Marra stepped out behind her and said, “Whoa.” She had seen the carved and vaulted room where her niece had been laid to rest but had not really considered the implications for the rest of the catacombs.
This was truly a palace of the dead. The ceilings vanished into darkness. The entire boardinghouse where they had spent the last week could have fit within the walls. Carvings circled the room, an endless procession of warriors and great beasts chasing each other for eternity. Racks of weapons stood against the walls, pole arms bristling like wheat, swords still gleaming dully after who knew how many years.
The center of the room held a single slab of stone, and on it, inlaid with metal, a sarcophagus. The slab had been worked into the shape of a great bear, holding the coffin on its back, its teeth buried in the belly of some unfortunate animal.
Fenris whistled softly, and the sound woke echoes like a flight of birds in the far reaches of the ceiling.
“Ostentatious,” muttered the dust-wife. She laid her hands on the sarcophagus and scowled. Marra was struck by the incongruity of it, the thin woman with her robes full of packets and string, presuming to command the sort of person that could be laid to rest in such a room as this.
“Nothing.” The dust-wife stepped back. “This ghost is long gone.”
Marra bit her lip. “What if the king we’re after is gone?”
“If he was gone, he couldn’t still compel the godmother. No, he’s around. Probably mad as hell, too.”
“That was comforting,” said Fenris. “I am comforted.” He shared a bemused look with Marra, who smiled in spite of herself.
Two doorways led in opposite directions. Fenris and Marra took one side and the dust-wife and Agnes took the other. Bonedog trotted between them, bored by the lack of new smells or motion.
“Oh,” said Marra softly, taking in the next room. “Oh, I see.” The room was much smaller, the walls holding touches of red paint. There were neither weapons nor carved warriors, only small jars ornamented with gold. The death mask on the sarcophagus was of a woman younger than Marra. Perhaps it was only the shadows, but she thought the woman’s eyes looked sad.
“His wife,” said Fenris. There were two more rooms branching off, barely more than niches. He stepped forward and looked into each one, then turned back, shaking his head to Marra. “I don’t think what we’re looking for is in there.”
“It’s her children, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” He took her hand. Marra could picture the small coffins and wondered if they were more or less ornate than her niece’s. She was glad of the hand in hers. He was very much alive—him and Bonedog, who wasn’t alive but didn’t know it.
“Over here,” called Agnes. “We’ve got a hallway.”
The hallway was as broad as the wife’s room had been. It vanished in both directions, with branchings off on the same side as the tomb they stood in. “Lady Fox?” said Fenris. “I think you likely have more experience here than the rest of us. Which way?”
“Huh!” She lifted the light on her staff. “My dead were all sensible people in the ground. Not these great frozen tombs. Your ghost would rattle around like a pea in a dish in here. I’ve no idea.”
Bonedog solved the problem by straining at his leash in toward one of the branchings, although it turned out that he only wanted to pee against a wall, which he did, meditatively, while everyone else pretended to be interested in the bas-reliefs on the walls.
The branching, newly anointed, led to another room like the last one, but with no hallways leading away from it. “Unmarried?” hazarded Marra. “So there are no other rooms for his bloodline?”
“Makes sense.” Fenris nodded to the grave mask, which was young but bore the lines of pain. There were fewer weapons here. They backed out of that room, and the next. At the end of the hall was an ornate threshold with carvings that stretched out five feet from the doorway itself—screaming faces, reaching hands, broken swords.
“That’s a little disturbing,” said Marra, poking the toe of her boot at one of the carvings.
“Enemies defeated in battle?” asked Agnes.
“Or sinners cast into hell.”
“Do they believe in hell, up here?”
“They do,” Marra said. “You freeze in eternal cold.” She shook her head. The concept had seemed foreign to her when she heard it. The Harbor Kingdom, sensibly, believed that the dead went into the sea, and the good were reborn from it, while the damned sank to the bottom and were devoured by crabs. Still, she couldn’t blame the Northern Kingdom for their confusion. There probably weren’t very many crabs up here.
“I hate to walk on them,” she muttered.
“They’re only stone,” said the dust-wife. “They were never alive.” She walked across the screaming carvings, the hem of her robes brushing over their faces. One by one, the others followed.
This tomb was as large and ostentatious as the wife’s tomb had been plain. The walls were ribbed with statues, each one of a stern-faced Northern god, and yet despite their faces, the impression was of a great throat waiting to swallow the unwary.
There were shadowy figures flanking the sarcophagus. Marra paused in the threshold, trying to make sense of the number of legs, the shapes …
“Oh,” she said softly. “Oh, I see.”
The cold air of the palace of dust had preserved the dead horses far better than she would ever have guessed. They had sagged and withered, but they were still identifiable. Poles thrust up into the bodies held them in place, standing at attention around their dead master. The proud arch of their necks had sunken in, but Marra could still recognize the marks of breeding and the richness of the golden bridles.
“A wealthy man,” said Fenris. “To be buried with his warhorses like this.”
“The father?” muttered the dust-wife, gazing up at the sarcophagus. “Or the son? Are we going forward or back?”
“If we go long enough in one direction, the weaponry should change,” offered Fenris, studying the carvings on the walls. “These saddles have stirrups. If we find a tomb without them…”
“If I could find a damn ghost, I could just ask,” said the dust-wife, annoyed. She smacked the sarcophagus lid and a hollow ringing filled the crypt, then died away. “But these are too quiet and too long dead. We need younger corpses. Or at least angrier ones.”
Marra did not have much time to worry about that, because the next corpse they found was positively furious.
Chapter 18
It was a small tomb off the grand one. A concubine’s room, perhaps. The materials were costly and exquisite, gold and jade and rosewood, and the death mask was beautiful and painted with lapis. Despite the materials, though, it seemed … hasty. As if everything had been slapped together swiftly and in fear. Jade tiles crunched under their feet, having fallen from the coffin, and there were no carvings, only faded paintings. The threshold was plain and uncarved and the doorway was hidden in the shadow of one of the scowling statues.
“This one,” said the dust-wife, with professional satisfaction. “This one here. This one is old, but she has grudges.”
She pulled something out of a pocket—Marra got a glimpse of orange red, like cinnabar—and dusted it over her hands, then knocked on the coffin lid as if it were a door.
Marra expected it to take a few minutes, as the drowned boy had, a slow swelling of horror as the ghost manifested itself, but she barely had time to brace herself before the room erupted.
Dust exploded up from the coffin. Broken tiles flew around the room. Fenris flung himself over Agnes and Marra, while Bonedog yapped silently, trying to catch one in his mouth. Only the dust-wife was unmoved, standing in the center of the chaos, with the light of the moon and her familiar’s shadow falling over her like a shield.
“Calm yourself,” she said. “Or I’ll lay you back down and find another spirit to work with. Your rage does not impress me.”
The entire sarcophagus twisted as it came alive, bouncing on the slab, and then it rolled to one side so that the death mask faced them. The beautiful face was still and calm but the eyes were alive and smoldering with fury.