by Mike Shel
Nothing.
“Sira!” called Auric. “Tug three times if you’re alright!”
Again, nothing.
The two looked at one another for a moment, then began pulling up the rope in earnest. Her head broke the surface of the darkness as her words did.
“—feet down!” she cried. “He’s alive!”
“What?”
“The pit’s only about twenty feet deep,” Sira said excitedly. “His leg’s broken, but he’s alive! There’s a layer of magical darkness, about six feet thick, and a sorcerous silence in the pit as well. Lower me back down and I’ll put the harness on him.”
Auric and Belech obliged, lowering the priest back into the darkened pit. A few minutes later, there were two quick tugs on the rope. They pulled the rope, the load considerably heavier than before. Gnaeus emerged from the blackness, cursing.
“—ucking Djao bastards! Broke my goddamned leg!”
The swordsman’s leg was indeed turned at a sickening angle and tears of pain coursed down his cheeks. They removed the harness and dropped it back in the pit for Sira, Auric ruffling the man’s hair playfully.
“We thought we’d lost you, boy!” exclaimed Auric with affection.
“As did I,” replied Gnaeus, teeth gritted in his agony. “I screamed like hell! Are you old men bloody deaf now as well?”
Auric was about to respond when a whimper from Belech silenced him. The old soldier hadn’t waited for his help pulling up Sira, but what emerged from the darkness horrified them: the harness was secured to a desiccated corpse.
“Sira!” wept Belech.
Auric saw the lifeless thing, so like the body he and Brenten had stumbled upon in their own pit three years past. A scream caught in his throat. But Gnaeus laughed without humor, propping himself against the wall.
“That’s not Sira,” he said. “It’s Galadayem Pela.”
30
Idol
While Sira finished healing his broken bone, Lumari informed Gnaeus of what had happened after he had fallen in the pit.
“The flagstones ate him?”
“Absorbed him, ate him—something like that,” Lumari replied.
Belech and Auric examined the thirty-three-year-old corpse of Galadayem Pela, attempting to ascertain the cause of death. “Both of her legs were broken,” said Belech.
“No sign of trauma to the head,” added Auric. “And her vertebrae are intact—she didn’t break her neck in the fall.”
“Then what killed her?” asked Gnaeus.
“She might have lasted a week, without food or water,” said Belech, a look of sadness on his face. “Unless she fell on her sword at some point, but I could find no such wound on her body.”
“She starved to death in that pit, with two broken legs, abandoned by her companions,” said Lumari, sober, looking down on the swordswoman’s corpse.
“Is there anything else we can learn here?” Gnaeus sighed, ready to move on, perhaps wishing to avoid thinking how that might have been his own fate.
“Well,” Auric answered, “nothing here is inconsistent with what Gower Morz was told happened, save the dimensions of the space and assuming the original expedition were truly fooled by the pit’s illusion.”
“You’re beginning to question the veracity of Wallach and Quintus’s report?” asked Lumari. “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“His bowels turned to water,” snapped Gnaeus. “The man shit himself three decades ago—him, a warrior-priest of Vanic! This is all about keeping his shame hidden.”
“It’s more than just the shame of being unmanned,” said Auric.
“Unmanned…” Sira echoed.
“You object to his choice of words?” asked Lumari. “I certainly do.”
“No,” answered Sira. “I don’t think Sir Auric meant to suggest that Wallach’s terror was the particular province of a man. It’s just…”
“Yes?” Gnaeus asked, his countenance impatient.
“What was the name of the original expedition’s sorcerer?” asked Sira.
“Cosus of Mourcort,” said Lumari. “A pyromancer, I think.”
“And was Cosus a man or a woman?”
Gnaeus opened his mouth to reply, but closed it, a look of puzzlement on his face. The rest of them were also at a loss.
“What’s your point, Sira?” queried Auric at last.
“Have you ever met a female warrior-priest of Vanic?” she responded.
“No,” said Auric. “The cult is very androcentric. Women can’t be ordained into the priesthood except under very special circumstances.”
“What about Maisalle the Hammer?” interjected Gnaeus.
