She found another body a layer below that and brought that, too, to the surface. The next stones were harder. Here the malice returned; the stench of blood and death intensified. She felt squeezed in a vile embrace, struggling to breathe, to move. Nedross, she remembered. These stones were nedross, evil in essence. Paks had been trapped under nedross stone, tormented.

The thought of Paksenarrion brought hope, an easier breath. Her magery flashed out, beyond her control; she felt the clash of two magicks as the blow of a thunderclap; she staggered and fell as the stones beneath her shattered, crumbled, disintegrated entirely to dust that plastered her face, clogged her nose. The dust vanished even as she choked on it. She was standing on a rough uneven surface of dry rock, not hewn stone. At her feet, a bloated stinking shape—the dead woman and child, magically preserved in gross decay. Pity filled Dorrin’s heart; hot tears ran down her face. Not only such a death, but to be locked into this shape forever—

Not forever. Dorrin fell to her knees. Power and compassion in that unseen voice. Falk? Gird? The High Lord himself? She did not know; it did not matter.

She reached out her hand and touched the stinking corpse. “Be free,” she said, speaking words she knew she must say. “Be free, go home, heal …”

The corpse turned to dust, bright as sparks in the dimness, and the sparks flew upward to the distant light. Now Dorrin saw bones only, the bones of the mother, the bones of the unborn child, fragile as slivers of dry grass, all lying loose, the ligaments that once bound them gone with the rest.

She had nothing to carry them in but her shirt. She took it off, and one by one she picked them up, the mother’s bones, the child’s bones, and laid them on the shirt, then rolled it into a secure bundle she could carry. She looked around the now-empty bottom of the well to be sure none were left, then felt the rough rock itself. Dry. Dry as those bones had been. At one side, a cleft that might once have been a spring to feed the well. She put her fingers into it. Dry.

“I don’t know what else to do,” she said, squatting there in the bottom of the well. “If it was blood that cursed the well, my blood will certainly not heal it.”

Silence followed her words. The stench had gone with the corpses; what she smelled now was dry stone and her own sweat. She waited, listening, and finally pushed herself up, tucking the bundle under one arm. “Falk? Alyanya? If you have advice—”

Nothing. Nothing but the feel of a few grains of dust still in her mouth, annoying. She worked up a gob of spit, and spat them out; the spit landed near the dark cleft, sat there glistening a moment, then disappeared. Dorrin found another grain of sand under her tongue and spat again, in the interests of sport trying to hit the same spot. Again it hit, this time spreading a little before it vanished.