Necroepilogos

Shilu led the way, down into the labyrinth of the tomb.

Eseld knew from bitter experience how easy it was to get lost in these barren caverns of grey metal. The top six floors of every tomb were always identical — fresh revenants were always ejected naked and shivering into the smooth passageways beyond the resurrection chamber, always laid out in the same quasi-biological pattern of thick arteries and tiny branches of capillary. Those first six floors could be memorised, and left behind in a matter of minutes.

Below that — past the security checkpoint where Shilu had fought Lykke — each tomb’s architecture became recognisably human, with proper corners and doorways, with corridors studded by entrances into vast echoing chambers, with tables and chairs, little cells, barred doors, raised platforms for meetings, or plays, or rituals. Many of the rooms contained equipment, though none of it was ever useful; every object was always broken or irrelevant. Eseld had spent more than one brief resurrection clawing through the abandoned rubbish, praying to her absent God for a weapon or a shield among the refuse. But she’d never found anything useful, not even a solid length of pipe or a fist-sized chunk of metal, just dead machines and useless detritus. Every surface and item was always swept clean of dust and dirt, as if preserved in stasis since God’s lonely death.

Below the sixth floor, the tomb was never the same twice; Eseld often recognised individual features or spaces, as if they had been reused in different configurations, but the layouts were never identical.

These spaces were bait — meaningless rooms and empty chambers, drifts of pointless junk, false promises of hope and hiding places. Staying there was death. Stronger revenants would search every nook and cranny for the nanomachine-rich flesh of newborn undead.

Survival and exit depended on movement. Run. Don’t look back. Don’t slow down.

Eseld had eventually learned how to navigate these floors, how to win the exit as quickly as possible: go down and out. Stairs, outer wall, down and out, down and out. Never stop running, find those stairs, get to the exterior wall, keep moving, and sooner or later the gate would be there, waiting for another morsel of undead flesh to join with the corpse of the world.

Eseld could reach the tomb gates in under an hour, allowing for dead ends and failures and doubling back.

Shilu had a different destination in mind.

The fallen angel — or risen demon, or pretender to God’s throne, or ‘Fae Lady’, or whatever she was — led the trio of naked zombies at a brisk walk. She did not follow Eseld’s technique of prioritising the outer wall to locate the next set of stairs on each floor; instead, Shilu made a beeline for the closest stairs down, as if she possessed perfect knowledge of the tomb’s layout. She made better progress in fifteen minutes of walking than Eseld could in half an hour of terrified flight. Shilu strode with detached confidence down echoing hallways of bare metal, through vaulted rooms dominated by gigantic meeting tables, past tangles of abandoned equipment and broken parts, all without so much as a sideways glance to orient herself. She took each set of downward stairs two at a time, without effort or sweat or even a deep breath.

Eseld scurried to keep up, eyes darting left and right, shoulder blades itching at every blind corner, heart clawing into her throat at every jagged shadow; Shilu walked with head high and eyes forward, as if Lykke was not still stalking them through the empty halls and passages of this echoing shell.

Eseld knew her meagre strength would count for nothing next to Shilu’s, if they were attacked a second time. But she wanted to help, she wanted to be useful. She wanted to do what little she could to warn this angel of death.

Sky and Cyneswith stuck close. The fight at the security checkpoint had changed them both. The two no longer held hands. Cyneswith was calmer than before, clear-eyed and curious. She looked with wonder upon everything they passed, even the broken junk. She would learn soon enough that her curiosity was irrelevant, which saddened Eseld a little. Sky’s earlier terror had calcified into tight-faced tension and nervous motion; she placed herself between Cyn’s smaller, more vulnerable body and every open doorway and deep shadow, acting protective, trying to shepherd the smaller woman. Cyn often picked up her pace to match Eseld, sharing a hesitant smile as she hurried ahead and left Sky behind.

Eseld could not return those smiles. Sky was volatile. Would she be jealous? Too much of a risk.

All three zombies were rapidly shedding the resurrection slime which had dried on their skin, leaving a trail of flakes behind them as they walked. Eseld shook out her russet hair and raked it back over her skull to keep it out of the way, then licked her hands clean. Cyn peeled the dry slime off her own skin and followed Eseld’s example, touching her tongue to the edge of the papery, translucent membrane.

“It doesn’t taste of anything,” Cyn whispered. “What is it?”

“Eat it,” Eseld grunted.

