Language warning: Serious swearing starts this chapter.
Gerdur was surprised to see her again, but happy that her appeal to Jarl Balgruuf had been successful. The detachment from Whiterun had arrived a day ahead of Ethne, and the townsfolk felt more at ease.
Most of them, anyway. The guards hadn't been there in time to stop bandits from robbing the Riverwood Trader of an invaluable gold ornament, as Ethne learned when she stopped in to resupply herself with fresh food. Just her luck, they were most likely holed up at Bleak Falls Barrow.
Bandits didn't scare her, though. She got some helpful directions from the shopkeeper's sister, who probably would have gone with her if both Ethne and the woman's brother hadn't been against it, and went on her way.
Bleak Falls Barrow had been impressive from a distance, the high, pointed arches of its portico dominating the face of the mountain on which it was built. Up close, the sense of weight supported by those ancient stones made Ethne's breath catch in her throat. The carved guardians perched atop the arches might have been dragons, or eagles, or some beast she had never even heard of; they were pitted and worn down by the elements, yet they still watched the approaches to the tomb with stern, reproachful eyes, warning all who would enter to be wary.
They had not succeeded in keeping the bandits away. Ethne had marked their tracks as she came up the path. She was no tracker, but the disturbance to the ground was obvious. There were several of them, she guessed, not at all bothering to conceal their passage. They must have thought no one would follow them up here, and they would have been right if her mission from Farengar had taken her anywhere else. She didn't relish a confrontation, but one way or another, she would have to get past them.
It had taken her most of the day to climb up to the barrow from Riverwood, and the sun setting behind the mountain cast the portico in shadow. It was a blessing: her approach up the broad north stair was hidden, and the bandits on guard lit torches, telling her exactly where they were. There were two at the doors to the interior, and one, armed with a bow, on a short promontory jutting out to the east. The latter would be the first to see her if he happened to look in the right direction.
She decided to save him the trouble. "Hey! You there!"
The bandit spun around, swinging his torch wildly in his surprise. "What? Who's there?"
Ethne reached the top of the stair and raised her arms to show she wasn't holding her weapon. "I don't want trouble. Let's talk."
"Are you crazy?" The bandit got off the promontory and came toward her, dropping his torch to free up his hands. "Get out of here! This is no place for a lost little girl!"
"I'm not lost," Ethne said, choosing not to dignify the rest with a response. Slowly and deliberately, she dropped her pack and loosened her axe to show she meant business. "I'm here to enter the barrow and reclaim what your lot stole from the Riverwood Trader, and I'd rather not have to kill you all to do it. Are you here for yourselves, or someone else? Is it worth your arm, or your head?"
She hoped they, like most bandits, would be self-centered enough not to want to risk their skins for the dubious chance of profiting off any one job. Unfortunately, she didn't cut a very impressive figure in her battered second-hand armor, and they didn't take her seriously. The first man laughed at her, and she could hear the other two joining in from the landing above.
"Tell you what," said the first man. "I'm gonna give you one last chance to turn around and walk away from here, and since I'm feeling gentleman-like, I'll even promise not to shoot you in the back. How's that for fair?"
Ethne sighed. "Damn it. I tried."
She drew her axe and charged with a yell. The man was startled, and he couldn't draw his bow or drop it for another weapon fast enough. He tried to block her swing, but the axe chopped right through the simple wood staff and bit down through his leather armor into his shoulder. Ethne felt the impact of the old iron blade with his collarbone. He screamed in rage and swung at her with his other arm, but his fist was nothing to the steel of her cuirass. She ripped the axe out of his shoulder and hewed at his neck. The blade wasn't good enough to go all the way through, but she hit the major blood vessels and windpipe. His cries were cut off, and he dropped, gurgling, to the ground.
Ethne whirled around. The other two bandits had come running when she attacked, and now they leaped down the stairs to her level, swords drawn.
"Damn it," Ethne said again. In a glance, she picked her first opponent: a younger-looking man in wholly inadequate armor that left his torso mostly bare but for a single spauldron above his sword-arm and a round plate over his heart.
