Waldroup reached in and tugged at the helmet. It receded, and the silver hair spilled out like brushed metal threads, finer than any metal they’d ever seen. It half covered the sharp, weirdly granular face that could have been male or female, and that remained severe and threatening even in sleep. The creature’s head rocked as the helmet came away, but it did not stir. “If we can wake it up,” he said.
Pushing the lid further out of the way, he leaned in and drew a strange thin dagger from a sheath in the armor. The blade edges were scored and oddly notched so as to present a barbed surface. The whole of it was dull black, not like metal at all; but the slightest touch of its edge sliced his finger. “Jesus.” He licked the cut.
He held it up vertically to show Thomas.
“If you got stabbed with this, it would take half your entrails with it coming back out.” Then he balanced the dagger on one finger. “Perfectly made. It’s as light as rain.” He flipped it up, caught it, and carefully tucked it back into its sheath, then worked the sheath free. It came away with a quiet click. “Better than mine, and they’re good.” He nodded at the first of the four vaults, nearest the steps. “We might as well open that one, too, see what treasures lie inside. You should have one of these knives yourself, lad.”
Thomas turned and shoved the heavy lid. It grated and rumbled, sliding open enough to reveal the sleeping creature in the darkness below.
He just had time to acknowledge that when something tiny and glistening flew out of the opening. It was smaller than a bat, green and skinny, and made a wild gabbling noise as it flitted past his face. It hooked his hair and shot toward the ceiling. His head snapped back as if tied to a horse, and he cried out. As if in reply, the little monster let loose a high horrid squeal.
Waldroup plucked his newfound knife and without hesitation vivisected the thing. Its two halves plopped onto the lid in front of him and continued squirming. It still clutched a fistful of Thomas’s hair.
In the vault out of which it had flown, the sleeping Yvag came awake. It hissed and blinked up at Thomas through the small opening.
“Waldroup!” shouted Thomas.
But Waldroup had his own trouble. The other Yvag was awake now, too. Disoriented, it grabbed at the side of the vault and tried to pull itself up while also clutching for its missing dagger.
The pressure of a hive of bees swelled inside Thomas’s head. The creatures were angry and talking to each other.
Waldroup’s Yvag lunged at him, caught him around the back of the neck and pulled him halfway over into the vault with it. He drew his arm back and stabbed its own knife hard into its throat.
Thomas backpedaled furiously as his enemy pushed the lid aside as if it weighed no more than parchment, and sat up. The stone lid hit the floor and broke in half.
He grabbed his bow, pressing against the nearest pillar as the Yvag stood. It pulled its dagger and bent into a crouch, about to spring. He shot it through one eye and it flipped backward over the lip of the vault and crashed down in shadows and billowing dust. He had another arrow drawn and ready, but saw that Waldroup had dispensed with his, was in fact holding its severed head up by the shimmering hair. “That knife’s very sharp, indeed,” he said. Black blood had spattered his face and clothing.
“What happened? Why did they suddenly—”
“The little monster.” Waldroup wiped the blade of the dagger through the hair of his dead Yvag, then leaned forward and used the tip to flip the gelatinous bat thing over. It had ceased wriggling.
Still holding the bow, Thomas edged over and peered down at it.
It had goggle eyes and prominent little fangs in a mouth full of tiny sharp teeth. Its ropy arms ended in circular spheres sporting claws all around. It appeared to be sexless, its jointless reedy legs resolving in vestigial two-toed feet. Tiny leathery wings lay twisted under its back. It had a tail like a mouse.
“It looks like something made out of a nightmare,” said Thomas, but he had a vague recollection of having seen its like before. He pushed the fingers of his drawing hand into his hair, winced. He was bleeding. The little monster had torn hair out at the roots.
“Homunculus,” Waldroup replied. “Or maybe it’s a fae, a hob for real, hey?” He poked at its body cavity with the dagger. “But look at this now.”
A whitish fluid spilled from its torso, and the dagger caught shiny strands of metal, as if its organs had been woven from the hair of the Yvag. Its green jellylike flesh was already melting into a puddle on the lid; shortly, only the spun wiry metal remained, like a miniature skeleton. In moments all of that had turned to rust and disintegrated.
Thomas was perplexed. “Why do you think only this one had it? Was it a pet?”
“Nasty little excuse for one.” He dragged its gooey carcass off the lid, dropped it inside the vault. “I think it’s a sentinel, like for any army. All of them sleep here while they ride their human hosts. Didn’t wake for intruders, nor even the alderman, before he died. This thing was in the first vault in order to sound the alarm, but we started at the other end because that one rode your friend Baldie. I wager the idea is, the one nearest the steps is likely to get opened first should someone come looking, so this thing sounds the alarm and wakes them all. They came full-on very quickly, didn’t they?” He turned and gazed down the row of opened vaults. “All of them, sleeping in our tombs, in graves, alive. How many queer tales of undead things this explains,” he mused.
“So two more will have died now, just like the alderman?”
“I expect so, but I’m not staying to find out. It’s time we were gone. This won’t be the only place they keep the puppeteers. Come on.” Waldroup led the way up the steps.
“But shouldn’t we wait to hear?” Thomas asked him as he followed. “They might be anybody.”
They emerged from the ruin.
“Oh, not anybody, I think. They’re selective, aren’t they? People of influence. Perhaps your sister’s nurse was one, but maybe she’s just spelled alongside your sister. I mean, lookit. Balthair and Stroud and those others who visited the abbey—all influence and wealth. The nurse has got neither.”
A possibility suddenly dawned on Thomas. “My father?”
“If they’d had him, they’d have used him. You couldn’t make yourself kill your father.”
“But they didn’t know Fingal was me until just now.”
“That’s a fair point,” Waldroup agreed, and pondered for a moment. “No, it’s like I said—they had plans to dispense with him, same as Balthair did his own family. He’d have inherited everything again, wouldn’t he? You’ve just saved your father for the time being, lad. And that’s all you can hope for right now.”
“Yvag.” Thomas scowled as he said it.
“Dwellers in Ailfion or Elfhaven or whatever they want to call it. Hidden on the other side of this.” Waldroup held up a black stone he’d taken from the Yvag he’d killed. Glancing around them, he added, “We need to collect our arrows from these bodies, gather our belongings from St. Mary’s, and get well away from here. Very, very far away.” He gestured with his head. “So pick a horse.”
“Why?”
“Because who knows what alarm’s been sounded. That screech maybe can be heard across boundaries. Stroud made it clear there would be retribution, and that was just for the first one we slew. When they learn all four are dead . . .”
Thomas said, “I have to see Innes. I have to know if the sorcery lifted with Baldie gone, that she can see the world aright.”
“Listen to me, Tommy, you can’t. However much you want to, you have to leave her now. They’re gonnae want our blood, little brother. And what will you tell her she doesn’t know? Either the glamour’s lifted and she can already see things right, or she never will. And you can’t fix that. You’ve done all you can.”
Thomas shook his head violently.
Waldroup said, “You go to her now, you’ll focus the Yvag on her. But you won’t be here to save her, because you’ll also tell them it’s us who killed their sleepers here. Right now there’s no one left who knows that. We don’t know how many places these things are sleeping. We have maybe enough time to collect our things, but we’re riding for the coast this night and a ship to Calais. And not a word of it to Clacher, either, not even him.” He walked over to the body of the Yvag, leaned down and picked up the blue ördstone the creature had dropped. He knelt beside it and, raising the stone above himself, cut a diagonal line down through the air. The line glowed a spitting, hissing green, and as the tip of it touched the ground, the green line parted, unfolding into a darker circle. Cautiously, Waldroup peered in.
