“Run!” she screamed.
The Syannese soldier at last took the point. In an instant, Briony’s last soldier had vanished from the inner vault carrying the infant in his arms. Only when Briony heard his feet scuffing on the stairs leading up from the outer vault did she take a breath. “The child’s out of your reach now, Hendon.”
“Bitch,” said Tolly. He wasn’t smiling anymore. “You’ll die slowly for that. And, after all, your blood will serve as well as that child’s for my sacrifice. ...” He turned to his guard, who was still holding Elan M’Cory. “Forget that whore. Come and help me with this mannish princess.”
A little unnecessary emphasis in his words warned her. Briony turned from Elan and the other guard just in time to save herself from another of Tolly’s unexpected attacks.
He quickly forced her back, but instead of letting her get to the door of the inner vault, he kept her moving until he was backing her toward his own guard, but even as Briony realized this she heard a shout of surprise and pain. She risked a swift glance, enough to see that Elan M’Cory had leaped onto the soldier’s back and was scratching at his face with her nails. The guard shouted and cursed as he tried to throw her off.
The distraction gave Briony time to avoid Hendon’s thrust and keep backing past them, around the outside of the six-sided vault, doing her best to keep Hendon on the other side of the lead coffin that lay in the center of the room. Briony realized that he had forced her into a losing game, and that Elan M’Cory was about to be overpowered by the soldier in Tolly’s boar-and-spears livery. Then the odds would be two to one. She feinted twice, then took a wild, swinging blow at Hendon’s head that he dodged easily, but did not let herself be carried so far that his following stroke could find her unprotected belly. As Hendon took a step back to set himself once more, Briony suddenly turned and lunged in an unexpected direction herself, slashing Hendon’s guardsman across his face. As he dropped his blade and reached up to his bleeding cheeks and mouth, she plucked her long Yisti dagger from her belt and stabbed at him, piercing his mail and sinking the slim blade deep into his belly.
The man stumbled, gurgling, then fell across the lead coffin.
“There’s your bloody sacrifice or whatever you were planning, Hendon,” she said, keeping the corpse between them as she circled and tried to catch her breath. “Now I’ll be happy to send you off to Kernios after him.”
Tolly’s face was set hard. “You have learned a few things.” He feinted, then lunged, then lunged again, the second one actually meant to strike her. It nearly did. She was weary already, but Hendon was not even breathing hard. He was not a big man, but he was very strong, with muscles like braided whipcord. “Was it Shaso who taught you so well, or your new lover, Eneas?” he asked. “I was the one who had Shaso killed, you know. It was by my order that nest of black traitors in Landers Port was burned to the ground. Too bad you weren’t roasted with the other birds in that same oven. ...”
Don’t listen, she told herself even as she wanted to weep with rage. Don’t listen. She dodged another one of his attacks, then a moment later caught a second one on her blade and just ducked under it, but she felt the sharp tip of Tolly’s steel pierce her surcoat and for an instant even slide along her neck before she spun away. She was tiring badly; the effort made her lose her balance and almost fall. Hendon saw his advantage and leaped after her, raining strokes on her like a blacksmith hammering at his anvil, so that Briony could do nothing except try to keep her steel between Hendon’s sword and her flesh.
But I can’t. He’s faster than me… stronger than me… and he always has been…
Suddenly Elan M’Cory screamed, a shriek of genuine terror that made even Hendon Tolly take a step back from Briony to look. A dark shape blocked the doorway between the vaults, and now took a shaky step forward into the inner vault.
At first, Briony thought one of the dead out of her family’s tomb had risen to stand swaying on the edge of the darkness, its filthy, tattered cloak like a shroud, its deathly face hidden deep in a hood. It reached toward them with hands that looked like ragged claws in the flickering torchlight, still wrapped in the cerements of the grave.
It spoke, but its voice was an inaudible, scraping hiss. The hairs on Briony’s neck rose and her heart, already speeding, threatened to burst from her breast.
“B-B-Brothers protect us!” Briony said.
The apparition tried again to speak, and at last words could be heard—ragged, gasping words nearly as painful to hear as they must have been to form. “Briony ...!” the thing scraped. “I have… come back ... from Death’s lands ...”
Her breath caught in her throat as the hooded shape took another staggering step into the vault. “Zoria’s mercy,” she gasped, “is that you, Shaso? Gods preserve us, is that you?” But even as she said it, even as superstitious terror gripped her, something seemed wrong.
Even stranger was Tolly’s reaction: the lord protector’s eyes bulged and his hands lifted as if in hopeless defense against this phantom, the sword he held in one fist all but forgotten. “You… ! But… but you’re dead!”
And then Elan M’Cory came crawling across the ground, weeping and praying, and Briony was convinced that the chaotic air of Midsummer had driven everyone around her mad.
The bandaged hands came up and slowly tugged back the hood. At first Briony could make no sense of what she saw—the milky, damaged eyes and the oozing, pale skin worthy of any corpse, blotched all over with what looked like black earth. But then, as the ruined face turned slowly from her to Hendon Tolly, she suddenly knew what she was seeing—who she was seeing.
“Gailon,” she breathed. “Gailon Tolly.”
The thing pointed at Hendon. “You,” it rasped, each word an agony. “You killed me.”
“What is this madness?” But the bluster had gone from the lord protector’s voice. “Is this some trick? You were dead, brother. Shot with a dozen arrows. But you are no ghost, that I would swear—you are flesh and blood ...”
“Your men… shot me, brother, then… buried me with my servants and friends.” Each word came a little easier now, but he still spoke with a halting and ruined voice. “They were not very good shots, as you can see.” He bared his teeth in a terrible grin. “Hours, days, I lay wounded in the dark earth with the corpses of my companions, too weak to move… but unable to die. I was a stranger in Death’s estate and Death did not want me. When I realized I was still alive, I dug my way out of what you meant to be my grave, Hendon, then came back to tell Briony of your treachery.” He turned his nearly sightless eyes toward Briony. “But I see you learned too late what my brother is—the rottenest fruit of my father’s loins. Now all I can do to atone for my mistake… is to end his life.”
He took a few uneven steps toward Hendon, who seemed stunned by what was happening. Then the slender, dark shape of Elan M’Cory scrabbled across the ground and grabbed Gailon Tolly’s legs.
“No!” she wept. “Don’t leave me again, Gailon! Not again!”
“Let go, sweet Elan,” the ragged figure said, his voice still the doomful scrape of an unquiet spirit, but he did not immediately pull away, and even seemed for the first time to show something like human emotion. “I cannot… I am no longer of your world. ...”