She looked him in the eyes and rushed him. He had probably never been in a real fight in his life, and he came to a staggering halt, sword forgotten at his side. Ethne turned sideways and slammed her elbow into the soft spot below his sternum, knocking him down to the stairs. He lay there wheezing, his wind knocked out.
"Stay down!" she barked, and turned to meet his partner.
This one was a Bosmer woman with the wild look of someone willing to kill. Ethne had to raise her axe quickly to stop the elf's sword, and she grunted at the shock down her arms.
"You never should have come here," the elf snarled. She jogged back and swung again fast; the blade clanged against Ethne's breastplate.
Ethne dodged the next slash and feinted right, then drove left at the bandit's off-side. The elf belatedly turned her sword to block, but her grip was awkward and weak. Ethne brought her axe down hard, low on the blade, and knocked it out of her hand. The elf was quick, and she managed to whirl away from Ethne's next blow, taking only a glancing cut to her arm, but she was finished and she knew it.
"Enough! I surrender!" she cried, hands raised to protect her head.
Ethne watched her warily. "You'll take the boy and leave?"
The elf glared at her with nothing but hate. "Yes!" she spat. "Spare us and you'll never see us again."
"Fine." Ethne marginally lowered her axe.
The elf watched her a moment more, then slunk off to pick up the young man. She had one last remark for her enemy: "I hope the skeevers feast on your entrails."
"Worse than skeevers have tried," Ethne replied, annoyed. "And thanks for the warning!"
She watched the two bandits limp away down the north stair. Once they were well out of sight, she picked up her pack and made her way up to the entrance of the barrow. The ancient ebony doors were wrought with images of dragons and every spare inch was decorated with spirals and crosshatching. They were huge, imposing, and heavy, but still moved with relative ease, and she was able to slip inside with a minimum of noise.
The interior was not as stuffy as she expected an old tomb to be. Light and air penetrated the gloom through large openings in the ceiling. Some were the result of structural collapse, and their stones lay in piles tumbled across the floor, but some were apparently by design: pillars rose through them to support the largest of the arches she had seen from the outside. Moss grew along cracks in the stone floor where rain would gather.
She could smell smoke and hear voices, faint and echoing from the other end of the long chamber. Hoping to get the drop on them, she moved as quietly as she could through the hall, keeping a central pillar between her and them. The Bosmer hadn't been kidding about the skeevers: Ethne almost gave herself away when she stumbled over one, dead, along with several others and two unlucky bandits who had been bitten fatally in the neck and groin. These people really had no idea what they were doing.
Creeping closer, she made out a Nord man's voice: "The dark elf wants to go on ahead, let him. Better than us risking our necks."
A woman answered: "What if Arvel doesn't come back? I want my share from that claw!"
"Just shut it and keep an eye out for trouble."
Good advice, Ethne thought, but too late. "Trouble's already here," she said, stepping out from behind the pillar and into the circle of their firelight.
"What the—?"
Two men and a woman scrambled to their feet and reached for their weapons. Ethne cursed to herself; she'd only heard two.
"Your friends outside are dead or fled," she told them. "Which will it be for you?"
"Oh no, you're not taking our treasure!" the woman cried. "Kill her!"
She attacked, but her weapon was only a dagger. Ethne side-stepped her lunge and bashed her over the head with the side of her axe. She dropped and stayed down.
The bigger of the two men charged next. He wielded a warhammer, and he was clearly strong enough to do some serious damage with it, but he was slow: all bulk, no finesse. Ethne dodged his first two swings, taking the measure of him, and then rushed under his guard and hacked into his knee. He fell with a cry of agony, clutching the wound, and Ethne finished him off.
The third bandit was smarter. Once he saw how the fight was going, he turned and ran off down a tunnel leading deeper into the barrow. Ethne swore and chased after him. The bastard was quick, and the tunnel was poorly lit with dying braziers. She could have turned an ankle on a loose stone or uneven step at any moment, but she couldn't let him escape to warn Arvel, whoever he was. She pushed herself, and she almost caught up to him when he reached a chamber whose exit was barred by an iron gate. He pulled a lever in the middle of the floor—and shuddered, struck by a barrage of arrows fired by hidden mechanisms in the walls. He fell dead.
