They met Sergeant Murgaddin the next morning in the common room of the Nentir Inn, where Wisara had laid out bread, cheese and enough hot porridge to satisfy even Dave, which was saying something, because Dave had eaten four bowls and was looking hopefully at the pot. The wreckage of the Blue Moon felt a long way off in the pale autumn sunlight, though Thorn could still see a bruise on Nibbles’ arm, and Dave was still in mourning for his pie.

Murgaddin brought a leather folder and the face of a man who had slept even less than they had.

“Sit,” he said. “Eat, if you haven’t. Then listen.”

He spread a rough sketch across the table. It was not a proper map, but it showed a track from the northern edge of town to a black mark beside a ruined building.

“The Hammers have been using an old manor house,” he said. “Burned in the orc war, like half the places round here. The cellars survived. That’s where they’ve made their nest.”

Thorn studied the sketch with the seriousness of a general. “How many?”

“Enough to be trouble. A handful of thugs. Maybe a mage: we’ve had reports of strange lights down there after dark. Go in, break it up, and bring me proof of who’s paying them. I’ve got guards, but none to spare, and the town council won’t send soldiers chasing rumours.”

“We’re not soldiers,” said Thorn.

“No.” Murgaddin’s moustache twitched. “But you’re the ones who walked into a tavern full of Hammers and walked out standing. That counts for something.”

He opened the folder: a small cloth bag that clinked pleasingly, and a stoppered vial glowing faintly in the morning light. “From the town,” he said. “Coin, and a healing potion from the temple stores. It’s not a fortune, but Fallcrest pays its debts. There’s more if you’re useful.”

Nibbles picked up the bag, weighed it in his palm, and did a small, quiet sum. Then he put it down again with the expression of a man who has been offered a fair price and is slightly disappointed that there is nothing to argue about.

“Payment on completion as well?” he asked.

“If you complete.”

“Then we accept,” said Nibbles, as though he were the one doing Murgaddin a favour.

Mara arrived as they finished, with Tobbs at her heels and Loki trotting behind, carrying something he had found. Tobbs unrolled a larger map: the road towards the distant plateau, marked in blue ink along the river and up into the hills.

“For when you’re ready,” he said to Thorn. “The manor first. Then Ethium. Nimozaran still needs those stones.”

“We know,” said Thorn.

“Do you?” Tobbs managed a tired smile. “Good. I’d hate to think I showed you a glowing rock for nothing.”

---

The ruined manor stood less than an hour’s walk from Fallcrest’s northern gate, alone on a rise above fields gone to thistle and long grass. Once it must have been handsome: a grand entrance, rows of tall windows, a roof of good slate. The orcs had seen to the upper floors. Only the blackened stone shell remained, and whatever lay beneath it.

“Cheerful,” said Nibbles.

“Haunted,” said Dave, with great satisfaction.

“It’s not haunted,” said Derek.

“How do you know?”

Derek thought about this. “I don’t,” he admitted.

Dave looked at the manor with new respect.

The ground floor was a maze of fallen beams, ash and bird droppings. Loki led them to a broken stairwell, where stone steps went down into cold air that smelled of earth and mildew. Thorn lit a torch. Derek raised his shield. Dave clutched his spellbook. Nibbles drew his silver dagger and looked delighted to have an excuse.

“Right,” said Thorn, turning to face them at the top of the stairs. He had been thinking about this all the way from Fallcrest. “Before we go down. Whatever happens in there, we stick together. We look after each other. And we don’t take anything that isn’t—”

But Loki had already gone down the stairs, and Nibbles had gone after Loki, and Dave had gone after Nibbles because he didn’t want to be left with the speech.

Derek patted Thorn on the shoulder as he went past. “Very good speech,” he said. “I’ll pass it on.”

They went down.

The old manor — where the stone steps led to trouble.

---

The first cellar had been a wine store once. Now it was a rough camp: crates dragged in as tables and barricades, muddy boot prints everywhere, a smell of old socks. Three men in patched leather, iron hammer pendants at their throats, looked up as torchlight spilled down the stairs.

One of them reached for a club. He did not reach it in time.

Thorn was already moving, and Loki bounded past him with a bark that bounced off the low ceiling. Derek planted himself in the doorway so nobody could slip round behind. The fight was short and ugly: clubs against axe and hammer, Nibbles appearing where nobody expected him, and Dave flinching behind Derek until he discovered he could throw a potato over Derek, which was a revelation.

When it was over, three Hammers lay groaning on the floor and the cellar was theirs.

“That went well,” said Dave, sounding surprised.

“Don’t sound so shocked,” said Nibbles, wiping his dagger on a crate. “We’re professionals now.”

