Relics of the Desert Tomb

by James Derry

  Jamal said, “We can’t discuss that now. I’ve got to go check on the zombies. And I’ll see if I can get that rope.”

  Jamal unsheathed his sword and nodded at Ohbo, who inched his way closer to Sygne. Jamal hated to think about what the two of them would talk about while he was gone, but he had no choice. Someone had to risk their life to try and save them all.

  “‘Manhood,’” he muttered. “I’m more of a man than fifty men.”

  He stormed around the last bend in the tunnel—moving far faster than he should have. The zombies of Tallasmanak had heard Sygne’s scream, and they were converging on the mouth of the tunnel.

  He was greeted by three fast-approaching corpses. Their gaunt faces were wreathed with branches of coral rock. Their teeth were bared permanently in lipless snarls.

  Jamal called over his shoulder, “They are coming!” Ohbo cried back some response, but it was too faint to hear.

  Jamal squared up against the three zombies—there were more coming up behind them—and he flashed his blade. “Come on. Every good monster slayer has to mark ‘zombie’ off of his to-slay list.”

  He backed into the tunnel, and the zombies followed, funneling themselves and diminishing their numbers advantage. The undead were even stupider than cavemen.

  Jamal readied to pounce into his first attack.

  “Let’s end this.”

  13 – Firearm

  Ohbo huddled close to Sygne.

  “Grizzly ghouls.”

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “From every tomb.”

  Sygne blinked hard and tried to focus. Ohbo was still groaning to himself, but she wasn’t listening.

  “They’re closing in to seal our doom!”

  Her forearm was really hurting now—a feeling between a maddening itch and the throb of a bone-deep bruise. She saw three roughly cylindrical warts protruding from her skin. It was enough to make her reel again. And just when she was starting to regain her balance. At the top of one wart, she thought she saw…

  A bit of movement, small and almost imperceptible. Translucent tentacles extending from the top of one of the tumorous growths. The tentacles danced in a spiraling pattern, and the air swirled around them. The smoke, even the light—all of it draining downward toward the center of that vortex. It was like the black hole in her dream.

  Except here it was, centered in her vision. Made physically manifest.

  “I see it,” she groaned.

  “What?” Ohbo asked.

  “The Lurker in the Void. I really do.”

  “Sygne, No… You’re scaring me.”

  “It’s here, in the flesh. In my flesh.”

  Sygne felt her consciousness slipping away again, swirling down into the Void. And that dungeon in Gjuir-Khib.

  ***

  Eiglon pressed the sizzling blade to the tender webbing of skin where Jamal’s pelvis met his loins. Jamal shut his eyes and screamed. Sygne tried to do the same, and for a moment, in her terror and disorientation, the dungeon shimmered out of focus.

  She heard a throaty scream—a man’s voice going from a guttural roar to a high-pitched keen. And she was overwhelmed by the sickening smell of burning meat.

  Her vision sharpened, and she saw Eiglon stumble away from Jamal. He was shrieking—his hands thrashing the air. A plume of steam surrounded his head.

  Lady Nemeah stood behind him. She had a pair of red-tipped tongs in her hands.

  The vice-commander turned to face Nemeah, and Sygne saw the bronze mask had been seared to the back of his head.

  Eiglon shrieked. He swatted at the lady, but he was still off-balance from Nemeah’s sneak attack. Sygne realized what had happened. Before Eiglon could truly begin on Jamal’s castration, Nemeah had snuck up behind him and burned him with the broiling mask that Eiglon had threatened to use on Jamal. Nemeah had dealt Eiglon a brutal injury. Thick streaks of blood ran down his neck, and his collar was already stained deep red.

  Nemeah easily avoided Eiglon’s swatting hands. Then she lunged forward and pushed the hot end of her tongs into the crook of his armpit. Eiglon cried out again and fell to the floor. Nemeah stepped over him.

  “Are you okay?” she asked Jamal.

  He nodded vigorously. His eyes were wide; he’d been terrorized beyond the point of words. Nemeah unlocked the bracket around his neck.

  “H-how…” Jamal gasped. “How?”

  Nemeah held up a crude key. “I asked the gaoler to give me his key.”

  “Hierarchy has its perks,” Jamal managed.