Ethne skidded to a halt and stood panting, looking around the room for a clue to understanding what had just happened. The bandit had expected the lever to open the gate, but it was trapped. What went wrong?
To the left were three alcoves set into the wall, each containing a pillar depicting a stylized animal figure. Above the gate were similar figures, set into the open mouths of graven stone heads. There should have been three, but the middle head had fallen to the ground, and someone had rolled it over, away from the gate, until its face was upright. It held the figure of a snake. The other two, left and right respectively, were a snake and a whale.
Three pillars, three heads. Surely it couldn't be that simple?
There was nothing for it but to give it a try. Ethne found that the pillars rotated easily, and she turned them until they matched the heads: snake, snake, whale.
She approached the lever cautiously. Every instinct was screaming at her that it couldn't be this easy, she was going to be shot to death if she pulled that thing, but try as she might, she could come up with no other solution. She took a deep breath, pulled as quickly as she could, and leaped back over the body of the dead bandit, throwing her arms over her head.
After a few moments, she had to admit she wasn't dead. There had been noise, but no arrows pierced her. She lowered her arms and found the gate standing open, her way forward clear.
"Huh!" she said aloud. "Rough luck, mate," she added to the bandit. "You should've run the other way." She went through his pockets and turned up a handful of coins, which she would spend on the honest businesses of Skyrim and thus redeem the distasteful act.
Ethne found a corresponding lever on the other side of the gate, and she got to thinking about how it had come to be locked. This Arvel character, perhaps, really didn't intend to share with his fellows, and didn't mind if he got them killed. She disliked him already. Even bandit scum weren't usually that scummy to their partners.
Going on, she descended a spiral staircase with more dead skeevers at the bottom. The light was even worse in this lower level. Ethne lit a torch from one of the failing braziers, and even so, she found herself running afoul of thick cobwebs that clung to her face and hands. This was bad. Whatever made these had made them recently, and Ethne was almost certain to meet it. Though she searched carefully for an alternative path, she found only dead ends, and had to backtrack to an intersecting hallway filled with webbing that could only be parted by the blade of her axe.
While slicing her way through, she stumbled over an old, empty urn and cursed the sudden noise.
From the depths beyond came a voice: "Is . . . is someone coming? Is that you, Harknir? Bjorn? Soling? I know I ran ahead with the claw, but I need help!"
That must be Arvel. What slime, to abandon his friends behind a trapped gate and yet still try to sponge off their loyalty in a pinch. Ethne was glad he was in trouble; it would make getting the claw off him much easier.
She cut through a final layer of webbing and emerged into a large chamber with a grate in the floor. The whole room was lined with webs, and silk sacs hung suspended from the ceiling. Most were small, skeever-sized, but one or two were larger. Ethne didn't like to think about those.
"Hey! Over here!" Arvel called. "Get me out of here!"
It took a moment to spot him: he was trussed up in the only other exit from the chamber, on the opposite side from Ethne, and her torchlight barely reached that far.
She started toward him, and he screamed.
"Ah, kill it! Kill it!"
An absolutely enormous spider dropped from a hole in the ceiling, almost on top of Ethne, and she screamed, too. The thing lashed out at her with its forelegs, trying to trip her, and she leaped away in a shambles, barely keeping her feet. She scrambled pell-mell back through the door, barely avoiding a stream of venom spat from the spider's fangs. Its clawed feet scratched at her through the doorway, but its body was too large to fit through.
Ethne stood panting behind the wall on the other side. Her mind raced. She'd seen giant spiders before, they were ubiquitous in the dark, forgotten places of Tamriel, but this was a particularly beastly specimen, with a corpse-white body, huge spiny mandibles, and black, dripping fangs. This thing must have engorged itself on the vital fluids of the unfortunate victims in the sacs, and Arvel was still alive because he was being saved up for later. Even a rat like him didn't deserve agony like that.
She came back swinging and smashed her axe into the spider's face, if it could be said to have one. One of its eyes was crushed and oozed a sickly greenish fluid. The creature hissed in pain and withdrew from the doorway.