Sky caught up and spoke in a hushed voice: “It’s like placenta, or amniotic fluid, right? Nutrient bath. Stem cells of some kind? Our new bodies grew from it, didn’t they?”

Cyn’s eyes widened. “New bodies?” She touched her fingers to her own cheek. “But I … I look just the same as always.”

“Don’t think about that,” Eseld hissed. “Eat it if you’ve got any left. We’ll need every scrap.”

“Mm,” Sky grunted. “Understood.”

Shilu led the trio down and down and down — three floors, six floors, falling deeper. Eseld kept an ear out for sounds of distant combat filtering upward from the tomb’s gate, but she heard nothing except a growing static murmur. After Shilu’s victory by the security checkpoint, rain had been falling against the window — but there was no way a rainstorm would be audible this deep inside the tomb. The raindrops would have to fall like bullets.

Lykke showed herself, thrice.

The first time she appeared as a shadow on a wall. The group was traversing a long room filled with low tables, halfway across the yawning darkness between one corridor and another. Cyn and Sky had fallen into complete silence, since even the whisper of bare feet returned haunting echoes from the shadowy ceiling of the stone-walled space. Eseld watched Shilu’s back as best she could, keeping her eyes on the dense gloom beneath each table they passed.

Lykke’s outline — a chimera of twisted flesh — burst onto the left-hand wall all of a sudden. She flickered and jerked as if cast by a roaring hearth-fire, fifty times the size of her already enlarged and monstrous body.

Cyn smothered a scream with both hands, scrambling forward to shelter behind Eseld’s back; Sky turned a yelp of surprise into an angry shout, raising her fists in hopeless resistance.

But Eseld followed Shilu’s lead, and Shilu did not react. Shilu strode on, unconcerned.

“Ignore her,” Shilu said. “It’s nothing.”

The second appearance was all whispers and white-wreathed wraiths. Shilu led the way down onto a spiral staircase which descended into darkness as it reached toward the floor below; the walls to either side were beyond sight, either too far away or cloaked by some clever trick of vision. Once Shilu and all three zombies were suspended on a stretch of staircase seemingly floating in a void, a teasing voice began to buzz and sigh at the edge of Eseld’s hearing.

She could not make out any words, like a howling scream lost amid the storm-winds deep in a forest. Any human speech was muffled and blurred. The whisper was accompanied by a flickering ghostly white in her peripheral vision, wisps and streamers of phantasm which vanished when she turned her sight toward them.

Cyn did not take this apparition well. “Am I the only one of our party besieged by ghosts?” she asked, voice quivering, clinging to Eseld’s arm with one hand. “Can none of you see this all about us? Am I touched? Am I haunted?”

Sky snorted. “Sensory interference. It’s nothing. Ignore it, like … like Shilu said. I’ve had worse. Got a heads-up rig hit by a custom ECM blast once. Shit had me seeing straight up gore splash for a week. Blindfolded myself in the end, waited it out. This is weak stuff.”

Eseld shook her head. “It’s her. It’s obviously her.”

“You’re right,” Shilu said from ahead, descending the staircase quickly. “It’s Lykke. Ignore her. Keep moving.”

The ghosts and phantasms vanished by the time they reached the next floor.

Shilu took the group outward, toward one of the exterior walls on this floor of the tomb pyramid. The static murmur intensified, growing louder and clearer. Eseld cocked her head; she picked out individual gusts of wind raking against the black metal of the tomb, followed by pounding sheets of precipitation throwing up rolling waves of dense sibilance. Distant booms and cracks and thumps punctuated the haze.

“Is that a storm?” Sky asked. “Sounds heavy.”

“Yes,” Eseld replied. Her throat was going dry. How could a storm be heavy enough to penetrate a tomb with such clamour? “A big one.”

Shilu said nothing.

The noise grew and grew — and then burst into view as the group stepped into a wide atrium. The room was walled on three sides in light brown stone, and on the final side with a slab of toughened glass, easily twelve inches thick. A wide skylight matched the window.

Rain was lashing against the glass in drumming sheets of wind-whipped grit and grease, a wall of water hurled about by the tendrils of the storm. This was an exterior room, on the edge of one of the pyramid steps which formed the tomb, but the corpse-city was barely visible through the torrent of rain churning in the air. The sky was a sagging gyre of black, like a distended stomach about to burst from accumulated rot.

Eseld had seen plenty of rainstorms, both in life and during her many resurrections, but nothing on this scale. The sky looked as if it was trying to reach downward and scoop up the land. Eseld wanted to retreat deeper into the tomb, away from the windows.