  “Exactly.” Nemeah glanced wildly around the dungeon. She was obviously shaken, but her wide eyes and her flared nostrils only made her look prettier. Sygne felt immensely grateful. The lady had saved Jamal, and in that incredible act of bravery and selflessness, she had banished a bit of the Lurker’s aura from this place. The air was still congealed in aquatic stillness, but Sygne couldn’t sense the Ancient One’s presence.

  Nemeah grinned at Jamal. “I should have asked the gaoler for a weapon as well. I’m sure he would have complied.”

  “You did pretty well improvising.” Jamal tried to shift positions so that Nemeah wouldn’t see his nether regions, but he was bound too tightly to the stone.

  “Yes.” Nemeah laughed nervously. “Oh,” she said. “You’re still naked.”

  “Yes. Yes I am.”

  Nemeah’s eyes snapped back to Jamal’s face.

  Jamal asked, “You don’t think the gaoler will lend me a pair of pants?”

  Nemeah shook her head. “I think I have a better idea.”

  ***

  It took Jamal a few seconds to realize that there was no strategy to fighting zombies. The mob had stampeded heedlessly toward Jamal, and he had been discombobulated by their lack of concern for their own personal welfare. But it made sense, of course. A zombie had no personal welfare. It didn’t care if a part of its body was lopped off. It was not as if it made a difference—it was still a zombie. Because of this, the undead didn’t dodge or balk as Jamal slashed at them. They just lunged ahead, always attacking. Relentless and stupid. So Jamal had to match them by staying constantly, mindlessly on the offensive.

  This was not to say that there was no skill involved. He wasn’t just hacking and slashing over and over again like a farmer reaping wheat. Meeting the mob’s attack took rhythm, mixed with speed and instinct. His sword hummed through the air, constantly in motion, knocking away (or severing) the nearest grasping hand. The most important thing was to avoid getting snagged. If a zombie grabbed his blade, he could easily slice his way out of its grasp, but that momentary loss of momentum might cost him dearly.

  Thirty seconds into the fight, Jamal’s sword was caught in the gap between a zombie’s forearm bones. He heaved to pull his sword free—the zombie’s arm came off with it—but in that moment he nearly suffered a raking blow to the face.

  He had to focus on attacking at the thinner, more tenuous parts of the ghouls’ anatomies. Joints and necks. Sometimes he would strike at a shoulder and cleave an arm off. This greatly hampered a zombie’s ability to attack. It seemed to throw the zombie off balance as well, and its remaining arm would flail out with weak, kittenish swats.

  One minute into the fight, Jamal decapitated his nearest opponent. Apparently the zombie needed its milky eyes to see. Without its head facing forward, the zombie’s body stood still, like a panicked animal. That created an obstruction for the other corpses, and a respite for Jamal.

  He felt a tug at his ankle. While the mob had been caught behind their headless companion, a tangled mass of severed arms had been worming its way across the floor of the tunnel. Now the nearest arm was clawing at his boots. Thoughtlessly, Jamal hacked through its wrist—and nearly sliced through the top of his foot. With stumps at both ends, the arm flexed and flopped like an injured inchworm. Its severed hand was still attached to Jamal’s ankle, where it began wriggling its grip to climb up his shin.
/>   Jamal bellowed at it. Fighting a score of standing opponents was bad enough, but now every time he lopped off one of their body parts, he created a new problem to deal with.

  The headless zombie was knocked forward by the crush of undead bodies behind it. Jamal sprinted up the curved wall of the tunnel (the branching formations of coral made for surprisingly good traction) and then sprang for the headless corpse. He used his free hand to grab it by the collarbone and drag it downward. For good measure, he cut through another zombie’s neck while he was in mid-flight. His first decapitation victim landed flat on the pile of crawling arms, effectively pinning them.

  Jamal landed on the zombie’s back and started his next round of attacks. He couldn’t help but cleave through hands and arms, which created more problems writhing across the ground.

  Two minutes into the fight, Jamal’s heart and lungs seemed to be inflating massively, threatening to burst out of his chest. He couldn’t remember feeling this tired, perhaps not since his training with the Gjuiran army. The general thinking there was that if you were stupid enough to find yourself hacking and slashing at a group of opponents for two minutes straight, then you were already dead, or going to be dead very soon. But none of Jamal’s old officers had considered the fact that he might be fighting zombies one day.

