UNDER THE CROSIER’S SHADOW - Unearthing the Scholar in the Urn

“Heave it, you mis-sewn heap.”

Kellan wiped wet chalk dust from his eyes with the back of a scarred wrist. His boots sloshed in three inches of grey, lime-choked muck at the base of the Crow-Watch cliff. Beside him, Gorr gave a low, wet rattling sound through the iron grate pinned over his windpipe.

The construct did not tire, but its weight was troublesome in the mire. Gorr’s upper half—the broad, salt-bloated chest of a drowned blacksmith pulled from the black mud below the lower locks—strained against the leather harness. Below his belt, three feet of stitched horse spine curved down into four thick, iron-shod timber legs that cut deep ruts into the wet limestone. Raw gut-string held the horse ribs to the man-frame, sealed over with hardened pitch that smelled of cold tar whenever the creature bent its back.

“Hold the beam,” Kellan grunted. He jammed a rusted crowbar under a slab of cracked slate that had slid down from the old limestone powder-kiln fifty years back. “If the stone shifts, it snaps your hind gear, and I haven’t the wire to stitch your legs back on.”

Gorr planted his front two hooves—shod in crude iron plates fastened with horseshoe nails right into the dead bone—and leaned his dead weight against the oak lever. The iron bar groaned. Flakes of reddish rust rained into the puddle between Kellan’s boots.

The slate shifted with a heavy, wet suck.

Air whistled through the gap, smelling of damp moss, dry cellars, and withered nettles. Kellan dropped the bar, took a battered brass lamp from his satchel, and blew on the spark-tinder until the fat wick took light. The yellow flame sputtered against the draught coming out of the cleft.

“Down,” Kellan ordered.

Gorr sank onto his hocks, the horse joints clicking like dry walnuts in a bag. Kellan leaned down, shoving his head and shoulders into the dark hole beneath the shelf.

The niche was narrow, dry as horn, and lined with rotting pine boards that fell to grey powder at the touch of his sleeve. In the back, half-buried under a drift of white chalk dust and dried beetle hulls, sat the pot.

It was cobalt-glazed earthenware, double-bellied, as broad as a wine firkin. The top was plugged with a heavy lead bung, poured hot into the neck and stamped with the faded cross-and-crosier seal of the Old Surveyors. Saltpetre had bloomed across the dark blue clay like white lichen, but the seal was whole.

“Still sealed,” Kellan muttered. He wiped chalk dust from his mouth with the back of his hand. “Fifty years in the dark, and you haven’t choked on your own grease yet.”

He reached into the hole, caught the lip of the urn with his bare fingers, and pulled. The ceramic scraped against the limestone shelf with a sound like a dull knife dragging across a slate roof. It took Gorr reaching in with one grey, four-fingered hand to haul the heavy jar out into the wet light of the quarry floor.

The pot thuffed down in the grey sludge.

Kellan pulled a stubby iron chisel and a wooden mallet from his belt. He didn’t wait. He set the chisel edge against the seam where the lead bung met the cobalt lip and struck it twice with the mallet.

Clang. Clang.

The lead cracked. A sharp whistle of ancient, trapped air escaped—dry, thin, smelling of parched vellum, stale cloves, and cold bone.

“Who breaks the seal of the Third Chair?”

The voice didn’t come from a throat. It rattled from inside the pot, flat and dry as dead leaves scraping along a floorboard.

Kellan blew the grey lead dust off the chisel tip. “Shut your jaw, Sarix. You’re six miles north of the parish wall, and the church burned eight winters back.”

The lead plug tilted, nudged from below by a pale, hairless crown of bone. A skull rolled into the mouth of the jar, its eye sockets choked with dry bay leaves that had turned black with age. Its upper jaw was notched with copper wire where three missing teeth had been replaced with pins of beaten bronze.

The jaw worked up and down with a clattering snap. Tack-tack-tack.

“Eight winters?” The skull spun half an inch to the left, its empty sockets staring into the grey drizzle falling from the quarry rim. “Nonsense. The Arch-Deacon’s tithe-collector was due on the first of the month. I have three ledgers un-copied. Where is my oil? Who allowed moisture into the outer seal? The grease on my palate is entirely rancid.”

“The Arch-Deacon was hung from his own gate-house with twenty feet of twisted intestine,” Kellan said, kneeling in the mud beside the jar. He reached into his coat and brought out a short, curved bone-carving knife. “The King’s men took the ironwork off the abbey roof, and the sheep-rot took the rest. You’re sitting in three inches of lime-mud, Master Scholar.”

Sarix’s jaw hung open for three long seconds. A single dried bay leaf dropped from his nasal cavity and floated on the grey water in the bottom of the pot.

