The alderman grinned in triumph. The bloody knife he claimed to have lost glinted in his fist. “Kill the one who brought you here!” The order screamed in Thomas’s head.
Squinting now, writhing, Thomas grimaced as the words twisted him up. His arm shook, his arrow scraping against the bow.
“Little brother?” asked Waldroup.
He fired.
The tip of the arrow split those grinning teeth and thrust the alderman back. Stroud’s look of triumph turned to horror. The fletch of the arrow projected from his mouth, and he pawed helplessly at his lips, his face. He shivered violently and a red mist erupted from him like smoke out of a chimney hole, gone in an instant. Left behind was a shell. Unlike the wet dissolution of Baldie, Alderman Stroud in an instant withered to parchment—to a desiccated corpse the equal of those ancient bodies lying in the recesses around them, save that it was dressed in fresh finery. Waldroup’s knife clunked to the ground, while the weight of the clothing pulled the alderman, bones clattering, after it.
The spell he’d woven lifted. Thomas, weak-kneed and sweating, clung against the nearest pillar, the bow dangling from his fingers.
“Tom?”
“He played it wrong,” he explained. “Kill the one who brought me here. But that was he. You told me to wait for you.”
Alpin Waldroup laughed with a kind of horrified relief. “You would have shot me?”
“He tried to get me to. He was in my head, ordering me—” He was interrupted by an inhuman screech like the one they’d heard following Baldie’s death. It issued from the sealed third vault.
For a few minutes nothing happened. They waited, watchful, half certain of what was about to occur.
The lid shifted slightly, rose up, and clattered; then with a drawn-out scraping it began sliding slowly, roughly down. Waldroup gestured for Thomas to move, and they took up positions behind two pillars.
Long iron-colored fingers curled around the lid of the vault with nails like talons and pushed until it tipped and stood at an angle against the foot of the tomb. The creature sat up slowly, its skin a greenish gray, mottled where it showed, webbed with the same black carapace including a helmet that shadowed its eyes—the armor of the Yvag.
Thomas raised his bow to kill it. Waldroup whispered, “Wait.”
They watched from the shadows as the Yvag climbed unsteadily out of its vault. It glanced at the tomb beside it, but Waldroup had replaced the lid so that it looked sealed.
Tall and reedy, the creature shuffled across the dim crypt, working so hard on staying upright that it kicked apart the dusty bones and clothes of the alderman without slowing. Its legs bent oddly, as if with additional joints. Its breathing seemed labored, and as it passed, the noise of its exhalations seemed to emerge from its side. It was desperate to get out.
The Yvag hauled itself up the steps. In one hand it held something small and dark and glittering.
The moment it ascended, Waldroup said, “Now. Before it has time to slice the world.”
“Why didn’t we just kill it?”
“I wanted to know what it would do. It was buried with one of them stones. I’ll wager the other one was, too, maybe the lot of them. Your alderman came down here for a reason, and it wasn’t to marry Elfland into the church. Come on!”
He raced out the door with Thomas close behind him, and thinking that Waldroup’s curiosity had almost got him killed.
Outside, two horses remained, searching for grass to eat beneath the thin snow. They looked up at the creature as it lumbered to the same spot as all the others and raised its arm to cut open the air. Two arrows struck it at the same time. One bounced off its armor but the other pierced the narrow space just under the helmet. The creature went up on its toes, flinging the ördstone without control, then crumpled to the ground and lay trembling, still alive.
Waldroup walked up to twist the spiked helmet off its head, but before he could, like a live thing the helmet snapped away from him and retreated into the suit of armor. A spray of silver hair spilled out around the blotchy, batrachian face, but nothing like human hair or animal fur. It was strange and metallic, like tightly woven wires. The creature hissed at him with its needlelike teeth. Points as sharp as thorns grew from its iron-gray face. Like the Queen, its eyes were peculiar, having no central pupil but a ring of black dots circling enlarged golden irises.
“Yvag,” Waldroup said, and the creature stared at him hatefully, black blood flowing around and down into its armor. “You want to go home.” He walked to where the ördstone had been flung. Held it up. “I promise I’ll send you if you’ll tell me why two men died and two of you waked.”
The Yvag tilted its head as if not sure it understood, but then it smirked. “Skinwalkers, we,” it wheezed with something like pride. “Yvagvoja. Great . . . honor.” The words echoed inside Thomas’s head as if in a well. It glanced at him. “‘See how we are kind, Thomas Rimor?’” it quoted in a rusty version of the voice of the alderman. Then it laughed, cold and humorless. Its torso heaved. Black blood bubbled from its lips, and its head drooped, chin against the arrow.
“Damn it.”
“Skinwalkers?” Thomas said.
“He told me I was wrong accusing him of working for the elven. He was elven, your alderman. Two deaths so unnatural,” said Waldroup, “and after each, one of these things stirs to life. That’s no coincidence. ‘A conveyance,’ he called your Balthair.”
Thomas’s eyes widened. “The alderman wanted me to give myself over. He promised me paradise.”
“The sort you don’t return from, I’ll wager. Look around you, little brother. Your friend and the alderman both—one drowned, an empty vessel. The other taken who knows when? Long ago from the look of it. Maybe all the time he visited your family, he was this. As he’s down to dust, he might have been dead longer than you’ve lived. They aren’t liegemen for the elven, they are the elven. Them’s I saw on the battlefield—wealthy, influential people, who had no business wandering in gore and guts among dead and dying soldiers. Why else were they there? Skinwalkers, weren’t they, looking for their teind?”
“Yvagvoja—the alderman used that word and so did this thing,” said Thomas.
“Mmm. Your friend Baldie drowned, but maybe no accident. Maybe that was always their intent, having him on hand to explain your brother’s disappearance. Stroud knew anything you said would be dismissed, so they could blame you. Only, you vanished. They moved onto their larger plan, and one by one, all his family conveniently died, leaving him to inherit.”
“And left for Innes.”
Waldroup nodded. “He and the alderman could have planted the idea in your father’s head, the way he planted shooting me in yours. They would have had all your property if you hadn’t returned. They would have killed your family next.”
“They snatched her baby, took it away.”
“Same as Alderman Stroud would have done with you.”
They stood a moment looking each other in the eye. Then Thomas said, “The other two vaults. The ones who visited the abbey, who accompanied the alderman to view our work. They’re still asleep.”
Grimly, Waldroup faced the ruins again. “Well, then. What happens, d’you suppose, if the leech dies before its host?” he asked, and strode back to the ruins of the crypt.
The second of the four vaults in the crypt contained a sleeping Yvag as well, which proved to be a problem. It was one thing to kill the elven when they were animated, dangerous—no different from cutting down a rampaging soldier in battle—but the idea of cold-bloodedly murdering the creature while it slept caused them both to hesitate. Waldroup even said, “This is ridiculous,” but remained standing over the vault they’d opened, staring down at the inhuman, armored knight, and clearly confounded by his own reluctance. “Maybe it’s protected and we’re spelled against harming it. How would we know?”
“We should wake it up,” Thomas suggested.
