The Iron
Crown

When at last we could bear to look closer at the remains, our first suspicions were confirmed: the whitening bones were those of the party of '34, who had set out under the leadership of my father and my second cousin Edmund on the same quest as ourselves.

Their fate had never been established with any certainty, but of course their disappearance was followed by a spate of rumours in court circles, and in later years we occasionally learned from travellers of the grim halls of the Mortuary of Abbus, or Jurrie as some would have it, where the spectres of those once beloved came forth from open graves to jeer and yell at their erstwhile kin.

I conjectured that we had stumbled into these same mortuaries, and minutes later Wollis, whose rage had caused him to throw down a monument which stood hard by, found in its base a tablet proclaiming the inauguration of the dismal charnel-swamp several centuries before, and naming its constructor as Abbus.

But in the corner were certain sely runes which Denis seized with greater interest than he had previously evinced in anything.

"This is my own doing!" he shrieked, and sure enough we recognized in the medallions and ornaments which dangled about him a distinct sequence of signs which exactly corresponded to the runes which held his attention. He 'gan to weep and search wildly for other marks in the rubble of the monument, but at length tired and climbed into the lower branches of a tree, where he sat, moaning dismally, and would not be comforted.

Not that comfort was forthcoming from the men. They had got the idea into their heads that Denis, whom they all misliked for the fact that his aetherial corpse prevented him from sharing the burdens, had contrived in some previous existence the murder of the party of '34.

Of course I knew this to be preposterous and sought to comfort them: "Good my friends," I began, "Turn your eyes from our ancient friend and his sorrow, and think on the sullied fragments of our kin. Do not they deserve decent burial in the manner of our own ritual?" The men could hardly resist such an appeal as this: immediately the spades and mattocks were unpacked and they began to dig a large communal grave for the dead of that earlier expedition.

Meanwhile, taking Denis with me, I sought among the corpses trying to find anything which would identify one of them as my father. Denis was clearly displeased by this task, but bore with me.