"Grave robber!" the heiress shouted. "Come to the graveyard! Bring your shovel!"
The grave robber looked up from where she and the highwayman were lounging in the shade of one of the hamlet's wizened elm trees, talking and half-heartedly sharpening their knives. "Wha…"
"Now!" the heiress yelled. Her hair was escaping its pins and loose strands stirred in the breeze. Her wan face was flushed, and the light of either fever or madness glowed behind her sunken eyes. The grave robber shut her mouth and tucked her knives back into their sheaths, grabbing her shovel and running after the woman.
Dismas followed. What else was there to do?
The heiress fled through the hamlet's twisting streets like a woman possessed, slipping on the slick cobbles. She shoved the barkeep aside when he stepped in front of her and dashed through a mud puddle without seeming to notice the filth that splattered over her skirt and stockings. She shrieked when the grave robber's hat blew off her head and the woman stopped and turned back to pick it up, a wordless cry of rage and horrific impatience, and the grave robber had no choice but to jerk back around and continue after her. Dismas stooped and grabbed it in passing.
"Here," the heiress said, running through the graveyard's open gate and pointing at one plot. "Dig here. Dig, for the Light's sake, before it's too late."
The grave robber, caught in the heiress' net of feverish desperation, obeyed and wordlessly began shoveling. The heiress fell to her knees and began scratching at the raw earth with her hands, flinging fistfuls of it behind her like a dog. Dismas entered the graveyard, panting and carrying the grave robber's hat.
"That… that's Reynauld's spot," he said.
"We have to get him out!" the heiress said. She stumbled to her feet and lunged past the highwayman, towards the caretaker who had arrived carrying another shovel. She wrenched it from his grasp and fell in beside the grave robber, digging frantically.
"Help us," she said, stopping only long enough to turn and look at Dismas and the caretaker. More of her hairpins had come loose; locks of hair hung around and in front of her sweating face, and in her stained clothes she looked utterly deranged. "He'll suffocate if we don't get him out!"
"He's dead."
"No! The ancestor told me he's alive! He's alive and we have to get him out!"
Dismas pulled off his overcoat and grabbed the shovel from her, digging with an unmatchable fury. Slowly, far too slowly, the dirt was pulled away, and a simple pinewood coffin incised with a cross was revealed. The lid had been nailed shut.
"Out of the way," the grave robber said. She pulled her pickaxe from her belt and started hammering at the lid. The wood began to splinter beneath the repeated blows. The heiress paced like a caged lion. Dismas held his breath. The grave robber's pick punctured the lid, and she began to lever it back and forth to enlarge the hole.
Something shifted inside the coffin, and then a gauntleted fist punched through the wood, lifting the grave robber's pick with it.
"Reynauld!" Dismas called. The heiress started to sob with relief. Dismas didn't join her, but a huge smile broke across his face.
There was no answer from within the coffin.
The grave robber abandoned the hole she had made, which was now much bigger, and began working at the places around it. Slowly, it widened, until there was an opening large enough for the crusader to climb out of.
Dismas' heartbeat seemed to stutter in his chest at the sight of the man, and all the air squeezed out of his lungs. The crusader's armor was dented and scratched, and the highwayman could see the crushed portion of the cuirass where the steel had ultimately failed its wearer beneath a mace's blow. Reynauld had died leaning on Dismas, choking on his own blood as his broken ribs ripped his lung open further and further, and Dismas had felt the moment that the crusader's heart stopped and he slowly toppled into the dirt—and yet here Reynauld was, climbing out of his own grave without any sign of hindrance or pain.
"Reynauld!" Dismas called again.
The crusader turned towards him, but said nothing. Dismas waited, feeling apprehension creep in the seconds passed. His smile faded.
"What's wrong, Reynauld?"
The crusader stood at the edge of the grave, unmoving and silent as a statue. Dismas looked at the heiress.
The woman shook her head in response to the highwayman's wordless question. "I… I don't know," she said. "The ancestor told me I could get one of them back, but he didn't—"
"One of them?" the grave robber demanded. "What do you mean, 'one of them'?"
The heiress recoiled at the look on the robber's face but didn't lose her nerve. "He said—he told me three were alive under the earth, but I would only have enough time to save one of them. The rest are dead by now, suffocated."
"What about Paracelsus?"
