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Nix studied the sanctum's door, a large slab of black metal featureless save for the narrow gash of a keyhole. Intricate stone reliefs of land lampreys and sand serpents — creatures deemed holy in ancient Afirion — lunged from the door's posts and lintel, the ropes of their serpentine bodies entwined in a chaotic swirl of fangs, bulging eyes, and implied violence. Afirion pictoglyphs covered the walls, the black, gold and turquoise ink telling the tale of Abn Thahl's life.

Nix put his hands on his hips and stared at the door as if he could will it open, like one of the mindmages of Oremal.

No luck. He frowned, looked over at Egil.

"No rust on a door more than six centuries old. Odd, not so?"

Egil sat on the floor with his back against the smooth sandstone wall, his twin hammers, both goresplattered, lying on the stone floor to either side, his legs stretched out before him. Sweat collected in the fringe of black hair that ringed his head above the ears. Blood — but not his own — speckled his thick forearms.

"Odd, aye," the priest said, worrying at a wound in the tree trunk of his leg. The tattoo inked on his bald pate — an eye looking out from the center of a starburst, the symbol of Ebenor the Momentary God — stared at Nix while Egil looked down. "Can you open it?"

The question jabbed a finger in the eye of Nix's pride. He turned to face his friend, his own finger pointed like a loaded quarrel at the top of Egil's head.

"Perhaps one of the zombies struck the sense from your head? Can I open it? I? You may as well ask can a whore hump, or can a wizard dissemble.

"There you are," said Egil, ignoring Nix's tirade. He brandished a sliver of bloody obsidian he'd plucked from a small gash in his left thigh and squinted up at Nix, brown eyes all innocence. "You were saying something about a wizard humping locks?"

Nix crossed his arms over his chest and glared. "You heard what I said, whoreson. "

"I heard," Egil said, with a longsuffering sigh and a weary nod. He held the sliver of stone close to the lantern for a better look. "Look at this. It's a piece of one of the zombies' blades. "

Nix and Egil had pulped a score of the undead creatures — onetime temple guards animated to unlife by the wizard-king's sorcerers — on their way through Abn Thahl's tomb.

"You may have heard but you didn't reply, so let me restate. Are you acquainted with a door I couldn't open? I press the question only to illustrate your softheadedness, as demonstrated by a faulty memory. It's important that you understand your limits. "

Egil tossed the sliver to the ground, tore a strip of cloth from his shirt, and pressed it to his leg wound. "There was that time in the Well of Farrago-"