“Are we?” said Dave. “Do we get paid like professionals?”

“We will,” said Nibbles darkly, “if I have anything to do with it.”

A passage led deeper, the air damper still, and a faint blue-green glow seeped round a corner ahead. Thorn raised his torch. The walls were slick with moisture, and mushrooms clustered in every crack: pale caps veined with soft light, casting an eerie glow over everything.

“Pretty,” breathed Dave.

“Poisonous, probably,” said Derek.

Nibbles sighed deeply. “Everything interesting is poisonous.” He brightened. “Wait. Does anyone know how much poisonous mushrooms sell for? Because I know an apothecary—”

“No,” said everyone.

---

Beyond the mushrooms the passage opened into a larger chamber, with a table covered in maps, coins and a guttering lamp. Four men rose from around it: two Hammers with clubs, a swordsman half-drawing his blade, and a broad figure in a dented suit of old plate armour. And behind them, a thin man in dark robes lurched up from his stool with a curse and thrust out both hands. A crackle of sickly green light spat across the room at Thorn and fizzled harmlessly against his shield.

The mage, Rulden, if the papers on his table were anything to go by, had not been expecting company. He had even less time to complain about it.

Derek met the next green bolt on his shield and went straight for the armoured man, his hammer ringing on old steel like a cracked bell. Thorn closed with the swordsman in a shower of sparks. The two Hammers lunged together, and Nibbles slipped through the gloom between them, quick as a thought. Dave, remembering the goblin cave and the Blue Moon and, above all, the pie, sent a potato into the nearest Hammer’s face with admirable accuracy.

Rulden snarled and grabbed for a book on the table. Before he could finish whatever he meant to do with it, Thorn kicked the stool out from under him and pinned his wrist to the floor.

“Don’t,” said Thorn.

The mage glared up at him, breathing hard. The fight had ended as quickly as it began.

---

They tied up the survivors and searched the chamber. Nibbles found a leather purse of gold and a scroll case under the maps, and announced the contents of the purse to the room before anyone had asked. Derek found another healing potion, just like Murgaddin’s, beside a short sword that shimmered with something more than ordinary steel.

And on the table, half hidden under Rulden’s spellbook, lay an Ethium Stone.

It was smaller than the one Tobbs had shown them, but there was no mistaking it: pale grey, blue-veined, humming with a sleepy warmth. Dave stared at it the way he usually stared at spellbooks, dragons and pie.

“That’s what they were guarding,” said Derek quietly.

Rulden said nothing. But his eyes flicked to the stone, and then away.

Dave, with Derek keeping watch over him like a large bearded babysitter, opened the mage’s spellbook and began to copy. The pages grew wobblier towards the back, but one spell caught his eye: a weaving of words and gestures meant to send enemies into an unnatural sleep. He copied it twice, mouthing the syllables as he wrote, his tongue poking out of the side of his snout.

“I’ve got it,” he said at last, looking up with soot on his cheek and triumph in his eyes. “Sleep.”

“Useful,” said Thorn.

“Very useful,” Dave agreed. Then, after a pause: “Can I try it on Nibbles?”

“No,” said Nibbles.

“Just a little bit?”

“No.”

They took the stone, the gold, the scroll, the potion and the sword, which went to Nibbles. Nibbles wanted to take everything else as well. Thorn drew the line at the table. Nibbles argued that it was a very good table, solid oak, and worth at least three silver to the right buyer. Thorn said they were not carrying a table back to Fallcrest. Nibbles said that was exactly the kind of thinking that kept adventurers poor.

Behind a stack of crates at the far end, they found a pair of heavy doors bound with rusted iron.

“Family tomb,” said Derek, reading the carving over the lintel, where a name had long since been chipped away. “This house had owners once. Proper ones.”

“With very good taste in doors,” said Nibbles. “I wonder what’s behind them. Gold, probably. Old families always have gold.”

“Or old families,” said Derek.

Dave’s eyes went very wide.

Thorn tested the doors. They shuddered, but held. He and Derek put their shoulders to the wood while Loki barked encouragement, and the rust gave way with a shriek that echoed through the cellars like something waking up.

Beyond lay a low stone room lined with four stone coffins.

For a moment, nothing moved.

Then the lids began to shift.

The family tomb — where the dead objected to visitors.

Skeletons sat up with the dry, horrible sound of bone on stone: four of them, yellowed and ancient, turning their empty eyes towards the doorway.

“Told you it was haunted,” said Dave, in a very small voice.

