With such jokes did they guide each other through the darkness, half reverting to the youths they’d once been—but now, with months of shared work and fear joined to the intimacy of their shared bodies, the jesting words were comfort rather than combat. Any too-strong sentiment would weigh them down and might be a tool for the spirits of the temple. With humor, they kept each other aloft, or at any rate walking.
It was after one such exchange that Erik noticed how the wet breathing was quieter. Their footsteps were no longer steady, broken up by the terrain, but the sound was more of the daylight world. He breathed easier himself, having lost a heaviness on his chest that he hadn’t been aware of before.
Then, once again, there were two doors: identical, wooden, and small enough that both he and Toinette would have to duck when passing through either. On one of them, the red light shone more boldly and steadily than Erik had seen it before. This time, he could easily make out the shape: a four-armed red cross, the limbs of equal length and all wider at the ends than the center.
The emblem of the Templars.
* * *
Beyond the door was a cave. The entrance was narrow at first, as well as short, but quickly opened up until Toinette could stand at her full height without dashing her skull against the ceiling and walk abreast with Erik. Beyond that, the cave didn’t get much larger, and it only stretched back a short way into the darkness.
Itwasdark. The eerie light had vanished. Toinette had no urge to complain. Had she been completely mortal, she would have been blind, but to her, the darkness only came as a relief. She’d stopped feeling the pull of the temple’s light after she’d refused it the first time, but its presence had still lingered.
Knife in hand, she looked around and quickly saw the distinguishing features of the cave.
At the end farthest from the door, a row of stalagmites half hid four shapes. Each was covered in cloth, but their size and outline gave their nature away immediately. Toinette went forward not out of any uncertainty but to see what other details she could make out.
From the darkness beyond the shrouded bodies, the skeleton grinned at her.
To any logic, one corpse more was no great matter, even if that one was undraped. That Toinette gasped and her heart began racing when she saw it was therefore damned embarrassing, and she hoped Erik hadn’t noticed. As a disguise, she stated the obvious. “So. Five of them. Plus the ones we buried. If there were more, likely they drowned on the way—or died elsewhere on the island.”
“So I’d think, aye,” said Erik. He drew closer to her, which gave him a better angle on all the bodies. Toinette doubted that was the only reason, just as she knew it was no accident of space that pressed her against his side. They were still solid, still living. It counted for a great deal at the moment.
The skeleton still wore the rusted remains of chain mail and helmet. He sat with a Templar’s shield across his lap and his head thrown back against the wall, and from a distance Toinette could see no clear means of his death. Then she took a few steps closer and spotted the jeweled handle of a dagger protruding from his ribs. One hand still gripped it.
“He killed himself,” she said, shaking her head. Toinette had heard of that a few times, mostly in silly stories about young people thinking their lovers were dead and acting foolishly, but she’d never thought to see it done, or even the aftermath. To one bent on self-murder, there were considerably better options—unless, she thought as she looked at the body, there weren’t.
“One of them could have stabbed him,” Erik said. “A quarrel—”
“What, and then he buried the others with a dagger in his breast?” Each of the shrouded forms had a crude cross over the breast, made of bits of rock carefully laid out. No blood stained the cloth.
“Well—no. A wound like that would’ve killed him almost instantly, unless it’s shallower than it looks.” Erik peered at the body and then shook his head. “The spot’s just right. And the angle. He’d have been a soldier, of course, but even so, the will it must have taken!”
Toinette thought of the man they’d killed outside the temple. “That’s two death-seekers,” she said.
“Aye. And this one had sworn himself to the Church.”
“Men discard those oaths when it suits them,” said Toinette, but still the gravity of it shook her.
They stood silent in the cave. It didn’t feel sowrongas the rest of the temple, but solemnity was in the very air they breathed. Men had died here, and likely killed as well—and not, Toinette thought, with the heat of a battle. One had survived to bury the others and then flee himself in the only way he could.
Had they quarreled? Had he killed them in their sleep? Had any of them begun to change already? She remembered the mention of corruption in the book.
A more urgent question: “What do we do here? Why were we sent?” Toinette frowned. “I’d as soon not disturb the bodies, but…”
She trailed off. In that uneasy silence came a scraping sound, and Toinette saw motion out of the corner of her eye. She snapped her head around and then couldn’t get breath to swear.
The sound had been bone against rock. The skeleton was moving.
Thirty-Seven
Bones long dead stirred slowly but unmistakably. The helmeted head lifted, the shield rose, and the corpse’s other hand uncurled from around the dagger’s hilt, falling to the side. A reddish glow suffused the bones as they rose, and two points of brighter red shone from inside the helmet.
Draugr, thought Erik at first: the shepherd-eater, the blood-drinker, the monster that had stalked through half the old tales of his childhood. When he drew his sword, he was trying to remember how the walking dead killed, and what killed them.
Memory of the old tales was what stopped him at first.Draugrin the stories had always been swollen and fleshy, gray-black from death. There’d never been skeletons. Thus pausing, he further thought that the red light had helped them before, at least once.
Erik stepped back, guarding himself with his sword, until the opposite wall of the cave hit him in the spine. Toinette was there already, eyes and lips narrowed as she focused on the skeleton, knuckles white around her knife.
