by K. J. Coble
Durrim paled and a few of his followers made odd signs with fists beaten softly to chests—invoking the power of Orkall. “But...we have killed no one here.”
Varya shook her head. “I know. These things are ancient and their deaths lost in the past. The thing that killed them, the events that led to it, is so far gone that they are left only with mindless hatred for all life. And...” she swallowed “...I fear they are tied to this place and to some other, greater thing that we have not yet seen.”
“How can you know this?” Skarvus wheezed, trying to rise. Anzo helped him up.
Varya sighed. “I would waste time we don’t have trying to explain. But know this: we can stop them. Their power is with the night. Only then can they abandon the prison of their former selves. If we find the place of their burial and destroy their remains, their unholy tie on this world will be severed.” She looked at Durrim. “You are right to venture forth in sunlight. Only by the daylight hours will our strength be enough to face them.”
Durrim’s jaw clenched. “Then we must hurry.”
***
Varya stood before the entrance to the ruin, Anzo and Heathen at either flank. Behind them, the Hamrak were readying weapons and fashioning torches in the feeble sunlight filtering through the rocky arches. Anzo drew his saber—recovered from where he’d dropped it the night before—and stepped to Varya’s side, put his free hand on her shoulder. “Well?”
She shuddered under his touch, eyes never leaving the hatchmarked script in the obsidian. “It’s so much worse than I thought, Anzo Severnus.”
“What is?”
Her voice dropped to a whisper and her words switched to Aurridian. “In the Age of Dreams, beings of vast, terrible intelligence lorded over the ancestors of man as though they were cattle. They worshipped forgotten gods and dreamt of becoming gods, themselves. When their powers came to threaten the very heavens, their fearful gods sent a cataclysm that swallowed the world in fire and water. The few of these beings not destroyed outright locked themselves away and pledged to outlast their doom.” She took a shuddering breath. “Those few of us that still know the stories refer to them as the Elder Tyrants.”
Anzo fingered the handle of his weapon, palm tacky on the leather grip. He nodded at the writings in the shining, black rock. “And...you got all of this from those?”
She shook her head with a sigh of impatience hardened by fear. “No. The writings here are only warnings against graverobbers and fools, not that any in this age could decipher them. But they’re in the script of the Tyrants, I assure you. One of their kind was laid to rest here.” She wrapped her arms about her thin frame and squeezed. “Or perhaps I should say ‘unrest’. Yhe Tyrants intended through eldritch rites to be awakened again, if one who knew their power could summon them...as appears to be happening here.”
Anzo glanced at Heathen, whose twisting face showed he had understood some of what passed between them. To Varya: “So what do we do?”
“First harpies, now Elder Tyrants...” She shivered again. “The Age of Dreams echoes into the present...”
Anzo shook his head in exasperation. Damn these Thothan ramblings. He seized her by the shoulders. “What are we going to do, Varya?”
Her face lost some of its rigidity at the contact. Her eyes flashed back to the present like a sleepwalker after a rousing. She blinked and a fragile smile touched tense lips. “I don’t suppose we could talk them into abandoning this?”
Noting Durrim’s approach, Anzo returned the smile with a lopsided one of his own. “I doubt it, lady.”
“Here,” Durrim said, holding out an armful of torches. “They’ve been prepared as you asked.”
Varya nodded. “Hold them.” She raised a hand over the brands, her eyes fastening shut while her lips moved soundlessly. Flecks of purple formed on her fingertips, flaked off at a flutter of her hand to land on the torches. Grumbling starting amongst the Hamrak, more signs made to Orkall. Durrim grimaced and did not quite hide his squirming. “There,” Varya said, lowering her hand and looking upon the prince. “Now, light them.”
The Hamrak produced flits. Within seconds the torches flashed to life with purple- tinged flares. Face streaked with sweat, Durrim handed them around, giving one over to Anzo last.
Varya had turned back to the doors, had her hands raised to the obsidian faces. She touched the surface gingerly, low words issuing from the back of her throat. Her fingertips traced the scripts down to the globe where the doors mated. Something clanged and dust puffed away from the cracks. The globe recessed into an unseen lock and, with a screech of stone on stone, the doors opened inward.
