They dragged him. He couldn’t have walked anyway. That long grass whipped his legs and ankles at first, but fell away. And somewhere in the dragging, the texture of the air changed.
It became cool, moist. Earthy. A smell he half-remembered through fever dreams, from when he and the horses had cowered behind stones while the ice rained down.
They’re burying me, Temur thought, and could not keep this wail of fury and terror within. To rot inside the earth, forever out of the sight of the Eternal Sky—if there was a fate worse than becoming a blood ghost, this was it.
Someone whispered in his ear, rough Uthman words, an accent worse than Saura’s. “This is the grave of Danupati,” he snarled. “His curse should keep you busy.”
Something heavy groaned. Temur struck a clay floor and lay still.
The footsteps receded.
There was the sound of a door shutting, with weight behind. He barely heard it over the thunder of his heart, the ragged rasp of his terrified, panting breaths. He had to calm himself, slow his breath. He had to get control.
He counted breaths in the darkness. He counted heartbeats. He closed his eyes so he could imagine he controlled the absence of light.
Slowly, he calmed himself. He listened, lying perfectly still.
Silence followed.
Then the sound of something wet and heavy slipping over stone.
* * *
The blindfolding sack was not so hard to scrape off against the stone floor. It still dragged from the ropes at his throat, but he could worry about that later. Even with it off, Temur found he could not see.
Wherever he was (buried alive), there was no trace of light. It was not just the darkness of night that surrounded him. It was a blackness so absolute that he imagined he saw motion where there was none.
But something scraped in the darkness, and it was not the villains who had dragged him here wedging the doors.
His hands were still bound behind him. But that was a small problem. He stretched his arms around his hips, wincing as rope wore into flesh that was already torn and burned, and pulled his feet through the hoop of his arms.
Now the ropes at his ankles. But his fingers were already slick with blood, and the knots had pulled tight from his struggles. It took only a few moments work to convince him that this was futile.
If this were a barrow, though—what had Saura called it? A kurgan?—then there would be grave goods. There would be knives, perhaps.
Temur felt his breath quicken, and forced the terror back with reason. He had heard of this Danupati. A great king, a conqueror like the Great Khagan Temusan. He had ruled a realm that swept, as Saura had intimated, from the White Sea to the Eastern ocean … a thousand years before. Farther, even: For it was he who had conquered the first Erem, long before the Sorcerer-Prince razed the second one stone from stone for daring to stand against him.
There was said to be a curse upon his tomb, such that should his bones be stolen, war would rage unceasing across every land he had called his own until the damage was put right. Whatever obligation of hospitality the woman-king Tzitzik felt to Temur, it was obvious that her men had no intention of allowing him to leave this place.
His bound hands held before his body, Temur groped forward a few inches at a time, in a hop that was also a shuffle. It was painstakingly, maddeningly slow progress, made worse when, between his own scuffling movements, he heard that scraping again.
When the darkness seemed to lessen incrementally, at first he thought his eyes were still fooling him. But then he realized that he could make out the hulked shapes of biers—one higher than the other—and the shadows of ranks of lances leaned against the earthen walls. Those.
The pale light had a moonlit quality, and it was so faint that if he had not just been in pitch blackness, he would have hesitated to call it light at all. But there it was, faint but slowly brightening.
And there among the crumbled remains of the others was a lance with an obsidian point, chipped glass sharp and ready no matter how many years it had lain below the earth. Now that he could see where his feet landed, Temur cast aside caution and hopped frantically to the wall.
The shaft had been wood, and it was fungus-eaten and crumbling. The glass head of the lance, though—that drew blood when he brushed his fingers across it. He clutched his prize.
He bent to reach his ankles and overbalanced, toppling to one side. He groaned; his head spun with the stink of sorcery or lightning. Sharp agony numbed his left hip and left arm.
One more scrape, one more rustle. And the source of the moonish light crept into view.
It was a fat worm, a grub big as a man, dull red in color and surrounded by a crackling blue light. It humped forward, damp and horrible, dragging its fat abdomen with three pairs of short, pointed legs. A trail of moisture glistened on the stone behind it.