Up above, the sky is a sun-washed silken blue that deepens into forever and the bees are going from blossom to blossom while life is warm. Yellow grains dust their bodies.
Akayla Sethrys’s boot hits the door just below the lock.
She’s been kicking these things in for eight or nine years now and she knows where to put her emphasis. She favors a pair of bespoke basilisk leather and steel sabatons for this purpose; today some additional luck is with her in the form of rotten wood. Jagged wet splinters fly as the broken door slams inward, peeling out of its frame. Another dungeon chamber breached.
“Onward!” cries Sethrys, crouched over her shield, blade up for quick thrusts past the rim.
Pinpoints of ominous red light flicker in the darkness. Fleshless eyes. Something stirs, rattles, rises. A dozen white frames of the dead. Human bones invested by insatiable ghosts, hungry in the dry sockets of their teeth, hungry in the hollows of their time-leathered marrows.
Sethrys doesn’t face the skeleton onslaught alone; behind her come Felix with his silver censer spilling threads of blessed smoke, Gorandal with their father’s father’s hammers, Morladi with her incantations. A wave of bone meets metal and magic. The skeletons are hungry for blood, but the adventurers are hungrier for glory. Seven major chambers into this sunken, mold-racked ruin and their enthusiasm has yet to dim. It’s not even time for lunch.
Sethrys slams, smashes, howls. Her blade flashes silver. With a triumphant cut she parts one skeleton’s head completely from its column of vertebrae. The skull whirls, the sputtering flames in its sockets painting roses of red light on the walls and ceilings as it flies spinning through the air, out the door-
Mullion Galdarsson has sifted bone before. Dead bone, certainly, but also not-quite-dead bone, more often than he’d like. This stuff, with the animating witchery freshly knocked out of it, hasn’t entirely settled yet. He slaps at a few clutching fingers, knocks a yellow-white hand away from his ankle like a grim, dry kitten. Legs, ribs, hands, hands, more legs, a spine, a skull-that worries him for a moment, but it gives him no trouble. No light in the eye sockets, no bite left in the teeth. No precious metal fillings, either.
Mullion sighs. The current mess might not prove a very lucrative one. Behind him, his sister Arna and his sometimes-friend Tylo the Sulk are crouched on shattered and parted bones as well, muttering and slapping defensively, moving occasional items of interest into the pouches and wicker baskets that hang on them all like ornaments on festival trees.
Somewhere ahead, the lunatics are plying their trade, thoroughly enjoying bloody combat with whatever fresh horror Mullion and his little crew of gleaners will be sorting in about twenty minutes. Lunatics, the successful ones at least, don’t have time to scour the trash of their own passage. That would cut into valuable combat time. Once the traps are disarmed and the monsters are beaten down, locals like Mullion and Arna and Tylo slink in behind them to sort and count and store all the wretched, dirty little scraps that might be sold or reused.
Jeweled necklaces? Gold bars? Oh, of course not. The lunatics always manage to spare a moment to snatch that sort of thing for themselves. Gleaners fetch up the bent and rusty coins of baser metals, the dusty weapons half-rotted in ancient racks, the glowing mushrooms and bile-yellow fungi that might be of interest to the alchemists (or just as often might not). Scraping walls, shaking junk, prodding crevices with wooden poles, sneezing in clouds of dust that mostly don’t kill anyone later (cousin Halvar had been the strongest of them, worth three Tylos, but when the remnants of his lungs had come up through his nose, they’d looked like tomato jelly)-that’s the work of gleaners. And the damnable thing is, even allowing for dust and darkness and the occasional dead cousin, the pay is considerably better than working the mills or fields back home.