Ethne followed, but she didn't go far from the door. "Come on, ugly, come and get a piece of me!"
The spider hesitated to chase her—it had a full belly, and this prey had already cost it an eye. Ethne dared to get close enough to strike at one of its legs and danced back, out of range. That did the trick. Ethne was an annoyance, and she would die for it if the spider had its way. She retreated back through the door, and the spider pursued, thrusting its legs through after her, trying to snare her with its claws. Ethne hacked one off, then another. The creature withdrew again, hissing and clacking its mandibles in fury.
Ethne followed. With two of the beast's main weapons disabled, she felt confident enough to take it head-on. All she had to do was avoid its venomous fangs. With Arvel shrieking at her to keep it away from him, kill it, save him, she ran circles around it, randomly switching directions to confuse it, and at every opportunity she cut into its swollen abdomen.
Its hide was old and tough, and didn't easily part. Ethne felt herself losing strength. It was late, she had spent all day climbing and the last hour fighting and running, she had recently been a prisoner, and she was not used to this anymore.
She tripped on the grating in the floor, and thought it was all over. The spider leaped on her, fangs raised to pierce her. At the last second, she unfroze, tossed her torch aside, and rolled under it. Its fangs snagged on the iron bars of the grate. Ethne looked up and saw its belly above her. She struck, struck, and struck again, and finally a tear opened its innermost membrane, spilling its guts. Ethne was coated in gunk. Gagging on the stench, she crawled away. The spider shuddered and collapsed.
"Is it over?" Arvel called. "Is it dead?"
Ethne cautiously picked up her torch and went for a closer look. The thing didn't even twitch when she put the fire up to its eyes. "It's dead," she answered.
The bandit was overjoyed. "You did it! You killed it! Now cut me down, before anything else shows up!"
"First things first." Ethne approached him. He was well-muscled for an elf, with a typically long, narrow face, and he'd affected a pointy mustache that made him look like the rat she already thought he was. "The claw," she demanded.
He nodded, constrained though he was by his silken prison. "Yes, the claw. I know how it works. The claw, the markings, the door in the Hall of Stories. I know how they all fit together!"
Ethne had no idea what he was talking about. "Is that why you stole it? Some ancient puzzle?"
More nodding. "Help me down, and I'll show you. You won't believe the power the Nords have hidden there."
Power? That was a new one. Most lower-order dungeon delvers were after gold and jewels, like Arvel's friend Soling.
"Here's the problem," Ethne said. "I don't trust you. I noticed you ditched your friends and reset that trapped gate behind you. One of them died to that. Why shouldn't I just kill you now and take the claw off your corpse?"
"Oh, but you have to help me!" he cried, struggling ineffectively against the web. "You'll never get through the tomb on your own, and you don't know the secret of the door. You need me!"
"I've made it this far," she argued, but unfortunately, he had a point. She was tired, and she didn't know how much farther she had to go or what dangers she might have to face on the way. Even an untrustworthy ally might be better than none. She sighed. "All right, look. I'm here for the claw and some old artifact which I'm sure is of no interest to anyone but a scholar. You help me and let me have what I'm after, and you can keep any other valuables we find. That's the deal. Got it?"
"Yes, of course, my friend. Very fair. Now please, get me out of this!"
Ethne couldn't help but notice that he looked anywhere except her eyes when he talked. She considered "accidentally" chopping off one of his hands as she began cutting through the web—she was pretty sure that was still the punishment for thieving in some places; it would be fitting—but that would rather defeat the purpose of keeping him around at all.
"It's coming loose, I can feel it," Arvel said. She sliced through a thick tangle of webbing, and his weight did the rest. He dropped to his feet, a little unsteady at first, but he quickly regained his balance and tore away tufts of silk still clinging to his body. "Sweet breath of Arkay, thank you."
"Save it," Ethne snapped. "You can show me how grateful you are by not fucking with me. Do you have a torch?"
"I did, until . . . " He looked around the room and spotted it. "Ah, there!"
She re-lit it for him, and he beckoned her to follow him through the passage that had lately had him as its door. She was happy enough to let him go first, so she could keep an eye on him.
