by Stephen Cole
‘I take things too far?’ She shook her head, gritted her teeth. ‘I know what you did. The bargain you made when you were young. The way you sold your soul.’ Jonah stared, terrified, as her hands squeezed over the gun as though she were trying to wring sweat from the handle. ‘I offered you a way out. A way to cheat what’s coming to you. To cheat death.’
He took a step closer to her, looked tenderly into her eyes.
‘And end my days with you … looking like that relic on the slab?’ He smiled and shook his head. ‘Shoot me now. It’s hot as all hell in here. I won’t have far to travel.’
Her face twisted as she fought to contain her anger. A crazed smile forced its way through her lips and she spoke in a low, trembling voice. ‘I wonder … if in all the years before me … there will ever come a sweeter moment than when I kill you. But first, I think we should watch your children suffer.’ She glanced back at her acolytes, shouted at them in their own language, then smiled back at Coldhardt. ‘Slowly.’
Jonah heard Tye gasp as the blade pressed into her throat, saw Con and Patch assume uneasy fighting stances as the acolytes started towards them.
‘No!’ Coldhardt made to grab Samraj’s gun, but her finger was already flexing on the trigger. All but forgotten, Jonah lunged forward over the wizened, shrivelled old body, grabbed her wrist and twisted it as she fired. The shot went wild. The report was like a bark of thunder and a glass tapestry shattered above them, showering them with shards.
Then there was a quieter sound, like eggshells crushing, and Jonah found himself violently thrown aside. He fell to the slimy floor and rolled over.
When he looked back up, the shadowy scene before him made little sense at first.
The acolytes had suddenly abandoned their tasks, even Hela. They had fallen to their knees as if in worship, muttering and wailing, singing strange prayers in ragged unison. Yianna was lying on her back on the floor at Motti’s feet, shouting for help; she had been abandoned. And why wasn’t Tye moving? Why was she just staring at the altar like Con and Patch, like they were all rooted to the spot? Even Coldhardt was …
Then suddenly he saw the force that had sent him sprawling.
The old, bony body of Ophiuchus was sitting up in the crimson puddle of his fine cloak.
His skin was like thin grey chewing gum stretched too far over the sticks of his old bones. The eyes were dead yellow jellies, pricked with specks of blackness, unblinking as they stared, affronted, at Coldhardt and Samraj. The cadaver’s jaw sagged open – and for a moment Jonah thought it would snap straight off.
But then a word formed in the creases of his leathery lips, rode out on a heavy breath.
Jonah didn’t understand the word, but he guessed it would sound bad in any language.
‘Ophiuchus,’ Samraj breathed, lowering the gun. She started speaking to the apparition in what might have been its own language, but which sounded like a frightened babble to Jonah’s ears.
Then his sight began to blur. The smoke of spores was thickening, distorting his vision. Lights were sparkling in the broken tapestry, and sinister shapes resolved themselves from the shadows they cast. The misshapen statues seemed to shift on their plinths. A low boom was building in his ears. The wall paintings were folding into the blackened, scabrous walls – strange windows opening on some wrong, forbidden world. Letting in things.
Jonah clutched his hands to his head as the funereal chamber seemed to warp all around him. The prayers of the cultists were growing wilder, higher in pitch. They started to sound like screams.
‘Samraj!’ That was Yianna. She was shrieking. ‘You hear the acolytes? These are the visions of Ophiuchus. He’s showing us what he’s seen. This is the evil the old mages linked him to.’
‘No!’ He could hear Samraj but no longer see her. She was lost to the darkness like Tye, like Coldhardt, like all of them. ‘Superstitious rubbish! This … this is some kind of mass hallucination …brought on by the snake-root –’
‘Flesh of the gods!’ Yianna screeched. ‘He ate of their bodies to feed his soul. Now the gods have come for our skins!’
‘Don’t believe it!’ That was Tye’s voice. ‘This is our reality, here in the chamber here.’
‘Catena Mundi, the link between worlds, yes?’ Con shouted. ‘Yianna is right, they have come for us.’
