After a time, the tiller ceased responding in the way One Thumb had told him it would, and Orthus did not know what to do.

“The tiller,” he called out. “It’s pulling this way and that.”

“We’re in the deeper current then,” One Thumb replied. “The current’ll be pushing harder from behind. Just keep it steady and straight now, Friend. And take a look behind.” All the rowers were facing the stern of the boat, but the stern rose a little higher than where they sat, blocking the view of the attackers. Orthus turned and cautiously peered behind.

“They’ve left their boat and taken the other. They’re doing something with the sail, and they’re starting to row.”

One Thumb grunted, and Fanet cursed. “Who are they, and why do they want us dead?” Fanet asked.

“As to the who, they’re Eternal Guard. As to the why, there’s no telling. We’ve done enough to warrant execution, but I never thought it would be Tongueless who swung the blade.”

“It’s probably me,” Orthus admitted. “I’m sorry?”

One Thumb gave another grunt. “Don’t normally ask, but I’m curious. And maybe there won’t be a chance later. What’d you do to deserve their attentions?”

“I saw something I wasn’t supposed to, and lived to tell the tale.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. That’s enough. But I don’t know how they found me.”

One Thumb opened his mouth to reply, but coughed instead. Blood flew out of his mouth.

“One Thumb! Are you all right?” Orthus knew it was a stupid question even as he asked it.

“Been better, Friend. I guess that arrow went deeper than’s strictly healthy. Don’t know that I’ll be able to pull much longer.” He bent his head and closed his eyes. His oar stilled.

“One Thumb!” Fanet shouted, and after a moment One Thumb straightened again.

“They’ll catch us up, lads,” he said, and his voice was very weary. “Sooner rather than later, especially with us short of hands. So here’s what you have to do.”

~ ~ ~

Anomus learned just how much a creature of instinct he was when the three Eternal Guard entered his sham, hastily constructed tomb.

Intellectually, logically, he knew he was doing what was best for his goals. He could not let word get out that the Concubine’s Tomb was anything other than what it had been when the emperor had last left it. He knew it, with an iron certainty.

And still he had come within a hair’s breadth of killing the three Tongueless who had entered his domain.

It would have been so simple. The ‘burial chamber’ at the end of the tunnel rested on a pit that he had dug, forty feet deep. At the bottom of the pit, stone spikes, razor sharp. It had been all he could do, as the Eternal Guard had inspected the space, to constrain himself from dissolving the stone at their feet and send them plummeting to their deaths.

But if he had done it, the chances of his enemy slipping away would have risen unacceptably.

I must show them what they can accept, he told himself. Any sort of danger, anything unexplained and potentially dangerous will force the emperor away.

He watched them exiting the false tomb. Hating them all the while, he let them go.

The emperor was on his way. Early, far too early. Anomus forced himself to concentrate on that fact. He would arrive soon, likely in a few days, to inter his beloved concubine. So, ready or not, Anomus had to prepare his reception.

His first concern was mana. Without it, there was very little he could do. He had stored much of it since opening the second entrance to the Tomb. While doing so had caused him trouble and endangered his plans, he decided it was necessary to reopen the tunnel entrance, at least to a certain extent for the mana flow. What he received from the Well wasn’t much more than a trickle.

He had blocked the tunnel but kept the false tomb connected to him through a network of hairline cracks, unlikely to be noticed in the Eternal Guards’ torchlight. Those cracks were not enough to gain him any mana worth noticing, so he perforated the wall of the false tomb that connected to the Tomb-side tunnel with dozens of holes. It allowed more mana to flow in, and would be relatively quick to stop up the holes once again, should the Tongueless decide to re-enter the tunnel. It also allowed his flies to come and go. And finally, he needed a source of mana other than the Well, because he would now have to re-seal the undertomb.

That first victory, the defeat of Mordun’s seal and the opening of the undertomb now seemed to have happened ages ago, though in truth it had not even been a month. He had left the chunk of stone and mortar lying on the Well’s marble floor, still dangerous but impotent. He would have to deal with it now, however, as well as the opening to the undertomb. If the emperor’s lackeys saw this evidence that the Tomb had been violated, they would never let him enter.

He couldn’t put the golden seal back, nor would he if he could. Instead, he buried it in the floor, in the eight feet of rock between the floor of the Well and the ceiling of the Undertomb, dissolving the stone beneath it until it had sunk sufficiently, and then re-growing the stone over it.