They passed through an odd chamber containing some sort of altar on which sat several urns. Arvel didn't hesitate to rummage through these for loot, and as far as Ethne was concerned, he was welcome to it. She was unnerved by the combination of soul gem sconces beside the altar and spiraling grooves carved into the floor, leading from the altar to grates in the wall, which surely could not have been used for anything wholesome. She wasn't interested in touching any of it.
Beyond the chamber was a hallway lined with niches where the remains of ancient Nords lay. Some were wrapped from head to toe in yellowed linen; others had rotted away to skeletons. Some, however, were in remarkably good shape for corpses, the techniques of their embalmers aided, perhaps, by the cold, dry air down here. The years had taken their toll nonetheless. Their skins had withered to gray leather that cleaved to their bones, leaving dark hollows where their organs had been removed and their flesh had desiccated. Some were fully armed and armored, some had only tattered rags to cover them, some had nothing at all. All were eyeless and noseless, and they stank faintly of decay and whatever alchemical concoction had been used to slow it.
"Draugr," Arvel whispered. "They wake up sometimes. We wouldn't want that."
The hair on the back of Ethne's neck stood up. "No."
They crept through the hallway as quietly as they could, and nothing stirred.
Not until they reached the next large, pillared chamber. As their torches flickered across the niches, cold, blue pinpricks of light flared in the eyes of some of the corpses. They growled. They moved.
And that was when Arvel chose to break faith with her. Barely ten minutes had passed.
"Sorry, 'friend', but I have a treasure to get to." He took off running across the chamber. "I'm too swift for you!"
He might have meant the last remark for Ethne or the draugr, or both; it didn't matter. He was gone, and one of the undead was already on its feet and lurching toward her with a greatsword raised to strike.
"Shit!" Ethne raised her axe to parry. "Arvel, you prick, I saved your life!" She turned the sword aside and slid away from her attacker.
There was a clang and scream in the darkness, but Ethne had no time to take notice. There was another draugr coming up on her right with a cruel-looking war axe. This one was slower than the first, though. Ethne hacked its weapon-arm off at the elbow. Then the first one was on her left again, and without thinking, she lunged at its face with her torch.
This turned out to be shockingly effective. The draugr's head lit up like a match, and the rest of it followed. It snarled in rage and swung its sword at her, striking her cuirass across the ribs, but then it staggered and fell, crumbling to stinking ash.
The second draugr grabbed her shoulder with its remaining hand, grunting in some guttural language that Ethne didn't understand, but that froze her blood regardless. She wrenched away from it and stuck her torch into its hollow abdomen, and it, too, blazed up.
Ethne choked and wretched on the chemical fumes, but through her discomfort was a way forward. More draugr attacked her, some quite fiercely. She blocked their weapons with her axe or let them strike her cuirass, just so long as she got close enough to set them on fire. The flames consumed them one by one. Finally, only Ethne remained standing, winded, but remarkably unharmed.
The chamber had filled with smoke, and she hurried through it; but when the next passage came in view, she remembered Arvel and the scream she had heard when the fight began. What had happened to him?
She discovered his body crumpled in a pool of blood against the left-hand wall, pierced with many wounds. A little further searching revealed the mechanism of his undoing: another trap, this time a trick stone in the floor that triggered a spiked wall. Arvel the Swift had been in too much of a hurry to see it. The gods had a morbid sense of humor.
Gingerly, trying to avoid getting his blood on her hands, she detached a large pouch from his belt and checked inside. There was the golden claw, gleaming in the torchlight. To her surprise, she also found a small journal, the pages simply stitched to the inside of a leather cover. The most recent entry proved interesting:
My fingers are trembling. The Golden Claw is finally in my hands, and with it, the power of the ancient Nordic heroes. That fool Lucan Valerius had no idea that his favorite store decoration was actually the key to Bleak Falls Barrow.
Now I just need to get to the Hall of Stories and unlock the door. The legend says there is a test that the Nords put in place to keep the unworthy away, but that "When you have the golden claw, the solution is in the palm of your hands."
