• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“These are all of the creatures he buried under the road,” Keverel said. “His menagerie.”

Lucan walked over to it and tapped on its lid. “Do we crack it?”

Remy looked to Biri-Daar, knowing what her answer would be. She would have enough respect for the dead that she would not have the sarcophagus itself violated even if they took with them everything else they could carry.

“Yes,” she said.

Stunned, Remy echoed her. “Yes?”

“It has been many centuries since the Road-builder lay in this tomb,” she said. “Open it.”

Lucan found the seam dividing lid and case. He wedged the blade of his knife into it, working it all the way around the sarcophagus. Bits of precious stone and gold flaked onto the floor. “I’m going to need a hand here,” he said when he’d circumambulated the sarcophagus. Biri-Daar, Keverel, and Remy stepped up.

On Lucan’s count of three, the four of them heaved the lid up. It overbalanced, tipping on end and sliding to the floor with a deafening boom. “That ought to bring the road crew along,” Kithri observed. Whatever anxiety the idea provoked in her was not enough to prevent her stooping to scoop up some of the larger fragments of gold inlay.

The inside of the sarcophagus, as Biri-Daar had suggested, was empty.

But not just empty. Instead of a floor, only black space lay at its bottom. A cold damp breath blew out of it.

“Rope,” Biri-Daar said.

Among them, they had two hundred feet. “This is where we go down to go up,” Lucan said.

“And then,” Remy added, remembering their morning’s exchange, “up will be down. Is two hundred feet enough?” he added as the rope uncoiled down into the darkness.

“Someone has to go first to find out,” Keverel said. “I will.”

“No, you won’t,” Kithri said. “I will. I’m light enough that if there isn’t enough rope you can pull me back up.”

“The halfling talks sense for a change,” Lucan said.

Kithri climbed up onto the lip of the sarcophagus, tipped an imaginary cap at them, and rappelled away into the darkness. She looked up when all of her save her face was in shadow. “One tug means all is well. Two means leave me. If you feel two, don’t believe it. What I mean is three, except I didn’t have time.”

“What would three mean?” Paelias asked.

“Help,” she said, and lowered herself out of sight.

They had received no message from her when the road crew arrived at the door looking to clean up their mess … and them with it.

This was the elite, the foremen and their hand-picked laborers. They were brawny, grim, twirling their picks and mauls with flippant menace. There were dozens of them, crowding the passage from the burial chamber doorway past the first bend and beyond. “Don’t think we can let them rebuild the sarcophagus lid,” Paelias said, looking down at the pieces of it scattered around their feet.

“Not until we get down there,” Lucan agreed.

Remy shrugged. “Or Kithri comes back up.”

“Hold them,” Biri-Daar said.

The words had not left her mouth before Lucan’s arrows were ripping into the front ranks of the crew. As they slowed, piling the others up behind them, Remy and Biri-Daar herself met them at the doorway, holding them at the choke point where they couldn’t use their numerical advantage. Keverel, a step back, held forth his holy symbol. “Erathis commands!” he boomed. “You shall not enter!”

Slowed, pained by the holy force of the god, the undead tried to press forward. “Keep them back, Keverel,” Paelias said. He was leaning over the edge of the sarcophagus, the fingers of one hand resting on the rope. “We’ve got a tug.”

“Remy, you and the eladrin go,” Biri-Daar said. “Lucan too.” She had her talisman of Bahamut out; its fierce glow threw the room’s shadows into sharp relief and washed over the undead crew, driving them back. Remy started to argue, but Lucan shouldered his bow and caught Remy’s arm.

“It’s not cowardice when the chief tells you retreat,” he said. “We go to the Keep. So let’s go.”

When they got back to the sarcophagus, Paelias was already on the rope, skipping nimbly down the seemingly bottomless