Page 38 of Beds and Blades

The soldiers moved before he finished speaking.

“Bring the heaviest stones from the collapsed western storehouse,” he continued. “Block the stairwell from the top. I want weight over the entrance.”

“Yes, High Commander.”

“Place the stones carefully. I want them stable. If it pushes, I want to hear it. If it breaks through, I want warning before it reaches another part of the fortress,” he said sharply.

Another soldier nodded and ran.

Skip pointed toward the walls surrounding the courtyard.

“Twenty archers above. Ten on the east wall, ten on the west. Rotating watches. Drawn bows if the stones move. If it comes out, the arrows will slow it. You blind it. You pin it long enough for the hooks to take the head.”

The words moved through the courtyard with the clean force of command. Men and women repeated orders. Boots struck stone. Someone began shouting for ropes. Someone else called for the quarry sledges.

The first stones arrived then, dragged across the courtyard by four soldiers with ropes looped around them. The sound was terrible—heavy rock scraping over stone, slow and final. They began setting them across the stairwell entrance, one by one, building a crude cap over the darkness below.

I looked at Skip.

He was watching the crypt.

“If it waits,” I said, “it gets stronger.”

“Significantly.”

“If it comes out, it comes out fed.”

“Fed, and faster.”

“And if it has two men down there…”

“It will not waste them.”

The certainty in his voice was worse than speculation.

The garrison moved around the crypt with ropes and stones and bows.

Below us, under the courtyard, something had made a meal of one soldier and taken two more into the dark.

Morvanna's attack had not ended at dawn. It had only gone underground.

Chapter eight

Surrender

Skip had to attend to the crypt.

More specifically, he had to secure the crypt, oversee the placement of the stones, assign watches, review every approach to the courtyard, and make absolutely certain that every soldier posted there understood exactly how not to die if the thing below decided to come up.

I returned to my quarters.

Caen had lent me several books from her tower. The one that caught my attention first was titled The Great Unification: The Sorcerer Zhor and the People of Mytharo.

I opened it intending to skim. I did not skim.

The text was dense, dramatic, and deeply biased in the way all official histories are biased.

The castle at Druvenfall had not always belonged to Morvanna. Nearly one thousand years earlier, it had been the stronghold of a sorcerer named Zhor, who launched a war against the peoples of Mytharo that lasted forty years.