So he had been telling the truth about that, or at least what he believed to be the truth. She put the book back and decided to have a look at this claw. It was gold, all right: heavy for its size, battered, but completely untarnished, despite being as old as this barrow. On its palm were set three discs bearing more animal signs: bear, moth, and owl. No doubt the solution to another puzzle like the one in the lever room.
Intrigued, she belted the pouch to her own waist and set off again, keeping an eye out for more traps or draugr.
She found both: first three draugr, quickly dispatched with fire as soon as she saw them stirring, then a nasty swinging blade trap that gave her serious pause. How in Oblivion had a thing like this not rusted up centuries ago? Magic? She'd never heard of a spell that could eternally lubricate a metal joint, but then, she'd never heard of lots of things.
It took several minutes of watching the blades, counting the seconds between each swing, before she worked up the nerve to make a dash for the other side. She barely made it. The last blade clipped her back as she passed and sent her spinning to the ground. Her cuirass protected her, but she almost lost her torch as she flung out her left arm to catch herself. Mercifully, it stayed lit—and showed her the pull-chain to shut down the blades. Great. Why couldn't there have been one of those on the other side?
She shut it off anyway, just in case she had to come back this way later, and pressed on through a series of winding tunnels. More draugr awakened at her approach, stepping down from alcoves where they had stood upright, as though on guard. These, too, fell to her axe and flames, but the first one nearly took her down with them when his burning body collapsed into an oil slick on the floor. A fresh oil slick, and how, how was that possible? The sudden explosion of heat was intense enough to take her breath away, and her legs were burned through her simple cotton trousers. Her first healing potion went toward recovering from that ordeal. She hoped she wouldn't need the second one, but she was no longer certain of anything.
On top of bizarrely well maintained traps and eerily talkative undead monsters, she couldn't make out any sort of order to the architecture of this place. It seemed like the builders had just dug in whatever direction they felt like, with no plan other than onward and downward, as they needed more spaces for bodies. Her impression of aimlessness was compounded when she ran into a cave-in and found that her only way forward was through a metal gate that allowed an underground stream to pass through it. It opened by a pull-chain, allowing her to pass through, too. She followed the stream through a natural cavern, and where the stream tumbled over a ledge too high to jump down, she saw a bridge over the course of the water below, guarded by a draugr. That meant this place was connected to the barrow, and that meant someone had designed it this way deliberately, for reasons completely ineffable to Ethne. The ancient Nords were a very strange folk.
She found her way down to the bridge easily enough and got a very welcome breath of fresh air. The bridge was at the bottom of a deep crevasse, open to the night sky. It was cloudy, and a gentle rain drizzled down. This draugr wouldn't catch fire so easily, so she goaded him into charging at her. When he got close enough, she lowered her shoulder, rammed into him, and knocked him into the rushing water below. Problem solved.
There was a ramp leading down to the bottom of the crevasse, but Ethne did not have the energy for any diversions. She kept on straight through the next more-or-less natural passage, which finally led her back to the now-familiar curved stone tunnels of the ancient Nordic tomb. Beyond a large antechamber and a pair of iron-enforced wooden doors, she found a grander, more important-looking section of the barrow, and this was already lit. Her first sight was an enormous brazier set about with what she was now sure were stylized dragon heads, and past it, candles and smaller braziers burned on stands along the walls.
She had to get past another fucking blade trap, and this time, having learned from the first, she took it slowly, darting past each razor-sharp pendulum in turn. In this way, she got through unscathed, only to find herself in a lantern-lit room crawling with draugr that seemed to have been awake even before she got there. The impossible thought struck her that they must be the ones maintaining the traps, lighting the candles—and spilling lamp oil.
This time she saw it before she stepped in it, and it was a good thing, too. The draugr down here were livelier than any she'd encountered before, and looked like they meant to give her a mean fight. As they ran toward her, she crouched, touched her torch to the floor, and leaped back, throwing a protective arm across her eyes as it blazed up. The conflagration was short-lived, but it was enough to destroy the first wave of draugr, and she did for the rest herself, though not without taking a serious beating from one who had the sense to get behind her and hit her with a warhammer. That put a dent the size of a man's fist in her backplate, knocking Ethne to her knees and the wind from her lungs. Even as she coughed and gasped to get her breath back, she flung herself at the draugr and fired him up before he could cave in her skull. He was the last.
