Gravediggers
Session: 2026-09-02
Three bodies at the well, and the closer they got the worse it read.
Two were Seawatch — armor on them, throats opened ear to ear. The third had old hands, a villager's hands, and no head. All three had their wrists bound. Someone had put out the torches around the well and left them standing where they'd burned down.
Victor crouched by the headless one and looked down the well anyway. "Your body has gone looking for your head," he said, "and it is not down there." Then, to Cain: "Do what you must for these fine fellows. I'm worried."
"Add them to the pile," Cain said.
Pedro had already started on the houses. Ship shacks, mostly — tools left out, the look of people who had walked away in a hurry and not come back for them.
Then Fabri, who had spent the fight holding the horses and holding his nerve, pointed at the long building down by the water. "Fellows. Fellows — I can hear something over there."
Cain grunted and walked toward it. The doors were lashed and boarded from the outside, the way you close a thing you want kept in. Victor called out a hello. Something called back through the wood. Help. Help.
Against the wall beside the door someone had stacked a bundle of torches and stood a barrel of pitch.
"I think the rat heathens meant to burn them," Cain said. He raised his voice for the boards. "Don't worry, townfolk. Kelemvor is here to liberate you."
It took a few hands to clear the doors. When they came open the smell came out first — fish, thick enough to lean against — and then the heat, and then the faces.
The whole village, near enough. Nightclothes, sweat running off them, some of them swaying where they stood. They had been shut in that heat long enough that a few had the look of people who'd been cooked and didn't know it yet.
Zephyr moved among them as they filed out, saying the soft things. "Today is not your judgement day," Cain told them, which was his version of the same.
Someone asked where the monsters had gone. Cain pointed at a dead one on the ground, said his more talkative friends would explain, and went off to find more work.
Vath built a small fire and set water over it. He filled a cup for Cain and one for himself, and the two of them sat back against the warehouse wall and let the younger ones do the asking for a while.
It wasn't laziness. He and Cain had done their share of this — the burying, the questioning, the standing around in a wrecked place working out what had come through it. There was a point where the most useful thing an old man could do was sit down and let someone with more road ahead of them carry the next part.
Victor asked an old fisherman what had happened. "That's what a hero would ask, isn't it," he added, mostly to himself.
Middle of the night, the old man said. A crash first — they'd thought it was fire. Then the monsters, herding everyone into the warehouse at knifepoint. Another villager had heard little but had seen some of them go north when it was done. The old man's name was Elias Trent.
The headless body at the well was the mayor. Harry. The two soldiers were Brandor and Jan; they'd served under a Seawatch captain named Finbar. Finbar Yorgsun. The name rang against something Vath had heard once in Land Ho and couldn't place. He didn't push it. He set it down where he kept the things he wasn't sure about.
They carried the mayor into the fish plant and covered him over.
Fabri had gone very still watching them do it. Then he crossed the yard fast. "Mirna. Mirna, my love — I've missed you."
The woman he went to did not soften. "Fabri?" She looked him over the way you look at a bill you weren't expecting. "What have you done now."
She was in plain village clothes, but the cloth was good and the seams were better — her own work, Vath guessed, and her hands when she moved them were a seamstress's hands, worn at the fingers. She had been telling Fabri, flatly, that he was not staying.
Vath stepped in beside Cain and touched two fingers to his arm. Guidance, passed along without a word.
Cain watched. Fabri's hand went to Mirna's and left something in it — a coin, platinum, no face stamped on either side. Cain carried three or four just like it in his own pocket, given to him in a Silverport alley by a man who'd called himself a priest of Kelemvor.
Mirna closed her fist around it. She sighed. And then she was telling Fabri that he could stay after all, and that he still snored like a man three times his size.
Cain watched her put the coin away somewhere it wouldn't be seen. "You saw that," he said to Vath. Not a question. "He paid her, and she changed her mind." A pause. Vath, "Do we tell the others?"
The coin went into the ledger Vath kept in his head — the one for things that weren't finished with them yet.
Before they moved on, he went and looked at Harry properly.
The belly wound had already turned; it reeked. Done with one of the serrated black daggers, he thought, from the shape of the tear. The neck was cleaner. One cut, heavy, and the bone under it crushed rather than parted. Something sharp and something with real weight behind it.
Zephyr read the ground around the soldiers. Both had been on their knees. Bound, put down, and the mayor's head taken away with whoever had done it.