“The exception that proves the rule,” said Sira. “She was part of the League during the reign of King Ferrick II.”
“Sat on the throne from 452 to 459, more than three hundred years ago,” said Belech.
Gnaeus gawped at the old soldier.
“An especial talent of mine,” said Belech, arms crossed over his chest.
“Yes,” continued the priest. “The cult tends to have a rather condescending attitude toward women—we’re frail flowers. It’s the duty of men to protect us from the perils of the world.”
“Your point?” grumbled Gnaeus. “Prior to my retirement, if possible.”
“If Cosus was a woman, then all of the Syraeic agents who died in the temple were female.”
Auric wondered why he hadn’t noticed that before.
“So Wallach’s failure was that much more mortifying because he failed to protect his female companions?” asked Lumari. “That doesn’t seem as earth-shattering a revelation as I was expecting from you, sister.”
“No. Maybe it’s more than that.”
“What?” Belech asked.
“I don’t know.”
Gnaeus threw up his hands, exasperated. “Can we get moving? Or should we exhaustively review the past expedition’s hair color as well?”
They employed their original method to surmount the pit, with Auric the last across. There was more talk of Wallach’s gruesome end, their conclusion leaving Auric cold: the temple, or the Aching God itself, had somehow eaten the old man.
The Aching God can claim my guilty carcass at last!
The bricks that comprised the hall beyond the pit chamber were porous, wiry vegetation growing between them. The corridor took several weird, disorienting turns that made no logical sense. After about two hundred feet, Lumari stopped and pressed her booted foot into the lichen-encrusted flagstones, causing a nauseating squishing sound.
“Spongy,” she whispered.
“The lichen?” queried Sira uncertainly.
“No, the flagstones,” she answered.
The alchemist grabbed a dagger from a protesting Gnaeus’s bandolier and crouched down. She scraped the muddy growth a bit, then plunged the blade into the flagstone with surprising force. She slowly withdrew the dagger from the fresh wound, making a squelching sound. A viscous green liquid bubbled up. She scraped some of the mucus into a clear jar and began adding other watery substances.
“What is it, Lumari?” asked Auric as his disquiet grew.
“I don’t know. The architecture looks like a human construction, with the cut flagstone and bricks, but it feels fleshy, like a thick growth of moss on a hillside. Is this a Djao material I haven’t heard of, Sir Auric?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he answered.
Lumari stood, pressed a finger into the sweating, grimy wall. “Again, spongy, but not as much give.”
“What do you make of it?” Auric asked.
The alchemist shrugged, looking again at the mixture in the jar. Auric felt his mouth go dry as he dragged his sleeve across his forehead to mop the perspiration threatening to drip into his eyes.
&nb
sp; “This seems…unnatural,” murmured Belech.
Gnaeus took a dagger himself and dragged the edge along the wall beside him. Some of the same sickly green mucus oozed from the gash like sap from a tree.
“Needless to say,” said Lumari, now looking at the jar’s mixture through her jeweler’s loop, “Gower Morz reported nothing like this.”
Auric corralled his own disquiet, seeing his companions’ growing unease. “We proceed. If any explanation occurs to anyone, share it, but this doesn’t alter our goal. According to our information, the chamber with the idol should be nearby.”
“First, we should come upon the body of the pyromancer, Cosus,” said Belech. “Some sort of serpent was supposed to have dropped from the ceiling and strangled him or her outside that chamber.” He glanced up at the ceiling, wary, his companions following suit.
As they turned the next corner, they found the body, lying face down on the ground. The corpse was clad in form-fitting leather, the curves immediately betraying the gender: Cosus of Mourcort was undoubtedly a woman. Some of the repellant plant growth covering the stone had found purchase on the corpse and they were forced to cut away patches of it, holding her body to the ground like covetous hands. Belech tapped the faceted ruby in the corpse’s forehead, marking Cosus’s profession, then examined the neck.
“Her neck was not broken,” he concluded. “But this…this looks like a knife wound.” He indicated a puncture visible at the base of her skull. The rest were silent, letting that revelation sink in.
