"You'll explain that to me eventually," Corren said, watching the gate grind open under the puzzle's release.
"Perhaps," Aurelle said, in a tone that suggested perhaps meant not particularly likely.
The passage beyond gave way to a horde of Tomb Weavers, low, quick, many-legged things that made Aurelle's careful composure crack for one honest, unguarded second ("I hate bugs," muttered with real venom) before Corren's lightning chant scattered the swarm into so much smoking chitin, and a wounded queen spider the size of a cart fell a moment later to a single precise thrust of Rooke's blade. A trapped bandit's cries drew Aurelle's mercy against Corren's shouted warning, and the freed man's flight ended, seconds later, at the hands of a shambling, human-shaped Tomb Walker that none of them had heard approaching, its rusted sword finding him before any of them could reach him in time.
"They're human," Aurelle said, staring at the fallen shape with the horror of someone recalculating everything she'd assumed about a threat she'd thought she understood. "All of them. If we're not careful in here, we can become exactly what we're fighting."
They pressed on through a hall of stirring crypts, a Tomb Walker's ice-magic freezing Rooke's sword arm for a heartbeat before Corren's fire chant burned the ice away, past swinging blade traps Aurelle dragged Rooke clear of with a speed that left him breathless with gratitude rather than his usual banter, and finally into a treasure crypt glittering gold in torchlight, where a nightmarish crown of iron spikes, the Truth Seeker itself, sat clutched in the arms of a long-dead, mummified figure inside an open sarcophagus.
"Retrieve it," Aurelle said, her voice carrying real unease now beneath the command.
"Rooke," Corren said, taking an unhurried step backward, "it's your turn to be brave."
Rooke's protest about being ashamed of the both of them died somewhere in his throat as he approached the mummy, hand trembling only slightly as he pried the device free from a grip that resisted with a stiffness no properly dead thing should still have had left in it. He turned back to them wearing the exact triumphant grin of a man who had no idea yet that the corpse behind him had just opened its eyes, and it was Aurelle's shriek, sharp and entirely undignified, that finally warned him, half a second before withered fingers closed around his own shoulder from behind.
They ran the whole way back through the temple's winding corridors with the shambling thing at their heels, its footsteps dragging and uneven but never quite falling far enough behind to feel safe, torchlight throwing their own shadows huge and lurching against walls carved with symbols Corren still had no name for. Aurelle nearly lost her footing twice on stairs she'd navigated flawlessly on the way in, and Corren caught her elbow the second time without either of them slowing down long enough to acknowledge it, and didn't stop running until the mountain air outside had gone from a threat to a relief, all three of them gasping and half laughing with the specific, giddy hysteria of people who had, by a genuinely narrow margin, survived something absurd.
"I am never," Aurelle said, once she'd recovered enough breath to form the sentence, "doing that again. Any of it. The bugs, the mummy, all of it."
"You said the same thing about the tomb the last time," Rooke pointed out, still cradling the Truth Seeker against his chest like a man half-convinced it might also grow arms.
"I meant it less that time," Aurelle said, and for once didn't seem to notice or care how little sense that made out loud.
Back at the castle, when the Duke asked how the mission had gone, none of them found the words to properly explain a reanimated mummy chasing them through a mountain, and settled instead for vague, faltering half-truths that left Maravent's eyebrow raised but his questions, mercifully, unpressed further.
The Duke's summons came again within the week, and this time his tone carried none of its earlier warmth at all. "There's a rebellion brewing in the Duchy of Fennmoor," he said, spreading a map across his desk with a single economical motion. "Farmers and blacksmiths, armed and organized enough to threaten the stability of this entire Kingdom if it isn't handled properly. I want it ended."
"We move in and remove the leadership," Aurelle said immediately, the suggestion arriving with the flat certainty of a rule already memorized rather than a plan freshly considered. "Cut off the head, the body stops fighting."
"Or we crush the whole encampment before it spreads," Rooke offered, no less immediately.
"No." Corren's own voice surprised him with how sure it sounded. "I'll surrender myself to them. Talk first. See what they actually want before anyone decides what they deserve."
Maravent studied him for a long moment with an expression Corren couldn't fully read, something between curiosity and calculation. "An interesting instinct," he said at last. "See that it doesn't get you killed before it produces anything useful."
They rode out through the green, unbothered farmland of Blackmere into the harder, war-touched country of Fennmoor three days later, and a red-caped commander met them at an imperial fort flying the bronze phoenix, briefing them on a rebellion that had, by every account the man gave, already cost the region two burned granaries and one dead tax collector. Corren left his weapons behind at the fort and walked the last stretch of road alone, a white flag in one hand, toward a barricade of overturned carts and pitchforks manned by farmers who watched his approach with the wariness of people who had already been burned once by promises that arrived wearing a Kingdom's colors.
They carried him through to their leader, a broad, weathered man named Tam whose face held more exhaustion than anger by the time Corren actually stood in front of him, sitting on an upturned grain barrel with a pitchfork close enough to hand that he clearly hadn't decided yet whether this conversation would need it. Behind him, in the shade of a lean-to built from cart boards and old sailcloth, women were binding a wounded man's arm with strips of someone's spare shirt, and a boy no older than eight sat cross-legged in the dirt sharpening a scythe blade that had never once, Corren suspected, been sharpened for the purpose it was about to be used for.