Perspiration poured from Cerril, forced out by the fever that filled him onto his chilled skin. Black spots swam in his vision as he rounded a freestanding tomb that had its roof partially caved in by a lightning-blasted oak.

A dozen crypts stood against the cemetery's back wall. Vines covered the wall. Flowers and leaves along the vines shivered as the cool wind raked its talons through them. Most of the crypts were in various stages of disrepair. Some of them were only a framework that had folded down onto the stone coffins.

Cerril's eyes lit on the largest of the crypts.

There, he told himself, and he knew he was right. Malar's coin pulsed strongly within his closed fist.

Cerril glanced across the rear section of the graveyard. His eyes focused on the squat, broad building that tucked into the graveyard's back wall. The roof was angled just enough to keep rainwater from collecting on it. Despite the building's obvious age, the roof remained intact, covered in wooden shingles that had to have only been replaced a few years before. None of the other crypts had a roof in such good repair.

"Is that it?" Two-Fingers asked.

"Yes," Cerril said, unable to stay back any longer.

The grip on his heart was too firm, too sure. He followed an overgrown path between rows of graves littered with rubble. No ornate markers or statuary occupied the graveyard's rearmost section.

The crypt was less than ten feet tall and was easily forty feet across. Though he couldn't accurately judge how far back the crypt went, Cerril felt certain it had to have been as deep as it was wide, if not deeper. Cracks tracked several of the layers of stone used in the building's construction. Weeds and saplings jutted from the cracks, seemingly growing from the building's corpse. A short flight of steep steps led up to a wide entrance where splintered wooden doors sagged from broken hinges. The thin veneer of stain and lacquer had worn away in places.

"Do you know what this building is?" Hekkel asked in a hushed voice.

"What is it?" Two-Fingers asked.

"See?" Hekkel pointed, just barely visible from the corner of Cerril's eye. "If you look hard under those creepers and vines, you can see a symbol there."

"It looks like the head of a goose," Two-Fingers said.

"Not a goose," Hekkel said. "That's a picture of a stream or a river pouring down into a lake."

"You think this is a well house?" Two-Fingers asked. "Or a bathhouse where the dead are cleaned?"

A couple of the boys cursed as they considered that possibility.

Cerril knew he almost lost part of his group then, and he didn't want to face alone whatever lurked inside. "It's not a bathhouse for the dead. That sign belongs to Eldath."

"Who is Eldath?" one of the younger boys asked. His name was Aran, and he'd only arrived in Alagh?n a few months before, an immigrant from the Whamite Isles that had been nearly destroyed during the Serosian War. Legend had it that the Taker, Iakhovas, had caused the destruction of the Whamite Isles. Now, according to reports, only the undead remnants of the island populations lived there.

Steadily feeling the pull from inside the building, Cerril reached the top of the short flight of stairs and walked into the crypt. Shadows cloistered in all the corners and it was hard to keep from imagining them moving.

"Eldath is a goddess," Hekkel whispered as the group followed. "They call her the Quiet One. She's a healer, and she serves Silvanus and helps the druids of the Emerald Enclave."

One of the boys cursed and spat. "My brother works as a logger. He hates the damned druids because they keep interfering with his work and making things hard for everybody."

"So this house belongs to Eldath?" Aran asked.

"No," Cerril answered. "It belongs to the Temple of the Trembling Flower. They represent Eldath in Alagh?n."

"I've never heard of it."

"The temple is small," Two-Fingers answered, surprising Cerril by even knowing of it. "Not many people are interested in worshiping a goddess who preaches that peaceful intentions can overcome a sword blow."

"So why would a coin bearing Malar's symbol call us here?" Aran asked.

The question, Cerril knew, was a good one-one that Cerril had been entertaining since he'd recognized the structure for what it was.

"Malar directs his believers to destroy the followers of Eldath as a show of faith to him."

"Bet that would make Eldath's priests take up a mace or a cudgel," Aran said.

"No," Cerril replied as he brushed away the cobwebs that blocked the entrance to the building, "it only makes for fewer worshipers for Eldath."

He peered inside the structure and saw cheaply made caskets crumbling on iron-studded shelves. Several of the caskets had broken and moldered away, revealing bits of skeletons wearing scraps of clothing.

"Damn!" Hekkel swore. "Skeletons! Those Cyric-blasted things could be enchanted to come alive and attack anyone who enters this place."

Cerril turned when he heard the footsteps of the group halt behind him. The fever burned within him again, pulsing at his temples.

"Those skeletons aren't going to rise," he said.

"There's no reason for us to be here, Cerril. You can go the rest of the way yourself. Malar's geas was laid on you, not us."

"Then I'll go myself," Cerril said, and his words echoed throughout the building.

"You just want us along because you're scared," Hekkel said.

Cerril was scared, but he struggled not to show it and to keep his voice normal as he said, "Gold and gems divide much easier when there's only one person."

Hekkel took a step forward, baited as surely as one of the rats they caught for the blood games in some of the sailors' taverns.

"What gold and gems?"

Flipping Malar's coin again, Cerril deftly caught it from the air. The gold slapped against his palm.

"Malar called me here," said Cerril, "to this place of Eldath. I've already told you how the Stalker sets his believers onto those who worship the Quiet One." He paused, knowing he was about to tell his biggest lie ever. "Do you think that Malar would call me here, to this place claimed by Eldath, and not reward me?"

Hekkel's response died on his lips as the possibility locked into his brain.

"I'm sure," Cerril said, turning back to continue through the rooms of broken caskets and dismembered skeletons dressed in rags, "that there's enough here to take care of us all, at least for those among you brave enough to see this thing through."

"Cerril's right," Two-Fingers agreed in a stronger voice. "Whatever Malar's giving him for this service, he's being generous enough to share it with us."

"Cerril's not a generous person," Hekkel objected.

But no one was listening to what Hekkel had to say anymore, Cerril noticed. The lure of gold and treasure was too much for the other boys. Alagh?n was a city filled with small treasures that had been hidden away and found many years later, and it was filled with still more stories of those forgotten treasures left by wealthy merchants, pirates, thieves, and nobility that had visited the Jewel of Turmish. Inventing the possibility of another such treasure was no stretch at all.

"What was this place?" Two-Fingers asked, following Cerril through the doorway into another room.

Cerril followed the pounding in his chest, going straight back and avoiding the other rooms that lay off the first one. He brushed more cobwebs from another open doorway.

"This was a charity crypt," he said. "People who die without kith or kin to bury them, or those who wander into Alagh?n and get killed but go unclaimed, end up here."

"The priests say they care about these people?" Hekkel sounded doubtful.

"No," Cerril replied, stepping through another doorway and across a broken skeleton that was sprawled on the floor, "the Assembly of Stars pays the temples. Other rulers paid them in the past."