The heiress' face showed only blank incomprehension.
"The plague doctor. Paracelsus," the grave robber growled. "Why the crusader? Why not her?"
"We—a plague doctor of similar skill arrived on the stage coach only two weeks ago, and she has all the same abilities—"
"She isn't Paracelsus! Nobody that arrives on the coach will be Paracelsus! What are we to you? Servants? Chess pieces? Toys that can be broken and cast aside as you scavenge a dead man's secrets?" She began advancing towards the heiress. "We are people. We have names. We bleed, we suffer, we—"
The crusader drew his sword and leveled it in front of the grave robber, both warning her and barring her way. The robber stared down at the blade for a moment, then looked back up at the heiress. Her eyes blazed with fury and grief and unshed tears. "We love," she said, voice cracking.
"There was only enough time to save one—barely enough time to save one," the heiress said quickly. "Can't you understand? I had to choose."
"You chose wrong, you cunt."
The grave robber stormed away with her fists clenched, snatching up her hat and jamming it onto her head as she left. Dismas watched her go, then turned back to Reynauld as the crusader started to sheath his sword. All of a sudden, though, he let go of the handle and let it fall to the ground, then began clawing at the chinstrap of his helmet. He wrenched it off his head and threw it to the side, and Dismas was relieved to see that his face was normal: the skin was a tad pale but un-decayed and otherwise healthy, and his eyes were their usual brown color.
The crusader fell to his knees and started to vomit.
Dark brown slime streamed from his open mouth, and the stench of rot was strong enough that Dismas could feel his gorge rising in sympathy. He swallowed hard several times, forcing it back down, and then swallowed again when he saw that the pile of vomit was writhing with fat white maggots.
At the heiress' gesture the caretaker went and fetched a bucket of water from the hamlet's well, and Reynauld rinsed out his mouth once he had finished emptying his stomach. Dismas watched him carefully, and saw that his movements were natural: coordinated, certain, without the sort of hesitation that might suggest he no longer understood how to interact with his surroundings.
"Reynauld?" he tried again, in a small, vain hope. Perhaps now that… that carrion was gone from inside him he would be able to talk.
But the crusader ignored him, and turned away to put his helmet back on and sheathe his sword. Dismas watched his armor glint in the weakening autumn sunshine and felt a deep, wrenching ache in his chest that threatened to rise up in his throat and choke him.
"Can you speak, crusader?" the heiress demanded.
Reynauld turned towards her. He stood with feet planted shoulder-width apart and one hand on the hilt of his sword, looking strong and confident—but also remaining silent.
The heiress waited, staring into the holes of his visor, then sighed and looked away. She wiped at a smear of dirt along her cheekbone and patted at her hair in a useless attempt to neaten it.
"Very well," she said. "Go with the highwayman to the sanitarium. And you," she said, looking at Dismas, "Have the sisters look him over for anything… odd."
The highwayman shrugged, picking up his overcoat and pulling it on. "Fine," he said, deliberately not looking at her as he spoke. She doesn't know our names either, even though we've been with her from the beginning.
When Dismas looked up again, however, he saw the heiress accepting the mantle that the caretaker held out for her, her thin, pale hands shaking as they tied the red cord at her throat. It didn't look as though she had heard the highwayman's acknowledgement; her sunken, feverish eyes had become distant, her focus returned to whatever Hell the ancestor was whispering to her from.
And then she looked at him, those eyes momentarily sharpening to the world around her and catching hold of his, and Dismas saw something in their depths. He was too much a veteran to flinch or recoil, but his fingers made an involuntary twitch towards the hilt of his dirk.
Reynauld's gauntlet clamped down on his forearm, his grip like an iron vise.
"Hey, c'mon—relax," Dismas said, frowning and looking up at the crusader's visor. "You know I'd never stab her."
But Reynauld didn't release him until the highwayman's hand eased away from the dirk, and by then the heiress and the caretaker were sweeping out of the graveyard. Dismas grimaced at Reynauld and rubbed his forearm, but the crusader didn't rise to the bait, scoff, and make a dry remark about Dismas apparently feeling too delicate to go on the next mission. He merely stood there, silent and unmoving. The highwayman swallowed a sigh.
"Well, let's go," he said. "Time for you to get poked and prodded by nuns."