Hamrak murmured and signed. Heathen growled, fingering his axe. Varya pulled back a step as air stale and icy as winter’s wind sighed out into the world.
Anzo dragged in a long breath. Forcing himself forward again, he took the first step over the threshold and waved his torch into the dark beyond. Obsidian glimmered back, traced the outline of stairs descending.
“Well, done, my lady,” he said turning to Varya.
Her eyes shimmered, the pupils dilated. “I...I didn’t do that,” she whispered. “I was merely working a divination, to find a way in.” She gulped. “There was no command to open.”
Fingers of ice twisted their way into Anzo’s bowels and ash taste dried his palate. He turned away to hide his own reflexive swallow.
“Enough talk,” Durrim growled and stepped past Varya to Anzo’s side. The purplish torchlight colored his drawn features and lightened his hair, made him momentarily the aged mirror image of his father. He jerked the torch forward. “With you.”
They started into the tomb, Anzo and Durrim at the lead, Varya and Heathen side-by-side at their backs, the rest of the Hamrak following. The stairs descended a short way, walls smooth, featureless, and flashing the torchlight back at them coldly, shadows that were vague hints of reflection tracing each intruder’s passage.
The descent ended in a rectangular antechamber, bordered with columns fashioned into spirals that seemed to flow upwards, lifelike, into the low ceiling as the torchlight played upon them. The floor was comprised of perfectly-fitted blocks. Script marched across the walls in precise lines. The uneven shimmer of the torches gave everything the illusion of movement. Angles, cracks, creases between stones at one moment had perfect symmetry, at the next mocked the eye with strange disunion.
A pair of doorways awaited them on the opposite side. With the forced bravado of a man defying death, Durrim strode across the chamber to the passage and played his torch into either. He turned to the others. “One goes up, the other down.” He fixed a stare on Varya. “Which way, woman?”
Rubbing at her face, Varya shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“We split up, then,” Durrim said. “Weasel, Heathen, Skarvus, and Mekkli go down, the witch and the others with me go up.”
Anzo frowned. “Divide our strength?” He noted Heathen pawing at his axe in agitation and Varya’s brows knitted in thought.
“I will be at your side, puppy!” Skarvus insisted.
“We stay together,” Heathen added.
“He’s right,” Varya said. She looked at Anzo and offered him and Heathen a pained smile. “We have only the time until the sun sets. We’ll cover more ground this way.”
“Some difference that will make if we’re all lost,” Anzo retorted.
Varya drifted to him, put her hands on his chest, a finger brushing the amber there. “We won’t be out of touch. I will hear you.” She patted him and pulled back. “It’s the best way.”
Anzo grumbled and fidgeted with his weapon but knew the wisdom of her words. “All right.” He offered Durrim a stiff nod. “Let’s be at it.”
With whispers of encouragement and pumped fists, Durrim and his party with Varya at the lead wandered up the right-forking stairwell. Heathen stared after them.
“Come on, kid,” Anzo urged.
“I don’t like it.”
“Well, there isn’t
a hell of a lot to like, is there?” He rapped the giant on the arm. “Let’s do this.”
They started down the left stairs. The descent was steep and the passage narrow, barely enough for two to pass abreast, Heathen dipping his head low. The walls to either side emanated cold and shimmered with moisture. Breath puffed in air tinged with a stale, foul odor of things left to moulder. A solitary drip-drip echoed somewhere below. Footing on the stairs grew uncertain, boots scuffing on slick obsidian. Time marched endlessly in the thick blackness beyond their faltering torchlight. The flesh between Anzo’s shoulderblades crawled.
“Something ahead,” Heathen murmured.
The corridor widened as they continued, alcoves spreading to either side. Anzo paused and held his torch shivering before him. A casket occupied each space, upright and cylindrical, lids adorned with effigies of beautific humanoid figures that were somehow not human. Jewels winked in the torch glow, woven into stone in scintillating patterns of ruby, sapphire, and diamond. Vaguely smiling faces and closed eyelids spoke of endless rest Anzo knew was a lie.
“Destroy the remains and they’re done, she said,” Anzo remembered. He gestured at one of the sarcophagi. “Crack it.”