“Someone shoved a goddamned dagger into the woman’s spine,” Gnaeus muttered. “That’s fucking murder.”
“Wallach spoke of his guilt, before the temple took him,” Sira commented, eyes welling up with tears.
“What would make him murder his own comrade? In cold blood?” marveled Lumari.
“Something…something awful,” whispered Belech, who had gone pale.
Auric looked to the end of the corridor they followed. It took another sudden turn. Beyond lay the chamber, assuming the progression of Gower Morz’s map was to be believed. Auric held out his left hand, watched it tremble. “Steel yourselves, my friends. Our target is very close, and we must face whatever lies ahead.”
The corridor made several wild turns, doubling back on itself, suddenly descending, then just as abruptly angling upwards so that they had to grab hold of protuberances in the walls to aid their ascent. Just as Auric began to doubt they would find a chamber at all, the corridor suddenly narrowed, became more like a cave tunnel, three and a half feet in diameter, descending at a slight angle. He took a fresh glow-rod from Lumari, cracked it to life, and tossed it down the tube.
“It’s only about eight feet long,” he informed the others. “There’s a chamber beyond it.” Auric thought for a few moments, his companions silent. He looked at Belech, then Sira, then decided. “I’ll go first.”
He drew Szaa’da’shaela from its scabbard, then crouched on all fours and crawled down the tunnel, its walls distressingly slick. As he descended, he thought he detected a subtle rhythmic thrum in the walls, like the pulse of some great beast. Auric emerged in a circular chamber roughly fifty feet in diameter. No lichen grew on the floor or walls, which were smooth, rubbery, and warm to the touch. Several large indentations lined the perimeter of the room. Though the materials were strange, Auric was reminded of the fateful chamber in the temple where he, Lenda and the others had awoken the hungry corpses. He looked to the center of the room and had to resist an animal urge to cry out. There was another indentation in the floor there, ten feet across—it looked like a pit tightly covered with a fleshy tarp, identical to the one he saw in his last nightmare; the one that had eaten him. He stared at the drumhead, but couldn’t be certain: did the membrane just quiver?
Auric nearly leapt out of his skin when a hand touched his shoulder. Belech had joined him in the chamber, and Sira was now emerging from the tunnel as well. “Blue Mother Belu,” mumbled the old soldier as he surveyed the place. “Is this like—”
“A very similar configuration to the chamber in the temple I last explored, yes,” Auric said, a bit too quickly, “where we removed the ornamentation from the idols and the corpses came alive. I don’t see this ‘repugnant’ idol Quintus and Wallach reported, though.”
“Look there,” said Sira, pointing at the far wall.
The angle, along with an illusion created by the lighting and smooth material of which the chamber was constructed concealed the fact that one of the niches was deeper. Belech began approaching the niche gingerly, causing Auric to shake off the paralysis that had gripped him. When they reached it, they spied another chamber beyond. Auric looked back and saw that Gnaeus and Lumari had now joined them.
“Next?” asked Gnaeus, his normal aloofness lost to a nervousness Auric had not witnessed before in the man.
“Ariellum Brisk,” said Belech. “Torn to pieces before the idol by an unseen force.”
“Where is this idol?” asked Lumari, shirt collar dark with sweat. “It was supposed to be in this chamber.”
“We think there’s another room beyond this,” said Belech, pointing at the deeper niche. “Through this passage.”
Now, now, now! thought Auric. Move now, before your resolve flees!
With Szaa’da’shaela still unsheathed and a glow-rod in his other hand, Auric turned down the concealed passageway. A strange, dull radiance glowed at the end of the hall, suggesting Lumari’s chemical illumination would be unnecessary. He stepped forward into another circular chamber, this one no more than twenty feet in diameter, a phosphorescent glow seeming to emanate from the walls. At the other end of this uncomfortably warm place was the idol.
