“Flesh,’” I said.
Kiya nodded. She pointed to the picture-writing up and down its length. Images of heron and crocodile as well as jackal and serpent. Now and then these were interrupted by the image of Lemesharra, wearing the same jackal mask that the statue at the front of the temple wore.
After we took our inventory, wondering at the uses of these things, we returned to the entry hall where we had first seen the stuffed skins of the vampyres.
They were in a ring, as they had been before. Kiya noticed something about them. “All of them are doing something. They are waiting for someone. Waiting on someone.”
“These are servants of the one entombed here,” I said. “Meant to stand guard against those who enter. They’re meant to scare us, to warn us. Our tribe. Ancestors. These were extinguished, skinned, then raised again like scarecrows.”
“As those outside were,” Kiya said.
“The other Maz-Sherah,” I added, feeling grim about our prospects.
I traced a wide circle with my foot at the edge of each of their heels.
Beneath a thin layer of dust I noticed interlaced designs on the floor below us.
“A seal,” I said, withdrawing my sword from its scabbard. I traced what I saw as a door of some kind, a perfectly round reflection of the dome above us, and the dome basin far below. “Between where we stand and the last chamber we entered, there is another chamber. We must open it.”
8
We made little progress over the next two hours, using an ax, dagger, sword, and sculptor’s tools, as well as other items gathered from the chambers. It would soon be daylight in the world. We needed to rest, and also to drink, but did not know how we would be able to do so. Had we come this way for nothing? Had we come to find a tomb that meant nothing, that contained nothing? This dust-thick chamber with its dead vampyres posed as if in some drama for our benefit?
The stink of death had increased, and although we were not living creatures in the mortal sense, still the smell of rotting death brought us no solace.
When we slept that day, close to each other there on the floor, guarded by the ring of the vampyre statues, I could not even sense the stream around us, though I knew it had to be there.
Somewhere beyond this temple, beyond this city and its mountain rock, the sun arose, and the seeping blackness of oblivion entertained me with its peace.
I awoke sharply, feeling as if my senses had become keen again. I sat up. Kiya, already up, gazed down at the circular seal in the floor. Ewen, beside me, coughed as he awoke, as if he could not breathe.
“I had dreams of terrible things,” he gasped when he had his breath again.
“Of what?” I asked.
“Of a mortal,” he said. “One such as I have never seen. He watched me as I slept and put his hand upon my hair. He made me think I would end like...like one of these.” He pointed to the statues near us.
As I rose, I thought I saw a handprint in the dust near where my head had rested.
Was it Ewen’s? Kiya’s? But it seemed larger than either of their hands. It struck me: someone else had been there. While we slept. I showed it to Kiya, and she nodded. “There is a watcher. But I have no sense of him.”
“Who would watch us, but not destroy us?”
“A cat plays with its mouse before slicing it open,” she said. Kiya got down on all fours on the floor, using the amber dagger to scratch away at a curve of the sealed door below our feet. She pointed out the edges where we’d worked on it the previous night—all our work was for naught, for it was as if the door beneath us had resealed itself.
I dusted off much of the door and saw that the designs in the stone seemed to be in small, round shapes. “There is a key to this, I’m sure of it,” I said. “But what is the key?”
Kiya brought the scroll out, unrolling it. It was as long as the door itself, but not nearly as wide. Yet, when she placed the scroll in such a way that it bisected the middle of the seal, the picture-writings seemed to line up with some of the carvings in the floor, although many were very faint.
“If only we could understand it,” she said.
“There’s the sword.” Ewen pointed to the lower left hand area of the scroll. He was right—the black sword that I had secured to my waist had been depicted in the scroll. Likewise, we saw the sewing needle made of human bone and the thread of human hair among the images of jackals and birds. Then three gold coins, which seemed to be resting over three perfectly small, round indentations. An outline of what also might have been a human hand was depicted in the scroll, and, beneath it, a very faintly similar shape in the stone door.
Then, as I put my fingers over the scroll, I noticed that by covering two letters of this strange alphabet I could make out some letters.
“Look.” I pointed this out to Kiya, who was the reader among us.
“Aleph,” she said, looking at the letter. She shrugged. Then she covered the next four letters and came up with another letter. Then another, and another. Then the letters stopped. The rest of the scroll was unreadable, full of pictures and wedge-shaped curves. “The only word it spells is a name,” she said. “Ar-tep. Artephius.”
“Is that a place?”
“A person, a place,” she said. “Or perhaps the name is an indication of something else. It is of no consequence—it may be the signature of the scribe who created this.”
“Give me the coins,” I said, looking up at Ewen.
When I had them in my fingers, I removed the scroll, and placed three of the coins in the round indentations of the door beneath us. Then I took the sword and laid it down exactly in the arrangement of the scroll that corresponded with the door. We took each of the materials and did this.
“It’s a map of some kind. This is a map for this doorway,” I said. “Only...only it will not open.”
“The hand,” said Kiya. She put her hand, palm down on the indentation where it was meant to go.