  His arms were beginning to tremble, the strength flooding out of them. As far as he could tell, there were still a dozen or so fairly whole zombies on the attack. Even the corpses that he had felled were still writhing on the floor, trying to kill him. It wouldn’t be long now before he did something dumb or clumsy, and then the mob with seal his fate. Sygne and Ohbo would die soon after.

  Over his shoulder, he called, “Ohbo! Find Sygne’s pocketbook.”

  “I have it!”

  “Look through the front cover. There should be three pouches in there, black fabric. Throw the pouches down the tunnel!”

  Jamal took two big leaps backward away from the throng of clutching hands. He huffed, trying to catch his breath. Zombies scrambled to close the distance to Jamal. He swung his sword in a figure eight pattern, incapacitating the two nearest corpses, and then beheading both of them with one horizontal swipe.

  “Okay, Okay,” Ohbo called. “I’m throwing them now.”

  The zombie’s hand had made its way up to Jamal’s knee. He didn’t have time to peel it off. He turned and ran toward Sygne’s pyrotechnic pouches. He found them all clustered relatively close together on the floor of the tunnel. There wasn’t much time, what could he do? He had to mix the contents of the pouches together. His scabbard snagged onto limestone and jabbed him in the belly as he bent down. That would have to do.

  He knew that Sygne combined the contents of all three packets to make her fireworks. So he poured the three powders into his scabbard.

  He needed some of Sygne’s tiny sulfur sticks. “Throw me the matches!”

  “What are matches?” Ohbo cried.

  Jamal growled and ran back to Ohbo’s position. As he ran, he could feel the powders sloshing together in the bottom of his scabbard.

  Sygne’s pocketbook was still flipped open on Ohbo’s lap. Jamal snatched up the sticks of tinder from Ohbo. (A quick glance at Sygne. She was unconscious again.) He unclasped his scabbard and scraped the matches against his belt buckle; three of them ignited at once. He clamped them tight in his fist. Soon the heat was blistering his knuckles, but he didn’t dare drop them into the scabbard. Not until he saw the whites of the zombies’ all-white eyes.

  He found the zombies lurching together, one shambling mass of bodies. He dropped his clutch of matches into the tube. Then he tossed it at the mass of bodies and sank into a crouch.

  He was prepared to see the scabbard explode, and it did—but not in the way he expected. First, it clattered to a full rest on the floor of the tunnel before it went off. The zombies continued marching toward him, even as some in the middle of the pack nearly tripped on the smoking tube.

  With a loud pop, an explosion of flame and smoke shot through the opening in the scabbard. The tube was propelled into the air, threading the spaces between zombies’ legs. It struck an embankment of coral with flames still jetting from its open end. Then it ricocheted backwards, swiveled in midair, and passed again through the crowd of corpses. This time it struck a zombie’s knee and deflected upward to deliver an uppercut blow to the zombie’s chin.

  The flaming projectile hit the ceiling and angled straight for Jamal’s chest.

  On instinct Jamal caught it instead of dodging it. Perhaps he was thinking that he didn’t want the projectile to fly back to where Sygne lay unconscious. The scabbard moved fast, but there wasn’t a lot of weight behind it. He was able to catch it and hold it steady as a comet’s tail of flame and sparks sprayed out from its open end.

  The nearest zombie was doused in fire. It did not shirk away, even as flames licked across its face and its lidless eyes. In fact, it stood still and spread its arms out, as if it enjoyed the blaze.

  Jamal swept the scabbard from side to side, spraying fire on some of the other corpses. The zombies stood still as the inferno spread.

  After several long seconds, the firework powder was all used up, and Jamal’s scabbard spewed useless and foul smelling smoke. But the scientician’s trick had done its job; it had stopped the zombies in their tracks.

  Three of the corpses were really blazing. They turned their backs to him, and the crowd parted for them as they passed by. The fire popped loose one zombie’s shoulder joint, and a skeletal arm fell to the floor. A corpse wearing a queen’s gown bent down and cradled the flaming body part to her chest like a baby. She turned to walk away from Jamal. They were all turning to walk away, back toward the dome.

