stone beneath his boots. It tainted the air like poisoned smoke.
That reminded him of Caer Magia.
“A bloodcrystal, do you think?” said Kylon in a quiet voice.
“Probably,” said Caina, the pyrikon staff in her left hand, the white glow throwing back the darkness. The staff’s light revealed the high, wide corridor rising around them, the walls carved with row after row of hieroglyphics. Kylon idly wondered what they said, and decided he was better off not knowing.
“An Ascendant Bloodcrystal?” said Kylon.
“No,” said Caina. “If there was an Ascendant Bloodcrystal down here, it would have killed us already.” She shook her head. With the mask and the shadow-cloak, he could not see her expression or detect her emotions, but he knew her well enough to hear the strain in her cold voice. “And it doesn’t feel like an Ascendant Bloodcrystal. Something else, I think. I don’t know. Let’s not find out.”
“Agreed,” said Kylon.
“How much farther?” said Caina.
“Not far,” said Morgant. “Three more galleries like this, I think. Then the stairs to the Hall of Forges.”
“We have not seen any undead yet,” said Laertes. He had his broadsword in hand and his Legion shield upon his arm, his eyes roving over the shadows.
“Oh, we will,” said Morgant. “Sooner than we might like. You’ve seen battlefields before?”
“More than I can recall,” said Laertes. “I was a centurion of the Legion.”
“Ever seen a battlefield where the corpses rise again?” said Morgant.
“I have missed that privilege,” said Laertes.
“We’re about to rectify that,” said Morgant.
Something rattled in the gloom ahead.
“What was that?” said Nasser.
“It sounded like bones tapping together,” said Nerina.
“Exactly,” said Morgant.
The gallery ended in archway and then opened into a large hall, much like the massive halls Kylon had seen branching off the Hall of Flames above. Dust coated the floor, and cobwebs hung from the carved walls and ceiling.
Hundreds of corpses walked with slow, limping treads within the hall.
Many of them were withered and mummified, leathery flesh clinging to ancient bone. Some of had crumbled to skeletons, their bones held together by glowing wisps of necromantic force. The empty eye sockets of the corpses glowed with the same eerie green light, and as Kylon looked at them he saw ghostly images superimposed over the undead flesh, images of living men and women and children.
Images, he realized, of the living men and women and children that the undead had been in life.
As one, every single one of the hundreds of undead filling the hall turned to look at them, a chorus of moans and hisses and maddened words in a dozen different languages filling the air.
“There are hundreds of them,” said Laertes.
“One thousand four hundred ninety-seven, to be precise,” said Nerina, her voice quavering.
The undead surged forward in a wave of leathery flesh and crumbling bone, skeletal toes tapping against the floor, the green light flaring and pulsing.
“Stay where you are, all of you,” said Caina. “Stay where you are!” She leveled the pyrikon staff, the pale white light shining around them in a dome. “We’ll see if Morgant was right or not.”
No one said anything to that. Kylon took the valikon in both hands, bracing himself. Every instinct screamed for him to attack, or to move to a more defensible position, but he dared not. The undead charged forward, raising hands hooked into claws…
And then they came to a sudden stop, slamming into the pale white glow as if it had been a solid wall of iron.
A hiss of fury went up from the undead, a cold wind blowing around Kylon. The undead spread around them in a ring, but the white glow from the pyrikon stopped them.
“Well, assassin,” said Laertes. “Seems your memory held after all.”
“Good thing,” said Morgant.
“Ciaran,” said Nasser. “See if you can move forward. The rest of you, stay within the light.”
Caina took a step forward, and then another. The undead retreated before the staff’s glow, flinching away from the light. Two more steps, and the undead backed away, the cold wind snapping at her shadow-cloak.
“It’s working,” said Nasser.
“All right,” said Caina. “Everyone stay with me. We’ll do this slowly. One step at a time.”
She took another step forward, and the wind gusted, throwing back the cowl of her shadow-cloak. Suddenly Kylon felt her emotional sense again, a mixture of cold determination and stark terror.
And as it did, a ripple of shock rose from the undead. They quailed back, every single one of the creatures staring at her.
“It is her,” hissed one of the creatures, speaking Istarish with a peculiar