Nothing happened. Ewen followed suit. They looked to me, and feeling that strange feeling of being “the One,” I put my hand down on the stone, but nothing happened.
Then I arose and went to the guardians of the place, the statues of the dead vampyres.
I tore the hand off one youth and brought it back with me.
9
I set the hand into the recessed stone.
Suddenly I heard the turning of some mechanism, like the creak of the wheels and ropes of a trebuchet. It was an engineered doorway, and only when each item had been placed into it would it begin to work. All around us, the bowls of oil lit up with fire, without benefit of fusil or flint, casting flickering shadows all around us. I pressed the hand a bit harder into the stone.
Again, the grinding of wheels and rope; the round doorway beneath us began to sink farther downward. I drew the scroll back, and we watched as the seal sank farther and farther—perhaps two or three feet down.
Then the room itself began to vibrate as if from an earthquake.
The chamber itself began moving—its walls dividing, and the floor beneath us splitting as if run by some mechanism.
Chapter 16
________________
THE TOMB
1
The walls around us moved with that mechanical grinding sound then closed together so that entirely different chambers appeared beyond us—not the corridor back or forward, but other pathways. I had been wrong—it was not just one chamber level between the bottom level and us. It was a vast canyon of a room that stretched downward.
We each stepped onto one of the floor segments. The stuffed vampyres seemed to move in a strange dance—although no limb moved, their entire bodies seemed to float by on the great jagged plates of the floor, until much of the floor had been pushed back to the walls. We stood there as if looking down from a cliff. An icy wind rose from the chamber below. Near one edge of the newly moved flooring: a platform at the top of a stone staircase, leading downward to the center of the newly formed pit below us. We only had to s
tep floor piece to floor piece to get to it, like hopping stones across a stream.
I grabbed up the black sword and went first into the icy depths of this new hell.
As I went, I was on guard, for I smelled death more strongly—mortals were within, flesh was there, and even blood. It was strong and terrible and not of the usual enticement of mortal blood, which was nearly erotic in its pull to me. Frost lined the steps so that we had to be careful not to slip. Some engine churned and spat, humming like a thousand bees. Although I would only learn of such things centuries later, it was a freezer of some kind—whether natural or unnatural, I could not then know.
A blue light began to form the farther down we went. Then I saw what looked like white wheels and gears and locks shifting and clicking as if in some mechanism.
Human bones were stacked together in bundles, interconnected, some carved into rounded wheels, others a semblance of their former existence as femurs, pelvis and skull. They moved together, clicking, turning, the engine of this pit.
Who in Heaven or Hell had created this? It was an engineering marvel, and it operated without human hands pushing or pulling at it. The crack of bone, the hiss of some unseen steam (for how could there be steam in such a frigid place?), and the slight squeal of the turning gears all accompanied our descent. It was as if it were the machinery of the Devil himself
As the blue light brightened, I saw shapes and shadows along the wall. They became clearer as I descended closer to them.
It was a large chamber full of mortal beings. There were ropes of some strange red hue that ran between them and around them like a spider’s web. They hung suspended along the curved walls and wore masks of gold and silver upon their faces, men and women, youths and maidens. They hung like stags in the kitchen butchery after the hunt. Their flesh had been made so cold that it was nearly blue, with a limning of frost at their extremities.
As I came closer to these mortals, I saw they were not bound in rope at all, but some kind of blown glass, in tubes that wrapped and curved about the bodies. Blood pulsed between these unfortunates. More than twenty such human cattle hung suspended like this. In their backs were a series of thick blades thrust into their spinal columns, fixing them to the curved wall of the chamber.
My heart began to beat fast, for I was thirsty for what would sustain me, as I knew my companions would be. And yet, this terrible hanging garden of flesh and pulsing blood was beyond even our monstrous imagination. Ewen was the first to touch one of the maidens, just around her belly. “She’s like ice,” he said.
I followed the lines of glass tubing as it descended to a point behind the stairway. There, at its base, was a long, wide crystal box of thick and workmanlike design.
Within it, the blurred form of a man.
Blurred, because it was surrounded by some kind of darkness or shadow that I could not fully make out. As I touched the crystal tomb, I heard Kiya cry out on the steps above me. I looked over at her, then in the direction she moved. It was Ewen—he had already pressed his teeth into a maiden’s arm to drink from her.
The thirst had overwhelmed him, despite the danger.
Kiya grabbed him by the shoulders and drew him back, but he turned and said, “She’s good. The blood is good.”
The blackest of blood soaked Ewen’s face.
An image arose in my mind that was perverse and wonderful at the same time.
We were in a wine cellar. This was where he kept his best vintage.
Or someone kept it stocked for him. Some servant who had not abandoned him in his tomb.
For it had to be the resting place of the Priest of Blood.