Skarvus hobbled to the first casket, was joined by the Hamrak called Mekkli. Together they wedged their swords into the crease under the lid and began working at it. Grunts and the screech of steel on stone filled the air, obscenely loud in the chilly, black stillness.
“That’s a lot of these things,” Heathen growled. He nodded down the stairs. “Should we move on, see where this goes?”
A screech and clang set Anzo to jumping back as Skarvus fell from the sarcophagus, his sword spinning aside with a slight bend to the blade. The old man cursed and clutched at his bandaged leg, his face a web of creases and agony.
Anzo knelt at his side. “Can you go on?”
“So cold...damn it...like its creeping up my leg...”
“Can you go on, Skarvus?” Anzo repeated.
The old warrior nodded tightly.
Anzo glanced at Mekkli. “You two keep at it here. When you get the damned thing open destroy whatever’s inside. Burn it if you have to. We’re going to continue.”
The Hamrak nodded, Skarvus with pain that suggested he’d only barely heard. Anzo waved Heathen after him and they resumed the descent.
“Skarvus is in a bad way,” Heathen whispered. “He shouldn’t have come.”
“Well, you try talking any of these fools into that.”
A grunt was the giant’s only answer.
Ranks of caskets smiled over them as they continued down. The stink of old rot worsened, along with something more ripened, more recent. An arch appeared below and the stairs ended finally. Anzo paused and nodded to Heathen. The pair readied weapons and torches and swept down the last few steps and through the entrance.
Their torches guttered in an atmosphere thick with dust that shimmered in the weakening globes of their light, gathered beyond them in the dark to whirl and bunch. A rectangular chamber extended before them, spiral-columned and lined with files of more caskets. Gold and fiery gems winked back at them. A row of sarcophagi lined the center of the room, reclined in two rows that stretched beyond the range of their illumination. Each was brilliant with death shrouds fashioned in precious metals, faces captured perfectly, restfully, wickedly.
“Anzo...” Heathen’s face failed with a croak. He pointed his axe, shaking. “The nearest one...”
Following the gesture, Anzo stepped fully into the chamber and played his torchlight over the closest casket. A pair of shapes clotted about its base. Moving closer, Anzo made out the glimmer of blackened pools, saw the fliud smeared wildly about the sarcophagus. A coppery stench hit his nostrils in the same moment his eyes adjusted enough to take in ripped leather, flashes of gouged chain mail, purplish shine of ragged meat, yellowy shards of bone...
Gagging, Anzo winced away. There had been tufts of gray hair and a face that might have once been familiar when alight with song.
Heathen’s voice wheezed out. “The bard...”
Anzo shook the horror aside, ruthlessly battered down the howl of instincts to flee. Forcing himself forward again, he snarled, “Get the damned thing open. Let’s finish this!”
Avoiding the corpses of Thalien and Machrus, Anzo and Heathen wedged their weapons under the lid of the casket and strained against its weight. It didn’t give. Heathen set aside his torch, adjusted position, crouched, and put his huge musculature under the handle of his axe to form a better lever. Again, they tried, Anzo’s arms trembling with the effort, Heathen’s face a mask of blackening fury as biceps knotted and sinews trembled.
The lid cracked with a ping like glass chipped and foul-stinking dust smoked out. Groaning, the pair lifted it free to crash over one side. In the resounding din that echoed through the chamber like a thunderclap, they looked on the thing inside.
Tatters of finery faded to clotted-blood brown adorned a shrunken, skeletal figure. Rings glinted on bony fingers. Necklaces of tarnished silver chain splayed around a jaw sagged open in some silent protest of the body’s desecration. An amulet of obsidian suspended from one, a bulbous, tentacled shape with two rows of tiny rubies worked into it that had to be eyes, somehow, that fixed their unearthly stare on Anzo.
His face awash now in clammy sheen of fear, Anzo held the purple-limned torch flare over the body and snarled, “Burn, you dog.”
With an eardrum-rending shriek, the corpse lunged at Anzo. A skeletal fist locked over the hand holding the torch, bony touch burning Anzo with chill from beyond his world. Another fastened about his throat, lances of icy pain biting into his windpipe. He hacked for breath, even as the thing pulled its face close, skull face eyeless, mouth grating open with teeth filed sharp.