Before anybody could comment on the storm, Lykke made her third appearance.

The hem of a white dress fluttered in the depths of the corridor ahead, vanishing around a shadowy corner; the fabric was followed by the darting white motes of several bloated flies.

No footsteps. No laughter. Nothing which could be heard over the raging storm and heavy rain.

“Fuck!” Sky spat. She reached out to grab Cyn’s arm, to halt her as well; Cyn winced at the tug on her wrist, but she stopped. “That thing is hunting us, making fun of us, trying to rile us up! She was right there! Right ahead of us!”

“No,” Shilu said. “She’s not.”

But Shilu paused as well, several paces deeper into the atrium. Eseld did the same, examining Shilu’s expressionless face and wide dark eyes.

Shilu paid no attention to the spot where Lykke had vanished into the shadows. She stared out of the window, at the storm.

“Then what the fuck did we just see?” Sky demanded.

Eseld bared her teeth at Sky. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” Sky narrowed her eyes at Eseld. “Don’t ask questions? Don’t try to protect ourselves? That was her, her dress, her fucking disgusting flies, that was her, she’s hunting us—”

“She is, yes!” Eseld snapped. “But we can’t do anything about it! You got a knife on you? A gun? No, huh?”

Sky let go of Cyn’s arm and tightened her hands into fists. Eseld kept showing her sharpened teeth.

This was bad — why had she leapt to Shilu’s defence? It wasn’t as if Shilu needed the help. Sky was large and strong and aggressive, exactly the type who tended to make it further and start eating other people first. Sky was dangerous and Eseld knew it all too well. Eseld glanced at Cyn, but Cyn was edging away, clearing the way for a fight, eyes darting back and forth.

“Lykke,” said Shilu, “is reconstituting her inter-nanonic definitional matrix.”

Sky snorted. “And what does that mean, when it’s at home?”

Shilu turned her head to stare at Sky for a moment. Sky swallowed.

Shilu said: “She’s putting herself back in her body. We’re seeing echoes of the process moving across the local network. It’s not Lykke, not really. It’s her reflection.”

Eseld said, “How long do we have?”

Shilu sighed. “Good question. I don’t know. The process should be instantaneous. She should not take this long. As I told you, I do not have the means to disrupt her in this manner.”

Sky snorted. “So she’s faking. Winding us up.”

Cyneswith cleared her throat. “Trying to get us to fight each other, perhaps? That’s always a risk. You should never listen to voices from the forest. Don’t listen to anything you can’t see, especially if it’s trying to tease you.”

Shilu looked back at the windows. “No. She has no need for that. She knows I cannot defeat her a second time.”

Eseld said, “Is she maybe … ‘limited’ as well? Somebody else holding her back? Something like that?”

Shilu blinked. Her eyes tightened — a new expression. “Perhaps. I do not understand who would do that, or how.” She pointed at the window. “Especially in this new context.”

Sky frowned. “The storm?”

Eseld said, “It’s not natural, is it?”

Shilu did not explain. She crossed the atrium and walked right up to the wall of windows, putting her face close to the glass. Eseld shared a glance with Sky and Cyneswith, then hurried to follow. The freshies trailed behind.

Eseld could barely see the revenants in the tomb’s outworks down below, obscured behind a wall of thickening rain and constant swirls of high wind, in addition to the gritty, greasy, black-oil residue on the glass itself. Anybody down there would be drenched to the bone if they were not under cover — which was not dangerous for a revenant, freed from the indignity of hypothermia and the maintenance needs of an immune system, but deeply unpleasant all the same, and very difficult in which to fight. The rain was so heavy that visibility must be terrible, footing treacherous, communications garbled.

Some movements were still visible even through the dense rain — large chunks of rubble and rebar picked up by the wind and tossed through the streets beyond the tomb. Walls were shivering in the wind, concrete debris stripped from exposed edges, crumbly brick collapsing before the storm.

Shilu was staring upward, at the dark and churning clouds on the jagged horizon; the storm was mounting the back of the graveworm.

Eseld said, “The worm is blocking the worst of it, isn’t it?”

“Mm,” Shilu grunted. “Not for long.”

Cyn spoke from behind Eseld: “That’s real pretty. A really pretty storm. I always loved storms.”

Sky said, “Shit, we have to head out into that? Can we grab some coats first? We’re not gonna be naked, are we?”