“Lies,” the skull clicked. “The Church has six regiments of heavy horse in the valley. They would never permit the copper roofs to be stripped. Who are you? You dress like a hedge-cutter’s apprentice and you smell of candle stub and wet horse-hocks.”

“Kellan. Third-rank practitioner out of the lower trenches.” Kellan set the edge of his knife against the skull’s parietal suture, right where the old bone had grown dark and greasy with age. “And if you don’t stop rattling those bronze teeth, I’m going to tip this jar onto its side, let the drain water fill your eye-holes, and use the rest of the pot for a chamber pot until the clay cracks.”

The skull went instantly still. The lower jaw gave one small, pathetic tack against the upper teeth.

“You have no respect for the Seniority,” Sarix whispered, rattled thin as parched straw. “I am Master Sarix of the Fifth Order of St. Jude. I hold the complete water-rights and cadastral surveys for four hundreds.”

“You hold three pounds of rot and some dried grass,” Kellan said. He didn’t lift the knife. “Where are the boundary marks for the deep seam? The old ironwood groves behind the ridge.”

“I am an archivist of the Third Chair! I do not surrender territorial draftings to stray trench-grubs who carry bone-knives!”

Kellan turned his wrist. The point of the knife dug into the outer layer of bone, raising a tiny white curl of skull-shaving. “Gorr. Turn the pot.”

The flesh-golem reached down with its thick, dead hand, caught the rim of the blue urn, and tipped it fifteen degrees into the mud. Wet chalk-water began to trickle over the lip, splashing against Sarix’s cheekbone.

“Stop! Stop, you illiterate swine!” the skull shrieked, its jaw snapping frantically to keep the muddy water out of its mouth cavity. “The third drawer! The hidden niche in the western survey ledger! Three fingers below the iron benchmark at the quarry post! The scroll is wrapped in calf-waxed linen!”

“Better,” Kellan said. He tapped the construct’s shoulder. Gorr set the pot right-side up again with a dull thump.

Before Kellan could reach into the dark mouth of the cleft to search for the hidden niche, a wet thwack cut through the noise of the drizzle.

Something hit the oak timber three inches from Kellan’s ear.

A shaft. Four fingers long, tipped with a sharpened marrow-spike and fletched with grey crow-feather that had been greased against the damp. The wood of the arrow was dark, heavy ironwood, thin as a reed.

Gorr grunted—a short, mechanical puff of air through his iron throat-valve—and pivoted his four legs in the mud, bringing his heavy horse-stern around to shield Kellan’s flank.

Above them, fifty feet up on the jagged limestone lip of the quarry, a shape moved against the grey sky.

It was lean as an ash pole, draped in stiff, salt-stained sackcloth smeared with thick coats of white beeswax to match the chalk cliff. It had no flesh on its shins—just pale, peeled bone bound with oiled sinew to keep the joints from pulling drafty in the high wind. Its arms were long, double-jointed at the elbow by some old, crude necromancer’s splice, and it held a heavy recurve bow made of split horn and iron wire.

“Arc-scout,” Kellan grunted, staying low behind Gorr’s horse-hip. “Feral.”

“That is Yvaine,” Sarix’s skull clicked from inside the pot, his voice suddenly full of spiteful cheer. “She has been up on that ledge since the second year of the salt-plague. She shoots anything that doesn’t carry the Arch-Deacon’s signet. Shoot him in the bladder, girl! He threatened my vessel!”

“Quiet, pot-head,” Kellan snapped.

The bowstring above went twang—a wet, dull thrumming sound like a broken fiddle string.

The second shaft glanced off Gorr’s iron-shod knee-joint with a shower of sparks and a sharp ping. The construct didn’t flinch. His dead blacksmith chest swelled as the bellows in his gut took air, and he let out a low, vibrating roar through his throat-grate that set the slurry puddles rippling.

“She’s low on fat,” Kellan noted, peering between Gorr’s hind legs. “Look at the joints. The sinew’s dry. She’s moving stiff on the left turn.”

The archer on the cliff rim didn’t drop down. She reached behind her back, pulling another reed-thin arrow from a pouch made of cured sheep-stomach. But as she drew the iron-bound bow to her cheekbone, her left tarsal joint caught in a tangle of wet briars growing out of the limestone crack.

The bone popped—a dry crack that carried down the cliff face.

She didn’t scream—she had no lungs to force air through a throat-pipe—but her draw faltered. The arrow flew wild, burying itself deep in the chalk mud ten yards to the left.

“Gorr,” Kellan said softly, pulling two lengths of heavy hemp rope from his belt. “Take the legs. Don’t crack her ribs—I need the arm-reach.”

