ligaments holding it together. I think it was a real skeleton that had been changed to stone.”
“Khaavolaar,” breathed Ekhaas.
“Could it have been done by a medusa?” asked Tooth. “Or a basilisk? No hunter has ever seen one in these parts, but this is old.”
“Medusas and basilisks change living flesh to stone,” Tenquis said. “Their victims look like statues. I’ve seen them. Magic might change a skeleton to stone.” He looked back up to the window. “But why pose one like that?”
A yip from Marrow brought them around. The worg crouched beside another collapsed wall, pawing at something. Geth handed the skull to Ekhaas and went over. He bent down and brushed away dry dirt, then shifted a rock. His teeth flashed as he bared them. “There’s another one here. Crushed. I think the wall fell on it.” He picked something out of the ground and held it up. It was a battered and corroded metal greave. “This one was wearing armor.”
Tenquis examined it. “Dhakaani design,” he said.
Ekhaas shivered and set skull and jaw down on the ground. A frightening suspicion was growing in her. “Stay close, but look around,” she said. “See if you can see any more.”
Geth looked up at her. “You think these were the people of Suud Anshaar? But the stories don’t mention this.”
“I’m starting to understand that sometimes the stories aren’t completely right.”
They found four more skeletons nearby, some more weathered than others, most preserved only by some coincidence of shelter. Two stood in a hidden niche, entwined in an eternal embrace, yet also curiously apart. Tenquis slid a hand among the frozen bones. “If they were posed like this,” he said, “why aren’t the two skeletons actually touching each other?”
“I’m not sure they were skeletons when they died,” said Ekhaas. She held her arm in a position similar to that of one skeleton, then took Tenquis’s arm and pressed it to hers, matching the other skeleton. “Imagine the gap between our bones,” she said, her mouth dry, “separated by the thickness of flesh.”
Tenquis jerked away from her. “Something turned their bones to stone?”
Geth considered the skeletons, his face grim. “It happened fast, then. I don’t think they had any warning.”
“Maybe they didn’t,” said Chetiin. The old goblin stood in a ruined doorway. “But you need to see this.”
Beyond the doorway, two sturdy walls preserved a section of corridor no more than ten paces long, both ends open. Two stone skeletons stood in the corridor. Unlike the other skeletons they’d seen, these were posed in attitudes of panic. One was precariously balanced in a sprinting position-fleeing from something, Ekhaas guessed. The other was on its back on the floor, twisted around, and staring back with empty eye sockets. The person it had been must have fallen and looked around to see his-or her-doom bearing down.
The skeletons were different in two other significant ways from the others they’d found. They were clad in the ragged remains of clothing-and they were human.
“You said the last time someone came looking for Suud Anshaar was about thirty years ago?” Ekhaas asked Tooth. The hunter nodded, his eyes fixed on the black and glittering skeletons.
“Those are Cyran clothes,” said Chetiin. “I think we’ve found the last people who came here.” He walked up to the skeletons, paused a short distance away, and pointed at a faint dark stain on the floor around them. “That’s what’s left when flesh rots and liquefies.”
“Do you think-” Ekhaas hesitated, words catching in her mouth before she forced them out. “Do you think whatever did this killed them? Or did they-?”
The words caught again, but this time Chetiin anticipated the question. “If I had to guess,” he said, “I think they might still have been alive after it happened.”
Ekhaas’s stomach rose. She had to clench her teeth and fight it down. Tenquis shuddered and closed his golden eyes. Even Geth and Tooth looked a little bit green. Marrow whined and curled her tail low. Chetiin turned away from the skeletons — just as the wail broke over the ruins for a third time. Once again it was strangely sourceless, but in Ekhaas’s imagination it seemed closer than before.
“Tiger’s blood,” murmured Geth. “Whatever that is, I don’t think it’s a ghost.”
Tooth’s broad face had gone from green to pale. “It can’t be the same thing that killed Suud Anshaar, can it? Why wouldn’t your stories mention something like this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the empire suppressed what really happened before the story could circulate,” Ekhaas said.
“I would,” said Chetiin. He’d drawn both of his daggers, the one from his left arm sheath with the nasty curved blade and the one from his right arm sheath with the blue-black crystal that winked like an eye from its ugly straight blade. He looked at Ekhaas and Geth. “What do we do?”
Ekhaas exchanged a sharp glance with the shifter. His jaw tightened and he nodded. Ekhaas put her ears back. “We go on,” she said. “We keep looking for the shield fragments. We watch, and if whatever is making that noise shows itself, we try our best to kill it.”
“If it can be killed!” said Tooth. There was an edge of madness to his voice. “What if it can’t? How-”
Tenquis reached out and slapped him hard. “We’ll fight it,” he said harshly, “when we fight it.”
Tooth stared at him. Tenquis slid his wand into a pocket and calmly readied his crossbow. “You’re harder than you look,” said Tooth.
“I’m a tiefling,” said Tenquis, “and I want my revenge on Tariic. I’m as hard as I need to be.” He looked to Ekhaas. “How do we get to that hall?”
“This way, I think,” she said. She led the way out of the other door in the ruined corridor, trying hard not to look at the remains of the last expedition to come this way.
Since she had become aware of them, Ekhaas spotted more of the skeletons as she climbed through the ruins. A few were whole or almost whole, blending into the shadows. Some were just weathered heaps of bones, collapsed over time just like the fortress. Others were no more than broken bits of glittering black stone tumbled among fallen rock. Not all were hobgoblin. Ekhaas recognized goblins and bugbears, a pair of dogs, varags-how many of them had wandered onto the Wailing Hill before they learned their lesson? — even the fragile skeletons of birds, hollow bones broken as if they’d fallen out of the sky.
If not even birds on the wing could escape the curse of Suud Anshaar, did they really have a chance?
No, she reminded herself, they weren’t dumb animals, and they wouldn’t be taken by surprise. Whatever waited in the ruins, they’d fought and survived worse. They would find the shield fragments. They would escape the fortress. The fragments of the shattered shield would provide the key to destroying the Rod of Kings.
Because if they didn’t, this journey would have been for nothing.
She started to sing. Quietly, just loud enough that the others could hear her, and not a magical song, but a Dhakaani battle hymn invoking the strength of muut in combat and the glory of atcha in victory. It was an old song, as old as the long and wondrous middle years of Dhakaan, when the emperor’s power spanned a continent. The same song might have echoed in Suud Anshaar. Tasaam Draet might have listened to and been inspired by it.
She felt some of her fear slip away. The others stood straighter and scanned the shadows with eyes that were brighter and more alert. They moved with greater confidence. Even Marrow seemed to beat her tail in time to the song. And when the wail inevitably came again, Ekhaas raised her voice just a little to challenge its power. For a moment, the wail seemed a little less terrifying-even if it did seem to have taken on a more directional quality.
Chetiin pointed across the ruins. “Somewhere over there.”
“I think I felt it through the ground,” said Tenquis.
Ekhaas let the song die away, the better to hear any movement among the stones. Geth’s hand had stolen up to touch his collar of black stones. Faint wisps of vapor escaped between his fingers into the warm night air; he’d said in the past that the collar turned cold to warn of unnatural creatures.
“Geth?” she asked softly.
“Keep moving,” he said.
They moved. The deeper they penetrated into the remains of the fortress, the better preserved the structure seemed to be. Walls, doorways, and pillars remained in place-with the result that their line of sight to the area around them was constantly changing and being cut off. Worse, the surviving corridors were often half-filled with debris. There was no running here. Moving too quickly sent loose stones sliding and might plunge a foot into a