“No,” said Shilu. “That storm would kill the three of you. That’s a hurricane.”

“What?!” Sky said.

“Those gusts down there are hitting a hundred miles an hour. The heart of the storm is to the north. Sustained winds of one-fifty, maybe one-sixty miles per hour. Likely higher on the far side of the graveworm, two fifty to three hundred miles per hour. Maybe higher. I can’t get exact measurements without network access, only what I have on-board. It’s heading directly toward the tomb. Perhaps half an hour until direct contact.”

Eseld knew what was happening.

“It’s Lykke, isn’t it?” she whispered.

Sky laughed — a horrible jerking sound on the edge of hysteria. “You’re kidding? You’re joking, right? That monster can — what, summon storms? You’re telling me it’s trying to kill us with a storm? It—”

“Fairy magic,” Cyn said. “Command of the weather.”

“Shut up!” Sky snapped at her. Cyn flinched. “Shut up! It’s not magic, there’s no such thing as magic, or ghosts, or—”

Eseld rounded on Sky and showed her sharpened teeth. “It may as well be! Stop shouting at her!”

Sky’s face flashed with anger.

Shilu turned away from the windows. “There are no atmospheric convection cycles to begin a hurricane, and no liquid water left in the oceans with which to form one. Even if that was not true, we are thousands of miles inland. The storm is impossible. It is being sent on purpose.”

“By Lykke?” Eseld prompted.

Shilu shrugged. “Unknown. I doubt she has network access enough for this. This is not unprecedented, but it is very rare.”

Eseld hurried on. “It’s a way to drive us to ground, or to create a lot of confusion to cover for something else, so … so Lykke wouldn’t need to do that, not to kill us, I mean. It’s something else, something trying to stop her? Or to confuse her. Or make sure she’s finished the job.”

Shilu stared at Eseld for a moment. “You think quickly, zombie.”

“Just trying to survive.”

“Yes. And somebody is trying to kill you, you three zombies.”

Sky blinked several times. Cyn just nodded.

“Not you?” Eseld asked.

Shilu shook her head. “The storm is little danger to me. The tomb can withstand winds ten times that intensity. The graveworm could survive much more. The only threat is to exposed zombies. Whoever sent it wants to keep you in the tomb. Or perhaps they aren’t taking any chances of Lykke failing. But it gives me a perfect opportunity to escape. I could break this window and fly to the ground. The hurricane will soon introduce enough local network interference to give me a chance. But it would kill the three of you.” Shilu sighed; for the first time her expression went further — she scrunched up her eyes with frustration. “I don’t understand why any of this is happening.”

“Does this change our plans?” Eseld asked.

Shilu’s eyes snapped open. She shook her head. “No. We go to the gravekeeper.”

“Then let’s go!” Sky snapped. “Before that plague-ridden bitch finishes putting herself back together. Cool? Can we move out now, ma’am?” Her voice dripped with sarcastic deference.

Shilu turned and set off again, heading deeper into the tomb. “We’re almost at the elevator. Not far now. No more stairs.”

For ten minutes Shilu led them deeper into this floor of the tomb, heading toward the core of the building, worming through increasingly tight passageways and narrow corridors, with lots of awkward blind corners. The pounding of the storm grew and grew as the zombies burrowed deeper into the ossified meat of the tomb, a standing wave of background static pounding against the exterior walls. Eseld could barely imagine the growing fury outdoors. Such a storm would have ripped trees from their roots and flattened buildings to kindling.

Eventually Shilu stopped about twenty meters shy of a sharp left-hand turn in a long corridor. Eseld almost blundered into her back, scrambling to a halt. Cyneswith let out a little squeak. Sky hissed, “What is it?”

Shilu said nothing for a moment. She stared through the metal of the corner, as if she could see through solid matter; Eseld guessed she probably could. The corner did not look any different to Eseld.

Then Shilu said: “This is unexpected. I may be about to die. If I do, turn back and run for the exit.”

Eseld shared a look with Sky. Cyn shrugged and mouthed ‘fairies’.

“Stay here,” said Shilu

Then she strode forward, heading toward the corner. On the last step she paused for a split-second, then stepped out of cover.

Nothing happened.

Shilu stood beyond the corner for several seconds, staring at something Eseld couldn’t see. Then she turned and gestured to the trio of revenants, pointing toward the corner — a clear instruction: do not advance further until ordered.

