Samas realized he'd been standing too long. His back was beginning to ache, and he felt a little short of breath. He cast about, spotted a marble bench, and lowered himself onto it. "What does Dmitra want to talk about?"
"I have no idea."
Oh, you know, Samas thought, it's just that the "First Princess of Thay" wants to tell us herself. "At least explain why you found it necessary to contact me in this melodramatic fashion."
Malark grinned. "If I may say so, Master, you don't know the half of it. To make it possible for me to reach all three of you zulkirs in time, my mistress conjured me a flying horse, and as I understand it, when an illusionist manufactures such a creature, it isn't altogether real. Recognizing its ephemeral nature yet still riding it high above the ground makes a man feel rather bold.
"But to answer the question," the outlander continued, "you are watched. I should know. Some of the watchers report to me, but there may be others who report directly to Szass Tam, and if so, I'd rather they not tell him you and I have spoken.
"Now then: What answer should I deliver to Tharchion Flass?"
Frowning, Samas pondered the question. Like any sane person, he had no desire to run afoul of Szass Tam, yet as Malark himself had pointed out, he could always claim afterward that he attended the secret meeting as the lich's loyal ally, to make sure no one was plotting against him. Meanwhile, his truest fealty was to himself, and he hadn't prospered to the extent he had by ignoring any opportunity to find out what the other grandees of the realm were scheming or to accrue every conceivable advantage.
"Where and when does she want to see us?"
Bareris saw that he'd stepped into an overgrown but open stone well. It was like the shaft he'd climbed out of days before, only narrower. Falling, he dropped his sword and grabbed at the curved wall beside him but failed to find a handhold.
Below him, metal rang, and an instant later he slammed down on a hard, uneven surface. Once the shock of the impact passed, and it was clear the short drop had merely bruised him, he discerned that he and his weapon had landed on a portion of a staircase spiraling into the depths. The disquieting vacancy that was his phantom guide hovered farther down.
He wondered if the spirit had just attempted to lure him into a fatal fall. If so, it would be crazy to continue following it.
But if it wanted him dead, it could have just attacked him with its sword, or let the banshee kill him. It seemed more likely that it had simply expected him to spot the shaft before blundering over the edge.
In any case, Bareris might have nowhere to go but down. By now, more of Xingax's hunters could easily have reached the ridge.
He rose, picked up his sword, and grumbled, "Warn me next time." The entity drifted onward, and he stalked after it.
Before long they came to the first of the vaults opening onto the well. The chamber was a sort of crypt, with supine, somewhat withered-looking figures of pale stone, their arms crossed, laid out in rows on the floor. They could have been sculptures, but Bareris' intuition told him they were corpses, coated with rock or ceramic or somehow petrified entirely. That suggested the ancients hadn't excavated this place to serve as a village or fortress either. It was a warren of tombs.
The dead bodies brought the phantom wavering in and out of visibility as it took on the semblance of first one and then another, but it didn't cling to any of them for long.
The crypts grew larger as Bareris and his guide descended. Stone sarcophagi, in some cases carved with the images of the dead, hid their occupants from view. Faded, flaking murals on the walls proclaimed their achievements and their adoration of their gods. The phantom borrowed faces from some of the carved and painted images as well, only to relinquish them just as quickly.
The bottom of the well was in view when the phantom led Bareris off the steps and into one of the vaults. A moment later, a gray, plump, segmented creature half as long as the bard was tall crawled from behind a bier. It raised its hairless, eyeless, but nonetheless manlike head and swiveled it in his direction.
Bareris's body clenched into rigidity, and pain burned through his limbs. He struggled to fill his lungs then chanted a charm of vitality.
The agony and near-paralysis faded. Intending to dispatch the sluglike creature before it could afflict him a second time, he lifted his sword and took an initial stride, but the spirit stepped to block the way, and a shadow blade extended from its murky hand.
Meanwhile, the crawling thing turned, retreated deeper into the crypt, and called out in a language Bareris had never heard before.
He hesitated. Despite the unpleasantness he'd suffered a moment before, it now seemed as if the worm-creature wanted to talk, not fight, and he certainly didn't want to battle it and the wraith at the same time if it wasn't necessary.
He sang to grant himself the gift of tongues then called, "I couldn't understand you before, but I will now."
"I said to keep your distance," the eyeless being replied. "I don't want to turn you to stone-not unless you mean me harm-but I can't stop the force emanating from my body any more than you can stop the flow of blood through your veins."
"I didn't come to hurt you," Bareris said. "I asked your… companion here to take me somewhere safe because other undead creatures are hunting me. I should warn you, they might track me into the well. They've sniffed out some of my other hiding places."
"I doubt they'll find this one," the creature said. "Those who built it had a fear of necromancers tampering with their remains, so they took precautions to prevent such indignities. They laid their dead to rest in a secret place far from their habitations and also arranged for me to dwell here, to petrify the corpses and make them impossible to reanimate. Most importantly from your perspective, they laid down wards to keep a wizard's undead servants from locating the tombs."
Bareris felt the tension flow out of him, leaving a profound weariness in its place. "That's good to hear."
"Sit. Mirror and I can offer no other comforts fit for a mortal man, but you can at least rest."
The bard flopped down with his back against a wall. "Mirror is an apt name for your friend, I suppose. Mine is Bareris Anskuld."
"I'm Quickstrike. A gravecrawler, as you can see."
Bareris shook his head. "I have to take your word for it. I've never met or even heard of a creature like you before."
"Truly? I wonder if the rest of my kind have vanished from the world." Quickstrike sounded more intrigued than dismayed by the possibility. "Men also called us ancestor worms."
"Interesting," Bareris said, and it was, a little. Despite the despair that had consumed him of late, he couldn't help feeling somewhat curious about his new companions. Curiosity was a fundamental aspect of the character of any bard. "Are gravecrawlers undead?"
"Of a sort, but not the sort that was ever human or preys on humans, not as long as they behave themselves."
"I assure you, I intend to. And Mirror is a ghost?"
"Of a particularly brave and accomplished warrior, I believe. As you will have guessed, Mirror is simply the nickname I gave him, based on his habit of filching an appearance. He doesn't remember his true name or face any longer, or much of anything really."
"Why not?"
Quickstrike's body rippled from head to tail in a manner that suggested a man stretching. "He fell victim to the power that destroyed his entire people. It's a sad story, but one I can relate if you want to hear."