Really the last. The upper level of the chamber was clear, since everyone up there had come running down to confront her. Across a suspended walkway over the chamber floor, through a small room and past another set of doors, and she found herself in a long, low vault, lit with braziers, that she knew immediately must be the Hall of Stories.
Between the ribs of the vault were carved stone reliefs depicting what Ethne assumed were religious scenes. She couldn't interpret them, but each panel contained a central figure, each with its own animal totem above. She made out a moth-woman, a fox-man, an owl-man, and a dragon-man. Who they were and what their totems symbolized, she had no idea, but the room filled her with awe nonetheless. There was a sort of subliminal hum in the air, like the echo of voices chanting rites of worship. Probably just the crackle of the coals and air whistling through tiny fissures in the walls, but then again, maybe not.
At the end of the vault was the door, and it was not like anything Ethne had ever seen before. It appeared solid, with no hinges or handles she could see. There were three concentric arches built into it, each bearing an animal roundel, with a disc in the center, pierced with three holes. Well, she could guess what fit there. Arvel had described the golden claw as a key, and she saw now that the door was indeed a puzzle. Absurdly simple if only you had the solution, which she did. The arches, actually rings, turned easily, and she matched their totems to the ones on the palm of the claw: bear, moth, owl. The nails of the claw fit neatly into the slots in the central disc. Gripping the claw by its turned-out wrist, she rotated it.
The door clanked, and shuddered, and sent dust cascading down on her. She staggered back, coughing and brushing herself down—and saw the door sink entirely into the floor.
The hum got louder.
No, she must be imagining things. She was exhausted, and her brain was fogging up with wild fancies.
But she was close to her goal, she had to be. The main burial chamber would be behind a big, important door like this. She hurried up the stairs on the other side, through a tunnel, dark with no draugr able to get through the puzzle door to light the braziers, and out into a vast, pillared chamber. She startled a colony of bats that took flight around her, their leathery wings churning the air around her head, and flocked up and out into a cavern that put all other caverns to shame.
Water spilled into it from fissures in the wall and a hole in the ceiling. The ancients had channeled it into a moat surrounding the raised center of the cavern, and there . . .
The clouds parted, and moonlight fell through the hole in the roof to light the face of an enormous black wall, worked all over with mystic designs in ebony. Carved on it was . . . Ethne didn't know. A strange helm? Some beast of the ancient world, lost even to legend? Something about the flaring side pieces suggested rushing jaws and sweeping horns. The eyes, though, the eyes were those of a dragon. They caught her, held her, and she had crossed a bridge over the moat and begun climbing the stairs up to the wall without realizing she was doing it.
And there was a sound. The air around her thrummed with voices, chanting syllables she didn't know to the beat of a drum that echoed the beat of her own heart, drawing her in.
The lower part of the wall was inscribed with angular marks, and some of them glowed with magical fire. Once her eyes fell on them, she couldn't turn away. As she approached, tendrils of light shot out to her, dancing over her body, sinking into her veins, and setting her nerves alight. Every hair on her body stood on end. A voice was whispering to her. She couldn't understand it, wasn't sure it was even using words, but the marks on the wall glowed brighter and brighter, excluding all else from her sight, until finally, a corresponding light snapped on in her brain, and she recognized it. A word.
Fus.
She felt, deep in her bones, the gravity of the earth pulling her down to it. She felt the wind bending the trees and the waves crashing on the rocks. She felt strong wings beating against the sky. She felt force.
The magic let her go. She staggered back in a half-blind daze, gasping for breath.
What the fuck. What in all the bloody hells of Oblivion had just happened to her?
A noise from behind: the crack of stone unsealing. Ethne whirled around, blinking rapidly to clear the streaks from her vision. There was a black sarcophagus; she had been so engrossed with the magic wall that she hadn't noticed it before. Its lid flew up and smashed face-down on the ground. Out of the coffin rose up a draugr. This one was different from the others. He looked much the same, but the way he glared at her with those awful glowing eyes, Ethne knew he hated her.