Anzo got his free arm, his sword arm up, and angled the point of the saber over the lip of the casket. With a scream that came out only as a wheeze, he thrust upwards into the corpse’s torso. The point erupted out its back in a cloud of pulverized ribs, tags of rotten linen, and dust. But its grip on Anzo only tightened. He whimpered, the only call for help he could manage, as air-starved lungs began to fail along with his strength and terrible cold wormed into his veins.
Roaring, Heathen cast aside his axe and mounted the casket, straddled the living corpse-thing from above. He reached down and grabbed the skull, leaned back with even more effort than he’d expended on the sarcophagus lid. For an instant it seemed the creature shook in his grasp, some hint of a struggle or even plea. Vertebra parted with a broken stick crack. Heathen flopped backwards, fell off the casket as the detached skull flew free, trailing dust across the chamber until it struck the opposite wall and shattered into a thousand fragments.
The thing’s screech faded out with a hiss. The grip on Anzo loosened as the body collapsed in on itself. Dust and a touch of some other luminescence swirled over the sarcaphogus, funneled upwards before dissolving into a cloud of settling ash.
Sobbing for air, trembling with otherworldly cold, Anzo sagged down the side of the casket, his torch dropping to one side. He didn’t no how long he laid there before Heathen was at his side, a stream of blood leaking from his hairline, a cut from his fall but none the worse for wear. “How are you?” he asked.
“Alive,” Anzo managed between breaths.
“That’s better than anything else in this place.” Heathen snorted then laughed, smacked Anzo’s thigh. “Well, that wasn’t too hard, was it?”
Something crashed behind them, a sharp detonation like pressure released. Then another and another thunderclap, hammering in a regular pattern through the room, repeated up the the stairs and into the distance. Both men leaped to their feet in time to see clouds of loosened dust and sarcaphogus lids falling away. Boiling out from beneath them emerged a tattered, skeletal mob, howling, sqealing, cackling for vengeance.
Heathen froze, his face still caught in a wisp of former laughter. Anzo grabbed his arm. “Go, you idiot! Let’s go!” They spri
nted for the exit with the unholy press babbling behind them.
Revenants and fallen casket lids clogged the stairwell above them. Heathen scooped up his axe and hewed the first to reach them from skull to crotch, the thing disintegrated with a high-pitched sigh and a plume of sorcery-limned vapors. Anzo hacked a second one to bits, bone shards and tags of burial shrouds flying, while Heathen forced his way on. Bony fingers snagged and bit at them. Shrieks split their ears and ash filled their nostrils with the gagging haze of old death.
Screams carried through the din above, Skarvus’ pained voice clear. Anzo became a whirlwind, tearing through the living dead while Heathen covered their rear, bawling in frenzy that was both fear and delight. A melee writhed on the stairs above. Bones and crumpled finery piled about Skarvus’ feet but he staggered, a revenant forcing him into a corner with icy fingers pawing for his neck while Machrus folded under a press of the creatures.
Anzo reached the old warrior first, slammed the pommel of his weapon into the back of his attacker’s skull and crumpling the decrepit thing into powder. He spun and chopped at the things piling over Machrus. Severed limbs flew away, a skull leapt from its wobbling neck, its fangs crimson with the fallen warrior’s blood. Wailing with frustration and fury, Anzo finished the last with kicks and short, sharp blows. They fell away, leaving Machrus beneath in shuddering ruin, skin torn free in bloody flaps, coils of intestine looping bown the stairs. His eyes still shimmered with a hint of life, but there was no man in them, any longer, only pain.
“Leave him!” Heathen was hollering into Anzo’s ear. The giant dragged Skarvus onto his back and started up the stairs. “Anzo, come on!”
Anzo gave Machrus a final, sickened look and scurried after his comrades.
The dead boiled up the stairwell after them.
***
At the top of the stairs, the trio halted, Heathen letting Skarvus down. The revenants came up the stairs after them in a dust-wreathed mass. Heathen stepped into the doorway, barred the bottleneck with his mass and his axe. Sharp, chopping blows interspersed with kicks met the press, dismembering and pulverizing. Scratches marred his leather corselet and tears left his tunic sleeves and leggings in tatters, but he held them.