It was seven feet tall, vaguely humanoid and toad-like. Its bulbous head was tilted back, a broad, toothless maw stretched open, like some grotesque newborn bird waiting for its monstrous mother to vomit down its throat. Its flesh was covered with warts and tumorous growths, and it had six limbs, chitinous like an insect’s, all supporting an enormous, swollen belly. The coloration of the thing was blotchy, a senseless mix of disgusting greens, blacks, and yellows. Auric understood the name Wallach and Quintus had given the idol now: the skin of its grossly distended abdomen seemed painfully stretched, ready to erupt, strained beyond its capacity. “Repugnant” was far too gentle a word for the unspeakable atrocity standing before him.
“The Aching God,” Auric whispered, his voice shaking, a lump of mewling horror climbing up his throat.
“Belu w-wept,” he heard Belech whimper behind him.
Sira, calm and collected in any circumstance, was visibly trembling next to Auric and took hold of his hand that clutched Szaa’da’shaela. She began whispering a litany against evil. Lumari was speechless, staring at the thing as she stood against the wall near the entrance, as far from the idol as she could be without leaving the chamber.
“That’s the most fucking unholy thing I’ve ever laid eyes on,” said Gnaeus, his voice choked with revulsion. “What can you say of a people who worshiped this…beast?”
“What’s that?” asked Lumari, her normally even tone timorous.
Auric followed the alchemist’s trembling finger, pointing at the loathsome statue’s base. Another body lay crumpled on the ground before it. He willed his legs to move, but stood rooted to the spot, unable to urge his muscles into action. Then he noticed a vibration at his hip. The Djao blade was trembling, as if it was itself repulsed by the grotesque totem presiding over the cursed chamber.
When did I sheath the sword? he wondered.
“Ariellum Brisk was supposed to have been torn to pieces,” said Belech finally. “Is that body hers?”
You must walk, Auric screamed in his own mind. Move forward! For Agnes, and all the others! Somehow Auric rallied his flagging will and approached the idol. Belech came with him, and Auric silently thanked Lady Hannah for her insistence that the old
soldier accompany him. One foot in front of the other, hesitantly, he at last came close enough that he might reach out and touch the foul statue if he wished to. He did not. At this uncomfortably close range, he could see the effigy glistened with a noisome mucous, like some colossal, nightmarish amphibian.
The merest hint of an odor, ineffably polluted, penetrated the protective ointment Lumari had shared with the party. Auric and Belech both spun away from the idol and doubled over with violent retching. The alchemist rushed to them and applied a generous new dose of the green ointment to their upper lips, suppressing her own gorge with difficulty.
After a few moments, Auric and Belech gathered themselves and turned their attention to the body, curled up before the idol. It was the corpse of a petite woman, clad in jacket and trousers like Lumari’s, covered with pockets and compartments, a pair of bandoliers replete with vials and flasks wrapped around her torso. Belech reached down and gently turned her over, then gasped with surprise.
The corpse’s throat yawned open, sliced deeply from ear to ear. Auric found tears welling up in his eyes, recalling Del Ogara’s own lethal wound. For a split second he saw the face of the sorcerer superimposed over that of the desiccated corpse.
“What is it?” shouted Gnaeus, who himself refused to approach the despicable idol.
“It’s the corpse of the alchemist, Ariellum Brisk,” Auric said through sudden, immense sadness. “Someone cut her throat. Like…like a sacrificial animal…before an altar.”
Belech stood, took a few steps back, held the back of his hand to his mouth. He burst into tears, overwhelmed. Choking back the tears, he spoke, his voice hoarse and mournful. “Those bastards made a bloody offering of her—to that thing!”
The party retreated to the previous chamber, unable to think clearly in the presence of the dreadful totem and the corpse of the betrayed Syraeic sister that lay before it. Auric’s mind spun with this terrible revelation. He wished he could purge his mind of the knowledge, feeling somehow contaminated by it.
“A priest of Vanic and a priest of Belu,” said Sira in a voice both soft and distant, though there was anger there as well. “Veterans, deeply initiated in their faiths, offered a blood sacrifice of a friend and colleague to an alien demon-god. Why? What conceivable circumstance could possibly drive ordained clerics to such an unspeakably profane act?”