by Matt Gilbert
He went through the process by the book, counting, categorizing, comparing. In the end, he was baffled. There was nothing obvious beyond the broken ribs. The patient was pale, covered in sweat, and semi conscious. His temperature was close to normal, perhaps a little high. His breathing was irregular, his pulse strong but fast.
Pain could account for the color, but the sweat was a clue. It looked very much like a heart attack, but the pulse did not match. A seizure or stroke, perhaps?
“Not what you think,” Logrus croaked, as if reading his mind.
“Keep talking, Logrus,” Aiul said, and squeezed his shoulder. “Stay with me. Tell me what you’re feeling.”
“Hate,” Logrus whispered.
“I mean physically.”
“Pain.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere!”
“I know it’s difficult. Try to be more specific.”
Logrus drew in a great, ragged breath and let it out again.
“Flame burning me,” he mumbled. “My head being sawed open. Cracking my chest with some kind of vise. Cutting at my heart.”
“No,” Aiul told him, even more worried now. What does it mean that he's having a complete break with reality, too? I don't know how to diagnose this! “That’s not happening. You’re safe. Do you know where you are?”
“Not to me,” Logrus gasped. To others. Here. In Torium.”
“Take your time,” Aiul told him. “Try to focus.”
Logrus’s eyes snapped open and he raised his head, staring at Aiul in blind fury. “My gift, fool!” he hissed. He let his head fall back to the floor and sighed. “Wait. Just wait.”
Aiul did so for many long, confused minutes, keeping watch of Logrus’s condition, which seemed to improve by the second. At last, Logrus sat up, buried his face in his hands, and began to sob. After a while longer, he rose to his feet and wiped his sleeve across his wet face.
“Come with me,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “I need light.”
“Not much left of it,” Aiul noted grimly as he followed Logrus into the dark center of the room. “I saw some doors on the far walls. Maybe there’s a way out. If we don’t find something soon….”
“I know,” Logrus answered. “But I must do this. Then we can leave.”
“Tell me what the hell is going on.”
Logrus shook his head. “You’ll see. Just ahead.”
Aiul was doubtful, despite his late experiences with the supernatural. Logrus had a tendency to attribute mundane matters, such as his own prowess, to supernatural causes. Aiul, however, was fairly certain that Logrus had suffered a stroke.
Aiul felt a surge of fear as he saw figures loom in the darkness, but quickly realized that they were statues. There were hundreds of them, arrayed in the center of the room, in as many different poses, each unique. The flickering torchlight played over the still forms as Logrus and Aiul approached. Shadows scurried over floor and statue alike, slowly retreating from the advancing flame. Aiul marveled at how lifelike the statues were, how well proportioned, but he felt a strange disquiet, as well. There was something odd about the poses.
Ten feet from the nearest, he realized what was troubling him. The statues were obscene depictions of men, women, even children, in unspeakable agony. They were incredibly lifelike. Missing limbs showed bone and muscle beneath. Open chests showed the organs all in their proper locations. The artist may have been mad, but his skill was unquestionable. He had had captured the very essence of horrifying death and chiseled it without a single flaw, over and over, and none the same.
“Mei!” he whispered. “What madness drives a man to work such things into stone?”
“They are not stone,” Logrus said, his voice a cold monotone, fists balled in an effort to contain his rage and horror.
“What are you saying?” Aiul gasped, horror twisting in his gut as he moved forward for a closer view. He touched a statue, and recoiled at the feel of pliant flesh, the tacky, cold sensation of wet, dead blood. The world seemed to spin wildly about him as he staggered away, close to hyperventilation. He could feel the wrongness, the monstrous evil if it, as if it were a physical force. He fell to his knees and vomited.
“So you have it, too,” Logrus nodded. “Weaker, like my zombies. But you have it.”
“Yes,” Aiul moaned, struggling to his feet. “Mei, how can you stand it?”
“It is necessary.”
Aiul glared at the garden of corpses, his jaw clenched in hate.
“This one,” Logrus said, pointing to a child’s body. “He died screaming, begging not for his own life, but that they spare his mother.” He choked back a sob, and pointed to a woman. “This one, they forced to watch as they cooked and ate her husband. They made her eat of him, too.” He covered his face with his hands, as if to ward away the visions. “They are all like this. All of them.”
“How can the gods let such things occur?” Aiul said in disbelief.
Logrus turned a grim stare toward him. “Has not a god sent us here?”
Aiul’s reply died in his throat at the sound of hatches closing in the distance. “What now?” he wondered.
They waited, listening, the dripping of water and the hiss of the torch loud in their ears, and then came another sound, a shuffling, something large approaching.
A figure out of a nightmare loomed from the darkness. It was fully ten feet tall, and shaped like a man, but there, the resemblance ended. Overlong, arms, proportioned more like an ape, ended in razor sharp talons. The creature had no neck to speak of, merely a misshapen mound atop impossibly broad shoulders. Two beady, reptilian eyes stared from the gnarled head. Others, arranged seemingly at random about its body, rolled in their sockets or cut back and forth in paranoia. A snakelike tongue slipped in and out of a jagged-fanged maw, testing the air. More mouths, smaller, but no less vicious, dotted its body at irregular intervals, their tiny teeth chattering and gnashing at the air. Small tentacles erupted from unlikely areas and whipped about the creature, as if it were flagellating itself. Muscle rippled beneath black, putrescent skin as the thing approached them.
“Playthings,” it spoke, in a sickening, burbling rumble. “You are fortunate. My master wishes you to live. For now.” Its laughter was the hacking of a man dying from tuberculosis.
Logrus could not contain himself. His face twisted into a mask of hatred and fury as he charged the creature, a cry of abandon on his lips.
Aiul joined him, shouting Elgar’s name as a battle cry. For the moment, they were united.