"Drun volaan?" he coughed in his harsh, guttural voice. "Dovahgolz?" He laughed. "Dir ko maar."[1]
Ethne raised her axe and her torch, but he didn't charge her. Instead, he opened his lipless jaws and sucked down a dry, rattling breath.
"FUS RO DAH!"
Something invisible slammed into her. She flew back, cracked her head against the wall, and dropped to her knees on the ground. Sparks exploded before her eyes, and for a moment she had no idea which way was up, but she knew if she didn't move she was dead. Forcing her legs and arms to push, she lurched up drunkenly and fell again. The draugr's battleaxe clanged against the stone where she had just been. She didn't try to get up a second time, but crawled as quickly as she could away, toward her torch, which was guttering nearby. Her enemy's footsteps followed her. She lunged for the torch, laid her hand on it, and rolled to the right, avoiding another deathblow. Lying on her pack, she saw the draugr turn toward her, his cold eyes stabbing out hatred and fury. He opened his jaws to draw breath again. If he finished, so she would be.
She made herself leap up and fall on the draugr, torch thrust out before her. She shoved it up into his ribcage, where it lodged. He began to burn.
"Ni!" He shoved her away from him with one bony hand and raised his battleaxe, but already the weight was too much for the cinders of his spine. His torso collapsed into his pelvis. He fell. The lights of his eyes went out forever.
Ethne lay panting and trembling on the floor. She felt sick and dizzy after that last effort. Her head pounded, and tentative exploration with her fingers found a goose egg about the size of her fist. How stupid of her, not to have a helmet. But she still had a healing potion, and thank the Divines that the bottle hadn't broken during the fight. She chugged it down and willed her stomach not to revolt on her until it had done its work.
Gradually, the pain receded to a tolerable dull ache, and Ethne sat up and had a look around. She was surprised that she could see at all, but the skies outside had cleared, and moonlight picked out the contours of the cave in silver-pink lines.
The Dragonstone, she remembered. Where was the Dragonstone?
There was a large chest next to the coffin, so she checked there first. Amazingly, it was not locked, and it contained an impressive set of ancient armor that she supposed must have belonged to the dead draugr. She considered filching it, but she didn't fancy carrying it on her back all the way to Riverwood in her condition, never mind Whiterun, and she also didn't fancy bearing arms and armor that announced to the world that she was a graverobber. Anyway, the horned helmet looked silly. She promised herself that she would get a practical one as soon as possible once she was back among the living.
She didn't find anything that might be a Dragonstone in there. A small shelving unit beside the coffin was also a bust. She'd avoided looking into the coffin itself, but finally she had to. Of course, there she found it. Farengar had said that it would be interred.
Ethne couldn't make much out of it in the moonlight, but she recognized the same emblem at the bottom of the stone as on the top of the wall. Definitely a dragon, then, and why a magical dragon wall had talked to her and shot her full of alien knowledge, she had no strength to contemplate.
She bundled the stone into her backpack—gods, it weighed a bloody ton. After using her flint and steel to light a fresh torch, she climbed a tall staircase on the far side of the wall, hoping that up meant out. When she came to a dead end, she despaired at the thought of walking all the way back the way she'd come. It took her fatigued brain a moment to realize that the odd thing on the pedestal in front of her was a handle. She spent an embarrassingly long time searching for nonexistent traps before she finally pulled it and opened the hidden door. Cool, rain-washed night air rushed over her sweaty face, and she knew she was free.
She hurried along the tunnel as quickly as she could, intent on finding the exit and getting her bearings before deciding where to curl up for the rest of the night. The tunnel let out onto the mountainside. To the north, she spotted a tower, and she thought it was the same one she'd seen from the path leading up to the barrow. She'd stayed away from it then, and she intended to do the same now. It didn't look like anything could climb up to where she was too easily, and she'd killed everything that might have come up on her from behind, so the tunnel would be her campsite.
1.
a: "Why this intrusion?" Lit. "Cause/bring intrusion?" (Can you believe there's no word for "why" or "what" in Dovahzul?)
b: Lit. "[The] Dragonstone?"
c: Lit. "Die in terror."