That still left the gaping passage down to the undertomb that had been sealed with stone and mortar, and the golden seal of the emperor of the gods that had adorned it. Recreating the stone and mortar blockage was nothing for him, but the seal presented problems. He could recreate anything, any inert substance that he had claimed, but he had never claimed gold. The best he could do was to affix a plaque of bronze, to mimic it.

Nor, he discovered, could he recreate Mordun’s sigil. When he tried, the bronze simply did not react to his will. He found that interesting. Frustrating, but interesting. He was forced to settle for something vaguely similar in shape. It would not stand up to any sort of close inspection, but then neither would bronze pass for gold, to anyone who was paying attention. But he had no better means to deceive.

He made one further alteration to the Tomb’s entry chamber. High up on the wall he created half a dozen openings whose shapes exactly matched the shape of one of the dark, diamond-shaped tiles that decorated the walls, directly behind the tiles. He tunneled down through the rock, creating small passages connecting the undertomb to these voids. They were large enough for his wasps and geckos to traverse, though not for the beetles or his lone scorpion. When the time came, he planned to flood the Well with assassins from above. If it became necessary, he could also quickly destroy the blockage to the undertomb, commanding his heavier, larger creatures to ascend the stairs.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Finally, as much as he disliked doing it, he seeded the Well and the Tomb’s entry hall with traps.

There wasn’t enough space between the floor of the Tomb and the ceiling of the undertomb to create killing drops, so he decided that the pit traps he created would drop their victims all the way down to the floor of the undertomb. There was a sense of justice in letting his enemies find death among the decaying flesh of their victims. He grew five foot long, razor-sharp stone spikes on the floor of the undertomb in appropriate places, to greet victims as they fell. He laid out the pit traps in a sort of checkerboard pattern, avoiding the many support columns that kept the Tomb from collapsing into the charnel ground below.

Anomus also prepared falling blocks, to cover those spaces where he could not construct pit traps. When he was finished, there was no place in the Tomb’s entry hall that was not a killing space, and only the very center of the Well’s floor was safe from death both above and below. It was impossible, of course, to create falling stones in the Well, since its ceiling was ironglass. The center of the Well’s floor was supported by one of the undertomb’s massive columns.

Anomus was troubled by this. He disliked having this one safe spot in his zone of death, because it was exactly where the Concubine would be placed. Because of that, it was exactly the one spot that he could almost be assured the Emperor would stand, at some point.

There was nothing he could do about the Well’s cap, but the floor was not beyond his skill or abilities.

A cursory inspection of the support column told him that he could not safely remove it; the floor would collapse down into the undertomb if he did so. But, with his preternatural abilities, he could hollow out the column to a great degree and reinforce it with iron, in a way that human builders could never do with natural stone. Anomus set to work creating reinforcing iron rods inside the perimeter of the hollowed-out column.

He could collapse it speedily, but not as quickly as the other pit traps of his killing ground. It was not a perfect solution, but it would do.

None of his traps could be triggered without a conscious decision on his part, he made sure of it. The emperor had to enter the trap before it was set off.

That much of his battle preparations Anomus had completed before the dim ghoul, Grik, called for his attention.

“Eh. Builder.”

Anomus turned his consciousness towards the call, and instantly saw Grik standing at the now-blocked tunnel entrance, holding the empty basket Anomus had made for him to gather sand.

“Builder? Where tunnel go?”

“I have had to close it, Grik. There are humans outside.”

Grik chewed on that news for a while. “But Grik need sand,” he finally replied.

“If Grik goes outside, the humans will kill him,” Anomus told the thought-challenged creature, summoning up what patience he could.

“Oh. Bad, yes. Grik no want die.”

“Indeed,” Anomus replied, deeming the matter finished.

“But Grik still need sand.”

If Anomus had still possessed eyes, he would have been rubbing them. He settled for creating sand, an appallingly large stream of sand, above Grik’s head. He buried the foolish ghoul in it, chest deep.

It was a waste of mana. But it was satisfying.

~ ~ ~

Anomus’s fit of pique with the ghoul did lead him to one small discovery, though he could not immediately see any real usefulness in it – he could create matter anywhere within the volume of the Tomb, even thin air.

He experimented a little and found that, with a completely unacceptable expenditure of mana, he could keep that matter floating, refusing gravity’s pull, and of course the larger the item, the greater the expenditure of energy. He filed the discovery away.