Eseld hurried to the corner, with Cyneswith and Sky at her heels. All three zombies pressed themselves against the wall, as Shilu indicated.

Shilu said, “One of you will have to take the same risk I just did. Decide who.”

“But you just did it, right?” Eseld asked. “What is it, what—”

“Guns. They may respond differently to zombies. One of you volunteer, quickly.”

Cyn started to say: “What if we—”

“Quickly.”

Sky snapped, “Why, what’s wrong? Spit it out!”

Shilu pointed back the way they’d come.

The outline of a human figure was extruding itself from the grey metal wall which they had just passed, like a person pressing their whole body against a sheet of canvas. Facial features were sharpening and clarifying, individual fingers popping free of the metal surface, limbs gaining substance and shape with every second. Textures grew from metal layers — bouncy curls and fluttering sundress frills, splaying forth in fans of simulated fabric, stiff and grey.

Lykke was emerging, pressed from dead matter into living flesh.

Cyn clapped both hands to her mouth, recoiling into Eseld’s arms. Sky spluttered and slapped her own right thigh, reaching for a weapon which wasn’t there. Eseld bared her teeth and spat.

“Quickly,” Shilu repeated.

Eseld started to move, intending to step out next to Shilu and accept whatever this godless fate had decided for her — but then Sky said, “I’ll do it!” and darted past Eseld.

Sky stepped out of cover and threw her arms wide, eyes bulging, ready for a second death.

Nothing happened.

“We’re clear,” Shilu said. “Go.”

Shilu took off at a sprint. Sky blinked in shock, then reached back and grabbed Cyn, sweeping the smaller woman off her feet and into Sky’s arms. She darted after Shilu.

Eseld glanced back. Lykke had both arms free from the wall now, half her head and torso out, legs trailing behind. The metal surface of her skin was gaining colour, flushing with pale skin and white sundress and blonde hair. Her eyes were still dead grey, empty of life. Her hair was stiff as metal shavings. Her head twitched.

Eseld scrambled around the corner and after the others — then gasped, almost losing her footing in shock. She caught herself, got herself upright, and broke into a sprint.

The corridor was kinked in three places as if to create a trio of choke points; it terminated in a steep switchback ramp which climbed toward a raised, walled platform or second level, from which an observer might look out over the choke points below.

The walls and ceiling bristled with firepower.

Hard-point weapon emplacements cradled all manner of guns and cannons, none of which Eseld could name. Black-mouthed machines tracked Eseld and the others with empty muzzles as they ran down the corridor toward the ramp. Shilu was not spared the battery’s attention; clusters of lance-structures swivelled to follow her, backed up by multi-barrelled monsters ticking and clicking in time to their internal engines. Many of the guns whirred with the sounds of tiny motors as they twisted and turned, or hummed with the infernal buzz of power-packs and on-board reactors.

Hundreds of automatic turrets and gun emplacements tracked the zombies and the fallen angel down the length of the jinking corridor. Eseld felt as if she was sprinting down a length of intestine, lined with waving cilia.

Shilu hit the ramp first and reached the observation platform moments later. Sky went next, hurling herself upward, cradling Cyneswith in her arms. Eseld was last, mounting the ramp and hauling herself to the top. She collapsed against the wall-lip of the platform, heaving for breath.

A pair of large metal doors stood half-open on one side of the platform, ten inches thick. Beyond them was a blank metal box.

“It’s a dead end!” Cyneswith wailed.

“No, that’s a lift,” said Sky, tipping Cyn back to her feet. “We need to get in the lift! Where does it lead?”

Shilu turned to face the corridor through which they had just passed. She held her arms out to either side and made her hands into blades, extending flesh and bone into lightless black metal.

“Shilu?” Eseld hissed. “Shilu, this is a dead end, and I know it too. You said you can’t fight Lykke again, what do we do?”

“I have no idea,” said Shilu. “None of this is meant to be here. These guns should not be here. And they should have killed me.”

Sky whirled on Shilu. “What now?! Do we pile into that lift? We can’t just stand here and die!”

“There’s no point,” said Shilu. “Not unless the guns wake. And I don’t think they will, I think—”

“Shishi!”

Lykke’s bright and burning warble filled the air with laughter.

An apparition in white stepped around the far end of the jinking corridor, hands raised in playful surrender.

Lykke looked exactly as she had when she had first appeared — a young woman with luxurious blonde hair, wearing a sundress and fancy shoes — except her colours were greyed out, washed thin by her rebirth from the wall. Her joints did not appear to work properly, as if she was suffering a restricted range of motion. Her hair was stiff and artificial. Her eyeballs were fused in place.

