlaid in gold, jade, and mother-of-pearl with a fantastically complicated collage of different creatures. There were men and halflings, crows and wolves, legendary creatures Remy had never believed existed such as beholders and the semi-sentient molds said to creep the darkest