Jonah joined in with the acolytes’ screams as weird, willowy phantoms drifted from the shadows towards him.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Tye stared around the chamber in horror. Hela was down on her knees, clutching at her throat, tearing at her veil. Jonah was lying on his back near the altar, arms flailing as if a cloud of invisible wasps had descended on him. Con was curled in a ball beside a pillar, rocking herself for comfort, while Patch all but drowned out the babbling prayers of the acolytes with his screams of ‘Get away!’ repeated over and over again. Yianna was silent now; her face a grimace of sheer terror, trapped in some private hell.
Of Coldhardt there was no sign at all.
‘Totally safe,’ murmured Motti. Something had happened to him when he’d first checked the doors to this place. Had he tripped something – some ancient last line of defence – or had the snake-root spores somehow altered his perceptions ahead of the rest of them?
Tye kept catching intense colours at the fringes of her vision, blindingly bright patterns at the backs of her eyes. Either the spirits she had invoked earlier in the antechamber were helping to keep her sane or this had to be an illusion brought on by the snake-root spores. Tye had sat through enough voodoo rituals as a child to know how certain substances could mess up your mind, cheat your senses – and to know how faith and fervour could feed into that hysteria, keep it going, lift you higher.
If you were prepared to surrender yourself to that ride, it could be a euphoric experience. But if you didn’t want to let go, if you were afraid …
The old figure was sitting up like his back was locked in place, like it might splinter if he ever moved again. His face was just as rigid, fixed and imperious. Samraj was weeping, wailing, her reason lost, beating her legs in frustration.
Where the hell was Coldhardt? Had he run out on them for real this time?
The room was starting to bend around her. Tye knew she didn’t have long before she was as helpless as everyone else. She guessed that whether hallucination or some kind of psychic attack, these visions could drive them all mad.
She needed a distraction. Phosphor cap? She had one stuck beneath her collarbone, though she was so sweaty now it had almost come free. She threw it down between Patch and Con, shielded her eyes from the explosion of light …
When the smoke cleared, Tye saw that Patch had stopped shouting. Had she brought him round? No – he was just standing there, looking up into the shadows, gibbering. She had thought that with just the one eye, perhaps he wouldn’t be so easily affected by –
The eye.
Tye stumbled over to him. The pressure was building in her ears, she couldn’t swallow it away. It was so damned hot, and every step she took broke more of the fleshy mould and spilled more spores. You idiot! You could be making things worse, she thought, but she had to reach Patch, and this stuff was everywhere.
She lifted up the leather patch over his eye.
Ick. Ick. Ick.
And she hooked her nails around the ceramic eyeball and plucked it out.
Patch didn’t even flinch as the leather slapped back down over his face, hiding the little pit beneath.
‘Gelignite,’ she muttered aloud, her fingers trembling as she tried to undo it. ‘He said he kept gelignite in this one …’ She gasped as she walked into something.
It was one of the creepy statues, like a wraith captured in marble.
Suddenly it was leaning down, shoving its huge shadowy face into hers.
She closed her eyes, bit hard on her lip, scissored her teeth on the flesh till the pain and the shock of the blood on her tongue made her gasp.
When she opened her
eyes, the statue was just a statue. But the patterns behind her eyes were starting to circle and spin, the same sickly yellow as the glow of the snake-root.
‘Motti!’ she shouted, pushing a wailing acolyte aside to get to him. ‘How do I use this stuff?’
‘Totally safe,’ he said.
Tye shouted in pain and surprise as her left ankle was grabbed tight.
It was Hela, unveiled. Her old face was thick with blue veins, twisting in despair as she clutched hold of anything for comfort. Tye tried to yank herself free but she was held fast.
And she felt the colours edge round from behind her eyes for a full-on assault. This time she might be dragged under.
‘Motti, it’s not safe!’ she shouted, reaching out to him. ‘How do I set this stuff off?’ She could almost touch his hand …‘You went under before any of this started happening. Now I need you here with us. It is not safe, you stupid bastard, d’you get me?’
She grabbed hold of his hand, staggered in Hela’s grip, opened out his fingers, slapped Patch’s eyeball into his palm.