“Shishi, really!” Lykke said. “That’s more than enough of making me run about. Now I need to limber up and oil down and you just—”

Every turret in the corridor whirled to point at Lykke.

Her eyes went wide. Her mouth formed a little ‘oh.’

Shilu shouted, “Into the li—”

The battery of guns opened up with a deafening roar, filling the cramped corridor with a storm of firepower; the slam of bullets and plasma bolts and sabots drowned out the distant drumming of the hurricane’s fringe, punctuated by the kick and thump and whine of a hundred magazines and motors and mechanisms.

Lykke’s grey-washed form vanished beneath a hail of gunfire, blotted out by the flash of energy weapons, swallowed by the explosion of debris. The end of the corridor collapsed into metal slag and flying fragments and molten droplets of melted steel. A cloud of shrapnel burst against the platform, whizzing and pinging through the air.

“Into the lift!” Shilu howled above the noise.

Sky swept Cyneswith off her feet again; Cyn was screaming, hands clamped over her ears. Eseld sprinted for the gap between the lift doors and hurled herself through, into the darkness. Sky shouldered inside after her. Shilu slipped through last and slammed the doors shut, blotting out the worst of the cacophonous gunfire.

A two-button control panel stood to the left of the doors. Shilu slammed the ‘down’ arrow. A tiny red light flickered on.

The lift jerked, then began to descend.

Three pairs of lungs panted hard in the dark. Cyn held back a sob, gulping for air. Sky muttered, ‘fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.’

The sound of the guns above did not stop — but the furious roar started to slow, growing quiet, as if the turrets were falling silent one by one.

“That didn’t stop her,” Eseld said. “Did it?”

Shilu’s gaze crept upward, watching through the wall and the shaft as the lift descended. “No,” she said. “Not for long.”

“What do we do now?” Sky said. “What do we do, how do we get away from her?! How do we fucking kill her?”

“We don’t,” said Shilu.

“There has to be a way, you were listing them earlier! We’re heading to an armoury, right? You mentioned fire, heat. What’s in there? Do we have thermite? A flamethrower? You need an ECM bubble to stop her re-downloading her imprint? I can rustle up something if we have a powerful enough plasma charge and some kind of shield to contain the—”

“We do not have the means,” said Shilu. “Nothing in a tomb armoury will be enough to stop one of us.”

“Nothing?” Sky swallowed. “Nothing at all?”

Shilu considered this for a moment. “There may be a flamethrower. The flame will not be hot enough. She might retreat from it regardless. Maybe.”

Sky clenched her teeth and raked her hands through her dark hair. How naive, Eseld thought, how childish. One could not turn at bay and fight demons and angels, not with all the weapons in this dead world, not with anything she’d ever witnessed, or could imagine. One could barely turn and fight stronger revenants, let alone true cosmological actors in charge of their own destinies, like Shilu. Their only option as zombies was escape — or the salvation of this ‘gravekeeper’.

Silence stretched on. The lift continued to descend. Shilu said nothing, staring at nothing, her sheet of flawless black hair hanging like frozen obsidian. Cyneswith shuffled closer to Eseld, then wormed her hand into Eseld’s grip. Sky began to pace. Eventually the sound of the guns was gone completely, replaced with the distant thundering howl of the hurricane outside, battering the tomb with walls of storm and surge.

Over two minutes later, the lift stopped.

Shilu turned to face the trio of zombies. Her skin flowed and flowered and hardened — back into the nightmare scarecrow of black chrome, covered in blades and sharp edges, standing on a pair of spear-point feet. Her face was a pale mask, inhumanly perfect.

Cyneswith went stiff and still. Sky snorted. Eseld attempted to show no fear.

“There are two chambers beyond this door,” said Shilu. “I am going to step into the second chamber. Do not follow me. One of four things will happen. The gravekeeper may kill me, or it may kill Lykke. It might kill both of us. Finally, it might do nothing. Those are the four outcomes. In the event it kills me or kills both of us, you should arm yourselves and attempt to escape the tomb.”

“It won’t kill us?” Eseld asked.

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

Shilu smiled — a pair of tiny curls at the corners of her pale polymer mouth.

“You are beneath notice, zombie. Even with a storm sent to pin you in this grave. To a gravekeeper you’re not even there. If I die here, do not linger. Good luck.”