  Jamal backed away as well, still holding his smoldering scabbard out in front of him.

  He returned to Ohbo, who was cowering beside Sygne.

  “What was that noise?”

  “Pyrotechnics.”

  “Did you kill the zombies? I mean I guess you didn’t kill them… Unless you can kill them again? I mean…”

  “I made them leave.” Jamal bent close to Sygne. “She fainted again? We have to get out of here.”

  “Yes… Uh… Jamal…” Ohbo’s lip quivered.

  Jamal dropped to one knee. “I’m exhausted. Fighting zombies is hard.”

  Ohbo could only speak in scared-sounding hiccups.

  Jamal was too tired for nonsense. He barked, “What is it?”

  Ohbo pointed to Jamal’s leg. A severed hand was still attached to his shin, clawing its way upward.

  Jamal pulled it off of him and threw it down the length of the tunnel.

  14 – Fuel to the Fire

  Lady Nemeah pulled shut the dungeon door behind her and called to the gaoler, mustering all of her royal imperiousness. “Guard! Come here!”

  A stocky man hurried down the corridor, coming from the outer gate of the keep. He wore a customary leather mask. Sygne noted that anonymity must have been a major tenet in the field of torture and imprisonment.

  Eiglon’s moans could still be heard through the thick door.

  “Hello, Your Splendidness,” the gaoler sniveled. “Is the interrogation going horribly?”

  Nemeah stammered for a moment before saying. “Yes, quite horribly.”

  “Excellent!” The gaoler’s head bobbed up and down.

  The lady pointed to a two-wheeled cart overloaded with rough-hewn blocks of cedar. “The vice-commander is quite spent after tonight’s grilling. He’s staying in the cell for a while, but I don’t want this firewood to go to waste. I want you to haul it up to the Eastern Gate and leave it there.”

  “Yes, Your Frivolousness.” The gaoler frowned as he felt the extra weight of the cart, but he didn’t seem to expect that anything (or anyone) out of the ordinary was inside of it. Grunting heavily, he trotted up the sloped corridor and out of the keep.

  Nemeah tried her best to sound nonchalant as she called
after him. “And don’t put those logs on the fire yet! I will use them. First I need to go to the stables…”

  “Yes! I will wait by the cart.” The gaoler smiled unctuously, and Nemeah rolled her eyes. Gossip was the lifeblood of the Gjuiran royal court, and word had probably spread quickly that Lady Nemeah was inappropriately free with her affections. Sygne wondered if the gaoler was hoping for his own unseemly liaison with the royal lady.

  She didn’t have long to consider this. The scene around her swirled, the walls of the dungeon corridor dashed away like eddies in a sandstorm.

  ‘What is this? No!’

  For a while, she’d been feeling safe. Nemeah had rescued Jamal. Of course she had. Jamal was still alive today, which meant his story hadn’t ended on that slab of stone. But now that safety was being torn away.

  A new scene opened up before her, and Sygne glanced around for Jamal. What memory would she see now? Instead she saw something quite different.

  ***

  Jamal dusted ash and flakes of corpse detritus from his shoulders. He was just beginning to stand when Sygne jolted upright.

  “No!” she exclaimed. “No, make this stop!”

  The cameleer stretched out to her, but Jamal reached Sygne first. He put a soothing hand on her shoulder. Sygne’s face softened, although her eyes still stared blankly ahead.

  “Sygne, it’s me.”

  When she spoke, her tone was softer. “Jamal?” She cocked her head like a blind person.

  “What’s wrong, Sygne?”

  “Nothing,” she cried. “It’s Nothing.”

  Ohbo pleaded, “Then could you not be so loud about it, my sweet?”

  “Quiet!” Jamal told Ohbo. “Can’t you tell she’s having a vision?”

  The scientician wrapped her arms around herself and shuddered. “It’s night. It’s windy. A storm is starting. And I see a tree. By itself. On a dune.”

  “The dragon blood tree?”

  Sygne nodded vaguely. “It’s bare. Dead.”

  She winced, and Jamal felt a sudden piercing sensation. The light around them seemed to surge for a moment.