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expressions on the faces of the gargoyles staring at it did not surprise me overmuch.
    Aarundel straightened up to his full height and pulled his scarf away from his mouth. "Seeing this mortuarium, I do not begrudge any Reithrese termination."
    "I'm thinking," I agreed as I tugged my scarf down, "it's not the sort of place I'd be wanting to lay about, even if for only a year."
    The Elf pointed to a tortuous script carved into the lintel above the massive doors. "Granting you dispute my translation of Tashayul's supposed inaugural remarks, but that indicates that only the dead or faithful may pass into this place at night."
    "It's a good thing we are dead, then, I'm thinking, because my madness has not extended far enough for me to be begging favors from the Cold Goddess." I slapped him on the shoulder and ran across the roadway to the tower. "Come on, it says we're welcome."
    "Living or dead, I think the Reithrese would find little to welcome about us."
    Aarundel had a point. After Tashayul's death in the Roclaws, the Reithrese focused their attention on completing the Imperial capital of Jarudin and did not expand the Empire at all. But instead of thanking us for the chance to consolidate their gains, they charged Tashayul's Skull-riders with the task of seeing to it that I was slain. For the purpose of maintaining cordial relations with the Elves, Aarundel's name was not on any death warrant, but the Skull-riders were not terribly inclined to using methods that would spare him while killing me.
    Realizing we would not be shed of them—worshipers of a death goddess being rather focused in their beliefs—on this side of life, we lured a whole pack of them into the Roclaws. With them in hot pursuit, in the midst of winter and with a blizzard howling around them, we set a trap for them. An avalanche—quite common in the Roclaws at that time of year—wiped the lot of them out.
    It was assumed the two of us had died as well. The Reithrese failed to realize that the people of the Roclaws had long before learned how to trigger avalanches and avoid being trapped in them. With the aid of Roclawzi nobles who hoped to use my status as a hero to their own ends, Aarundel and I escaped a frozen death and rode from the Roclaws free of hostile pursuit.
    Newly dead—and thereby freed of normal, sane concerns—we set out on our pilgrimage to the city of the dead.
    Taking a leg up from a shinbone carved into the stone, I peeked up into the death house through an arched window. Seeing no movement, I hooked a leg over the windowsill, jamming my heel behind a skull or two, then reached up and used a death's-head's open mouth for a handhold. Hauling myself into the tower and landing on solid stone on the inside, I helped Aarundel in.
    The inside of the tower stood in marked contrast to the outside in terms of decoration—in a manner of speaking, anyway. A fair not of columns and vaulted ceilings made the place a forest of stone. We had come in on a walkway that ran around three sides of the chamber. Steps came down from the center of the wall opposite us to the sunken floor of the chamber, and heading back up them would doubtless take us to the tower's main corridor. In the east wall I saw another narrower door that had a ramp leading up to it. It stood open and led back into the center of the complex. Enough light from the furnaces came through that opening to provide us with flickering illumination within the death chamber. Voices came to us through the doorway, but I understood nothing, and Aarundel apparently decided none of it warranted translation.
    The chamber we were in had a frieze with selected scenes from the history of the Reithrese race. It started with their creation by the gods, then showed how they had proved victorious over the forces of the ancient gods in the long war that supplanted the parents with their children. It continued with a number of other events that had significance for the