The flesh-golem lunged forward. Despite his heavy, awkward build, the horse-legs gave him terrifying traction in the thick limestone powder-slurry. He didn’t climb; he slammed his three-hundred-pound frame directly into the base of the crumbling chalk face. The wall shivered. An avalanche of loose limestone gravel and wet turf slid down, taking the skeletal archer with it in a cloud of white dust and broken scrub.

She hit the ground lightly, rolling like a bundle of dry sticks, her sackcloth cloak flapping. Before she could reset her horn bow, Gorr’s broad hand came down like a butcher’s cleaver, pinning her spine to the wet ground.

The skeleton thrashed. Her feet—peeled bone tied with yellowed catgut—kicked against Gorr’s ribs, making dull thunking sounds against the dead smith’s leathery skin. Her jaw was pinned shut by a strip of hardened wax, but her sockets burned with two pinpricks of cold, greenish phosphorescence deep in the bone.

Kellan walked over, his boots sucking in the mud. He looked down at her.

“Old parish pattern,” Kellan said, kneeling beside her. He used the flat of his knife to turn her skull. “Look at the turn on the atlas vertebra. That’s bailiff’s work. They stripped her meat with lye before they strung her up, didn’t they?”

“She was an archer out of the south marches,” Sarix offered from his jar, his voice sounding slightly smaller now that the construct was standing over him again. “She died of the lung-rot in the winter of the great frost. The church steward had her wired so she wouldn’t rot in the watch-tower. She’s very stubborn. She shot three tax-collectors before the lime-kiln fell in.”

Kellan didn’t answer. He reached down and took the horn bow from her fingers. The wood was good—mountain ash backed with sinew and iron plates at the belly. He unstrung it with a smooth motion of his heel, throwing the bow into his pack.

Then he pulled his bone-knife and pressed the flat of the blade against her forehead, right between the eye-sockets.

“You’re missing three fingers on the draw hand,” Kellan told the twitching skeleton. “And your left hip-pin is loose. You stay here, you’ll be buried in chalk by the next thaw, and your bones will turn to soft lime in five years.”

The green light in her sockets flickered. She stopped kicking against Gorr’s chest, though her ribs still creaked under the construct’s palm.

“I have two miles of ditch to clear and five timber-rafts to haul down the channel,” Kellan said. “I need an eye on the high ridge who doesn’t sleep and doesn’t need pork fat.”

He dragged the point of his knife across her skull, carving a crude, jagged glyph into the frontal bone—the three-legged spade over an open iron ring. Bone dust flew off the blade, white and sour-smelling. He pressed his thumb firmly into the fresh cut into the groove until his skin bit into the fresh bone-scratch.

The skeleton gave one long, shuddering twitch. The green light in her eyes died down to a dull, steady glow, like rot-wood in a dark cellar.

“Get up,” Kellan said, stepping back.

Gorr lifted his hand. The skeletal archer didn’t attack. She sat up slowly, her bone joints clicking like dry dice in a cup. She looked down at her left ankle, where the old catgut binding had frayed to fluff, then looked at Kellan.

“Give her the grease-pot, Gorr,” Kellan said.

The construct reached into a leather pouch at his hip, pulled out a thumb-sized horn jar of grey fat mixed with graphite, and dropped it into the skeleton’s lap. She took it with her four-fingered hand, unstoppered it with her teeth, and immediately began smearing the tallow grease into her dried knee-hinges.

“Waste of grease,” Sarix grumbled from the blue urn. “That grease was meant for my lower hinge-pins. My jaw is so dry I can taste the lead seal.”

Kellan walked back to the urn, shoved his knife into his belt, and picked up the heavy earthenware pot by its handles. He settled it against his hip, the weight dragging his right shoulder down.

Inside, the scholar’s skull rattled against the clay walls with a dry clack-clack.

“Right then,” Kellan said, turning his face toward the grey valley floor where the dark line of the larch woods began. “Let’s see these maps, Sarix. And if you lie about the ironwood boundary, I’m dropping you down the old well behind the mill.”

“The Third Chair does not lie about boundaries,” the skull snapped, his lower jaw scraping against the cobalt glaze as Kellan stepped out into the rain. “Though you might find the ditch-line slightly altered. The parish bailiff moved the eastern markers forty rods to the left back in the year of the three moons… not that an unlettered ditch-digger would understand the geometry.”

Kellan didn’t bother answering. He pulled his hat low against the damp wind, his iron-shod boots sinking deep into the limestone silt as he led his small, dead line down out of the shadow of the quarry rim. Behind him, the arc-scout followed, her bare bone toes making no sound at all in the soft, white mud.