"They don't keep a headsman here," Vath said. Nobody in a village this size did that particular work.
"An executioner's axe," Cain said, looking at the neck. "More reason to catch up with them."
They took a short rest against the wall. Cain used it to tell the rest of them about the coin — the one Fabri had passed, the ones in his own pocket, how they were the same coin. Mirna had gone from barring her door to Fabri to keeping him, in the time it took to close a hand. "Always thought the bugger was odd," Cain said.
Then north, after the rats. Six of them dead at the boats; ten or so still ahead, by the count.
Pedro didn't like the shape of it. A ballista, he wondered aloud — was that what had opened the cutter? Vath brought up the sorceress in the mine, the one who'd tried to end all of them with a ball of fire. Pedro dealt in fists and in things he could get his hands on. Siege engines and fire from the sky were not that.
"That's what friends are for," Cain told him.
Cain and Pedro found the trail before Vath did. Trees snapped clean at the trunk where the old man had pointed, and under them, in the soft ground, tracks.
"If it leaves tracks like a rat," Pedro said, "and knocks trees down like a rat, this is the right way."
Something in that group was big. Vath noted it and kept it to himself.
Cain thought Pantera might earn her keep here. Vath put out the call and she came, dropped her nose to the scent right away, and took her time with it — moving low, careful, making a show of the stealth with nobody but Vath to see it. They followed her the better part of an hour before the sound started: a thin, steady clinking. Picks. More than one, working against stone.
Vath and Pedro went ahead to look. Pedro lost track of him inside of ten feet, which Vath took as a good sign.
The trees opened on a clearing. A wide pit in the middle of it, with a fresh heap of dug earth beside it. A rat with a bow stood at the lip, looking down into the hole. Across from it a dragonborn worked a pick one-handed and held a coiled whip in the other, and kept leaning over the edge to say something down into the dark — low, quick, in a tongue Vath had never heard spoken.
Behind him, at a camp, a dwarf paced in armor made of plates that had never come off any animal Vath could name. Two axes on his belt. One looked like black glass. One looked like bone.
Two more rats were down in the pit, mud to the elbow, rags and shovels.
They're digging something out.
A branch cracked behind Vath — not an animal; he knew the difference in his sleep. The archer heard it too and started toward them. The dragonborn barked once and the archer turned around and went back to the pit.
Then the rest of the party was there. At his shoulder, all of them — Victor, Cain, Zephyr, Pedro — come all the way up the tree line behind him, and not one rat had turned a head.
Vath filed that away, careful, the way he'd filed the coin. They could move as one thing when they wanted to badly enough. There might be a way to make it hold longer — a little of his own craft laid over the top of it. Something to try, next time there was a next time.
Late afternoon, cold, the light going to amber. Victor said, quietly, that he could bring a storm down on them.
Vath hadn't known that anyone outside a circle could do that. He said as much.
"Convenient," Cain murmured, "when they dig their own graves."
The plan came together in a few sentences. Then Victor ran his hands down his woolen legs, made a small motion toward the sky, and the clouds came in fast and low and dropped a bolt of lightning into the clearing with a crack Vath felt in his back teeth.
He followed it with his the druidic-magic he knew; the ground between the trees and the pit went to thorn and wire; vines came up whipping around anything that stood in them.
"Rat gravediggers!" Cain shouted, delighted.
The dwarf broke for the tree line and the ground took large chunks off him for trying it. A rat hauled itself out of the pit on the same side, already half-wrecked. Vath threw a lick of flame at it, missed wide, and stepped out of the trees anyway.
Lightning came down again and a rat came apart under it. Victor moved up beside Vath and tried to use gusts of wind to blow two more advancing rats, but to no avail. Cain's spectral weapon caught one and folded it; his voice found another and it dropped. "Get in front, youngin's."
They came on regardless. Arrows found Cain. Zephyr shouldered up beside him, took two cuts giving as good, and put a shimmer of faith over himself. Pedro launched off his back foot — the wolf on his fist reaching ten feet past where his arm ended — missed with the first, and landed the second like a dropped anvil.
A rat swung a shovel at Zephyr two-handed and buried it in the dirt where he had been standing.
The storm was Victor's, but the thornground it fell on was Vath's, and standing in the middle of both he felt steadier than he had all day. He set his feet and looked for the next enemy.