Thorn met the first with his axe. Derek’s hammer cracked the second apart, and Derek looked, for the first time all day, as though he were enjoying himself. Nibbles danced backwards, swearing in three languages. Dave, who had learned Sleep about four minutes earlier and was keen to show it off, flung the spell at the third skeleton with a grand gesture and a ringing voice.

The skeleton did not go to sleep. The skeleton did not look as if it had ever been to sleep, or ever would.

“That’s not fair,” said Dave.

“They’re dead, Dave,” said Derek, smashing it into pieces. “They don’t sleep. They’ve done all their sleeping.”

Loki did not care about fairness. He launched himself at the fourth skeleton’s legs and brought it down in a clatter of bones, and Thorn finished it. When the last bones lay scattered across the floor, the tomb was quiet again.

Nibbles searched the coffins with the air of a man owed compensation for the fright, and found more coins, old and tarnished but real, and some jewellery too damaged to wear but worth something to a smith. He valued each piece out loud, wrote it in his ledger, and then valued it again, slightly higher.

“Family curse?” said Dave, looking at the broken lids.

“Family problem,” said Derek. “Let’s not ask why.”

---

They came back to Fallcrest in the late afternoon with scraped knuckles, mushroom spores on their boots, and Rulden’s letters tucked safely in Thorn’s pack. Murgaddin met them at the gate and read the most important one twice without saying a word.

Rulden,

The arrangement stands. Prove your worth now.

A courier travels the north road within the next tenday, bearing a map recovered from the outer ruins of Ethium. It must not reach Fallcrest.

Seize it. Kill the courier if needed, but bring the map intact.

Others have begun to take interest in the old places. This cannot be allowed to spread.

Deliver the map to my agent at the river crossing. You will be paid in full upon confirmation.

Do not fail me again.

— Maelis Varn, Third Hand of the Valnaran family

“They missed Mara,” said Thorn. “We got there first.”

“Aye.” Murgaddin’s voice was grim. “And they’d have tried again if you’d left them down there.” He folded the letter. “The Valnarans are one of the four guilds in the Gang of Four. Trade racketeers from Sunfall, allied with assassins, old thieves’ guilds and street brutes like the Hammers. It’s an unstable lot, but it’s held for years. And now someone’s paying them to hunt Ethium.”

“Someone in Sunfall,” said Derek.

“Or further south.” Murgaddin looked towards the distant plateau. “Their reach gets longer every season. You did well today. Better than well. Fallcrest owes you more than a potion and a bag of coin, but take this as well.”

He handed over a heavier purse of gold. Nibbles took it before anyone else could, and for once did not say anything at all. He simply held it, with an expression of great peace.

---

That evening they rested at the Nentir Inn. Dave copied the Sleep spell properly into his spellbook, in his best handwriting, with his new blue ink, and then drew a small picture of a skeleton with a speech bubble saying ZZZ and a big cross through it. Nibbles polished the magic short sword and argued with Derek about wasting identify scrolls on mushrooms. Thorn sat by the window with the Ethium Stone wrapped in cloth on his knee, feeling its faint warmth through the fabric, and thinking about the pale line on the horizon.

Tobbs came to see them after dark, with Mara and a satchel of road bread, dried meat and a fresh copy of the route north.

“Nimozaran is pleased,” he said. “More than pleased. One stone is a beginning. The manor was only one cell. There will be others.” He hesitated. “They wanted that map because of what’s waking up on the plateau. You have a stone now, and you know the road. If you’re still willing…”

Dave nodded so hard that his horns nearly knocked the lamp over.

Nibbles counted the new gold one more time and said, “We’re going.”

Derek closed his prayer book. “Better to go now than wait for the next letter.”

“Then leave at first light,” said Tobbs, visibly relieved. “Follow the river road until it turns east. The blue mark shows where the old track climbs into the hills, and the waterfall behind it: the only way up. Make for the ruined tower first. If the stones are waking anywhere, that’s where you’ll feel it.” He swallowed. “After that, you’ll be deep in Ethium’s shadow.”

They slept, packed, and were at Wizard’s Gate when the bells rang dawn.

The road east lay ahead of them, pale and empty, curving between the hedgerows towards the river and, beyond that, the plateau where old magic stirred beneath broken stone. Thorn led the way, axe across his back, the shield of Fallcrest at his side. Dave clutched his spellbook, heavier now by one spell. Nibbles carried his silver dagger, a magic short sword and an identify scroll he was saving for something impressive. Loki trotted ahead, nose to the wind, sure that whatever came next would be interesting. And Derek walked at the back, counting them all, every few minutes, just in case.

Behind them, Fallcrest’s walls grew small in the morning light.

Before them, Ethium waited.