His jaw tightened. No. He would not give up looking, just because of a moment of doubt. He needed answers and a moment of frustration was not going to stop him. He would empty the crypt before admitting defeat.
But maybe that wasn’t necessary. The histories of the Order said that when he was defeated, the Abyssal Plague had turned Tavit Nance into a demon, but that he had retained a vicious cunning. Kri sat back and tried to put himself in Nance’s place. He had something to hide from the Order-most likely notes, papers, or a book. The crypt would provide a hiding place that was strong and might survive anything the Order did to the village above. But paper or parchment couldn’t be left out in the open in a crypt. It had to be protected from the damp and vermin. It would have to be inside some kind of wrapping or case, but among the bones, a wrapped bundle or a case would stand out.
So why not put it in one of the cases already present in the crypt?
Kri grabbed the nearest casket and wrenched it open. A yellowed skull surrounded by neatly stacked bones grinned up at him. He threw the casket aside, knocking over a pile of bones and sending them rattling to the ground. “Kri?” called Tabisha.
“It’s nothing,” he shouted back to her. “I’m fine.” He whirled around. There were fewer caskets than there were loose bones, but it would still take time to search them all. A lust for discovery was in him. Whatever Tavit Nance had hidden in the crypt, he needed to find it now. He opened another casket. More bones, economically packed to the casket’s top. There wouldn’t have been room to hide anything inside.
Kri felt a flush of triumph. He had the solution to the puzzle. “Tabisha!” he said. “Look for a casket with its bones dumped out beside it. If Nance was in a hurry, he wouldn’t have looked for an empty casket-he would have made room by emptying one.”
He went to work without waiting for her reply. The chamber he was in had no telltale heaps of bones. The caskets were all orderly, undisturbed except for the two he had opened. Kri hurried to the next chamber. Again, all was in order. He bit his tongue. He couldn’t be wrong about this. It made too much sense.
“Kri,” said Tabisha, “I think I’ve found something.”
She stood in front of the arch with the broken keystone, outside of the chamber with the sagging ceiling. Her torch, thrust at arm’s length through the dangerous arch, shed just enough light to glimmer on a small casket of white stone against the far wall and the heap of yellow bones in front of it. Kri’s mouth went dry. He would have plunged through the arch, but Tabisha caught his arm and held him back.
“Let me,” she said.
For a moment, blinding rage filled Kri. This was his discovery. He should be the one to open the casket. He pushed the anger back. “You think it’s trapped?” he asked.
“Not deliberately.” She nodded at the ceiling. “But I don’t like the look of that. A lumbering priest isn’t going to get in and out. A light-footed thief can.” Her glance dared him to challenge her.
Kri studied the ceiling and the arch, trying to recall all he knew of the principles of masonry, then nodded at last. Tabisha handed him her torch. “Hold both of them high.”
Under the double illumination, she slipped through the arch and into the chamber. Her eyes, Kri noticed, weren’t on the ceiling, but the ground. At first he thought she was just trying to avoid scattered bones, but then he saw that the stones paving the floor were uneven. Whatever forces had cracked the arch and weakened the ceiling had heaved them up as well. A misplaced foot on a tilted stone could send Tabisha staggering. The impact of her body, however slight, could jar the precarious balance of the ceiling.
But Tabisha reached the far side of the chamber without stumbling. Using her foot, she delicately swept some of the tumbled bones so she could stand directly before the casket. She bent and examined it. “There are claw marks on the stone,” she said, her voice pitched low.
“Nance’s demon claws.” Kri’s heart soared. “Bring out the entire casket.”
Tabisha looked over her shoulder at him. “It would be easier to open it and just bring whatever’s inside. The latch is torn off-”
“ Bring out the casket! ”
The echoes of his voice brought grains of crumbled mortar drifting down from the ceiling. Tabisha looked up, hesitated, then twisted back around and heaved up the casket. Her return across the chamber was slow and ponderous. She placed her feet with even more care, possibly because she couldn’t see the floor over her burden. Kri could see the strain in her face and arms. His hands shifted eagerly on the shafts of the torches. By the time Tabisha was only a few paces from the arch, he couldn’t stand waiting any longer. He thrust the torches in among piles of bones to support them and free his hands.
She froze the instant the shadows started to dance. “Kri, hold up the torches! I need to see.”
“Let me help you.” He moved through the arch.
“Kri, don’t!”
He didn’t see quite what happened-his gaze was on the casket-but Tabisha shifted suddenly. Stones grated under her feet. She swayed to the side, unbalanced by the weight of the casket. Kri, startled, stepped back from her.
His foot came down on a bone. It rolled and splintered under him. He stumbled, falling against the side of the arch. The stones creaked, then groaned loudly. Kri threw himself back. Tabisha cursed and leaped forward as the cracked keystone gave way and the arch came crashing down.
Dust filled the air, extinguishing one of the torches and reducing the other to a guttering orange glow. The sound of the collapse left Kri’s ears ringing. He groped for the remaining torch and waved it gently until the flame rose again. The dust dispersed the light, limiting his vision. Kri groped his way forward.
The casket rested, miraculously upright, on the ground just a handsbreadth from Tabisha’s fingers. Tabisha herself lay stretched out on her belly. Her eyes were closed, but the dust that drifted around her mouth eddied with each slow breath. Stones lay across her legs and hips, both the smaller stones of the arch and larger ones that must have tumbled from the ceiling. Kri reached for his protege.
His gaze, however, slid away from her and back to the casket. Had whatever it contained survived the fall? He should check. It would only take a moment. He shifted and reached for the casket.
Tabisha’s eyes flickered and opened. Her breath quickened. Her voice, when it came, was dull and thick. “Kri…”
He hesitated.
And a voice seemed to slip into his head like a manifestation of his desire. Look inside. You want to.
His hand was on the broken latch. His fingers slipped into the grooves the demon claws had made. On the edge of his vision, he saw Tabisha try to pull herself from the rocks. The attempt ended in a gasp of pain. “Kri!” she called again. He lifted the weight of the casket’s stone lid and leaned forward to peer inside.
Cradled in a nest of crumpled paper, a tiny crystal vial gleamed under the light of his torch. Kri squinted and brought the light closer. There was something inside the vial. Something red and crystalline yet liquid, like blood mixed with honey and shot through with faint specks of gold and silver. The joy of discovery filled him, greater than any he had ever felt.
A sample of the Voidharrow. The last remnants of what Tavit Nance had taken from the Order. No wonder he had hidden it! Kri’s hand actually trembled slightly as he lifted the precious vial from its resting place. He held the very thing the Order had denied him-that his god, by her silence, had kept from him. His mind reeled at the secrets he might be able to learn from those few imprisoned drops.