‘Look what Patch did to you!’ she yelled. ‘He’s totally got one up on you now. He’s laughing his ass off at you, Motti! He’ll dine out on this for months!’
Slowly, Motti looked down at the thing in his palm. At the grey eye staring cheekily back at him. And suddenly he cringed, roared with disgust and –
‘No!’ Tye yelled. ‘Don’t!’
He threw the eyeball away.
It sailed into the wall, cracked against one of the mosaics.
And exploded in a white inferno that drove every shadow from the place.
Tye felt a wave of heat break over her. It felt hot enough to strip skin. Motti was thrown forward by the blast, smashed into Tye, breaking Hela’s grip.
So that’s how you set it off, thought Tye as the cavern started falling in around her.
* * *
In the aftermath, Jonah’s ears screamed with the noise of the explosion. The heat of the blast had barely warmed him, but its light had seared through the engulfing darkness, driving away the phantoms – for now at least.
With a frisson of fear, Jonah saw that the twisted, ancient body was lying on its back on the stone once more, as though it had never moved at all. How much of the last few minutes had been delusion and how much real, he didn’t know – but he could still see the nightmare shapes of the wraiths every time he closed his eyes, as if the brightness of the blast had burned the images on to his eyelids.
A severed stone head stared across at him from the floor – one of the statues, brought down in the blast. He stared at it dumbly for a few seconds. Another few metres and it would have crushed him flat.
Focus, he willed himself. This is still a nightmare and you’re trapped in it. He choked as he brushed dust and debris from his body. The cavern was brighter now – the fungus on the wall around the mosaic had caught light and was starting to blaze with a thick, orange flame. And blearily, Jonah saw someone stagger in front of him.
It was Samraj, swaying from side to side as if she were trying to charm some vast, invisible serpent.
The gun swung up to cover him. He stumbled away, backing up behind the altar for cover.
A sound caught in her throat, then another – more of a cry. A choking cry for help. The gun wavered.
Then Jonah saw the blood and shrapnel peppering Samraj’s shoulders. His stomach turned as he saw the blackened gash in her head. She was holding a sharp flint in her other hand, a big, bloody stone splinter she must just have plucked out.
He watched her hard, beautiful eyes roll in her ruined face as she pitched forward and collapsed on top of the ancient body, pinning it to the slab in a final embrace.
Disgusted, Jonah looked away. Then a sudden shower of rock dust came down beside him. It built in a heap at his feet, like sand in the bottom of an hourglass. None-too-subtle metaphors of our time, he thought, getting weakly to his feet.
Time was running out for this place.
A weird wailing noise started up – one of the acolytes was rushing about between his fallen buddies. Jonah knew he must do the same for his own band of brothers. He had to find them fast, check they were OK, because if these flames kept spreading …
‘Jonah!’ It was Tye’s voice, some way off. ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m here!’ He choked through a billow of smoke, glanced up nervously at a fresh creak and crumble from the ceiling. The shadows were thick about him. ‘Where are you?’
Then someone rushed up behind him. Jonah whirled round, raised a fist, ready to lash out.
‘Fine way to say thanks,’ said Tye, half-smiling.
‘Thanks for what? What the hell happened?’
‘What the hell happened here?’ she said, pointing to where Samraj lay sprawled on top of the body.
‘You’d think they’d get a room or something, wouldn’t you?’ said Jonah. ‘She caught some flying rubble from the blast. I think she’s dead.’
‘I thought I was a goner for sure.’ Motti appeared from out of the gloom, looming over Tye’s shoulder like some scrawny Goth familiar. ‘I remember going over to the doors, then … nothing. Nothing till I found Patch’s goddamn eye in my hand.’
‘I was trying to shock you awake to give me some help. Didn’t expect you to be that squeamish about it.’
‘Who’s squeamish?’ he challenged hotly.
She half-smiled. ‘Who’s back to normal?’
Then the ground bucked suddenly beneath them. ‘Whoa,’ said Jonah. ‘What the hell was that?’
‘This whole place sits on a fault line in the earth’s crust, remember?’ Motti stared at Tye almost accusingly. ‘And we just let off some high explosives. It’s seismic fun-time.’