2
The interconnecting network of glass tubes curled and wrapped from body to body, thrust into the artery at the throat, at the legs, or straight into the area of the heart. The tubes all met and dripped into a large bulb-shaped crucible, as the kind I’d seen the surgeons use to heat when curing old women of maladies on their flesh. The blood welled there, and it was no more than a wineskin might hold. From this vessel, a single tube descending into the crystal tomb of the priest.
That was the darkness within it.
It was filled with blood. He slept in it, this priest-king.
It kept him alive, but entombed.
Who had been the architect of this mouth of Hell? Had it been the goddess Lemesharra herself? Her aspects of Datbathani and Medhya, the monstrous pagan goddesses of fertility and destruction?
But why would a vampyre do this? Why a god? This was all of mortal hand of some kind. It had to be. Only a mortal would be devilish enough to create these puzzles within puzzles. Only a mortal would slaughter vampyres for the sport of creating statues. Or hang them upside down and carve the word “Maz-Sherah” into their skulls to frighten us off.
For that had to be why this show had been staged. To keep us out or to slow us. To play with us.
Only a mortal would take his brethren, like these who hung around me, and turn them into a winter storehouse to feed a vampyre more powerful than all others. No vampyre would do it—it took away the hunt. Only mortal man tormented others of their kind for long periods of time.
But the blood would not be so rich, would it? These bodies had been hanging for many years. Kept alive like meat in an icy environment, just enough to keep their sluggish blood manufacturing itself. Their bodies cool enough that the process of death was slowed. The tubes running between them such that they lived off each other’s blood, as well, in whatever basic way a human might. But such living death would not last long. Whoever had done this had to replenish these bodies every several years or risk the blood stopping, surely. Mortal blood was not endless. The heart would eventually stop. The flow would thicken.
Someone, some alchemist of the world, kept this well-engineered chamber going. Some mortal. Or organization of mortals? A cabal of some kind? While we had slept during the day, had one or many been there, studying us, watching us? Perhaps even taking from us? In this underworld, what devil presided? It could not be the one in this tomb, for he could not rise from it. We were his rescuers, in fact. And yet, why would anyone who existed there let us awaken to the night? Why would any mortal man allow us to survive the day’s hours?
Kiya approached me as I took in the chamber and wondered at its origins. “The watcher,” I said. “It is some human being. Or a group of mortals. I would say this is magick, but it looks like a series of spinning wheels above us made of bone, and. below, an alchemist’s laboratory.”
“The alchemy of Hell,” she said.
3
There was no time to waste. I felt more than the chill of the place. We were in a trap of the kind made for rats, and somewhere the razor’s edge was above us and might descend at any time. We had come to find our power and our source. We had come for the ancient sorceries of our kind.
We had been enticed. Pulled as if by magnets.
We all three lifted the lid of the crystal tomb.
Dark blood overflowed its edge.
I reached into the congealing blood, which was like tiny particles of red snow. I drew up in my arms the skeletal remains of the Priest of Blood. In the corpse’s arms, cradled like a scepter, a great staff made of gem and bone.
Chapter 17
________________
THE PRIEST
1
A sound like the rush of birds through an echoing hallway—we all heard it as I brought the body from the tomb of blood. As I laid the body down, I saw more clearly the staff that it clutched. It was the Staff of the Nahhashim that I had known of from my vision. I did not know what it meant, but I felt it must be of some magickal significance. It was this that I took first from the remains, having to cut the shackle at his wrists, then pry the bony fingers back from the staff. The Nahhashim staff was too important to the vision for me not to take it.
Surprisingly, the staff seemed very light in my hands, and warm to the touch.
The priest’s body had been wrapped in some magnificent fabric. I not
iced a gleam of gold filigree and a bright blue pattern in the bits that had not been destroyed by the chilly blood.
His skull was oddly elongated, and his jaws thrust out like a wolf’s, with great incisors that were nearly tusks, while the rest of his teeth were sharp and serrated like shark’s teeth. As the blood dripped from his form, I saw that his eyes had been sewn shut. My mind flashed on the image of the vampyre woman sewing with the needle of bone. While his mouth had not been similarly sewn, it was sealed in its own way—a bone hinge and lock of some kind had been fashioned around and through his teeth. It was to become known to me as a trick of mortals who stopped up a vampyre’s thirst by binding the mouth with bone that cracked, unhinged, then bound the jaw. His left ear had been sliced clean off, and the skin there was scarred and burned. Tattoos encompassed his scalp, and on his right ear, the piercing of many small jewels and rings had elongated it.
His shoulders seemed too bony, and when I turned the corpse to the side, I saw that there were strange protrusions of bones almost like pronged horns from between his shoulder blades, connected to a thickened spinal column. His wings had been cut off. He had once had them, but whoever had imprisoned him in this blood sleep had torn them from him as a child might tear the wings from a fly.
His chest was sunken in, and over his heart, metalwork of a strange design. It was a small sphere the size of my fist. Protruding from the sphere, a thin small blade that was thrust into the heart area. I reached out to touch it, but felt a strange repulsion—nearly a vibration—which made me feel sick to my stomach.
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