~ ~ ~

“There’s no outrunning them,” One Thumb told them. “The only chance for you all is the river. You dive deep and swim far before you surface. Less likely to catch an arrow that way. Dive from the prow, out of their view. And you each go in different directions. Scatter. Can’t chase you all. Not quickly. Have to take off their armor. After that, it’s up to the gods.”

The big man was fading fast. Every word of his short speech was accompanied by blood.

“You go first, One Thumb,” Fanet said.

“Don’t be daft. Still beer to drink. Fanet first, then Hull, then Goti, then Friend. Left-right-left, understand? In oars, now. I’ll take the tiller.”

“One Thumb-” Goti started, but One Thumb hushed him.

“No time. Get going. Tell my wife she’d better not remarry. One man suffering her is enough. Go.”

The fishermen pulled in the boat’s oars, and One Thumb crawled towards Orthus and the tiller as the others began evacuating. The dying man grabbed Orthus’s arm and pulled him close as they splashed into the water.

“You can’t swim like us. If you try, you’ll die. So you get into the water and you grab onto the prow, below the water line, and pray they don’t notice you. Understand?”

“I’m sorry,” Orthus said.

“No time for that. It’s just the world. Go.”

An arrow hissed down out of the dark and buried itself in a blood-spattered oar.

Orthus went.

~ ~ ~

A short distance upriver, high priest Charn, Beloved of Vernith, stood at the prow of the imperial barge and stared into the dark. Behind him, the Concubine lay in her ironglass coffin. Around the coffin knelt half a dozen of Charn’s acolytes, chanting the Prayer of the Dead, endlessly and futilely, though they did not know it.

Behind the barge, a dozen other boats, carrying Hesia’s grave goods, and guards, and priests, and slaves.

Charn was unhappy. No. He was… troubled.

Everything was as it should be; he had seen to it, though the effort had been exhausting. Venal and self-centered though he might be, the high priest of the goddess of the underworld was devout. He took his duties seriously. And something was wrong. The thought nagged at him, and would not let him alone.

He did not know what. Charn had gone over the preparations for the interment again and again, and could find no fault. He had done everything his faith said should be done, everything his goddess demanded. And yet…

And yet. The emperor’s indifference to his beloved’s interment was one thing. Yes, it troubled him. Charn was self-centered, but that did not mean he could not read other people. In point of fact, it was one of his natural skills, and had played no small part in his rise through the priesthood.

He knew Irobus to be mercurial, petty and cruel. The emperor had ever been so. But his devotion to the Concubine had always been, in Charn’s estimation at least, evidence of his ruler’s humanity. Such as it was.

That Irobus would move on from that devotion a decade after her death should not, perhaps, have been surprising. More surprising was that it had lasted so long. So Charn tried to tell himself. But it rang false.

Charn admitted - in the safety of his own thoughts if nowhere else - that he had long viewed the emperor’s show of grief as being overwrought. A man pretending, beyond all reason or necessity, to an emotion that simply was not natural in its duration or intensity. And then Irobus’s sudden change of attitude, as if he had simply grown weary of keeping up the pretense… Charn did not understand it, but he believed his intuition. It was troublesome, but ultimately did not affect his obligation towards the Concubine, her shade, and her corpse.

If that were all that troubled him, he could have accepted the situation and slept soundly. But it wasn’t all.

None were higher than he in Vernith’s priesthood. No mortal stood closer to the goddess and Her affections. She was his master, and he, Her willing slave. Every sacred rite that he had performed, from his first days as an acolyte until the present, had filled him with a sonorous, solemn peace; an ephemeral but very real connection to his deity.

Every rite he performed, from his first day until the day that he currently was living had filled him with Vernith’s presence. Except any rite or prayer having to do with the Concubine. Then, he sensed no approval or disapproval from Vernith. He sensed nothing at all.

He had long blamed it on the emperor’s decision to forego the traditional adornments in the Concubine’s Tomb, but since Irobus’s sudden and inexplicable indifference toward Hesia’s eternal fate, Charn had begun to doubt that was the cause.

But for the life of him, no matter how long or hard he thought, Charn could not think of a reason why. And that worried him, deeply.

He stared out into the dark towards their unseen destination, an imperfect and sometimes unpleasant man, trying to solve a puzzle that he did not possess all the pieces to.