‘Let’s get the others and get out of here,’ said Tye.
‘We’re already here. We’re OK.’ Con emerged from the shadows, dragging a bewildered Patch behind her. ‘The explosion gave us something in our own reality to focus on, yes? Reset our senses, if you like. A shock of that force can break through the strongest mesmerism.’
‘That’s really all you think it was – mesmerism?’ asked Jonah. ‘Those visions, those … well, they weren’t real?’
Con looked away, troubled.
‘Where’s Coldhardt, anyhow?’ Patch started staring about nervously. ‘We’ve got company.’
Hela and some of her brethren were heading in their direction, looking for Samraj, or to their master for guidance – or perhaps making ready to kill their enemies.
‘Time we left,’ said Jonah, as grit and pebbles hailed down from the rocky sky.
‘We can’t go without Coldhardt,’ Con insisted.
Tye grabbed her by the hand. ‘Coldhardt might not even be here. He may have gone without us!’
‘Then the old bastard had the right idea,’ said Motti, ‘because we ain’t going nowhere.’
More cultists were closing in, encircling them.
‘We’d better buy some time,’ said Con grimly. ‘Jonah, help me.’ She started wrestling Samraj’s body up from the altar. ‘We’ll threaten to kill her if they don’t let us go!’
Jonah stared at her, appalled. ‘Bit late for that isn’t it?’
‘Bit late for losing your bottle, too,’ Motti hissed, pushing Jonah aside and giving Con a hand. ‘They don’t know she’s a stiff, remember?’
‘I don’t know if you can understand me,’ Con called to Hela, gripping Samraj by her bloodied throat. ‘But if you move a step closer I’ll … Oh, God!’
‘What is it?’ hissed Tye.
‘The bitch has got a pulse.’
Jonah swore. ‘She’s got a gun too –’
Suddenly Samraj jerked into life. She screeched with rage, elbowed Motti in the guts, doubling him over, and kicked Con aside into Patch so that the pair of them fell sprawling at the feet of the approaching acolytes.
Then she brought the gun up against Tye’s head.
‘No!’ Jonah yelled, and threw himself at Samraj
. He’d stopped her once this way, he could do it again. But this time he was too slow. Her dark eyes burned darkly with spite as she twisted her wrist away, brought the gun up hard under his chin.
Jonah tried to roll with the blow, tumbled backwards over the body on the altar. He felt its old, brittle bones crunch beneath his weight. Caught a wheeling glimpse of acolytes surging forward to grab hold of Tye, of Samraj, her bloodstained leer as she aimed the gun straight at him.
Heard the thunder of the weapon as it fired.
Tye yanked herself away from her attackers as the gun sounded. ‘Jonah!’ she yelled.
But Samraj, injured at least, was a lousy shot. The first bullet bit into the stone altar. The next two slammed into the ancient body that crowned it.
The thing that might have been Ophiuchus twitched once – twice. Then the wizened head lolled to one side.
Samraj stared in horror and dropped the gun.
Tye ran behind the altar and helped Jonah up. ‘You OK?’
Rubbing his bloody jaw, he gestured to the ruined body on the slab. ‘Better than him.’
There was a moment’s horrible calm. Hela and the acolytes stared at the grisly scene in shocked silence. Samraj staggered forward, pawing over the old man’s body with a careful composure spoiled only by the way she had to keep wiping blood from her eyes. Con and Patch pulled away from their attackers and joined Tye and Jonah behind the altar, as did Motti, clutching his bruised stomach.
Then Tye became aware of a fierce heat on her back. The fire had spread behind them – they were hemmed in, nowhere to run. The ground rumbled again, as if some giant far below was laughing at them.
Slowly, the acolytes were closing in.
Samraj pinched the figure’s nose, pressing her lips against the leathery flaps of the sagging mouth as she tried to give mouth-to-mouth. But the nose pulled away in her fingers like a crust of soggy bread. She tutted crossly and dropped it to the floor. The old man’s emaciated jaw sank into the wrinkled neck and did not rise again.